According to this http://www.recode.net/2016/3/24/11587234/two-years-later-facebooks-oculus-acquisition-has-changed-virtual Oculus had 75 employees when it was acquired. So, that $700 million to retain employees works out to a little under $10 million per employee for retention?!?!

I am really in the wrong industry...

I understand fully that is sounds creepy...but is it really that odd?

We replace dying organs with functioning ones. We use stem cells from healthy adults to cure a variety of ailments in sick people. Is it really that odd that the blood from a healthy, young person may have positive affects on the aged?

I have not done any research on this technique nor would I endorse it but I am a bit confused why it is being so roundly dismissed.

Would it really be that much more expensive to drop 50 or more if you are doing it? I would think that most of the cost is not in the materials but labor.

These were bone marrow stem cells, not embryonic stem cells.

I'll be curious if they manage to support the media codec framework. Broadcom opened up some of the internals for the VideoCore for handling graphics acceleration but they have held onto the codec support for licensing reasons.

Thank goodness all of us here at Slashdot are in the clear.

Sorry....but you know someone had to make the joke.

I've got to disagree a bit with you. I'm fine with her using her own server for personal email. However, any government business, whether classified or not, should be done through government email servers. That's why we have open record laws is so that we have a level of transparency and, to me, she was blatantly trying to skirt those laws by setting up her own server.

My 2c. Take it for what it's worth.

And what about if the cost to entry of the concept is too high for the individual? A large corp could just sit and wait till the "implementation" period expired and then grab the idea. How long do you have to get to the "use" period before you lose the patent?

No, the issue is that patents are granted for stupid, unoriginal things. If only good, unique ideas were allowed then this would not be the same issue.

I won't purport to speak for all of Slashdot but to me this is a valid use of DRM. With Netflix you are purchasing a service, not owning the media. They are within their rights to try and protect that content.

Considering pretty much all OTA TV in the US is MPEG2 Transport Streams, saying that MPEG2 is not used anymore is a bit of an overstep. Anyone wanting to build out a PVR using a backend that captures without realtime transcoding needs to have the MPEG2 codec bundle.

All that being said, a couple bucks extra for that optional functionality is hardly an issue.

It certainly depends on the use case. Datacenter power and rack space is expensive. If your cost is $100 / month for the additional power and rack for your extra server the vmware package starts to make sense. But yeah, when you get all the bells and whistles VMware can get crazy expensive.

I was referring to the linked article regarding cashless adoption being pushed. Specifically it cited Zimbabwe, Kenya and Somaliland where rampant inflation caused a loss in confidence of the currency.

Seems more like mistrust of local currency because of inflation is pushing people to use US dollars. Alternately, the push for credit cards that transact in US dollars. So, pretty much they are placing all their trust in the banking system as far as I can tell.

Yeah, someone is confusing bits and bytes.

Ultimately I believe that the court ruled incorrectly here. The way this should have been handled is that the court should have ruled based on the law as written. The thing is, if our political system wasn't so messed up it would have never reached the supreme court. Congress would have simply fixed the law itself to clarify the actual intent and life would have gone on. Although it is pretty clear what the intent was in this circumstance I think it is dangerous to allow for that broad of discretion for the judicial branch.