I'm pretty sure this already happens without secret patents. For example, companies will tell software engineers to never read anything about patents so that if they do infringe, it won't be wilful.

I actually got this here in Singapore with my DSL from SingNet. Basically, they give you a free entry-level mobile internet plan if you sign up for DSL, although this is only with the DSL service and not with their fiber service.

I only briefly looked at the patent, and it looks like it's simply the application of OFDM to wireless communication between computers. OFDM, for those who aren't very familiar, is a way to deal with linear time invariant systems that can corrupt the data. For example, you can consider the signal going from one antenna to the other as going through such a system. Since these types of systems will only modify the amplitude and phase of each frequency band separately, instead of mixing them together as would be the case in the time domain, you encode the information you want to send as specific frequencies. For example, if you send out a wireless signal and it echoes all over the place, the time domain signal gets all mixed up and "slushy". However, if you perform a Fourier transform on the input signal and the output signal, you'll notice that the echoing only caused frequency bands to individually get attenuated/magnified and/or shifted in phase, but none of the frequency bands has mixed together. OFDM exploits this property to provide for robust communication (well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general gist of it). However, it sounds like this patent is simply saying "hey, OFDM is good for wireless communication", which feels kind of obvious to me considering the point of OFDM.

Yes, right now it is limited by the technology (a full frame sized sensor with 2 micron pixels would be really sweet for this, but I suppose process would be really expensive), but eventually it will be limited by physics itself. For example, if you were to somehow be able to make a sensor array whose pixel pitch dipped way below half the wavelength of the light you are capturing and if you used microlenses at the wavelength of light, you wouldn't really be able to capture any more three-dimensional/refocusing information anymore.

Do remember that the Lytro captures its image at one instance (okay, technically integrated over a short period of contiguous time), so while for static scenes your approach would work, it wouldn't work all that well with dynamic scenes. Personally, I'd like see more artistic photos such as say a black balloon covered in starry speckles bursting with a figurine of the baby from the end of 2001 inside.

Well, technically speaking, finite-length signals can't be band-limited due to the uncertainty principle, and a band-limited signal which has been windowed in time will have some spill-over, causing small amounts of aliasing. Of course, in theory, this effect is really minuscule if you have a long enough signal, a good windowing function and/or not setting your sampling rate at exactly twice the bandwidth of the original unwindowed signal. The engineering rule of thumb pz came up with for oversampling would only be useful for ADCs and DACs due to limitations and difficulty in designing good analog filters. The intermediate storage format for the signal digitally would not really benefit much from such a high sampling rate.

Years back, I remember working through some of those SAT prep books for the math section. Seemed like every one of them had at least one error in the solutions, with Barron's seeming the best and stuff like Kaplan's having many mistakes. Well, obviously I was bored, so when my answer didn't agree with theirs, I wrote proofs proving their answer was wrong.

Your photo links to an event on the 18th. Information from the article leads to the incident occurring on the 12th.

You're not a dubstep producer/engineer are you? ;)

Hah! Reminds me of the stereotypical Japanese company meeting, where nothing really gets done; it's the drinking parties before and afterwards where real communication, agreements and work get done.

From their diagram, it looks like each contact lens is composed of two lenses. Imagine making a tiny little lens that focuses a very close micro-display onto the retina and a normal sized contact lens for every-day use. Cut out the middle of the normal contact lens and insert this tiny little lens. You'll essentially have two "scenes" superimposed on your eye -- one focused on the micro-display and one focused on the surrounding environment. I imagine getting rid of aberrations on the tiny little lens is going to be very tricky and thus the resolution/image-quality of the entire display system might be quite limited. Another issue that's not so serious would be that your defocus bokeh would be kind of strange...

Most warships in the age of sail used long guns as chase guns; they weren't unique to the British and Americans. And a long nine-pounder was only a modest-sized gun, like you might find on a frigate. The heart of the fleet, the ships of the line, would have 24-pounder or 32-pounder long guns for the broadside battery. (During the Napoleonic Wars at the end of the 18th century, short-barreled "carronades" became much more popular, replacing many of the smaller long guns.)

Actually, this is the exact opposite of the strategy preferred by the British. It's true that back in the days of the Spanish Armada in the late 16th century, they preferred to hit at a distance with longer-ranged guns, but this approach didn't work out as well as hoped; the guns' accuracy and energy fell off much too quickly with range. By the height of the age of sail in the late 18th century, British ships preferred to close to point-blank range (one reason why short-range carronades became so popular). The keys to their naval superiority were better seamanship (leading to more efficient and effective ship handling), aggressive tactics (take the fight to the enemy whenever you could), and better gunnery, which for the British meant that their gun crews could pump out more shots more accurately than their adversaries could. The British believed that in a close-range fight, their ships could be relied on to deal much more damage more quickly than their enemy, to the point that they could board or otherwise force the enemy to surrender, and that any damage their own ships suffered could be handled and patched by their well-trained crews. It was a belief often confirmed in practice.

In this style of fighting, the main role of chase guns was either to slow down a fleeing adversary enough to allow the British ship to close for a short-range battle, or if pursued by a clearly superior enemy, to slow him enough to allow you to escape.

The British kept to this approach until the development of accurate long-range rifled guns forced them to abandon it.

Heh, nice one, but alas that joke seems to be meaningless for modern airliners. It comes from the days of piston-engined airliners, because only piston engines "miss" (misfire in one or more cylinders).