Typically compulsory licensing requirements include that the price must be fair. No reasonably human being (and likely no court) would feel that $1 billion dollars per thermostat is a fair licensing price when Honeywell is selling their thermostats for $50-$100 each. Presumably they'd have to sell their thermostats at $1b+ to claim that the patents were worth $1b per unit and seems likely that Honeywell would find themselves out of business pretty quickly if they demanded $1b+ per thermostat.

I had no idea these Nest Thermostats existed, but they look awesome. Now that I know about them I can go out and buy one and enjoy an increased quality of life. Thanks, Honeywell, for bringing them to my attention!

Be my guest. I'm fully in favor of the free flow of ideas, especially those that help to educate people.

DNS is a lot like a phone book, which is something many people understand. If we blacklist someone from DNS it's like removing them from the phone book. Their phone number still works and anyone can call them. Removing an illicit phone number from the phone book will not prevent people from dialing the number. A phone number would still be passed around in forums, between friends, etc.

Regularly removing phone numbers from the phone book may create many alternative phone books which is likely to create a big headache for all users in figuring out which phone book they need to use to find a particular website and in figuring out which phone books contain legitimate information and which ones will give you the real phone number for your bank and which ones will give you fake books. This is particularly concerning because the legislation proposed doesn't apply due process to removing a phone number from the phone book, but instead allows for arbitrary removals.

Is this DARPA's real motive or do they want the ability to cannibalize enemy satellites?

I think what he's trying to say is that they're now accepting payment in Lattes. I intend to take advantage of this new feature and send them a Latte or two every month rather than paying with my credit card.

Seems like you should weigh the pros and cons of selling it on the open market. Depending on the portion of the company owned, you may well be better off threatening to donate it to some entity that they would not want owning a portion of the company, such as a competitor.

The right answer is to use encryption on all websites. Unfortunately we're not yet at a point where all websites can be bothered to support encryption which means that we should use encryption for every website that supports it and carefully consider whether websites that don't support it are worth the risk. It would be nice if your web-browser would automatically use encryption on sites where it is available and, thanks to the EFF, there is a Firefox plug-in that does just that. Consider giving HTTPS Everywhere a try.

I agree, these are interesting questions. You propose some interesting analogies and the conclusions of them are hard to argue with. There is, however, a subtle point that gets lost in these analogies; Apple is the only publisher or merchant. Would your conclusions hold weight if a publisher refused to publish books with advertisements in them and they were the only entity that could publish books? Or what if they refused to sell clothing with advertising on it while being the only seller of clothing? I believe that in either of these cases the answer is no, if one publisher had a monopoly on the ability to publish books or one clothing store had a monopoly on selling clothes, that it would be unreasonable for them to regulate what books can be published or what clothing can be sold based on their own arbitrary opinions.

Unfortunately the waters are murkier than this. Apple has a monopoly on publishing apps for the iP* platform (iPhone, iPod, iPad), but other companies make similar platforms. Is it ok for one company to have a monopoly on (and use it to restrict) publishing for a particular platform when other competing platforms are available? After all, one could buy an Android phone instead of an iPhone and thus avoid Apple's restrictions. Is that good enough or does the market for each individual platform need to be free? I'm not sure how this might map into your above examples. The closest I can come is one merchant having a monopoly on cotton shirts while wool and polyester shirts are available from others, but that fails to capture the way you choose one platform and are locked into it for two years.

This ruling is entirely unreasonable for two reasons:

(1) This effectively extends the jurisdiction of an community law to the entire country

(2) This requires that someone know and understand all the laws of every community

I don't know whether the ruling is wrong with regard to the law or whether the law is horribly broken, but rulings like this are entirely unreasonable. It goes against the principles of the US to allow a small group of people to inflict their personal views and opinions on the entire country. I really hope that this precedent is changed, either by a successful appeal to the supreme court or better laws.

When I was in elementary school, we went to the computer lab a couple days a week and were forced to use the PAWS typing tutor software on the Apple IIe. Is it really that case that there are still schools that don't teach this? Also, based on my experience, I don't think we should wait until high school to teach people to type. Elementary school seems like the right place, as children are learning to read and write, why not learn to type too?

That's easy, just tell them that the screenings work about as well as speech recognition. It's 95% accurate and everyone knows how much it sucks.

I absolutely agree with a crystal radio. It's a simple, cheap, fun project which could easily be completed within a class period or two. To make the project more fun (and make them do more Physics), let them decide what radio station they want it to tune. They'll have to calculate the appropriate values for the inductor(s) and capacitor(s) for the LC filter and they'll get to tune into their favorite station.

I agree that this is a good step towards fixing the price model for internet access as the currently model is horribly broken. For customers with bursty traffic (i.e. most residential customers), it's insane to charge based on the maximum rate at which they can move data. This would be like charging people for the diameter of the water pipe entering their house rather than the amount of water that actually flows through it. This model only makes sense when the faucet is always on. The same holds for a data connection.

The sooner ISPs figure this out and charge based on actual usage, the sooner they'll be incentivized to give us more bandwidth and will lose any interest in cutting off their best customers (why kill a cash cow?). They'll want to provide more bandwidth to heavy usage customers in hopes that those people take advantage of the additional bandwidth to move more data generate more revenue.

Agreed, this is just another example of gcc failing to follow the spec. gcc is known to optimize away side-effects such as segmentation faults that might occur from a pointer dereference which is optimized away or a divide by zero error from a division that has been optimized out. It's really annoying that gcc thinks it's ok to change the meaning of programs in this way when it's optimizing them.