And this is a bad thing how? We've saved billions by having them make our.. nearly everything. It's about time to start working on getting on the same page with China. We'll have to start sliding a little more toward cooperation, they'll have to start sliding a little more toward competition. With any luck, we can sort of meet in the middle.

Meanwhile elsewhere... Scientists in the Soviet and China replicate the exact same research for no other reason then that it's not available when they could instead be working on something more useful, like improving on it. Doh. People! Try to cooperate. Getting into space is hard enough as it is, try to forge some info-trade agreements. Perhaps GPL the bitch as a sign of good will - it's not like the US is using it for anything much now. Also, China does not give a good god damn if they lock up their spies. They're golden on people, maggoty with 'em, if you want one they'll give you a spare one just in case.

That was kind of my thought as well. Lots of interesting things coming out of China (legit) and they may feel it's time to start moving more people toward 100% legit designs. Kind of like coding the rest of proprietary code out of a project bit by bit until it's all open. They're essentially pulling a Japan - going from "low quality copies" to "high quality copies" to "high quality imitations" to "the people others imitate". Incidentally exactly what the US did when it began, but that was before electronics.

'Sok. My timex syncs to Colorado. Now I just need to either get people to care or cure my OCD to the point where 1s/week isn't unacceptable.

Hear hear. Talk about magnet effect - $2M is harsh but so is $54k. $54 might be fair. Twice the market value of the stolen property and $6 extra punitive.

I use linux professionally. So does most of the web. We're "forced" to GPL any improvements we have to make in the process of getting the job done. "Forced" is in quotes because fair is fair - so did everyone else including those bat**** crazy people following Linus and Sallman who wrote the seeds that grew into this and frankly I feel I'm getting more then I could ever give (at best correcting the occasional bug). GPL is there so it's clear to the managers that if you have a problem with that, feel free to pay quite handsomely. It's cheaper to improve linux (and/or the rest of GNU) then it is to not use it. Epic score - that was the whole point all along, right?

Split "censoring airwaves" and "managing frequency blocks". I know they sound similar, but when it was mostly about managing what went where in the spectrum, there was cred (sometimes grudging) from those transmitting. There was some hate, but kind of like hot rodders v highway cops. Censorship of what has already been let onto a frequency or spectrum gets no real respect - you have to pay for talent in full dollars with a little extra for the anti-cred you get for being involved in it. Split them into two parts (and then feel free to take the second out back and shoot it, but that's a pipe dream) and the people doing actual sorting of spectrum can perhaps get some talent that wouldn't touch F*CC with a ten foot pole.

Hell of a lot of it. If you want to be found, you can easily get your name (with perhaps a general location, like "John Random Loser, Iowa") to be the top google hit. Put everything you please on the page, including any phone numbers, addresses, GPS coordinates, etc. There you go - anyone who knows your name and perhaps some minor detail to tell you apart from namespace crashes can find out all of your contact info. But we don't do that, because of the people we'd prefer didn't find us. We'd like a degree of control over who gets what and a modicum of firewalls to limit damage when one of the IDs get found out by the wrong people and has to be abandoned.

Well, supposing both sides use them we'll be approaching essentially playing battlebots for it. Of course it'd be even better if we could like flip for it or play chess for it, but it's kind of a step (or stumble) forward.

The same standard as everyone else sucks, including for everyone else. Figure out a standard that works. Fair price for innovation, fair price for production. Right now, neither is - the US isn't using Vaseline (TM) on how things are produced, but happy to complain about what IP get made. Equally, China, as much of the area, isn't that interested in paying obscene patent fees. And while anything is underground you might as well shove it underground all the way - products made at gunpoint and zero worry about what is legal. Go to your room. Both of you. No, really, STFU. I won't hear a word more until you both can behave like adults.