Yes, it is all about the money and no, it's not pure extortion. I don't know if you've noticed, but it costs a lot of money to build an airport and it costs a lot of money to run an airport. Some of that money comes from general taxes that all people pay, but most of the money comes from charging fees to users of the airport.

Everybody that uses the airport pays a fee. The airlines who use the airport to run a business, the airline passengers who use the airport to travel, the taxi drivers who use the airport to run a business, the livery service drivers who use the airport to run a business, the concessionaires who use the airport to run a business. Privately owned vehicles driven by private owners have always been exempted because they are just ancillary to getting the paying airline passengers to and from the airport.

These new "ridesharing" services are attempting to be private individuals when it suits them best and businessmen when it suits them best. SFO is calling them out on their BS and rightly so. If the "ridesharing" services win, the next step will be to either put a toll booth at the entrance and make everyone pay, or increase the general taxes so everyone pays. They will get their money.

Software is good for the economy, whether it is free or not. When it comes to businesses (the B in BSA), no software is without cost. Businesses buy support contracts and some may even pay third parties for training. The support contracts in particular pay for a lot of free software development.

To use the Great Lakes route (as they are currently used), the magnet would be required to go out into the open ocean, go around Cape Cod and the rest of Massachusetts, go around Nova Scotia and into the St Lawrence Seaway, which would then allow it to enter Lake Ontario, go through the Welland Canal into Lake Erie, and on and on to Chicago. The open ocean is what is going to kill it.

The chosen route will almost certainly be through the intracoastal waterway which requires very little open ocean travel - and that can be planned for especially calm days.

But alas, the real question is why the route does not involve the Erie Canal (which is still in operation!), which could certainly accommodate something of this size. They could head up the Hudson River to Albany and then take the canal to Buffalo on Lake Erie, bypassing the ocean altogether. Perhaps they really are concerned about the waves in the Great Lakes.

That was the Jeep Cherokee if you ever took it off-road. People loved them.

Ugh.

I keep seeing things like this on Slashdot. We are all for "plain english" laws that are easy to understand even without a law degree. Yet absolutely nothing in your recommendations fit. How on earth is anyone supposed to interpret "not patentable per se" and "you can't patent it unless it is particularly clever"? WTF? This is not helpful. You want to know how to make the patent situation worse? Add a bunch of new, incredibly vague laws.

Unless you can write up your suggestions in a manner in which every single graduate of a US high school comes to the same conclusion after reading your law, you are not helping things. I know that you are smart and would be the best, most impartial federal judge that was ever yet appointed, but perhaps you should reconsider how easy it is to solve the problems we face.

Yes, in exactly the same way that any Linux desktop distro that comes with a preconfigured set of software repositories could attempt take control of what people install.

OS X and Windows 8 have app stores where you can conveniently find and install software for your machine. Neither Apple nor Microsoft have ever made any indication that they will ever eventually prevent users from installing software that comes from a different source. And yet here on Slashdot we continuously get comments that imply that such a thing has already happened.

But this is a SAN FRANCISCO start up! They are going to collect all that data and sell it to advertisers! This is major automotive DISRUPTION you are witnessing!

Or they can buy a Ford, which can already do that for parents and more - like you can set it so the radio can't be turned on if the driver isn't wearing a seatbelt, or the low-fuel light comes on sooner because your kids are idiots, etc.

HFT exists to take advantage of arbitrage situations. They are reactive to changes in the market and colocating inside exchanges helps them to react quicker. It is certainly a profitable venture, as you can see.

Big Banks do not get any sort of priority over anyone else when having trades reversed. For starters, you are certainly not trading on the exchange for yourself, are you? You have a brokerage account, right? In that case, broker XYZ made the trade in their name. Your ownership of that stock exists as a notation on their books. That's it. Fidelity trades with Ameritrade. Bob does not trade with Joe. If some crazy event happens and trades are going to be reversed, Fidelity will ask for their affected trades to be reversed. All of them. Including the ones they made for you. But now, if you were trading for yourself, you can also ask for the trades to be reversed. I'm not going to paste a link here, but you can find it with less than 3 minutes of googling. Each exchange has a form on their website. Fill it in and email it to them. They can't refuse you just because you're a nobody. Really, they can't.

Now, as far as who's pocket HFT profits come from - that's a good question. First of all, there is no way to take any money from your pocket unless you are a party to the transaction. I had lots of money "in the market" as part of my retirement planning, but I didn't have any buy or sell orders. So I was completely unaffected by this flash crash. Right? My retirement was in jeopardy for 4 minutes. I didn't notice. I was working. Then the market recovered and my retirement plans were back on! Yay! Alright, so before HFT, buy/sell spreads were large. Now they are small. That's actually a very large benefit to me when I buy or sell stock. So no, I am not so sure that HFT is pulling money out of my pocket. Perhaps they are pulling money out of the pocket of the people that benefited when the buy/sell spread was large. Brokerages? I am not sure..

It's only invalid in the sense that the ITC won't do anything about it.

But the real issue is that an administrative commission is proving to be completely gutless when it comes to two American companies fighting each other. They have gone in circles for around 3 years now trying to figure out how to not do anything at all (while the lawyers on both sides have collected many millions of dollars in fees). The sole remedy available when you file an ITC case is a ban on importation and the ITC is simply unwilling to ban importation of popular products because they don't want to create any political backlash.

If there ever was any proof that giving federal judges a lifetime appointment to protect them from politics as much as possible, this is it

And do you know why? Because every .NET release makes it easier for mediocre developers to write software that takes advantage of your multicore machine. And .NET 4.5 (released with Windows 8) continues along that path.

Your 5-year old PC was running a lot of single-threaded code back when you got it. It's running a lot less of it now, even though the developers who wrote the code probably have no idea what they are doing.

It is a public road, and it's a bad road on purpose. In fact, once you reach a certain elevation, the road is a wonderfully smooth ribbon of concrete - they don't want dust to interfere with the telescopes. They also don't want ridiculous traffic jams beyond what they already have. So the first few miles beyond the visitor center is a terrible gravel road. Most people turn around.

The rental vehicle prohibition is between you and your rental car company. It has nothing to do with the State of Hawaii. If you feel like taking your rental car to the top, go right ahead. You will find that you are probably only one of a dozen FWD sedans on the top of the mountain. But... earlier this year some idiot tourists took their rental sedan up the mountain and forgot to put it in park when they got out. It slowly drove itself off the road and flipped over. It took the state more than a month to be able to get machinery in place to retrieve the wrecked car and take it down the mountain. Guess what - those tourists had to pay for the car AND the removal. You want to take that risk? Go ahead. Just remember that there aren't very many parking spaces up at the top of a mountain.

I highly recommend finding a way to get up there though - perhaps one of the many tour companies that do it? In fact, I think you'll find it to be a better experience. Most of those tours will get you up there so you can walk around a bit and watch the sun set. Then they take you down the mountain a bit to a secluded enough spot and give you an hour or more for stargazing - along with a very knowledgeable guide and a $10,000 telescope. The temperature will be well below freezing, so they also bring warm weather clothes for you - something you probably didn't bring on your trip to Hawaii.

Yeah, next month I'm moving into a new place and each bedroom will have a fully wired junction box in the middle of the ceiling. I have to provide the fixture.

I'm looking at LED fixtures and finding any useful information online is proving to be difficult. I see a lot of no-name Chinese stuff and I have no idea if it is good or if it is junk.

I see various stuff from names I recognize, such as Philips, but then you are looking at ~$500. I can buy a standard fixture and some LED bulbs for less than $100. If there is really some reason I should go for the LED fixture I would love to know it, but the info online is fairly useless for making a reasonably safe decision.

Is the rest of the industry still stuck at 32nm for ARM processors? I haven't seen anything yet that suggests that TSMC can meet 28nm demand on the various ARM chips they have contracts for.

At some point, the x86 Atom at 22nm or 20nm (or whatever is next) is going to be more powerful and more energy efficient than a real-world ARM chip.

Hmm, business travel in the United States. Large amounts of television commercials. Business travel in the United States. Large amounts of television commercials.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
-Upton Sinclair