Comment They don't get it (Score 5, Insightful) 439
Comment Instead of Patent Reform, Litigation Reform (Score 1) 130
In step 1 of the defense, the defendant provides prior art, claims of obviousness... to the Patent Office who then determines if the patent is still valid. The Patent Office (who are the experts, not the courts) judge if the patent is still valid based on all evidence.
After that if it still goes to court then loser pays attorney fees. No fees are paid before step 1 - so both sides get to hear the arguments before going to court. Plaintiff doesn't get punished with paying legal fees for simply not being aware of prior art. Defendant doesn't pay legal fees until they lose their appeal with the Patent Office and still decide to continue to fight. If the Patent is stuck down in step 1, then the Patent is void. It does not just apply to this single case.
Comment What about complex software? (Score 1) 130
Comment Posting IPs of Security Researcher Virtual Machine (Score 1) 36
Comment Re:err (Score 4, Insightful) 235
It's been very mixed because I have two different development teams. I have the core developers, the RPG and LANSA developers, and they have five, 10, 15 years with the company. They are very well entrenched, they understand the music business, they understand the technology, and they understand how we relate to the music business. On the Java side, everyone right now has been here less than a year. We have excessive turnover for my Web-based team. It's a younger workforce. They have different needs, different requirements and different desires than our slightly older workforce. I'm seeing them being much more [transient.] It's much more challenging to get the newer generation of folks interested in trying to understand the business vs. looking only at the technology.
Comment Answer: They will laugh their ass off. (Score 4, Funny) 231
FTA: How will officials in Washington react when China's Tencent (with a market capitalization of $42 billion, almost twice that of Yahoo) or Russia's Yandex makes a bid for AOL?
Submission + - New laser makes pirates wish they wore eye-patches 1
Comment Simple definition for Network Neutrality (Score 4, Informative) 945
You want chat with your internet. That's $5/month. You want email, voice mail, VOIP, games, NFL games, Blockbuster Streaming... That's extra. You want Netflix streaming. You can't have it. We don't have an agreement with them.
Most people talk about Network Neutrality as if it is giving preferential speed to one site over another. It can be much worse. We saw what happened when torrents (legal or illegal) were deemed to cause most of their network load. They tried blocking them. My provider blocks the standard SMTP port just in case my computer is a SPAM BOT. How soon before they deem that streaming movies are responsible for 50% of their bandwidth (and are a direct competitor with their own Cable TV offerings) and they block streaming video to "improve quality" for those poor customers who have their bandwidth unjustly stolen from those few who watch TV shows on their computer.
Comment Re:decent touch screen keyboard? (Score 1) 112
Why UV
Probably because they can alter the LCD screen from R + G + B to a R + G + B + UV - just a 4th wavelength for the monitor to handle - kind of like Sharp's RGBY TVs. Then the visible + UV light emitted by the backlight through the LCD panel is what changes the surface of the monitor. You don't need to run wires to every pixel in the monitor - wires that would be on top of the touchscreen and on top of the LCD panel.
Hiding the wires to control the shape isn't an unsolvable problem. Touchscreen monitors have the same issue. There will be other methods of changing the shape of a display, but this is the method Microsoft came up with - which is why Microsoft got a patent on an obvious feature. The patent is for the method of achieving this feature, not just making a shape shifting display. Tying the shape of the display to the existing video display technologies simplifies some things and has its advantages and is worth a patent.
Submission + - Hackers sends out fake tsunami warning on Twitter (sophos.com)
Andi Arief is Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's disaster management adviser and a frequent user of Twitter, diligently posting disaster-related updates. But when he lost control of his account, a petrifying message was sent out to Twitter users.
Submission + - Tandberg attempts to patent open source code (multimedia.cx)
Submission + - German scientists create 'super-photon'
Submission + - UK Police to get major new powers to seize domains (thinq.co.uk) 1
At present, Nominet has no clear legal obligation to ensure that