nobody3141

I do like American government acts.

I always picture the governor in Mel Brook's Blazing Saddles:

"Patriotism is good isn't it?"

"Yes Governor"

"So I should sign this PATRIOT act without reading it?"

"Yes Governor"

"Parasites are bad aren't they?"

"Yes Governor"

"So we ban them ?"

"Yes Governor" ....

If only Mr Obama had found a way of making his health care bill spell out "IF YOU VOTE AGAINST THIS YOU ARE SO GAY" ACT - he would have got it through.

You don't trust your local bank to store your $10 bill - but you still trust the central bank not to print a billion of them tomorrow?

I doubt that anybody 'doubled up' and now pays for both the DVD and streaming option. The reason for the DVD service to exist at all is to do with Hollywood accounting and the way the licenses are counted - the idiocy of this has been discussed here before.

The studios can't start their own streaming service simply because they do not have the branding they think they have. This isn't the 1950s, nobody thinks "I must sign up for MGM's service they have all the best action movies". HBO and BBC might manage to make separate pay-for services but are more likely to simply agree an extra cost deal with Netflix in the same way they sell an extra cost package to cable. Does HBO really want to get into the writing and supporting software player business?

Then the studios have a problem that they are in direct competition to their main customers - the cable companies that would be delivering these shows over IP. Can we say serious throttling?

Sooner or later somebody in Hollywood is going to manage to get the childproof top off their Lithium tablets and realize that iTunes hasn't quite destroyed the music industry.

Quick economics lesson. The money on Wall St doesn't belong to the guys in red braces - it is the pensions of ordinary Americans and the savings of little old ladies.

Letting Wall St crash and burn means everybody in America's pension disappears - everybody over 65 is out on the street. Everybody who saved money has lost it. Nobody accepts cash anymore, after all if you put it in the bank it might dissapear. You are back to bartering chickens.

To misquote Clinton - "It's the software stupid"

You can buy an MSP430 dev board form TI for $5 with more features but the thing about the Arduino is that somebody with NO knowledge of embedded programming can go from box to flashing LED in <5mins.

I have spent longer than that trying to work out which target configuration I have on some embedded systems (Yes Keil I'm talking about you!)

Comparing it to the installed Sarnia plant at roughly the same latitude.

That is 96.6 ha (239acres of cells) 80MW capacity and (estimated) 120,000 MWh over a year.

So this plant should achieve around 70% of that, so 85,000 MWh /year or 235MWh/day

Ever visited an Arabic country?

Whatever an American might think, this is THE major problem - not terrorism - but being 'hospitalitied' to death!

Filing a patent just to have a patent is a few $100 - even less if you only file provisionally and hope the new employer doesn't understand the difference!

But if you want a patent to be of value, then it needs professional drafting and filing in multiple countries with specialist lawyers who understand for instance why Taiwan is different. That and translation and renewal fees costs $10-100K

Remember. A lot of his talks are likely to be to universities/user groups who have never organised a talk before - so 'remember a microphone' is useful!

And a lot of talks maybe in 'emerging nations' who assume that since he is American he is rich and FSF is something like IBM - so he can afford to fly half way round the world without being paid.

This is from a few years ago (ie recording on tape) so GNU/FSF/Linux may not have been as mainstream and organisers might have only advertised this as a computer department seminar rather than a large event. I once organised a university SciFi society talk for a UK "childrens" author - just as they became a global hit. A talk that might bring 20 people suddenly filled the largest auditorium.

The rest of the stuff is just an engineers approach to solving problems. Rather than tell a dozen people at 100 talks a year how I like my coffee - I write it down once and end of problem

I have a list of patents I have 'invented' and were filed by previous employers and this has got me jobs - but on the basis that I 'understand about patents', not because they specifically wanted them (since I don't own them)

The problem with filing the patents personally is that it's expensive to do and astronomically expensive to defend them. That's the real problem with patents today - they have become a May Day parade of tanks used to impress the enemy with how powerful you are.

Really who would have guessed !

The largest percentage of cell phone users in the world will never have used a landline and never will.

It's a big mistake thinking that every new emerging economy has to go through the same industrialization steps in the same way as the last one.

That software patents don't work can be shown from the simple fact that no software "inventor" tries to sell his patented idea to a big company.

If I invent intermittent windscreen wipers for cars then it's worthless to me unless I also intend to make cars and without a patent I can't try and sell my invention to a car company because they can simply copy it. When have you heard of an inventor with a software patent selling that idea to a large software company?

There was a similar documentary featuring the memories of the remaining people a coupe of years ago - called "Station X" ? IIRC

It has do with paranoia and a government and civil services that have managed very nicely for 200years by automatically keeping all successes and failures secret.

GCHQ invented public key encryption in the 70s years before RSA. But instead of publishing it and making money for British companies and giving British citizens a way to keep their money safe they kept it secret. Note, that keeping the invention secret doesn't improve the security of any data encrypted with it.

They were given permission to publish it in the late 80s - a decade after it was making lots of money for R,S and A. But the permission was pulled at the last minute because the publishing of Spycatcher was proving embarrassing for the government and the natural knee jerk reaction was to keep everything - however tangentially related - secret again.

The parts are pretty standard and the government can potentially buy them by million plus they can easily line up cheap manufacturing. The OLPC was a unique and novel design with no real momentum behind it.

The main barrier to the success of this device is that since it's a government project at least 50% of the budget will be siphoned off into pork barrelling, ministerial pet projects and 'consultancy fees' to close friends and relatives of the politicians involved. Unless of course Indian politics is unlike any other variety.

He didn't say it did - but it is an issue with converting and indexing old documents. Google's ngrams for instance regularly transcribes them as 'f' so you have to search for both possibilities.

Pity the Sony Bono copyright law didn't apply or Franklin's decedents would still have the copyright on electricity!

And Trinity College would be collecting a royalty everytime an apple fell off a tree!

It's $60 retail, there are $75 retail Chinese Android 2.3 tablets - they didn't change the world, why would this one?

Is the government going to create online courses in English and Hindi? Is it going to have English lessons so you can access all those 'educational' Youtube videos? Is it going to record the best elementary school teachers and put their lessons online?

Or is it going to be another - "we put computers in schools and therefore solved all educational problems" just like the US did with the AppleII in the late 70s

Given that it's specs aren't much more than $100 chinese Android 2.3 tablets I doubt they are losing anything. Especially since they don't have a retailer taking 30%

Their policy for the other Kindles was to recover the R&D initially and then sell them at not much more than cost.

Hey the new 2012 Oldsmobiles are in! And not only are they new and improved in ways you can't actually detect - but they are guaranteed compatible with your current gas.

Crazy moves like "heavy spending on warehouses, data centers and digital-content offerings"

An online store buying stock and building infrastructure !!!!! Crazy , they should be borrowing money and paying themselves bonuses before going bust - that's what Wall St wants

B.R.I.C.K. my new robot flying aircraft can fly with no power.

(as long as it's only downwards)

So 10years of R+D from the foremost manufacturer of PC operating systems has produced ......

Hardware accelerated transparency effects on the desktop (if you're lucky and not on an Intel chipset)

Just think what the next 10years might bring - multicolored keyboard CAPSLOCK lights?

Lego had a patent on the design of the bricks 50 years ago - but failed to get a trademark on the shape of the bricks.

Apple got a design patent on the general shape of the iPad. Design patents are a convenient way to get around the fact that trademarks offer much less protection than patents and are generally assessed rather more sensibly.

There is a difference between trademark and patent.

But Apple has a patent on making something that replaces a pad of paper look like a pad of paper - shouldn't a similar arguement apply?

" Judges agreed with experts who said a brick was a technical shape which could not be trademarked."

Odd that the unique pattern of interlocking holes and columns on a Lego brick is obvious and technical.

While a tablet computer being shaped like the piece of paper it replaces is protected

It's not health it's government.

The ministry of defence stock control project is similarly behind schedule and overbudget - and last time they tested it they had 8Bn worth of kit the army couldn't find.

I mean how difficult is it to make a stock control system ??

If you are MIT/Stanford/UCB and you are worried that you have to teach an industrially useful language because the students need it to get jobs - then you should close down and send them to Pheonix or ITT-Tech

My understanding was that MIT switched to python because in later courses they could actually use it to get things done (robotics, image proc, etc). While if they taught scheme they had to at the end of the course pretty much say: well that was fun, now we have to teach you something useful to get the rest of the course done.

10 Healthcare is expensive

20 Technology is good

30 So we use technology to make health care cheap

40 We announce massive NHS-IT project

50 We spend $20Bn

60 We discover project totally useless and abandon it

70 goto 10