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