JamieEi

I'm ok with algorithm patents. It seems like the vast majority of abuses involve business method patents. I'd like to see those abolished.

For internet in many places it's them or them. Unless you are ok with very slow or very expensive.

I disagree that innovation in social is dead. You could have said the same thing a year ago, but who saw Pinterest coming? There are still lots of unmet needs.

It shouldn't be since it's not a programming language (i.e., not Turing complete). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language#Definition...

Except that probable cause requires a judge to authorize the action and allows supervision of the terms.

Microsoft continues to do very well in enterprise markets. It's true that their consumer mindshare is almost zero except for XBox, but there is a lot of growth to be had from enterprise servers and their various cloud offerings.

The difference is that your Amazon content can be used on virtually any device, whereas Apple has little interest in bringing iX to any additional non-Apple devices.

I'm not an intern, and I don't understand why web vs. local makes a difference in this case. Can you explain?

You want 50 sets of slightly different standards for light bulbs? Surely that is a recipe for chaos and inefficiency.

Yet it still happens all of the time at big companies.

His account was created 106 days ago and has 7 posts, 4 of which are about Anon/Lulz. From this you conclude that he is a sock puppet paid by someone (the FBI?) to lead us astray with his constant one liners. Seems like a stretch, but hey that's just me.

I don't understand the concern about typing non-ASCII Unicode characters on a Windows box. I know of at least 3 easy ways: charmap, alt+numpad, and editor-specific support.

I have Qwest because Comcast can't provide reliable service to my 1920s apartment building, and I only get 2.6 Mbps down. I wouldn't think I'd have to explain on HN why that's not a viable alternative. It's certainly not for the OP's use case of streaming video.

Sorry, Comcast has been handed a monopoly franchise for broadband in many parts of the US, including Seattle. With their obscene profits comes an obligation to provide acceptable service in all reasonable cases. This is not an equal bargain between two independent parties -- the OP has ZERO alternative broadband providers and the real battle Comcast is fighting is against Netflix.

FeedDemon Pro w/ Google Reader as the backend.

Missing features: - Mothball feeds I'm not reading lately but might want to pick back up in the future. - Topical aggregation of feeds/posts. - De-duping.

Not sure if I'd pay extra or switch readers for any of those features, however.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptationism

This is exactly how you should put out a fire. As a user I now feel better about Dropbox than I did before the ToS confusion.

I used Live Mesh from launch up until about a year ago and had similar experiences. Lots of sync errors, lots of pain upgrading when MS decided to shuffle Live Mesh over to the Windows Live team.

On the other hand, Dropbox has been incredibly reliable and easy to use, plus it works on Android and Linux.

It appears to be multiple patents, virtually all obvious and with significant prior art:

• 5,579,517: Common name space for long and short filenames

• 5,758,352: Common name space for long and short filenames

• 6,621,746: Monitoring entropic conditions of a flash memory device as an indicator for invoking erasure operations

• 6,826,762: Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer

• 6,909,910: Method and system for managing changes to a contact database

• 7,644,376: Flexible architecture for notifying applications of state changes

• 5,664,133: Context sensitive menu system/menu behavior

• 6,578,054: Method and system for supporting off-line mode of operation and synchronization using resource state information

• 6,370,566: Generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device

• Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;

• Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;

• Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;

• Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and

• Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/10/microsoft-sues...

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...

I really hate software patents and the trolls that abuse them.

You enter your email address, not your password.

Better workplace alt-tab skills. They take years to develop grasshopper. :)

I found this odd as well. I have always heard that it runs faster. For example: https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-H...

Netflix continued use of AWS would seem to argue against cloud addiction being an automatic path to scale fail.

It should also be a good reminder to all of the people on HN who jumped to the conclusion that this guy was right on very sketchy evidence. This place is influential. We should do better.

Are tax revenues being used to subsidize the lower price? I honestly don't know. You seem to suggest that they are, but you don't offer any data to back it up.

Can you point to a US city that does have a competitive broadband market? Surely they can't all have rigged the market as you suggest.

Do you think that the current system has led to a vibrant competitive marketplace for consumer broadband in the US? The facts seem to be that many municipalities are able to provide much faster connections at a lower price than the local cable monopolies are either able or willing to do. If you put aside theoretical preconceptions about how economies ought to run, it's hard to see how anyone can argue the better service at a lower price is a bad thing.

Nice blog post. But why is it hosted as a GitHub readme?

Ars Technica article about the same bill: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/cable-backed...

It sounds pretty close to a ban to me. Certainly close enough than "banning" rather "severely restricting" is not flamebait.