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Are We Getting Any Closer To The Wireless Holy Grail?
For years and years we've been hearing about how software-defined radio was the holy grail of wireless technologies. The idea is that the wireless radio is software-based, rather than hardware-based, and therefore can change on the fly. Thus, a single device can, in theory, do a lot more. For example, it could automatically find the best network and switch you to that network, even if it involves a totally different type of network. That's cool in theory, but it's very, very difficult and can lead to a lot of complications. There was a lot of hype about the technology a few years ago, but it's been pretty quiet for a while. That may be changing as Vanu Bose's company is starting to get some new press coverage long after his SDR company first got attention (in part, because he's the son of the founder of Bose, the speaker company). Of course, reading through the NY Times article on Vanu, it doesn't sound like we're really getting anywhere near the big vision of SDR that...

Online Survey Finds That People Are Online A Lot
Last week, there was a much discussed story about the online study that reported that Americans choose to spend time on the Internet rather than having sex. The WSJ Numbers Guy makes an astute observation, that "people who answer online surveys aren't likely to be representative of Americans when it comes to online behavior." When he dug a bit deeper, he found that the survey was conducted with a panel of 1,011 online respondents, who responded to the survey during the week that it was open. Furthermore, the people surveyed were drawn from a pool of people that actually signed up to be surveyed. Obviously the results are skewed to users that actively use the Internet. When questioned, Ann Mack, JWT's director of trend spotting replied "The fact that the survey was conducted online may skew the results a bit." This just serves as a reminder to take studies or statistics that are presented to you with a grain of salt. In this case, the company that did the study was looking...

Anti-Online Gambling Law Challenged In Court
A year ago, as part of a larger bill that was supposed to be about "protecting our ports," Congress banned online gambling. While there's some back and forth over the law (and some politicians seem interested in changing the law), representatives of the gambling industry have gone to court to get the law declared unconstitutional, violating an individual's right to gamble in the privacy of their own home. The judge said that she expects to rule within 30 days, so it should be a relatively quick turnaround -- though, it's almost inevitable that a series of appeals will follow no matter what the outcome. So don't expect any final outcome on this question for a few years. The Justice Department, of course, has no problem with the law and is asking for the case to be dismissed, even if they haven't even bothered to enforce the law (yet).

And The Hits Keep On Coming For Vonage: Loses Another Patent Decision
Vonage is not having a very good week. Just after a jury sided with Sprint over Vonage in a patent dispute, the appeals court has affirmed the injunction against Vonage from the similar Verizon patent case that was decided earlier this year. The only small victory for Vonage is that the appeals court sent back the ruling on one of the three patents in question. Vonage is claiming that the ruling barely matters, since it's already developed a workaround for the other two patents. Of course, that's what they say -- not what Verizon or the courts have said. And, it still seems likely that Vonage is going to need to pay out quite a bit in terms of damages for the patents the court affirmed. Again, the point still stands from yesterday. Despite the court's rulings, these patents are highly questionable, with a tremendous amount of prior art. Even if you take as a given that the patents are valid, they had nothing to do with Vonage's success -- which was based on figuring...

OLPC Acting More Like What It Is: A (Non-profit) Tech Startup
The One Laptop Per Child project has been struggling to meet the lofty expectations it set for itself a couple of years ago. India decided not to participate in the program last year, and Nigeria and Brazil have apparently backed out of the program as well. A year ago they were expecting orders of five to ten million laptops; now they're struggling to reach 3 million orders. They're trying to jump-start things by offering Westerners a deal: buy a laptop for a third-world child and get one for your own use. It's a smart idea, and it's a shame they didn't try this strategy from the outset. The OLPC project is essentially a tech startup (albeit a non-profit one) and they might find more success if they acted more like other tech startups: first get the product in the hands of some real customers so you can get some real-world feedback. Only after you've learned how the product performs in the real world do you start worrying about producing them in volume....

ISPs Selling Your Information Again
In the past, when ISPs have attempted to make money off their users' clickstream data, they have met with fierce objections. Now, a new company, NebuAd is asking ISPs to provide not only clickstream data, but also your personal information such as physical location -- and they then want to use this data to target ads to you. But not to worry, your embarrassing halitosis problem won't outed by a traveling salesman selling mouthwash, since according to the company's CEO, "We only look at consumer sites - not ones that are sensitive. So if you go to a sex site, we don't track that. If you look up something for HIV positive, we don't look at that. But if you are planning travel to the South of France or are researching a Lexus SUV, we do track that." Uh yah, right. Ad companies always have the users' best interests in mind, don't they?

How Much Taxpayer Money Is Wasted By Grandstanding Politicians On Unconstitutional 'For The Children' Laws?
For quite some time now, we've been pointing out how ridiculous it is that state after state after state passes "for the children" laws which clearly are unconstitutional. These laws are always thrown out by the courts. It's a total waste of taxpayer money, as the state needs to go to court to defend the law, only to have it thrown out (it's even worse when they go on to appeal). The politicians don't care. They just want to pass the law so they can show voters in their district that they're "protecting the children." Who cares if they're not actually protecting any children and actually really just wasting taxpayer money? The latest state to go through this process is Ohio -- and now reporters are finally starting to ask how much are these bogus laws costing taxpayers to defend in court? It probably won't stop politicians from passing these laws, but it's about time the press started asking this question directly to the politicians.

Will History Repeat Itself With Google Playing The Part Of Lotus?
History often repeats itself in the tech world and Joel Spolsky is seeing history repeating itself in the web application space. Using the example of Lotus in the office software space, he argues that the company lost relevance to Microsoft because it (wrongly) focused on optimizingperformance and features for a platform (DOS) that was quickly becoming obsolete. In the meantime, Microsoft and Apple built really cool features for their officesoftware and waited for platform capabilities to catch up (inevitably)due to Moore's Law. He then equates Google to the latter-day Lotus, painting a scenario where Googlesmugly laughs off a bloated but feature-rich (imaginary) NewSDK from a bratty startup, only to then get disrupted by this SDK when browser capabilitiesimprove. Of course, part of the analogy breaks down because Microsoft was hardly a bratty startup when it succeeded where Lotus failed.The prediction was serious enough to elicit a response from a Googler who disagrees with...

Comcast Fined For Airing Fake News Without Revealing It Was Fake
Over the last few years there's been quite a bit of controversial over the practice of biased parties putting together video news releases. They look like typical local news feature segments on a particular topic, but they're actually put together by companies, PR agencies or even government agencies. Cheap or lazy TV stations will often air them as filler, though they rarely explain the origins of the report (and often will play them off as the work of their own news agency). The FCC has been warning stations about the practice of airing these videos without disclosure, but it hasn't had much of an impact. That may be changing. The FCC has now fined Comcast $4,000 for airing one such VNR, about some kind of sleeping pill without disclosing that the "news" report was produced by the company that made the sleeping pill. While it's nice that someone is cracking down on this deceptive practice, there are questions over jurisdiction. The FCC has jurisdiction over broadcast...

Supreme Court To Determine If Patent Holders Can Shake Down Entire Supply Chain
While Congress continues to fight over patent reform (often missing the bigger issues for those that the lobbyists are most interested in), it's been the Supreme Court that's been doing its best to bring some sanity back to the patent system. After ignoring patent law as being a boring "commercial" dispute for years, the Supreme Court finally realized a few years ago that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (that handles patent cases) had basically redefined patent law over the last few years, creating much of the mess we're in today. Suddenly, the Court started taking a bunch of patent cases -- and almost every time it slapped down CAFC and brought some common sense back to the patent system. Of course, there's still a lot more to do on that front, and apparently the Supreme Court agrees. It's now taken yet another patent case that could have major ramifications.This case, officially between LG and Quanta, really concerns the question of how many times patent...

Lowes Tries To Silence Sucks Site For Complaints About Lowes
We've covered a variety of cases involving so-called "sucks sites," where someone registers as a domain name the name of a company and appends sucks to the end in order to create a complaint site. Companies have often complained that these sites are trademark violations, but that usually doesn't pass the moron in a hurry test. The latest such case involves home improvement store Lowes. A guy who bought a fence from them was upset that the installers botched the job. Lowes refused to take responsibility, so he set up a site at Lowes-Sucks.com and promptly received a cease and desist from the company claiming trademark violation. While early on, a few companies were able to get sucks sites shut down, it's become a lot rarer, as judges tend to recognize that criticism is perfectly legitimate -- and no one is likely to confuse a sucks site as being endorsed by the company. In the meantime, of course, in sending out such a cease and desist, Lowes has just drawn a lot more...