Scott's Blag Redux

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080723-nintendo-cant-fight-off-patent-metroids-faces-injunction.html

Looks like another company is losing to a patent troll. I keep thinking that Congress or the courts need to put a stop to this practice, but it’s so hard to define. Where do you draw the line between patent troll behavior and a legitimate inventor protecting his creation before he can bring it to market? No one seems to have an answer yet, but we need one soon. Perhaps patent lawsuits should have a stricter requirement for ‘standing’ - the patent owner must have a product that is damaged by the defendant’s actions? It would eliminate patent trolling, but it would also limit the usefulness of patents in protecting new products before they release.

Unfortunately, there is little emphasis on patent reform - it’s a complicated issue with a headline-generation-quotient of 0.0 for politicians. Plenty of reason there for them to stay away.

I saw The Dark Knight today. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Every cast member is perfect. Heath Ledger really does deliver an Oscar winning performance, and the Nolan brothers wrote the best movie so far this year. Go see it.

So it’s finally done. I have a ~4GB SQLite database file that has all user-movie-rating triples, along with indices on users and movies. It took almost a week to get all that data in and indexed. Most of that time was spent indexing. My next moves will be creating tables with per-movie and per-user average ratings. After that, I’m going to start working on SVD.

So, I’ve now flown twice in 4 days. Austin -> Midland Thursday, and Midland -> Dallas -> Austin on Sunday. Each time, I had to empty my pockets, check my (smallish) duffel because I like my own toothpaste, shaving cream and shampoo, take off my shoes and remove my laptop from its bag. The more I have to do this nonsense, the more I realize how ridiculous it is. I’m all for safety and security on airlines, but I think we need to take a leaf out of the Israeli book: harden the cockpits, lock them, and train the pilots extensively that you never open the door, and you land as soon as anything goes wrong. Make planes a terrible target for terrorists, and you don’t need to go crazy checking people before they get on board. The liquids thing today is the most ridiculous part. Liquid explosives are terrible, expensive, and hard to get. The 9/11 hijackers didn’t use them. The just used box cutters. Blocking liquids from carry ons has also overloaded airlines/airports baggage handling. If they’re going to block something, why not block laptops. I bet it’d be easy to build a blade inside a laptop somewhere. With enough machining (not a hard skill to learn), it’d probably be invisible on an X-ray. Or a battery could be turned into a bomb pretty easily. Laptops with two batteries would even keep working. Who really thinks airport security is going to know to check that both batteries register to the operating system, especially if it’s Linux?

A few years ago, I took Amtrak trains between Washington, D.C. and New York. Never went through a metal detector. Never sent my bags through an X-ray machine. And, I never felt insecure, simply because trains are a terrible target. You can’t do anything with them if you hijack them, and they’re always on the ground. We need to either make planes the same type of terrible target, or we need to go back to trains. That’s the only way to actually secure our travel.

Since this is such breaking news at this point. SQLite is really really slow creating indices on big tables. It’s still trying to create the first index on users. I’m about to kill it, wipe the database out, then set the indices up to be created while inputing the data. Maybe that will go faster.

Because while I love Ruby on Rails, it’s just too damn slow to run my blog on my Slicehost 256 Mb VPS, at least with mod_rails, and I’m too lazy to figure out Mongrel or any of the other Rails systems. It also seems less than stable, especially with how much I’m messing with it. Plus, Movable Type has an iPhone interface plugin.