Note the patents IV discusses in their dealings with the press: e.g. one for zapping malaria-carrying mosquitoes out of the sky with lasers. Surely, the entrepreneurs are lining up to bring that invention to the wealthy markets of the Dark Continent and the rest of the Third World. Right after they introduce Bill Gates' high tech toilet. In all seriousness, the sad truth is some projects will not be driven to completion by market forces. They require "brute force" (personal wealth and force of will) to make them happen. Gates' push for a malaria vaccine was one. Glaxo, as a "rational actor", would not have finished that project if not for all the free Gates Foundation funding. Truly an amazing achievement. However, his former CTO appears to be cut from a different cloth. His brute forced idea is IV. Not, e.g., a device to kill malaria carrying parasites with lasers, or any other such noble invention (they have plenty of examples to feed the press I'm sure), but a company to _license_ that invention, for a _price_... _if_ it can find a _suitable_ licensee. Big difference. Back in the real world...
Finding suitable entrepreneurs to take great ideas covered by someone else's patents forward is not how IV makes money. (Nor is it usually how great ideas reach the market. Theoretically of course it sounds great.) Rather, IV threatens successful businesses with lawsuits based on allegations of infringement of patents IV controls - low quality patents that would likely be partially or wholly invalidated were they to be re-examined or challenged in court. The targets of IV's threats are faced with the option of either challenging the patents (made more difficult through aggregation and extensive use of shell companies) or paying fees. The latter is less expensive, so they pay the fees.
I think of reduced memory requirements as a benefit to every application, including encryption. That's because nearly every application I use competes for memory; I also use memory as general storage media for stuff for which I want fast I/O and/or don't need to save permanently (e.g. mfs or tmpfs mounts). I think of memory as a precious resource.
No. What sites assume is that you are located (at least in a regional sense) near the (recursive) DNS servers you use. For example, that's how many CDN's work.
Note: It's certainly possible to share the exact same location (or interface, to be more precise) as your DNS server. I run my own personal DNS cache on localhost. It's not unheard of. I'd guess there would be a few other readers of HN who do this as well.
But of course before 1991-1992, there were no online catalogs. It was an entirely novel idea brought to us by Charles E. Hill. If not for Mr. Hill, there could be no eBay, no PetMeds, no online shopping as we know it.
If you use these servers you may see a lot less advertising. That's because more than a few of the top 100/1000/10000/1000000 sites are actually just ad servers, assuming Million Short is using Alexa as the source. And because they appear in the top Alexa list one might guess those particular ad servers serve a significant share of the internet's advertising.
Another thought is you could potentially use these as general purpose DNS servers; e.g. they are all Amazon EC2 I believe so with respect to the DNS-based geolocation efforts of many websites, you'd be treated as if coming from the location of whatever region the datacenter is in. Just add the top 100/1000/10000/1000000 sites to your HOSTS file.
A company with a page on its site, written by the co-founder, entitled "The Red Herring of Transparency".
Surreal.
He admits patent quality is poor and then at the same time wants you to pay to license IV's low quality patents. He's afraid of DJ's and reexams. Gee, I wonder why.
Maybe it's because many of IV's patents would never survive the scrutiny (that they should have gotten by the USPTO during prosecution).
Have you ever paid repeatedly for some thing only to find out later you did not have to? How did that make you feel? DJ's and reexams might save the present and future licensees of IV's patents a lot of money.
Finding suitable entrepreneurs to take great ideas covered by someone else's patents forward is not how IV makes money. (Nor is it usually how great ideas reach the market. Theoretically of course it sounds great.) Rather, IV threatens successful businesses with lawsuits based on allegations of infringement of patents IV controls - low quality patents that would likely be partially or wholly invalidated were they to be re-examined or challenged in court. The targets of IV's threats are faced with the option of either challenging the patents (made more difficult through aggregation and extensive use of shell companies) or paying fees. The latter is less expensive, so they pay the fees.