Talynebear

Verizon is just so mad at the Federal Communications Commission today that a normal press release wouldn't do.

After all, Verizon issues so many press releases denouncing the FCC for trying to regulate telecommunications that today's vote on net neutrality required a special one to make sure it would be remembered.

So Verizon wrote it in Morse code and set the date as "1934" to make the point that the FCC is taking us backward in time. Verizon sent out the press release in this e-mail:

Comic by: Derp-a-derp (via Depressed Alien)

Update: We hope you were quick... the bundle deal seems to be gone as of Wednesday morning. Amazon is still offering a similar Sonic-packed bundle for $4.88, though, which isn't really that much worse.

Original Story

Over the years, we've gotten used to Sega porting much of its library of legacy Genesis title to every platform imaginable, from mobile phones to the PlayStation 3. For those looking for a nostalgic fix, paying a few bucks per game for one of these quick trips down memory lane hasn't been an awful deal. But paying just about five cents each for a bundle of 51 classic Genesis titles is a bargain basement deal that's too good for practically any gaming fan to pass up.

Gordon Bremer didn't invent Bluetooth 2.0. In fact, as he admitted on the stand last week in an East Texas federal court, he hadn't even read the specification for it until 2007—three years after it was on the market.

Despite that, Bremer may be getting paid a hefty royalty by Samsung, after a jury ruled that the Korean electronics company infringed Bremer's patents. He stands to get 2.5 percent of the $15.7 million verdict [PDF] won by his employer, Rembrandt IP, one of the oldest and most successful "patent trolls."

The jury found in Rembrandt's favor on Friday after a week-long trial, finding that Samsung's Bluetooth-enabled products, including its most popular cell phones, tablets, and televisions, infringe Bremer's patents, numbered 8,023,580 and 8,457,228. The patents relate to compatibility between different types of modems, and connect to a string of applications going back to 1997. The first version of Bluetooth was invented by Swedish cell phone company Ericsson in 1994.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission announced recently he would seek to reclassify broadband Internet as a common carrier service so the government could enforce net neutrality rules, something that President Obama supports. Some telecom executives and Republicans in Congress are calling this an “extreme” and “backwards” proposal, and they’re investigating the President’s role in pushing for it.

But we’ve only reached this pivotal moment in the net neutrality debate because of past efforts by corporate lobbyists and their political allies to weaken the government’s ability to protect the open Internet. Without the telecommunications industry’s massive power to design policies in its favor, the government would most likely already have the authority it needs to ensure net neutrality.

In the early 2000s, back when Gmail was still for Garfield fans only, policymakers were facing important questions about the nature of broadband Internet and how it should be treated by regulators. The last major telecommunications bill was passed by Congress in 1996 and since then the technology had advanced rapidly, with two different services, cable Internet and digital subscriber line (DSL), becoming widely available.

The long-awaited Assassin's Creed movie is finally moving ahead, with Ubisoft revealing the film has officially entered production. The video game adaptation will be released on December 21, 2016.

Word of the production came from the most mundane of places though—Ubisoft's quarterly financial call. The publisher is co-producing the film with studio New Regency, which has had a golden period in recent years with films such as 12 Years a Slave, Birdman, and Gone Girl under its umbrella.

"We have the pleasure to announce today that the green light has been given by New Regency, and the production has already started," said Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillemot. "This is a very important milestone for the project and for our team on Assassin's Creed."

As patent reform moved into the political spotlight during the last Congress, one patent that kept coming up was the "online shopping cart." It seemed to resonate as a technology that clearly shouldn't have been patented.

By the time it started being brought up in Congressional hearings, though, the shopping cart patent was dead. Its owner, Soverain Software, was beaten when computer retailer Newegg won an appellate ruling invalidating its patents and throwing out the $2.5 million jury verdict against it.

That ruling also wiped out Soverain's biggest win: a 2011 verdict against Avon and Victoria's Secret, in which the companies were ordered to pay almost $18 million and a "running royalty" of about 1 percent, for infringing the same patents.

Even the cable industry's biggest fan can't deny reality.

"Customer service right now is completely unacceptable," Michael Powell, the industry's top lobbyist, said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Powell was the Federal Communications Commission chairman from 2001 to 2005 and is now CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA).

Comic by: Derp-a-derp (via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)