Ah, the humble End User License Agreement. You tear through them, you click “I agree,” but what exactly are you agreeing to? I don’t actually know, because like you, I never read them.

Claiming to read all your software licenses is the reverse of masturbation—90 percent admit they don’t do it, and the other 10 percent are liars. It’s hard to get through a whole day without agreeing to the occasional complex contract, we definitely couldn’t get through the day if we read them.

These days, companies claim to sell us their EULA in lieu of just selling us their software, to give themselves powers over their software the law doesn’t give them. How much power? No one exactly knows. This last-mile legislation by companies has met with mixed response when it goes to court.

Continue reading after the jump.

Last month, I talked about the growing need for radio-frequency (RF) spectrum to support Internet services on smartphones and other mobile computing devices. Some experts say we’ll need 700–800MHz of additional spectrum—none of which is available now.

We can’t manufacture RF spectrum. It’s a finite resource, and only some of it has the range and penetration required to blanket a region. Data compression conserves spectrum, but there’s a mathematical limit (Shannon’s law) that prevents further compression without losing data integrity. Today’s communications standards already approach the limit.

The telecommunications industry wants to grab more spectrum from TV broadcasters, who surrendered a big chunk of airspace in the recent transition from analog to digital TV. The telecoms want UHF channels 40 to 51, or even 20 to 51. Some people want to end terrestrial TV broadcasting altogether—which would still free less than half the spectrum we supposedly need.

Continue reading after the jump.

It’s wonderful that even after 30-odd years as a gamer, there are still gaming moments that can surprise and delight me. Assassin’s Creed II (finally available for PC this month) absolutely knocked me cold within the first few minutes of the Florentine sequences.

It wasn’t the gameplay. Although the movement and combat are certainly strong (and a clear improvement over the original), we should expect that. It’s 2010: We’ve had so many quality exemplars of stealth and fighting systems that a developer has no excuse not to do it right.

It wasn’t the premise, which is dumber than a contestant on Conveyer Belt of Love. All the memories of all my ancestors are encoded in my DNA? Really? Right there between eye color and height is a base pair of nucleotides recording my 24th great-granduncle’s encounter with a hooker on January 24, 1472? And Veronica Mars is capable of extracting that memory and feeding it back into my brain as a simulation? That’s your premise?

Continue reading after the jump.