Why sell at a loss? Windows RT has a Microsoft store built into the OS, so Microsoft will make their money back on the store just like Google makes up for giving way Android from Google Play.
You can't really compare Windows RT to Android. Windows RT has fixed component costs and overheads such as warehousing, shipping, customer service, advertising, all expenses Android is free from.
Going by your business model, you could perhaps compare Windows RT to the Kindle. Amazon sells the Kindle cheap to make money from the Amazon store.
To do a price comparison, IHS previously broke down the component costs and concluded that the 32GB version of the Microsoft Surface RT sold for $499 and cost $271 in parts. So, your plan would mean pricing the Windows RT at or below $271.
Will it work for MS though? Bear in mind what the Amazon store offers:-
18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books Thousands of popular apps and games Amazon Prime members enjoy unlimited, instant streaming of over 10,000 popular movies and TV shows
OTOH, Windows RT can only run custom apps made for it. It cannot run Win programs. It does not have the selection of apps available for iOS or Android. Last I saw, the selection was bare indeed.
MS cannot make money selling non-existent apps it does not have, and barring a sudden increase in products in its store and consumer interest in buying these products, your strategy will fail.
The only thing it will likely achieve is to set consumer expectation that Windows RT is not worth more than the cut rate loss making price it was sold for.
They did release a browser. they did offer licensing.
Right after another browser had been released, two years prior, incorporating the very same elements Eolas patented. What the inventor of this prior browser freely gave to the world (he declined to patent it), Eolas tried to keep for themselves by patenting it.
Lets talk about specific facts instead of hand-wavy personal feelings.There was prior art.
One piece of prior art in particular, the Viola browser, invented by Perry Pei-Yuan Wei, an artist, software engineer and then a student at the University of California at Berkeley. That browser dates back to 1991 and its plug-in capabilities to 1992, nearly two years before Eolas filed for its patent.
Since you are referring to the state of the internet at that time, lets hear from Tim Berners-Lee himself how it was like:-
Berners-Lee described Viola as “an important part of the development of the web.”
The jury was shown an e-mail from Pei Wei to Berners-Lee dated December 1991 — almost two years before Doyle’s invention — which read in part: “One thing I’d like to do soon, if I have time, is to teach the parser about Viola object descriptions and basically embed Viola objects (GUIs and programmability) into HTML files.”
Later Tuesday, Wei would testify that he had demonstrated interactive elements working in the Viola browser to Sun Microsystems in May 1993 — several months before Doyle claims to have come up with his invention.
Berners-Lee described how the web community at that time wasn’t focused on patents or even money — Wei simply put his invention online for free.
If you read the decision of the US Federal Court of Appeal, it is clear that Eolas was aware of the invention of Viola because Pei Wei himself told them on 31 August 1994. Eolas went to Pei Wei's website and downloaded and read his paper. They went ahead anyway and filed their patent on 17 October 1994.
As for whether or not the Eolas patent was obvious, it was so obvious it was even mentioned in the 1991 letter to Berners-Lee.
So. If you rush to patent something obvious that was already shown by someone else, so that you can use the patent to sue large numbers of companies for money, what are you called?
It's not all a matter of dollars and cents. Patents effectively block others from using technology/methods which fall within the scope of the patent, regardless of whether or not it may be the most efficient/commonsensical way of doing things.
The '985 patent, originally filed Aug. 9, 2002, involves a program embedded in a Web page--or "hypermedia document," as the patent language calls it more generally. Here's an excerpt from the patent abstract's description of the technology:
The present invention allows a user at a client computer connected to a network to locate, retrieve, and manipulate objects in an interactive way. The invention not only allows the user to use a hypermedia format to locate and retrieve program objects, but also allows the user to interact with an application program located at a remote computer.
Interprocess communication between the hypermedia browser and the embedded application program is ongoing after the program object has been launched. The use is able to use a vast amount of computing power beyond that which is contained in the user's client computer.
Eolas sued all the big companies such as Apple, Google, Yahoo, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Office Depot, Staples, Playboy, Sun, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase and Adobe.
It is good that the companies ultimately decided to fight the patent, and won. If the patent was allowed to fester, in the case of IE the alternative proposal was to require users to click on a dialog box for every ActiveX control that appeared on a page. Similar changes would probably have been required in respect of webpages maintained by the other companies. If you visit any of the websites run by any of the companies sued, it is likely that the way you access their functions would be different from what it is now (and probably require more clicking and/or be more annoying).
The best approach for dealing with piracy is making your content easily accessible, hassle-free (i.e., no DRM), and offered at a fair price.
Let me expand on this point. There are broadly 2 kinds of pirates - those who enjoy your product and pirate for personal use (the fans), and those who pirate commercially to make money for themselves (the thieves).
The fans are normally concerned with easy and cheap access to your product. Give it to them and most fans will not bother to pirate because it is risky (exposure to malware), often time consuming (some obscure products can be really hard to find), inconvenient (usually need to assemble from multiple sources) or require technical expertise (eg. applying cracks, rooting). A good example would be Steam which provides cheap and convenient access to games. A counter example would be Game of Thrones - If you live in Oz, you can't get it (no access) and it is expensive (requires cable subscription).
As for the thieves, normally an obscure small technical magazine would not be of interest to them. The exception is if your product is so expensive that even your fans are willing to buy copies from pirates, making it financially worthwhile. Again, reducing your product to a fair price (by market standards) will largely solve this problem. One example is AutoCAD, which has a captive market, ridiculous monopoly pricing and a huge piracy problem.
Since you mentioned "secure", I assume you are contemplating some form of DRM. Just be aware of its disadvantages -its usually expensive (you need to buy/licence the DRM, maintain some way of policing it, maintain customer service to handle irate buyers, have some sort of refund sceheme for customers who cannot run the DRM), it can negatively impact sales (see Sony rootkits), and if badly implemented, can actually cause lawsuits e.g. SecureROM.
"We believe that those new Pandoraviruses have emerged from a new ancestral cellular type that no longer exists," he says. That life could have even come from another planet, like Mars. "At this point we cannot actually disprove or disregard this type of extreme scenario," he says.
The naysayers:-
The virus's size is probably part of its survival strategy. Amoebas and other simple creatures could mistake it for bacteria and try to eat it, opening them up to infection. "The internal environment of the amoeba cell provides a very good playground for acquiring various kinds of genes from different sources," Koonin says. He thinks that the Pandoravirus's unusual genome may be a mishmash of random genetic material it's sucked up from its hosts.
I cite Occam's Razor -the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Apologies to the discoverers, but I think its far too early to point to any "ancestral cellular type that no longer exists".
Is it possible to engineer the appliance so that instead of using passwords sent remotely to access the appliance, access is only granted when a physical switch is flicked on by the consumer? i.e.
Operator: Okay, we are connected to your system, press the red button now. Customer: *press* Operator: Okay now were in. Gimme a few minutes while we check your system.
Just look at how the profiling is done. From TFA:-
One of the features of Orca is an algorithm – a set of rules – that assigns each member of the network a probability of belonging to a particular gang. If an individual admits to this, the assignment can be awarded 100% probability. But if he will not, then any known associations he has with other individuals can be used to calculate a probable “degree of membership”.
We have no idea what rules are applied, or the weight given to them. The could take into consideration, for example, factors like skin color, race, language spoken, location of birth, marital status, family pedigree etc. I'm certain that the police are already taking some of these factors into consideration in deciding who to pay special attention to. The difference is that this technology is impersonal and can be misused to provide a veneer of legitimacy to otherwise abusive acts , e.g. "I'm shaking him down because the program says he is a gang member".
My point is that people who are born into a gang dominated environment already are severely disadvantaged, and it sits ill that someone who may be innocent may be subjected to undeserved police action/scrutiny simply because he is marked as a criminal by some program.
Before you jump to defend the internet cafe owner, read his complaint. The "internet cafe" was a disguised gambling den.
TLDR:- 1. Their computers all carry a "Game Display" programme. 2. Buying internet time entitles the user to participate in sweepstakes where they can win prizes. The more time you buy, the more chances you get to join the sweepstakes. 3. The "Game Display" was expressly created to, in their own words, "instill in the patron a sense of excitement and entertainment".
Yes, the law is overly broad and should be reworded, but in this case it did not get the wrong victim.
The French judiciary has ridden to the rescue of the country's web users, striking down a controversial new law which would have allowed the state to cut off the internet connections of illegal filesharers for up to a year.
The ruling is a blow to French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who had characterised the so-called "three strikes" law as a crucial weapon in the fight against online piracy. The Hadopi law, named after the government agency which was to police the new regime, was also used by many in the content industry as an example that could be followed in the UK.
But France's constitutional council ruled today that "free access" to online communications services is a human right and cannot be withheld without a judge's intervention. The council also ruled that the method of policing the web envisaged in the law breaches a citizen's right to privacy.
Those of you who have been following along in the documentary know about the design vs. money tension we've had on this project since the early days. Even though we received much more money from our Kickstarter than we, or anybody anticipated, that didn't stop me from getting excited and designing a game so big that it would need even more money.
I think I just have an idea in my head about how big an adventure game should be, so it's hard for me to design one that’s much smaller than Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. There's just a certain amount of scope needed to create a complex puzzle space and to develop a real story. At least with my brain, there is.
As a side note, it appears that a majority of the backers (or at least, those who identify themselves as backers online) are fine with expanding the scope of the game. And also, that those who complain the loudest against it do not appear to have put any money into the project (like parent poster).
So what about the future of advertising on the Xbox One? “It’s going to be an exciting transition though because the 360 console wasn’t built with advertising in mind, it was more of an afterthought, so we’ve had to adapt to the technology and how we work to fit them in to the console,” said Technical Account Manager for Xbox LIVE Advertising, “whereas this new one is going to have advertising in mind. So a lot of the limitations that we have now, hopefully the release of the boundaries will widened so the opportunities will be a lot greater.”
I'm pretty sure NASA have heard of this JPL since the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech is a NASA laboratory.
From TFA:
“A commercial lunar lander jointly developed with NASA would capitalize on NASA's previous investments and expertise in lander technologies. It also would stimulate a commercial capability to deliver payloads to the lunar surface reliably and cost-effectively."
So how is reaching out to commercial entities to improve their existing know-how instead of relying ONLY on their own labs"being clueless and pathetic"?
IT would also go a long way to speed up checkin. The number of delays due to Bag-Tag printers malfunctioning is staggering.
How does this compare with the number of delays due to the electronic tags being updated with the wrong information by the passengers? If the tags can be updated by the passengers themselves, it is a virtual certainty that someone somewhere will make a mistake, taking into consideration the complexities of international flights, transit stops, connecting flights, return flights etc etc.
FTA:
The airline recently produced an electronic luggage tag that travelers can update themselves with a smartphone and re-use over and over. The proposed electronic tags will have two small e-ink screens showing the bag's destination and a corresponding barcode with more flight details. Using an app, passengers will be able to wave their smartphone over it and automatically input their destination via NFC.
Principle IV states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him".
This principle could be paraphrased as follows: "It is not an acceptable excuse to say 'I was just following my superior's orders'".
Nine years ago, top officials in the Justice Department and FBI threatened to resign over then-President George W. Bush's sweeping domestic surveillance policy, which they believed to be illegal. As the Washington Post reports, acting attorney general James Comey, FBI director Robert Mueller, and top leadership in the Justice Department began drafting resignation letters in March of 2004, after the National Security Agency (NSA), at Bush's direction, began collecting metadata on emails and Skype calls sent and placed within the US.
Comey and Goldsmith found the NSA's argument tenuous, and threatened to resign over it. Bush at first pushed forward with the program, even after Comey ordered a halt to it, but ultimately reversed course after Mueller threatened to resign.
Excuse me... Did you just try to cop the Nuremburg Defence on behalf of the NSA?
I'm just saying you need to blame the politicos who are responsible.
Ergo, blame the politicos, not the NSA. Perfect application of the Nuremberg Defence.
Superior orders (often known as the Nuremberg defense or lawful orders) is a plea in a court of law that a soldier not be held guilty for actions which were ordered by a superior officer.
This is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was "only following orders" ("Befehl ist Befehl", literally "an order is an order") and is therefore not responsible for his or her crimes. Colloquially "Befehl ist Befehl" is known as "orders are orders".
What if the patent is entirely worthwhile and then sold to a troll?...All patents = bad is not driving the conversation forward.
Wow. Did you even read? My argument was, in bold mind you, "...right now it is too easy to file for and obtain frivolous, undeserving, non-novel or obvious patents...Cut down on the number of patents issued and you cut down on the abuse that follows." Show me where it says all patents are bad.
And as for those tech companies "abusing their patents" do you have a cite for abuse versus assert?
Make doing that except on a one time, emergency basis a felony and threaten to charge the entire management with felony murder if anyone dies because of a "cyber attack."
While youre at it, lets get rid of murder and all violent crimes by making them capital offences where the presumption is guilty until proven innocent. Lets get rid of that pesky jury trial and time wasting right of appeal as well. That should scare off them criminals from even thinking about carrying out crimes.
Since we're relying on excessive punishments as a deterrence factor, why not also make speeding a felony as well.
I give WashPo credit for their coverage of NSA and for going where other US based news sources fear to tread. Of course, I'd give them even more credit if they had been a bit more bold and not lost the exclusive.
This however, does not give them a free pass if they publish silly articles.
In any case, most of the comments here I see are directed at the article and the writer, not the newspaper.
First he admits the benefits the Internet brings:-
I grant its astonishing capabilities: the instant access to vast amounts of information, the pleasures of YouTube and iTunes, the convenience of GPS and much more.
Then he explains why he thinks the Internet is bad:-
But the Internet’s benefits are relatively modest compared with previous transformative technologies, and it brings with it a terrifying danger: cyberwar. By cyberwarfare, I mean the capacity of groups — whether nations or not — to attack, disrupt and possibly destroy the institutions and networks that underpin everyday life. These would be power grids, pipelines, communication and financial systems, business record-keeping and supply-chain operations, railroads and airlines, databases of all types (from hospitals to government agencies). The list runs on. So much depends on the Internet that its vulnerability to sabotage invites doomsday visions of the breakdown of order and trust.
Take note of his key objection - he fears that essential utilities/services would be easily disrupted because they are connected to the Internet.
Point 1- Easy solution, disconnect these essential utilities/services from the Internet! Point 2- If these essential utilities/services cannot be disconnected from the Internet without some loss of function, they would not have been able to enjoy the same function if the Internet never existed.
I do not blame the writer for this article, he is primarily an economics reporterand appears to have been taken in by the fearmongering flogged by all those who have an agenda to promote cyberwarfare capabilities. I do however blame the Washington Post for allowing such drivel to be posted under their name. They should have known better.
If you read her policy speech, her focus is on the need to rein in "Patent Assertion Entities" ("PAE"), defined as "a firm with a business model focused primarily on purchasing and asserting patents". And she talks about solutions such as making it easier/cheaper to defend against frivolous lawsuits etc.
She does not appear to address, or even acknowledge the key underlying problem with the patent system, namely that right now it is too easy to file for and obtain frivolous, undeserving, non-novel or obvious patents. All the powers the patent trolls have stem from the patents they are granted. Cut down on the number of patents issued and you cut down on the abuse that follows.
This will not only cut out the PAEs, but also lessen the ability of legitimate companies to kill off their competition by abusing their patents, such as when Samsung/Apple/HTC/Huawei/Motorola try to block the importation/sale of each other's products on the basis of patents.
Let me illustrate this with actual examples where patent trolls sued small businesses for using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail.
The Project Paperless via AdzPro letter-writing campaign is a kind of lowest-common-denominator patent demand. Patent-licensing companies are going after the users of everyday technology rather than their traditional targets, the tech companies that actually make technology. Smaller and smaller companies are being targeted....Project Paperless and its progeny don’t have any interest in going after the Canons and the Xeroxes of the world. After all, they have patent lawyers on payroll already and are in a far better position to push back. Project Paperless' spawn—AdzPro, AllLed, GosNel, and the others listed above—exemplify the new strategy. They send out vast quantities of letters, mainly to businesses that never could have imagined they’d be involved in any kind of patent dispute. They send them from anonymous and ever-changing shell companies. And at the end of the day, they either file only a few lawsuits—as Project Paperless did—or none at all, which has been the AdzPro strategy thus far.
“Going after the end users may ultimately be more lucrative for them,” said one patent litigator at a technology company that's closely monitoring the AdzPro situation. “If they extract a small amount from each possible end user, the total amount might well end up being a much larger sum than they could ever get from the manufacturers. The ultimate pot of gold could end up being much bigger."
In typical patent troll style, these shell companies (with names like AdzPro, FanPar, and HunLos) are asking businesses and users for a few thousand dollars—far less than what litigation would cost—as a licensing fee for using this basic technology. Unwilling or unable to lawyer up, most choose the more convenient route of settling... Over the past few years, we saw Lodsys threaten and sue a number of app developers for using technologies provided that companies like Apple and Google require their app developers to use. More recently, a patent troll called Innovatio has been suing restaurants, hotels, and companies for using WiFi. Yes, that’s right. WiFi.
My point is twofold: 1) Patents are being abused by patent trolls, who do not create, nor provide any incentive to creators and 2) Patent abuse is spreading to cause great distress to the general public. I'm sure that some of these businesses, when threatened, would opt to forgo the use of technologies such as scanners, WIFI etc. Scaring people off with frivolous lawsuits from using technology that could improve their performance, efficiency, efficacy or make their lives better is blocking progress.
Slashdot Mirror
Why sell at a loss? Windows RT has a Microsoft store built into the OS, so Microsoft will make their money back on the store just like Google makes up for giving way Android from Google Play.
You can't really compare Windows RT to Android. Windows RT has fixed component costs and overheads such as warehousing, shipping, customer service, advertising, all expenses Android is free from.
Going by your business model, you could perhaps compare Windows RT to the Kindle. Amazon sells the Kindle cheap to make money from the Amazon store.
To do a price comparison, IHS previously broke down the component costs and concluded that the 32GB version of the Microsoft Surface RT sold for $499 and cost $271 in parts. So, your plan would mean pricing the Windows RT at or below $271.
Will it work for MS though? Bear in mind what the Amazon store offers:-
OTOH, Windows RT can only run custom apps made for it. It cannot run Win programs. It does not have the selection of apps available for iOS or Android. Last I saw, the selection was bare indeed.
MS cannot make money selling non-existent apps it does not have, and barring a sudden increase in products in its store and consumer interest in buying these products, your strategy will fail.
The only thing it will likely achieve is to set consumer expectation that Windows RT is not worth more than the cut rate loss making price it was sold for.
They did release a browser. they did offer licensing.
Right after another browser had been released, two years prior, incorporating the very same elements Eolas patented. What the inventor of this prior browser freely gave to the world (he declined to patent it), Eolas tried to keep for themselves by patenting it.
Lets talk about specific facts instead of hand-wavy personal feelings.There was prior art.
Since you are referring to the state of the internet at that time, lets hear from Tim Berners-Lee himself how it was like :-
If you read the decision of the US Federal Court of Appeal, it is clear that Eolas was aware of the invention of Viola because Pei Wei himself told them on 31 August 1994. Eolas went to Pei Wei's website and downloaded and read his paper. They went ahead anyway and filed their patent on 17 October 1994.
As for whether or not the Eolas patent was obvious, it was so obvious it was even mentioned in the 1991 letter to Berners-Lee.
So. If you rush to patent something obvious that was already shown by someone else, so that you can use the patent to sue large numbers of companies for money, what are you called?
It's not all a matter of dollars and cents. Patents effectively block others from using technology/methods which fall within the scope of the patent, regardless of whether or not it may be the most efficient/commonsensical way of doing things.
Here is a description of the Eolas patent :-
Eolas sued all the big companies such as Apple, Google, Yahoo, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Office Depot, Staples, Playboy, Sun, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase and Adobe.
To dodge the patent, Microsoft changed how IE worked.
It is good that the companies ultimately decided to fight the patent, and won. If the patent was allowed to fester, in the case of IE the alternative proposal was to require users to click on a dialog box for every ActiveX control that appeared on a page. Similar changes would probably have been required in respect of webpages maintained by the other companies. If you visit any of the websites run by any of the companies sued, it is likely that the way you access their functions would be different from what it is now (and probably require more clicking and/or be more annoying).
The best approach for dealing with piracy is making your content easily accessible, hassle-free (i.e., no DRM), and offered at a fair price.
Let me expand on this point. There are broadly 2 kinds of pirates - those who enjoy your product and pirate for personal use (the fans), and those who pirate commercially to make money for themselves (the thieves).
The fans are normally concerned with easy and cheap access to your product. Give it to them and most fans will not bother to pirate because it is risky (exposure to malware), often time consuming (some obscure products can be really hard to find), inconvenient (usually need to assemble from multiple sources) or require technical expertise (eg. applying cracks, rooting). A good example would be Steam which provides cheap and convenient access to games. A counter example would be Game of Thrones - If you live in Oz, you can't get it (no access) and it is expensive (requires cable subscription).
As for the thieves, normally an obscure small technical magazine would not be of interest to them. The exception is if your product is so expensive that even your fans are willing to buy copies from pirates, making it financially worthwhile. Again, reducing your product to a fair price (by market standards) will largely solve this problem. One example is AutoCAD, which has a captive market, ridiculous monopoly pricing and a huge piracy problem.
Since you mentioned "secure", I assume you are contemplating some form of DRM. Just be aware of its disadvantages -its usually expensive (you need to buy/licence the DRM, maintain some way of policing it, maintain customer service to handle irate buyers, have some sort of refund sceheme for customers who cannot run the DRM), it can negatively impact sales (see Sony rootkits), and if badly implemented, can actually cause lawsuits e.g. SecureROM.
From TFA. The discoverers:-
The naysayers :-
I cite Occam's Razor -the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Apologies to the discoverers, but I think its far too early to point to any "ancestral cellular type that no longer exists".
That's a pretty nifty idea.
Is it possible to engineer the appliance so that instead of using passwords sent remotely to access the appliance, access is only granted when a physical switch is flicked on by the consumer? i.e.
Operator: Okay, we are connected to your system, press the red button now.
Customer: *press*
Operator: Okay now were in. Gimme a few minutes while we check your system.
when gang members are identified, eliminate them
But what if the identification was wrong?
Just look at how the profiling is done. From TFA:-
We have no idea what rules are applied, or the weight given to them. The could take into consideration, for example, factors like skin color, race, language spoken, location of birth, marital status, family pedigree etc. I'm certain that the police are already taking some of these factors into consideration in deciding who to pay special attention to. The difference is that this technology is impersonal and can be misused to provide a veneer of legitimacy to otherwise abusive acts , e.g. "I'm shaking him down because the program says he is a gang member".
My point is that people who are born into a gang dominated environment already are severely disadvantaged, and it sits ill that someone who may be innocent may be subjected to undeserved police action/scrutiny simply because he is marked as a criminal by some program.
Before you jump to defend the internet cafe owner, read his complaint. The "internet cafe" was a disguised gambling den.
TLDR:-
1. Their computers all carry a "Game Display" programme.
2. Buying internet time entitles the user to participate in sweepstakes where they can win prizes. The more time you buy, the more chances you get to join the sweepstakes.
3. The "Game Display" was expressly created to, in their own words, "instill in the patron a sense of excitement and entertainment".
Yes, the law is overly broad and should be reworded, but in this case it did not get the wrong victim.
Having said that, the politicians appear to be equally dirty. There is some suspicion that this legislation was about politicians covering their butts and keeping legalized gambling interests happy.
The law the French government enacted to cut people off the internet, Hadopi, was basically unenforceable when the French Constitutional Court declared access to the Internet a basic human right in 2009.
Statement titled "A Note from Tim"
As a side note, it appears that a majority of the backers (or at least, those who identify themselves as backers online) are fine with expanding the scope of the game. And also, that those who complain the loudest against it do not appear to have put any money into the project (like parent poster).
Yup. MS said so themselves.
Xbox One built for ads from the ground up
Ironically, I know of some people who would buy the Kinect if that was a feature.
I'm pretty sure NASA have heard of this JPL since the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech is a NASA laboratory.
From TFA:
So how is reaching out to commercial entities to improve their existing know-how instead of relying ONLY on their own labs "being clueless and pathetic"?
IT would also go a long way to speed up checkin. The number of delays due to Bag-Tag printers malfunctioning is staggering.
How does this compare with the number of delays due to the electronic tags being updated with the wrong information by the passengers? If the tags can be updated by the passengers themselves, it is a virtual certainty that someone somewhere will make a mistake, taking into consideration the complexities of international flights, transit stops, connecting flights, return flights etc etc.
FTA:
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
I refer you to the Nuremberg Principle IV
There is always a choice not to follow. One could take the courageous example of acting attorney general James Comey, FBI director Robert Mueller and others in the Bush era :-
Excuse me... Did you just try to cop the Nuremburg Defence on behalf of the NSA?
I'm just saying you need to blame the politicos who are responsible.
Ergo, blame the politicos, not the NSA. Perfect application of the Nuremberg Defence.
I have nothing to hide !
...says the person posting as Anon C. Well played troll, well played.
Wow. Did you even read? My argument was, in bold mind you, "...right now it is too easy to file for and obtain frivolous, undeserving, non-novel or obvious patents...Cut down on the number of patents issued and you cut down on the abuse that follows." Show me where it says all patents are bad.
Sure. You only had to ask.
Motorola is guilty of patent abuse.
So is Apple.
So is Google.
Even Microsoft and Nokia are joining the bandwagon.
As an aside, I find it hilarious that someone posting as an AC is accusing others of being a troll. Man up and post under your own account.
While youre at it, lets get rid of murder and all violent crimes by making them capital offences where the presumption is guilty until proven innocent. Lets get rid of that pesky jury trial and time wasting right of appeal as well. That should scare off them criminals from even thinking about carrying out crimes.
Since we're relying on excessive punishments as a deterrence factor, why not also make speeding a felony as well.
You do, I hope, see the irony in your comment.
Its pretty funny.
You are reading too much into things.
I give WashPo credit for their coverage of NSA and for going where other US based news sources fear to tread. Of course, I'd give them even more credit if they had been a bit more bold and not lost the exclusive.
This however, does not give them a free pass if they publish silly articles.
In any case, most of the comments here I see are directed at the article and the writer, not the newspaper.
Let me explain.
First he admits the benefits the Internet brings :-
Then he explains why he thinks the Internet is bad :-
Take note of his key objection - he fears that essential utilities/services would be easily disrupted because they are connected to the Internet.
Point 1- Easy solution, disconnect these essential utilities/services from the Internet!
Point 2- If these essential utilities/services cannot be disconnected from the Internet without some loss of function, they would not have been able to enjoy the same function if the Internet never existed.
I do not blame the writer for this article, he is primarily an economics reporterand appears to have been taken in by the fearmongering flogged by all those who have an agenda to promote cyberwarfare capabilities. I do however blame the Washington Post for allowing such drivel to be posted under their name. They should have known better.
If you read her policy speech, her focus is on the need to rein in "Patent Assertion Entities" ("PAE"), defined as "a firm with a business model focused primarily on purchasing and asserting patents". And she talks about solutions such as making it easier/cheaper to defend against frivolous lawsuits etc.
She does not appear to address, or even acknowledge the key underlying problem with the patent system, namely that right now it is too easy to file for and obtain frivolous, undeserving, non-novel or obvious patents. All the powers the patent trolls have stem from the patents they are granted. Cut down on the number of patents issued and you cut down on the abuse that follows.
This will not only cut out the PAEs, but also lessen the ability of legitimate companies to kill off their competition by abusing their patents, such as when Samsung/Apple/HTC/Huawei/Motorola try to block the importation/sale of each other's products on the basis of patents.
No, parent post has a point.
Let me illustrate this with actual examples where patent trolls sued small businesses for using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail.
Or other cases where frivolous suits were filed against small businesses for the use of technologies like WIFI .
My point is twofold: 1) Patents are being abused by patent trolls, who do not create, nor provide any incentive to creators and 2) Patent abuse is spreading to cause great distress to the general public. I'm sure that some of these businesses, when threatened, would opt to forgo the use of technologies such as scanners, WIFI etc. Scaring people off with frivolous lawsuits from using technology that could improve their performance, efficiency, efficacy or make their lives better is blocking progress.