In practice it's impossible to do anything non-trivial without infringing a number of patents.
There is no test you can do to give a certain answer, the best you can do is licence the patents you're sure you'd be infringing. In the cases of patents owned by other big companies a big company which owns a lot of patents can just make a deal that they not sue each other.
In the case of patent trolls, companies with no real assets other than their patent portfolio and no income stream other than licensing and the loot from lawsuits this is of course impossible since they produce nothing they cannot be threatened with having the other companies patents used against them.
I really have to ask something of any engineers reading this who work in R&D- how many of you spend your dev time reading patents to find useful tech you could use in what you're developing?
Alternatively how many of you avoid doing so at all cost for fear getting 3 times the penalties if someone sues you for something you didn't think your tech infringed but is later found to infringe?
Currently there's well over 6 million active patents worldwide. Even cutting out all the ones in fields so far from your own they probably have nothing to do with what you're building (unsafe) that still leaves you with more patents to examine to see if you're infringing than even dozens of lawyers could compare to every part of what you're building in a year.(if you could delay time to market that long) Even then you wouldn't be safe since one of the lawyers might have misunderstood something or missed something. (lets not even get into changes late in the projects design)
You'd be left with a decent pile of "certainly infringes" and such a vast pile of "maybe infringes" that you'd be bankrupted by the licensing fees and delayed for years trying to contact every one. And even then you wouldn't be safe since a court might simply disagree with even a very very good lawyer.
So big companies make an effort, pay off the ones which they are certain infringe and which are certain to be spotted and hope.
I don't know about the workplace of the writer of TFA but when I worked in a big factory the price of downtime or a failure due to an application or a number of applications running out of disk space could potentially cause a million worth of damage in lost productivity or damaged product (say it gets stuck in a time sensitive step) in less than half an hour. I heard claims that a full fab down could cost a million in 10 minutes though that could have been a slight exaggeration.
a million worth of extra disk space to significantly cut down on the chances of that happening or to allow apps to have their own disk or partition(so say one buggy app doesn't bring down 10 more) would barely have made the managers blink.
And it would be a contradiction if the point was to deal with the government being bureaucratic rather than to deal with the government being abusive or secretive.
How much extra bureaucracy is there around keeping things which don't need to be secret secret.
He'd be fired under some trivial pretext the same way people aren't fired for complaining about labour law violations, they just get let go the next time they fail to park exactly straight in the staff carpark or turn up 30 seconds late.
please provide details of wikileaks hosting peoples bank account numbers and pins.
People die as a result of politicians and military commanders knowing they're not going to be held accountable for their actions. Are their lives worth any less?
" Where are his efforts to find the Taliban documents showing their human rights violations?"
Where are his efforts to find proof that water is wet?
"And where are the documents showing the amount of effort the US soldiers put in distributing contributions from US citizens, including medical, school, and sport supplies? Putting themselves in harms way to protect civilians during firefights? Or the extrodinary efforts they take to try to limit civilian casualties."
Front and centre at every press conference and event where the military want to make themselves look good. They're already making every effort to get that information front and centre. Wikileaks job is to show the other half of the story.
"And where are the documents showing the Taliban's indiscriminate placing of IEDs and the number innocent lives they have taken?? Hmmm??? "
Actually the recent leak had quite a lot of info about the civilian deaths caused by IED's. Nice to know you've been too lazy to actually read anything before posting.
A journalist uncovers information which needs to be heard. if a journalist discovers a company selling hotdogs made of rat meat they shouldn't have to spend an equal portion of their time talking about how really the companies products are quite good and affordable in some parody of being "unbiased".
"it's a data dump that any 12 year old with access to the Internet could do if they got the data."
get back to me when you find some 12 year olds who regularly get their hands on data which makes front pages worldwide.
So he should just stop promoting his site? because it may cause people to try to fake material?
Forging material is no trivial task, particularly in large volume. It can be done but it won't be a few college students. Those who want to see the site discredited and have the money and staff to create large credible fake leaks would be doing so already.
If the increased popularity motivates them more to do that then it means wikileaks is doing exactly what it should- scaring the hell out of corrupt politicians.
"Narcs, informants, and other snitches " all have one thing in common, they give everyday peoples secrets to authority figures. He gives authority figures secrets to all of us.
it's the difference between robin hood and a tax collector, both take money off people and give it to someone else, people hate tax collectors so surely they'd hate robin hood just as much.
I sometimes wonder if perhaps government needs another wing,
an executive, a legislature, a judiciary and another wing(investigative?) with the job of (but not monopoly on)letting everyone know what the hell the other 3 are up to with as much protection from the other brances as they have from each other and as much power to root around in the others buisness as any wing of government.
it used to be that the citizens were good enough at that job but nowdays with the way the weak ones are getting stamped on for trying and the rich and powerful don't give a damn I think it would be better.
I've just completed a "structured, formal courses of study". A CS degree in a respecteed university and graduated with honours yet I'll freely state that while I can handle linux/unix file permissions to a reasonable extent I have no idea about the more complex interactions you talk of.
There was a hell of a lot of useless cruft in my course, a hell of a lot of stuff that appeared to only be taught because someone senior in the department had a hardon for it or an otherwise utterly useless speciality. lots of material so out of date that it no longer works and worst of all, in some subjects which I had studied extensivly myself outside the course already, simply awful advice.
I'll never forget the lecture slides when the head of department decided to tell us about how to implement "security" when working with PHP in his module.*shudder*
If it's malware they're trying to stop and not anything else then they gain little. Foolish people who click "OK" to popups asking them to install anything and everything constitute an almost perfectly random search.
Better to just get a list of sites which serve malware from one of the companies which track such things and re-direct traffic for them into a hole.
this seems less innocent the more I think about it.
Also everyone at every office knows some lazy sod who despite not being the boss wants everyone at their office to work for them rather than with them.
She could have thrown together what she wanted in about 30 seconds in word or paint.
She didn't. Instead she wanted to use company time, company resources and even wanted to waste the time of other employees on her personal problems.
Everyone knows someone like this.
I'd have no problem with hiring this guy. I'd know I'm not going to be paying for him to design kids birthdays cards for the office sponge.
If that were the case then the fact that the dongle prevents the program from running (and as such prevents it/parts of it from being read into memory) would be enough to be covered under copyright.
1:http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/06/30/1618216/Regular-Domains-Have-More-Malware-Than-Porn-Sites?from=rss Regular Domains Have More Malware Than Porn Sites
Slashdot Mirror
meat is murder!
fish is rape!
bread is assault!
veggies are petty theft!
only one way to be sure- scan a note and see. :D
In practice it's impossible to do anything non-trivial without infringing a number of patents.
There is no test you can do to give a certain answer, the best you can do is licence the patents you're sure you'd be infringing.
In the cases of patents owned by other big companies a big company which owns a lot of patents can just make a deal that they not sue each other.
In the case of patent trolls, companies with no real assets other than their patent portfolio and no income stream other than licensing and the loot from lawsuits this is of course impossible since they produce nothing they cannot be threatened with having the other companies patents used against them.
I really have to ask something of any engineers reading this who work in R&D- how many of you spend your dev time reading patents to find useful tech you could use in what you're developing?
Alternatively how many of you avoid doing so at all cost for fear getting 3 times the penalties if someone sues you for something you didn't think your tech infringed but is later found to infringe?
Currently there's well over 6 million active patents worldwide.
Even cutting out all the ones in fields so far from your own they probably have nothing to do with what you're building (unsafe) that still leaves you with more patents to examine to see if you're infringing than even dozens of lawyers could compare to every part of what you're building in a year.(if you could delay time to market that long)
Even then you wouldn't be safe since one of the lawyers might have misunderstood something or missed something.
(lets not even get into changes late in the projects design)
You'd be left with a decent pile of "certainly infringes" and such a vast pile of "maybe infringes" that you'd be bankrupted by the licensing fees and delayed for years trying to contact every one.
And even then you wouldn't be safe since a court might simply disagree with even a very very good lawyer.
So big companies make an effort, pay off the ones which they are certain infringe and which are certain to be spotted and hope.
Up until last year the house of lords was the highest you could go.
(only just found out that that had changed.)
I don't know about the workplace of the writer of TFA but when I worked in a big factory the price of downtime or a failure due to an application or a number of applications running out of disk space could potentially cause a million worth of damage in lost productivity or damaged product (say it gets stuck in a time sensitive step) in less than half an hour.
I heard claims that a full fab down could cost a million in 10 minutes though that could have been a slight exaggeration.
a million worth of extra disk space to significantly cut down on the chances of that happening or to allow apps to have their own disk or partition(so say one buggy app doesn't bring down 10 more) would barely have made the managers blink.
at some point it's time to just give up.
And it would be a contradiction if the point was to deal with the government being bureaucratic rather than to deal with the government being abusive or secretive.
How much extra bureaucracy is there around keeping things which don't need to be secret secret.
He wouldn't be fired for pointing out corruption.
He'd be fired under some trivial pretext the same way people aren't fired for complaining about labour law violations, they just get let go the next time they fail to park exactly straight in the staff carpark or turn up 30 seconds late.
That would be great if he even had an address and phone number.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/7909793/Profile-Wikileaks-founder-Julian-Assange.html
please provide details of wikileaks hosting peoples bank account numbers and pins.
People die as a result of politicians and military commanders knowing they're not going to be held accountable for their actions.
Are their lives worth any less?
" Where are his efforts to find the Taliban documents showing their human rights violations?"
Where are his efforts to find proof that water is wet?
"And where are the documents showing the amount of effort the US soldiers put in distributing contributions from US citizens, including medical, school, and sport supplies? Putting themselves in harms way to protect civilians during firefights? Or the extrodinary efforts they take to try to limit civilian casualties."
Front and centre at every press conference and event where the military want to make themselves look good.
They're already making every effort to get that information front and centre.
Wikileaks job is to show the other half of the story.
"And where are the documents showing the Taliban's indiscriminate placing of IEDs and the number innocent lives they have taken?? Hmmm??? "
Actually the recent leak had quite a lot of info about the civilian deaths caused by IED's.
Nice to know you've been too lazy to actually read anything before posting.
A journalist uncovers information which needs to be heard.
if a journalist discovers a company selling hotdogs made of rat meat they shouldn't have to spend an equal portion of their time talking about how really the companies products are quite good and affordable in some parody of being "unbiased".
"it's a data dump that any 12 year old with access to the Internet could do if they got the data."
get back to me when you find some 12 year olds who regularly get their hands on data which makes front pages worldwide.
So he should just stop promoting his site?
because it may cause people to try to fake material?
Forging material is no trivial task, particularly in large volume.
It can be done but it won't be a few college students.
Those who want to see the site discredited and have the money and staff to create large credible fake leaks would be doing so already.
If the increased popularity motivates them more to do that then it means wikileaks is doing exactly what it should- scaring the hell out of corrupt politicians.
And yet my national newspapers filled it's first 10 pages with stuff from the latest big leak about afghanistan.
They also mirrored many of the documents on their own website.
The regular press have no problem publishing when wikileaks hands it to them on a silver platter.
"Narcs, informants, and other snitches " all have one thing in common, they give everyday peoples secrets to authority figures.
He gives authority figures secrets to all of us.
it's the difference between robin hood and a tax collector, both take money off people and give it to someone else, people hate tax collectors so surely they'd hate robin hood just as much.
huh...I'd never heard the term before.
But that sounds pretty similar to what I was thinking of.
It would also be far less effective since it would draw less leaks.
I don't see how his failure to wear a halo makes his current endevour any less laudable though.
The perspective esposed by people who want wikileaks shut down is also irresponsible and naive.
Hungry
I sometimes wonder if perhaps government needs another wing,
an executive, a legislature, a judiciary and another wing(investigative?) with the job of (but not monopoly on)letting everyone know what the hell the other 3 are up to with as much protection from the other brances as they have from each other and as much power to root around in the others buisness as any wing of government.
it used to be that the citizens were good enough at that job but nowdays with the way the weak ones are getting stamped on for trying and the rich and powerful don't give a damn I think it would be better.
that kind of "exposing contradictions and bullshit" comes under the headding of commedy.
bremer bird and fortune have been doing the same in the UK for decades.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC31Oudc5Bg&feature=fvw
I like the show but it isn't really news.
I've just completed a "structured, formal courses of study". A CS degree in a respecteed university and graduated with honours yet I'll freely state that while I can handle linux/unix file permissions to a reasonable extent I have no idea about the more complex interactions you talk of.
There was a hell of a lot of useless cruft in my course, a hell of a lot of stuff that appeared to only be taught because someone senior in the department had a hardon for it or an otherwise utterly useless speciality. lots of material so out of date that it no longer works and worst of all, in some subjects which I had studied extensivly myself outside the course already, simply awful advice.
I'll never forget the lecture slides when the head of department decided to tell us about how to implement "security" when working with PHP in his module.*shudder*
If it's malware they're trying to stop and not anything else then they gain little.
Foolish people who click "OK" to popups asking them to install anything and everything constitute an almost perfectly random search.
Better to just get a list of sites which serve malware from one of the companies which track such things and re-direct traffic for them into a hole.
this seems less innocent the more I think about it.
"by comparing the URL that a person visits against a list of good and bad sites"
If their aim is to just block bad sites why would they have to log anything at all? /dev/null.
Just re-direct all traffic to bad IP's to
Are you actually disputing that such a thing would take 5 minutes to do in word???
If he was merely mean that would be the case.
But he was both mean and funny.
Also everyone at every office knows some lazy sod who despite not being the boss wants everyone at their office to work for them rather than with them.
She could have thrown together what she wanted in about 30 seconds in word or paint.
She didn't.
Instead she wanted to use company time, company resources and even wanted to waste the time of other employees on her personal problems.
Everyone knows someone like this.
I'd have no problem with hiring this guy.
I'd know I'm not going to be paying for him to design kids birthdays cards for the office sponge.
"The average dog, on average, is smarter than the average cat"
ever seen a team of cats pull a sled through snow?
If that were the case then the fact that the dongle prevents the program from running (and as such prevents it/parts of it from being read into memory) would be enough to be covered under copyright.
1:http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/06/30/1618216/Regular-Domains-Have-More-Malware-Than-Porn-Sites?from=rss
Regular Domains Have More Malware Than Porn Sites
2:
China is not the source of all hackers or malware.
the USA is still the main source of spam and almost certainly still the main source of malware.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/04/28/us-still-main-source-of-spam
Cut out the racist crap.
China is no worse when it comes to hackers than the US.