It screams Dry Run if you are a TSA agent even in the absence of any explosive.
Possible; and the aim of a "Dry Run" is to identify the strong and weak points of the security network. If this was the case a) the TSA agent believed he had a terrorist in front of him b) the TSA agent believed the Terrorist wanted to know if he would be detected or not c) the TSA agent did what the terrorist wanted and told him that he had been detected. What he should have done is silently verified there were no explosives; arranged for the man to be watched and escorted through the airport and then, later, investigated his contacts.
The TSA agent should, at the very least be up on a disciplinary charge for incompetence. In fact, however he should be investigated for giving away state secrets and high treason. This entire arrest and news story becomes an even more serious cover up.
... These characteristics included an identifiable power source, circuit board with exposed wiring, and electrical tape...
I'm now calling on all Shashdotters; Open your computer or cellphone, verify the above checklist and immediately report yourself you your nearest bomb disposal squad. I have no doubt the have nothing better to do than deal with bullshit threats based on lists like the above.
Look at the timing of my post. It's two minutes after yours. I certainly took more than two minutes to start replying; realise I had to check all the articles again to be sure I hadn't missed something; find the best quote I could that might explain your viewpoint and then reply. In other words, your post wasn't already up when I wrote mine.
Anyway; thanks very much for admitting to being wrong. Realising we are wrong is one of the greatest things and is exactly how knowledge advances. Sorry if my post upset you but I really feel that the TSA had managed to mislead you with their usual insinuation against innocent people and that that was bad. Remember innocent until proven guilty. The TSA has the right to put out facts but not the right to put out accusations. They did the opposite.
THIS TIME they where most definitely justified to take in that guy. Yes, even if it turns out he was innocent. READ ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR CASE before posting, please. My first knee-jerk reaction to the headline, when I first saw it (somewhere else), was the same as here, but the full facts changed MY mind.
You mean stuff like this?
"He had every component to make a trigger mechanism," Nelson said. "Was it? No. But was everything there? Yes."
This is both lies and a total misdirection.
Misdirection? Yes. Everybody who carries a laptop or a mobile phone with them has "every component to make a trigger mechanism" (a timer, wires and a battery).
Lies? The crucial part of a "trigger mechanism", unless we are playing silly word games, is the detonator. This is the difficult bit to obtain or make, actually much more difficult than normal explosives. This is the bit that takes an electrical signal and converts it to an explosion. As such it contains (admittedly a small amount of) pretty unstable and dangerous explosives, would be illegal and we would have heard of it if he had it.
His watch would have justified an extra search. They might even have been justified in asking him to leave it behind because they were too stupid to understand it. His arrest is false imprisonment and was in no way justified.
It's easy for a US resident to overlook due to lack of experience,
gosh, we are assuming..
but local governments are supposed to serve the local people. A government of a German town is not like your average Latin American junta.
And yet, if we look on many German government sites we will find many places where we are required to deliver documents in particular formats. Strange that. Maybe it's a normal IT thing to do.
They have to listen to complaints of their constituents - and they did, and we are reading the story about it.
There are many obvious solutions; send out PDF documents, which can be directly created from OpenOffice and always have been possible. Agree to exchange in ODF format and recommend the use of LibreOffice for all (remember; it's free), Even simply upgrade to a reasonably recent version of LibreOffice. Etc. etc. Anyone who was listening to the complaints of their constituents would have identified these and tried them first, at least as interim measures before considering a complete change. Instead it seems they found a solution (change to our friend Microsoft) and then went looking for a justification.
Unfortunately it breaks a number of (arguably misbehaving) modules, and among most linux kernel developers it is a BIG DEAL to break existing code.
There FTFY. This can never be said loudly enough. If you don't believe me, please at least believe Donald Knuth
I wonder where all these people got the idea that breaking software is a good idea? Apple used to (and probably still does) break backwards compatibility. However they did this; for unpublished interfaces; where they gave warnings not to use them; where they broke them regularly and where they had a reasonable alternative that worked. That is the only exception; you told people from the very beginning, very explicitly not to do the thing that you are about to stop them doing. You also told them explicitly how to avoid it.
You must always make it possible for the old way to work in parallel with the new way. You have no idea how and where your software is used and why someone may need to keep it working in the old way and for how long. You may not be willing to maintain the old way, but you must leave space for someone else to do that.
OpenOffice was set up by Oracle precisely to knife the OpenOffice devs (who had almost all moved to LibreOffice) in the back. Anyone who works with them is a scumbag. That includes the Apache foundation who should be ashamed for being used like this. That's not the best basis for an open source community and definitely doesn't suggest that the OOO people will be honourable in future. Right now the LibreOffice people look to be the best technically, but even if they weren't, I'd rather have someone I feel I can trust than someone who might have the technical edge but is a psycho.
Look at how Linus refused to integrate patches from ESR (for a new config mechanism) and Reiser (for newer filesystem versions after he failed to support the older ones) because they weren't community players. Notice how this turns out to have been the right decision.
If interoperability was a feature that customers were willing to pay more for than the lost value of the worldwide Office monopoly plus the additional moral value of getting to kick the user down, M$ might possibly consider have put more effort into it. Truth is, Excel's not done till OpenOffice don't run..
They are running a local government. They do not need to listen to any private company. Make a policy which requires communication in ODF. block DOCX at the Firewall. Automatic security lockdown if the malware suite detects anyone attempting to lunch one. 90% of bullshit solved.
So, do we believe that anonymous speech is the only true way to maintain truly free speech, or do we cheer a man who hunts racists, with a technique that cripples free speech?
These things can actually complement each other. We really need proper freedom of speech for all reasonable political views. Things like speech and anonymous speech is a great way to achieve that. We should take a big effort not to compromise "decent" people no matter how insane if we find a chink in their anonymity (though I always tend to find a way to warn them if I do). However when we find something that gives away bunch of serious child molesters (and I don't mean "distributors of potentially under-age looking people in manga comics" or "twenty two with a 17 year old girl-friend" here) then we should do everything we can to completely fuck them.
When you find a weakness in tor which gives away a child molesting ring this a) publicises the weakness and makes political dissidents more likely to protect themselves b) scares the child molesters away c) saves people from being molested. That means that it improves the long term chances of anonymous speech for everyone else. What's not to like?
I'd say screwing over serious racists is almost as good but should be sort of optional. If you don't want to do it don't feel obliged.
If anything, while Apple is keeping carriers from locking you into their services (well, mostly. Visual Voicemail was AT&T-only, right? right. Sure that was a collaborative effort, but I'm not sure that doesn't make it worse.) they instead lock you into their services.
You are right and you are missing the point. If the services come from Apple, then that guarantees that the services will be updated to support the latest features of their newest phones. This stopped the carriers messing with the phone interface for short term commercial gain.
N.B. Visual voicemail is an Apple patented feature. It could be available on any network that wants it working. I guess they have to pay or do some integration though? I guess this article about visual voicemail in Britain shows exactly why Apple need their features to be independent of the mobile carriers.
It doesn't matter who it's targetting, this moves Google firmly out of the "open source" category into "merely visible source". It gives the impression that Google, sensing an opportunity to go far beyond the original goal of just ensuring that the mobile market remains open to advertising by Google, now has its eyes set on exerting monopoly control of the mobile market. With this, it would seem that Google has declared war on open source.
This is nothing new. Their entire business model was based on taking software which other people were developing on a shared basis and using that to provide services to people without actually distributing the software. They basically managed to take the "private/hidden" software that was always allowed by the GPL and extend that so that they could deliver the use of the software to someone without delivering the software. That is something that had been done before (think a private extension to a mail server) but never to the extent of a multi-billion dollar business so it was never enough to really warp software development. Google is and has always been a strong and effective opponent of things like the AGPLv3 which would mean that they would have to contribute their work back to "FOSS". They even seem to be internally opposed to the simple GPL even though GPL software has been the basis of their success.
Please note that whilst this is a little bit evil, it isn't any worse than any proprietary software company and almost exactly matches what Apple does. They contribute some of their software back to projects whist making sure that you never quite get enough to be truly free.
(basically preventing a normal consumer from every suing you for fault since they could never recover enough to make it worth while)
In the UK, where there isn't really such a thing as a class action, what is done is that the plaintiffs get together, select a case, or a few cases which are good examples of the group and then everybody supports those people to sue. Once they win, the others can point to the first win as evidence in their own cases and so are pretty much guaranteed a cheap win. This means companies are almost forced to settle and certainly end up with huge costs if they don't.
The user has one, your IT staff has another, and then a third works as a sort of one-time password for resetting the user's password. I don't know if any encryption schemes work like this currently, but here's how I'd picture it working.
I don't want to endorse any particular proprietary solutions, however almost all of the commercially available Windows solutions have this implemented and it's also possible to implement this on Linux using the standard built in dm-crypt. There is no excuse for not doing it.
N.B. 1) In the procedure above step 2 must use two factor authentication and you want to consider whether the user may be acting under duress. Normally a user should be required to actually physically come to the office to have their decryption password changed.
N.B. 2) It's worth making this procedure more difficult and painful than a reinstall in order to teach users about the benefits of keeping backups.
Please look at the other posts. This problem affects both likes and friends above a certain level. That has to be true because otherwise people working for big companies would simply use friending as a method of getting the same delivery as a like. The change would be much more okay if it was only for likes, but then it would be useless.
Hey Evil Kineval, I was talking about Patents, not wars.
The great thing about the right to self defence is it's completely scalable. From a guy who attacks you in a bar up to the level of a total Nuclear war the principle has a clear and applicable set of surrounding doctrines such as the use of "proportionate" responses (mostly required in Europe) and the lack of need for the same (clearly in Texas and some other parts of the USA).
Your analogy is flawed. People aren't dying, at least I hope not, over patents. The patent litigation is dumb regardless of whom is suing whom.
I think you need to look up the issues surrounding patents in medicine. Particularly, given the context, how the donations of the Gates foundation are used to shore up the killing of other patients through depriving them of access to key medication. Quite possibly the AIDS epidemic in Africa would have been solved by now were it not for patents.
Don't be so serious.
Well, as we've already discussed, the issue is deadly serious. However, I'm enjoying the discussion so feel free to continue.
No, this stuff is widely available and I actually do know it. You could too if you actually put a little effort in.
Firstly, many patents are not essential in the sense that it couldn't be done without them.
That's not a correct understanding of essential. Essential means "you cannot implement the standard as it is now without this patent". It is not directly related to whether there was another way of doing the standard.
Wifi could have been done without Motorola's patent. Motorola just happened to have patented a method that works, and this was included in the standard.
That's also very unclear. Where there are several acceptable methods, one of which is not patented, the standards bodies normally have the obligation to take the one which is not patented. If they do take one which is patented that means either that patent was the only way they knew of to do something or that that patent was the best value for doing that thing. In either case, the patent must be valuable to the standard to be included in the standard.
I (sort of) agree that reasonable is difficult to clearly define. But I think everyone can agree that asking for 2.25% is not reasonable because if other patent holders ask for the same, then more than 100% of the price of the product would go to the wifi patent holders.
This argument has been clearly refuted in the related case law and discussions. Different patents have different levels of value depending on how important the problem they solve is. Look at Microsoft's FAT patent; the principle is completely obvious and almost directly equivalent to the UNIX directory (store file data a file); it just becomes, arguably, special enough to patent because of a particular choice of structure. There could be hundreds of trivial patents like Microsoft's FAT patent or Apple's touch gesture patents but any of those could be worked around by just making a different set of choices. Consider a patent like the invention of CDMA, on the other hand. This solves a whole bunch of problems (how to share a radio channel without device to device coordiation; data protection and tracking difficulty; multipath propagation etc.). Qualcomm survived for years more or less on that single patent alone.
Motorola's case is very clear.
That's before we start thinking of other patents. And it is also unreasonable because the more patented technology you add to the product, the less realistic it becomes. So if Microsoft had to pay for the wifi patents, in addition to 3G and 4G patents, touch screen patents, USB patents, compression patents and so on, it would make any product impossible.
Unfortunately, you may be right. That's not a bug, that's a feature. Patents exist specifically to stop other people from making products which compete with your products. For example, Microsoft tried to make it practically impossible to deliver Linux based navigation devices with access to FAT based storage. Tom Tom had to stop that. You are allowed to use patents because the patent holder is happy to let you. Look at the fact that Microsoft wants $20 per Android device for six "trivial" and "invalid" patents.
Normally, the fact that a patent is "essential" to a standard would make it more valuable, not less valuable. You, together with the other essential patent holders would have the right to block all others from entering a market and legally create what would effectively be a cartel. RAND terms are not designed to reduce that price; instead they are designed to keep the price more or less stable.
Secondly, non-discriminatory means no discrimination. Everyone pays the same amount. Anything other than offering the same license terms to everyone is discriminatory
The contention is not that Apple thought he was biased. That's irrelevant. The contention is that, Apple knew that he lied under oath by not disclosing all of his previous lawsuits. Apple's lawyers, as officers of the court, have a clear duty to disclose any form of dishonesty that they know about.
I'm not sure exactly what oath he swore, but the one I can find easily is
‘‘You do solemnly swear by Almighty God (or do declare and affirm) that you will answer truthfully all questions that may be put to you concerning your qualifications for service as a juror.’’
I don't think the details in wording are nearly as important as you think they are. Once it's a sworn statement it's subject to the normal rules for perjury.
Microsoft has attacked by trying to demand royalties on every Android device. Now Google has got to a position where they can demand royalties on every Windows device. What's not a 'counter-attack' here.
Moto-goog charging 2.25% for FRAND patents is NOT a counter attack. No matter what you claim.
Why not? FRAND nowhere says "cheap". Given that it seems that these are essential WLAN patents, and they make up the only external communication from the surface tablet, a charge of 10% or a fixed charge of say $50 could be completely "reasonable". This is the problem with "reasonable". It has no clear definition and it definitely doesn't guarantee a price which should make the technology widely available.
And yes, I stand by my statement. You can't whine about patent wars in one thread and praise a patent war in another, hypocrisy reigns supreme. (Not you personally, just you in general)
It's very simple. I can easily criticise Germany for invading Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Poland in 1939 and still completely support the UK and USA for invading France in 1944. This despite the fact that France didn't invade either the UK or the USA. In fact, I can completely say that the WWII was a bad idea whilst having no criticism at all for the fact that New Zealand fought during it.
All parties are guilty in all situations, when everyone realizes that and stops picking on any particular company as the 'bad guy' I'll be a happy camper.
So, the USA was fully guilty and responsible for Pearl Harbour? Probably you would come up with some explanation about how the USA was "asking for it" by not supplying Japan enough oil. Aha ha. I'm sure you would be really happy if everybody thought so. It would mean there would be no need for you to examine your own moral situation. However there are plenty of us out here, both companies and people, who are just muddling by, trying to more or less follow the law and our own sense of morality. The fact that "nobody is perfect" doesn't mean that these people and companies are "guilty". Just try to do your best and accept the mistakes you make and you have no reason to feel bad. You too could resign from your current employer and become a valuable member of society. Think about it. It would be so easy and you would feel better too.
Actually, this is the funniest thing about all the righteous indignation against Google in this whole discussion. This wasn't actually a lawsuit by Motorola against Microsoft. This was a lawsuit by Microsoft against Motorola for Motorola licensing a patent they owned on the standard market rate and not the rate Microsoft wished to pay. In other words Microsoft sued Motorola; not the other way round
Slashdot Mirror
It screams Dry Run if you are a TSA agent even in the absence of any explosive.
Possible; and the aim of a "Dry Run" is to identify the strong and weak points of the security network. If this was the case a) the TSA agent believed he had a terrorist in front of him b) the TSA agent believed the Terrorist wanted to know if he would be detected or not c) the TSA agent did what the terrorist wanted and told him that he had been detected. What he should have done is silently verified there were no explosives; arranged for the man to be watched and escorted through the airport and then, later, investigated his contacts.
The TSA agent should, at the very least be up on a disciplinary charge for incompetence. In fact, however he should be investigated for giving away state secrets and high treason. This entire arrest and news story becomes an even more serious cover up.
... These characteristics included an identifiable power source, circuit board with exposed wiring, and electrical tape...
I'm now calling on all Shashdotters; Open your computer or cellphone, verify the above checklist and immediately report yourself you your nearest bomb disposal squad. I have no doubt the have nothing better to do than deal with bullshit threats based on lists like the above.
Look at the timing of my post. It's two minutes after yours. I certainly took more than two minutes to start replying; realise I had to check all the articles again to be sure I hadn't missed something; find the best quote I could that might explain your viewpoint and then reply. In other words, your post wasn't already up when I wrote mine.
Anyway; thanks very much for admitting to being wrong. Realising we are wrong is one of the greatest things and is exactly how knowledge advances. Sorry if my post upset you but I really feel that the TSA had managed to mislead you with their usual insinuation against innocent people and that that was bad. Remember innocent until proven guilty. The TSA has the right to put out facts but not the right to put out accusations. They did the opposite.
THIS TIME they where most definitely justified to take in that guy. Yes, even if it turns out he was innocent. READ ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR CASE before posting, please. My first knee-jerk reaction to the headline, when I first saw it (somewhere else), was the same as here, but the full facts changed MY mind.
You mean stuff like this?
This is both lies and a total misdirection.
Misdirection? Yes. Everybody who carries a laptop or a mobile phone with them has "every component to make a trigger mechanism" (a timer, wires and a battery).
Lies? The crucial part of a "trigger mechanism", unless we are playing silly word games, is the detonator. This is the difficult bit to obtain or make, actually much more difficult than normal explosives. This is the bit that takes an electrical signal and converts it to an explosion. As such it contains (admittedly a small amount of) pretty unstable and dangerous explosives, would be illegal and we would have heard of it if he had it.
His watch would have justified an extra search. They might even have been justified in asking him to leave it behind because they were too stupid to understand it. His arrest is false imprisonment and was in no way justified.
You do know about the whole Henry VIII thing, right? The UK hasn't been Catholic for centuries.
Don't worry, the Church of England has been negotiating to link with the Catholic church* for years and already have compatible teachings. Fortunately it's considered that they aren't really mad enough.
* honest to god [sic]**; this is the first link that popped up on Google. It must be the best source.
** [sic] as in that's really what the little voice in my head said... not as in a humour marker by someone who doesn't know what sick means.
It's easy for a US resident to overlook due to lack of experience,
gosh, we are assuming..
but local governments are supposed to serve the local people. A government of a German town is not like your average Latin American junta.
And yet, if we look on many German government sites we will find many places where we are required to deliver documents in particular formats. Strange that. Maybe it's a normal IT thing to do.
They have to listen to complaints of their constituents - and they did, and we are reading the story about it.
There are many obvious solutions; send out PDF documents, which can be directly created from OpenOffice and always have been possible. Agree to exchange in ODF format and recommend the use of LibreOffice for all (remember; it's free), Even simply upgrade to a reasonably recent version of LibreOffice. Etc. etc. Anyone who was listening to the complaints of their constituents would have identified these and tried them first, at least as interim measures before considering a complete change. Instead it seems they found a solution (change to our friend Microsoft) and then went looking for a justification.
Unfortunately it breaks a number of (arguably misbehaving) modules, and among most linux kernel developers it is a BIG DEAL to break existing code .
There FTFY. This can never be said loudly enough. If you don't believe me, please at least believe Donald Knuth
I wonder where all these people got the idea that breaking software is a good idea? Apple used to (and probably still does) break backwards compatibility. However they did this; for unpublished interfaces; where they gave warnings not to use them; where they broke them regularly and where they had a reasonable alternative that worked. That is the only exception; you told people from the very beginning, very explicitly not to do the thing that you are about to stop them doing. You also told them explicitly how to avoid it.
You must always make it possible for the old way to work in parallel with the new way. You have no idea how and where your software is used and why someone may need to keep it working in the old way and for how long. You may not be willing to maintain the old way, but you must leave space for someone else to do that.
OpenOffice was set up by Oracle precisely to knife the OpenOffice devs (who had almost all moved to LibreOffice) in the back. Anyone who works with them is a scumbag. That includes the Apache foundation who should be ashamed for being used like this. That's not the best basis for an open source community and definitely doesn't suggest that the OOO people will be honourable in future. Right now the LibreOffice people look to be the best technically, but even if they weren't, I'd rather have someone I feel I can trust than someone who might have the technical edge but is a psycho.
Look at how Linus refused to integrate patches from ESR (for a new config mechanism) and Reiser (for newer filesystem versions after he failed to support the older ones) because they weren't community players. Notice how this turns out to have been the right decision.
If interoperability was a feature that customers were willing to pay more for than the lost value of the worldwide Office monopoly plus the additional moral value of getting to kick the user down, M$ might possibly consider have put more effort into it. Truth is, Excel's not done till OpenOffice don't run..
There FTFY.
They are running a local government. They do not need to listen to any private company. Make a policy which requires communication in ODF. block DOCX at the Firewall. Automatic security lockdown if the malware suite detects anyone attempting to lunch one. 90% of bullshit solved.
So, do we believe that anonymous speech is the only true way to maintain truly free speech, or do we cheer a man who hunts racists, with a technique that cripples free speech?
These things can actually complement each other. We really need proper freedom of speech for all reasonable political views. Things like speech and anonymous speech is a great way to achieve that. We should take a big effort not to compromise "decent" people no matter how insane if we find a chink in their anonymity (though I always tend to find a way to warn them if I do). However when we find something that gives away bunch of serious child molesters (and I don't mean "distributors of potentially under-age looking people in manga comics" or "twenty two with a 17 year old girl-friend" here) then we should do everything we can to completely fuck them.
When you find a weakness in tor which gives away a child molesting ring this a) publicises the weakness and makes political dissidents more likely to protect themselves b) scares the child molesters away c) saves people from being molested. That means that it improves the long term chances of anonymous speech for everyone else. What's not to like?
I'd say screwing over serious racists is almost as good but should be sort of optional. If you don't want to do it don't feel obliged.
If anything, while Apple is keeping carriers from locking you into their services (well, mostly. Visual Voicemail was AT&T-only, right? right. Sure that was a collaborative effort, but I'm not sure that doesn't make it worse.) they instead lock you into their services.
You are right and you are missing the point. If the services come from Apple, then that guarantees that the services will be updated to support the latest features of their newest phones. This stopped the carriers messing with the phone interface for short term commercial gain.
N.B. Visual voicemail is an Apple patented feature. It could be available on any network that wants it working. I guess they have to pay or do some integration though? I guess this article about visual voicemail in Britain shows exactly why Apple need their features to be independent of the mobile carriers.
It doesn't matter who it's targetting, this moves Google firmly out of the "open source" category into "merely visible source". It gives the impression that Google, sensing an opportunity to go far beyond the original goal of just ensuring that the mobile market remains open to advertising by Google, now has its eyes set on exerting monopoly control of the mobile market. With this, it would seem that Google has declared war on open source.
This is nothing new. Their entire business model was based on taking software which other people were developing on a shared basis and using that to provide services to people without actually distributing the software. They basically managed to take the "private/hidden" software that was always allowed by the GPL and extend that so that they could deliver the use of the software to someone without delivering the software. That is something that had been done before (think a private extension to a mail server) but never to the extent of a multi-billion dollar business so it was never enough to really warp software development. Google is and has always been a strong and effective opponent of things like the AGPLv3 which would mean that they would have to contribute their work back to "FOSS". They even seem to be internally opposed to the simple GPL even though GPL software has been the basis of their success.
Please note that whilst this is a little bit evil, it isn't any worse than any proprietary software company and almost exactly matches what Apple does. They contribute some of their software back to projects whist making sure that you never quite get enough to be truly free.
(basically preventing a normal consumer from every suing you for fault since they could never recover enough to make it worth while)
In the UK, where there isn't really such a thing as a class action, what is done is that the plaintiffs get together, select a case, or a few cases which are good examples of the group and then everybody supports those people to sue. Once they win, the others can point to the first win as evidence in their own cases and so are pretty much guaranteed a cheap win. This means companies are almost forced to settle and certainly end up with huge costs if they don't.
Why doesn't the same thing work in the US?
The user has one, your IT staff has another, and then a third works as a sort of one-time password for resetting the user's password. I don't know if any encryption schemes work like this currently, but here's how I'd picture it working.
I don't want to endorse any particular proprietary solutions, however almost all of the commercially available Windows solutions have this implemented and it's also possible to implement this on Linux using the standard built in dm-crypt. There is no excuse for not doing it.
N.B. 1) In the procedure above step 2 must use two factor authentication and you want to consider whether the user may be acting under duress. Normally a user should be required to actually physically come to the office to have their decryption password changed.
N.B. 2) It's worth making this procedure more difficult and painful than a reinstall in order to teach users about the benefits of keeping backups.
Please look at the other posts. This problem affects both likes and friends above a certain level. That has to be true because otherwise people working for big companies would simply use friending as a method of getting the same delivery as a like. The change would be much more okay if it was only for likes, but then it would be useless.
Hey Evil Kineval, I was talking about Patents, not wars.
The great thing about the right to self defence is it's completely scalable. From a guy who attacks you in a bar up to the level of a total Nuclear war the principle has a clear and applicable set of surrounding doctrines such as the use of "proportionate" responses (mostly required in Europe) and the lack of need for the same (clearly in Texas and some other parts of the USA).
Your analogy is flawed. People aren't dying, at least I hope not, over patents. The patent litigation is dumb regardless of whom is suing whom.
I think you need to look up the issues surrounding patents in medicine. Particularly, given the context, how the donations of the Gates foundation are used to shore up the killing of other patients through depriving them of access to key medication. Quite possibly the AIDS epidemic in Africa would have been solved by now were it not for patents.
Don't be so serious.
Well, as we've already discussed, the issue is deadly serious. However, I'm enjoying the discussion so feel free to continue.
You are just making things up.
No, this stuff is widely available and I actually do know it. You could too if you actually put a little effort in.
Firstly, many patents are not essential in the sense that it couldn't be done without them.
That's not a correct understanding of essential. Essential means "you cannot implement the standard as it is now without this patent". It is not directly related to whether there was another way of doing the standard.
Wifi could have been done without Motorola's patent. Motorola just happened to have patented a method that works, and this was included in the standard.
That's also very unclear. Where there are several acceptable methods, one of which is not patented, the standards bodies normally have the obligation to take the one which is not patented. If they do take one which is patented that means either that patent was the only way they knew of to do something or that that patent was the best value for doing that thing. In either case, the patent must be valuable to the standard to be included in the standard.
I (sort of) agree that reasonable is difficult to clearly define. But I think everyone can agree that asking for 2.25% is not reasonable because if other patent holders ask for the same, then more than 100% of the price of the product would go to the wifi patent holders.
This argument has been clearly refuted in the related case law and discussions. Different patents have different levels of value depending on how important the problem they solve is. Look at Microsoft's FAT patent; the principle is completely obvious and almost directly equivalent to the UNIX directory (store file data a file); it just becomes, arguably, special enough to patent because of a particular choice of structure. There could be hundreds of trivial patents like Microsoft's FAT patent or Apple's touch gesture patents but any of those could be worked around by just making a different set of choices. Consider a patent like the invention of CDMA, on the other hand. This solves a whole bunch of problems (how to share a radio channel without device to device coordiation; data protection and tracking difficulty; multipath propagation etc.). Qualcomm survived for years more or less on that single patent alone.
Motorola's case is very clear.
That's before we start thinking of other patents. And it is also unreasonable because the more patented technology you add to the product, the less realistic it becomes. So if Microsoft had to pay for the wifi patents, in addition to 3G and 4G patents, touch screen patents, USB patents, compression patents and so on, it would make any product impossible.
Unfortunately, you may be right. That's not a bug, that's a feature. Patents exist specifically to stop other people from making products which compete with your products. For example, Microsoft tried to make it practically impossible to deliver Linux based navigation devices with access to FAT based storage. Tom Tom had to stop that. You are allowed to use patents because the patent holder is happy to let you. Look at the fact that Microsoft wants $20 per Android device for six "trivial" and "invalid" patents.
Normally, the fact that a patent is "essential" to a standard would make it more valuable, not less valuable. You, together with the other essential patent holders would have the right to block all others from entering a market and legally create what would effectively be a cartel. RAND terms are not designed to reduce that price; instead they are designed to keep the price more or less stable.
Secondly, non-discriminatory means no discrimination. Everyone pays the same amount. Anything other than offering the same license terms to everyone is discriminatory
Doing that kind of investigation is not only unneeded. It would actually be illegal.
The contention is not that Apple thought he was biased. That's irrelevant. The contention is that, Apple knew that he lied under oath by not disclosing all of his previous lawsuits. Apple's lawyers, as officers of the court, have a clear duty to disclose any form of dishonesty that they know about.
I don't think the details in wording are nearly as important as you think they are. Once it's a sworn statement it's subject to the normal rules for perjury.
Microsoft has attacked by trying to demand royalties on every Android device. Now Google has got to a position where they can demand royalties on every Windows device. What's not a 'counter-attack' here.
Moto-goog charging 2.25% for FRAND patents is NOT a counter attack. No matter what you claim.
Why not? FRAND nowhere says "cheap". Given that it seems that these are essential WLAN patents, and they make up the only external communication from the surface tablet, a charge of 10% or a fixed charge of say $50 could be completely "reasonable". This is the problem with "reasonable". It has no clear definition and it definitely doesn't guarantee a price which should make the technology widely available.
And yes, I stand by my statement. You can't whine about patent wars in one thread and praise a patent war in another, hypocrisy reigns supreme. (Not you personally, just you in general)
It's very simple. I can easily criticise Germany for invading Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Poland in 1939 and still completely support the UK and USA for invading France in 1944. This despite the fact that France didn't invade either the UK or the USA. In fact, I can completely say that the WWII was a bad idea whilst having no criticism at all for the fact that New Zealand fought during it.
All parties are guilty in all situations, when everyone realizes that and stops picking on any particular company as the 'bad guy' I'll be a happy camper.
So, the USA was fully guilty and responsible for Pearl Harbour? Probably you would come up with some explanation about how the USA was "asking for it" by not supplying Japan enough oil. Aha ha. I'm sure you would be really happy if everybody thought so. It would mean there would be no need for you to examine your own moral situation. However there are plenty of us out here, both companies and people, who are just muddling by, trying to more or less follow the law and our own sense of morality. The fact that "nobody is perfect" doesn't mean that these people and companies are "guilty". Just try to do your best and accept the mistakes you make and you have no reason to feel bad. You too could resign from your current employer and become a valuable member of society. Think about it. It would be so easy and you would feel better too.
Sue companies for using h.264 patents they hold?
Actually, this is the funniest thing about all the righteous indignation against Google in this whole discussion. This wasn't actually a lawsuit by Motorola against Microsoft. This was a lawsuit by Microsoft against Motorola for Motorola licensing a patent they owned on the standard market rate and not the rate Microsoft wished to pay. In other words Microsoft sued Motorola; not the other way round