Even more specifically, there have been any number of incidents of AV vendors pushing bad updates too. Now, who's to say that at least *some* of those bad updates were not done deliberately to cause disruption to one or more of their recipients? It would be trivial for a vendor in the pocket of a state actor to work out when Target #4796617's next AV update is due and start pushing out a bad patch just before that scheduled update then pull the update once they know they've got a hit.
Yes, you could say exactly the same thing about the equivalent tools make by companies based in the US/EU/China/wherever, depending on where you happen to live. Everyone spies on everyone, so we might as well assume that governments subvert popular software/hardware/services as well, right? So, assuming that you are a low value target to state actors, then the question becomes more about which of the following scenarios you prefer:
A tool that has been backdoored by some third party country that likely doesn't give a crap about your low value data and petty misdemeanors, even if they do decide to take a peek.
A tool that has been backdoored by your own government, and may well decide to share that information with other government organisations, and possibly even "friendly" companies/organisations like the **AAs, assuming that they decide to have a peek.
Personally, I think the former option is the safer one given the all pervasive surveillance states many countries seem to be turning into, signature updates to brick PCs in the unlikely event of a sufficiently large scale shooting war breaking out aside. All bets are off if you're not a low value target, of course, but if you are in that position then you'd probably want to be looking at a more in-depth security model that doesn't allow potential compromises such as the one allegedly impacting Kaspersky AV to be a complete deal breaker.
You know, it's really starting to bug me that the media, including those that really ought to know better, keeps referring to the victims of the Equifax hack as their "customers". With the exception of those who actually signed up to Equifax's credit checking service of their own volition they, or more accurately the data Equifax has about them, are either victims or the *product*. Equifax's actual customers are the banks, employers, stores, and other companies that buy the data Equifax holds on the victims of the hack, most of whom have no direct business relationship with Equifax beyond an agreement with a third party to have their credit checked that probably didn't even make it clear that it would be Equifax doing the checks.
Yeah, I know that. You know that. The average Joe who is used to Google/Facebook asking for their password to be re-entered (legitimately) at apparently random points in time though? Unless they've paid particular attention to blurb from Google/Facebook, or looked into how OAuth works, I can't imagine too many of them are going to think twice on the spur of the moment if the faked prompt is suitably convincing.
This is supposedly using some kind of federated authentication system like OAuth that doesn't require the password be exposed, but the idea is absolutely horrible from a phishing standpoint precisely because too many users are conditioned to blindly enter passwords on demand when confronted by an authentic enough looking prompt on what they consider to be a legit site. (In many cases, they'll even do it on a decidedly sketchy looking prompt on a highly suspect site as well, but that's kind of by the by.) The major flaw here is that there are far too many malicious sites, either deliberately so or through compromise and script injection, that could fake an OAuth style login then follow through with a request for the actual password. When even "trusted" companies that you'd expect to have near bulletproof security like Equifax are getting completely owned, how can you be sure that some random site claiming to use OAuth for your convenience is secure?
I say we get a password manager, and for each site have a unique strong password. It's the only way to be secure!:)
I'm in the same boat - only at 1080p and 42" for my big screen video consumption of TV and movies. According to the math, my living room allows for an optimal viewing distance that' would support a 42" screen mid-way between 1080p and 4K, so I'd probably see *some* benefit from going to 4K, but I just don't see any point in trading in my current 1080p screen for it. That's not to say I don't know the difference between 1080p and 4K though - I already have a 4K monitor for video and image editing but, as AniMoJo noted above, that's a completely different usage case and the same rules don't apply. Since I'm currently only shooting video 4K, I don't see much need on a monitor upgrade either, although that might change if/when I start working at 8K.
Absolutely agree; if they are running the store, then they are both responsible and liable. An IRL analogy would be a brick and mortar mall; Amazon might have their own stores in the premesis, but they are also sub-letting storefronts to other retailers and it's entirely up to them to vet those retailers and ensuring that they and their products are complying with applicable laws and regulations. Statutory rights are also statutory rights - they cannot be waived (at least not in any sane legal jurisdiction) and Amazon is surely aware of that; it might be an independantly run department in the store, but it's still Amazon's store, I'm still paying Amazon, and in many cases the goods are also being shipped by Amazon, from Amazon's distribution centres. I buy groceries etc. from any number of manufacturers at the supermarket, but it's absolutely the supermarket that has to deal with any issues I might have with them, including any returns and refunds/replacements - operating online shouldn't (and doesn't) change that in the slightest.
The solar eclipse glasses example is particularly interesting. Apparently Amazon did realise that they had a bunch of sellars that were being "less than honest" about their glasses and tried to initiate a recall of any already shipped products - or at least prevent people from using potentially hazardous products. Unfortunately for Amazon there were a number of issues in this; firstly, they managed to sweep up some highly regarded and almost certainly 100% safe products from reputable vendors in their "recall", secondly they left it far too late for people to source an alternative product (from Amazon or elsewhere), and - perhaps because of the second issue, or perhaps because of the "where there's blame there's a claim" attitude of some sections of society - they got sued by people who claimed after the fact not to have seen Amazon's warnings.
That all opens up a number of issues for online retailers - not just Amazon - to do with timeliness, what to do with the inevitiable false positives, and just how much notification is enough to avoid being liable in a lawsuit. On the one hand, they probably want as light a regulatory touch as possible - especially when it might make them liable - but on the other, those self-same regulations may provide some protections against (for instance) those who don't realise that being able to see a lit light bulb through their solar eclipse glasses constitutes a warning that the product falls quite some way short of requirements and maybe they need to pay more attention to that email. I'm sure Amazon et al are making at least some effort to police its third party resellers - for their part Amazon have certainly booted a few vendors of sub-standard USB cables and solar eclipse glasses - but there is clearly a long way to go judging by the number of decidely dodgy looking retailers in the Amazon Marketplace, and "caveat emptor" only goes so far when Amazon is, in effect, responsible running the entire mall.
My take too - it's a cute touch, and they must have known what the code was when they used it or they would have just have grabbed something vaguely appropriate from the OSS code base - like the use of NMAP in The Matrix, and many similar examples since - or gone down the gibberish/pseudo code route. I think most directors are well aware by now that with high-def. video anything like that put up on the screen will be subjected to a freezeframe and analysis, so you either need to make it relevant or an easter egg if you want to avoid some mockery. Since we clearly don't have any actual code to deal with the analysis of quantum lifeforms yet, that just leaves the easter egg.
175.45.176.0/22 - this is directly assigned by APNIC and is the DPRK's only known native IP space allocation.
210.52.109.0/24 - this was assigned by China Unicom as part of their connectivity provision for the DPRK, also assigned from the APNIC RIR pool.
77.94.35.0/24 - assigned by SatGate, a Russian satellite communications provider, and is from the RIPE RIR pool.
Presumably, they'll now be adding a further allocation (another/24?) for the fixed line into Russia as well. All data obtained from Your Friendly North Korean Network Observer (no affiliation), which is worth a read if you're curious out the DPRK's Internet infrastructure, such as it is.
And yet the spammers keep spamming. If spam was truly a solved problem, then there would be no money in it for them and they'd give up and move onto something else (actually some have - they've moved onto spam forums like Facebook and Twitter instead, or other aspects of cybercrime). Spam might *effectively* be a "solved" problem for you, and me for that matter, but it's clearly not a solved problem in the more general sense.
Matthew Prince should have a chat with Bill Gates about how well his 2004 prediction at Davos that spam will be a solved problem within two years worked out.
Also from that link:
[Gates] hailed search technology firm Google as a "great company"; its approach reminded him of Microsoft 20 years ago. But he also predicted that Microsoft search technology would soon outpace that of its rival.
I suspect Prince's powers of prognostication are no better than Gates'.
In an ideal world, yes. The examiners would do their supposedly pretty thankless jobs, and all the bad patents would be rejected while all the good ones would be approved - and since it is an ideal world everyone (except perhaps the submitters of rejected patents) would agree on which are "good" and "bad". Unfortunately, the current system in the US (and at various other PTOs) is to incentivise either approvals or throughput, both of which discourage fair evaluations, while a flat-rate salary system is potentially open to abuse because of the sums of money involved for patent trolls, or did you imagine a PTO staffed entirely by examiners who would never, ever, consider a bribe? There needs to be checks and balances - which is why I mentioned an appeals process which would help prevent bad assessments and weed out bad/corrupt examiners - but I think you've also got to provide some form of motivation for the examiners to do a *good* job rather than a quick one, and absolutely not just rubber stamp anything that's on the right form. A reasonable financial incentive is one fairly obvious way to go on that, perhaps offset against a lower base salary, but might not be the only one.
Alternatively, or additionally, you could also add an extra step where rather than simply have the PTO mark a patent as approved it goes into a "pending" state when the patent application paperwork is published and anyone can submit prior art to negate its final approval. Once that pending period is up, the examiner(s) can review any submissions and make a final decision on whether or not to approve the patent.
Sure, but which definition do you think that CBS is more likely to use - given that (for now, at least) they can hardly put together a bundle that includes content from other broadcasters? They've provided an option to acquire some of their content outside of a bundle - either standalone or in conjunction with another package - which is pretty much what people have been asking for. It's also potentially only a first step for them; maybe next, they'll go further down the pay-per-view route and let you pay for individual series, or perhaps even specific episodes. Or maybe they'll just scrap the whole idea because it turns out an insufficient number of people are prepared to pay, which - Devil's Advocacy aside - I suspect is actually more likely to be the case, popularity of Trek not withstanding.
FWIW, personally, I don't see much difference between monolithic cable bundles and the likes of Netflix/Amazon; sure the latter might be better value for money than a cable subscription, but there's still a huge amount of stuff I'd be paying for that I'm not just interested in given that I'm typically watching somwhere between two and maybe five or six shows a week, tops. Paying per broadcaster, per the CBS model, doesn't seem much better economically either; most viewer's shows will be scattered across multiple broadcasters, so the cost of subscribing to all the ones someone might want is going to add up fast and still includes a lot of unwanted content. It's even worse if you go full-on pay-per-view on a per-show or per-episode basis as that gets ridiculously expensive when you add it all up on the likes of Google Play or iTunes, and (so far at least) no one seems to be offering what I'd call true a-la-carte and offering a menu of *every* channel (or show) that I can build my own bundle of whatever I want from. Well, not legally anyway. The first company that offers a selection of package deals in the form of "Any X shows for $Y per month" that covers all (or perhaps even just most) of the shows I'm interested in, with bonus points if I get some form of credit for any unused shows in a given month, will get my money. Needless to say, I'm not holding out much hope.
Why *would* they realise this? People in the US have been asking for a-la-carte TV for years (decades?) rather than the bundles full of unwanted cable channels they've been forced to pay for in order to get the few they actually wanted. Now that they're finally on board with it, the Internet is providing broadcasters with a means to both cut out the cable middle-man and deliver those a-la-carte services, so of *course* they're expecting all those holdouts to finally cut the cord and just pay for the channels they want while dropping the rest.
Unless people want to replace their monopoly cable company bundles that are full of crap they don't need with a monopoly Netflix/Amazon/whatever Internet bundle that's also full of crap they don't need so they can continue to moan about the lack of an a-la-carte offering, of course.
It could be both, you know. Midland Beach (the area this happened according to TFS) apparently *is* a residential area in NYC that has a beach; it also has some parkland immediately to either side of it - all perfectly valid places for someone to be flying a drone in a safe and legal manner. It's also pretty close to an area of the US that's a high-profile target for any wannabe terrorist, so quite reasonable to assume that law enforcement and the military will be keeping a close eye on things, and that might potentially entail the use of Blackhawks flying at low altitude. Combine a drone pilot pushing the limits of where they were supposed to be with a pair of Blackhawks pushing the limits of where they were supposed to be *at the same time*, and accidents (which is what this almost certainly was) are just going to happen.
No, I didn't miss it, and I think the bond is potentially a good idea, but the problem isn't just turning it around to provide an incentive for examiners to reject bad patents - it's also figuring out a way to penalise the outright patent trolls and/or submitters of overly broad patents without placing an unfair burden on either lone inventors or the larger corporations/universities that produce genuine patent candidates in bulk. That's not entirely clear cut either, because for every pure patent troll, you've also got companies that apply for a mix of worthy and frivolous patents, and for many of those the cost of a bond (even one of $50k) is potentially just the cost of doing business. A company could afford to write off a lot of $50k bonds on rejected frivolous patents if they can get just one of them through and leverage it into settlements totalling ten of millions, or more, and that's the more fundamental issue with the system; the entire thing is too easily gamed by the big patent mills and the trolls.
The way to address that, and improve the signal to noise ratio across the board, is to increase the fees and/or bond for every rejected patent. e.g. say $5k for the first patent application, but if that gets rejected after any appeals then subsequent applications cost $10k, and it keeps going up, and up, and up, with each failed application and either doesn't come back down for quite some time, or maybe ever. That's necessary to prevent XKCD's bobcat scenario; large companies need to be prevented from gaming the system by trying to slip an overly broad patent through every now and then, then bringing the fees back down through more legitimate applications. Buying a patent portfolio? Congrats, you also bought their patent filing reputation and any increased fees that result from it. I'm still missing a way to deter patent trolls from filing each application as a new inventor or shell company to help keep their fees down, then transferring any successful applications to their patent pool though... Some kind of corporate registration and tax filings that could be cross-checked with other government agencies, perhaps?
I think you're under the mistaken impression that financial analyists looks at the world in the same way that regular, sane, people do. Some of these clowns actually think now is a good time to BUY Equifax stock. Well, either that, or they're currently holding a lot of Equifax stock themselves and are looking for some suckers who they intend to leave holding the bag.
Not true, it depends on how they adjust the rates they charge per timeslot vs. how many people were getting in under that 15 minute (or whatever it is) free window. If you are now going to be paying a total of $1/s for your EC2 server farm, then the breakeven point would be at $3,600/hour for that same server farm - if you're previous bill was more than $3,600/hour - including any dead time - then you are going to see a reduction in total costs. If you are in the situation where time is money and you are deliberately chopping up a task into a lot of parallel tasks so it finsishes faster and swallowing the resultant expense of having multiple servers sitting idle when the job completes, then the savings could add up pretty fast. The potential win for Amazon comes from all those who were previously getting free minutes through massive parallelisation to get under the free usage bar; that previously written off revenue is now going to be billed, and if Amazon has done their homework almost certainly will exceed the savings made by those in the former group.
I think the problem is more fundamental than that. By paying patent examiners to approve patents, you're also effectively encouraging them to fail to do their jobs properly and just rubber stamp any random patent that they review; whether or not the examiners are competent or not doesn't enter into it. The fix is to turn that on its head and pay the examiners a commission/bonus for each patent that they can find prior art on or find a justifiable reason to invalidate the claim. Better yet, start with a reasonable low fee and/or bond, but have the number of previous failed applications result in successively higher submission fees/bonds for subsequent patent applications. That way you don't discriminate against smaller inventors who may not be able to afford large application fees, or even larger companies that file a lot of valid patent applications, but you do have a clear financial deterrant against the patent trolls that churn out an endless stream of frivolous and/or over-reaching patents.
They're claiming it'll reduce them, but I suspect it's more nuanced than that. If you've been chopping your work up into smaller enough slices to qualified for free usage (15 minutes or less?) then it's absolutely going to cost you more, because that option seems to be going away. For everyone else though, I guess the de-facto subsidies of those in the former category are going to be coming off your bottom line, so yeah, there's probably going to a reduction for you.
You can bet that Amazon has crunched the numbers and the net overall revenue from EC2 will be going up though.
I was aiming to be more metaphorical and encompassing than the OP's more literal example of lifeboats, which is absolutely a women (and children) over men scenario, but even then - and regardless of the gender of the person who says "women and children first" - most people are going to try and get in the boat, even if it means sacrificing their principles to do so. The real point was that self-interest, whether instictive or reasoned, over principles isn't limited to any specific group - the aim is (supposedly) equality between the perceived group and "the rest", and usually that's only the case when it doesn't involve the sacrifice of a benefit that membership of the group being discriminated against does have. You can also turn things on their head; sometime the easiest (and sensible) path to equality is to grant something to the *other* group - entitling men to paternity leave, for instance, to stick with gender for examples - yet you don't tend to find as many people in discriminated groups that are willing to fight for that kind of change to achive the equality they supposedly seek, let alone the alternative of sacrificing one of the benefits they do have.
*ANY* boat - metaphorical or literal. It's a rare feminist, or any other disadvantaged group for that matter, that will stick to their principles when being a member of that group presents an opportunity to gain an advantage, as exemplified by the call "Women and children first!" in the rush to the lifeboats. The ability to put looking out for number one over our principles is one of the few things that seems to be a constant across pretty much any grouping of humankind you can imagine.
Actually, there's plenty of big storms in the records from the early colonists, but the focus is mostly on ships at sea, understandable since sea captains would have kept logs of such things, or from coastal settlements, again understandable since that where many early colonists settled. What is lacking is much in the way of evidence of either more frequent or more severe hurricane activity beyond a handful of exceptional storms that you'd kind of expect anyway, or reports of storm surges that were large enough to cause damage and flooding to areas further inland. There are a few examples of this, over the centuries, but seem more likely to be once in a life time/perfect storm type freak occurances rather than the kind of higher frequency or levels of destruction that would seem to support the idea that pollution (or lack there of) might be a significant factor in the strength of hurricanes.
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Even more specifically, there have been any number of incidents of AV vendors pushing bad updates too. Now, who's to say that at least *some* of those bad updates were not done deliberately to cause disruption to one or more of their recipients? It would be trivial for a vendor in the pocket of a state actor to work out when Target #4796617's next AV update is due and start pushing out a bad patch just before that scheduled update then pull the update once they know they've got a hit.
Personally, I think the former option is the safer one given the all pervasive surveillance states many countries seem to be turning into, signature updates to brick PCs in the unlikely event of a sufficiently large scale shooting war breaking out aside. All bets are off if you're not a low value target, of course, but if you are in that position then you'd probably want to be looking at a more in-depth security model that doesn't allow potential compromises such as the one allegedly impacting Kaspersky AV to be a complete deal breaker.
You know, it's really starting to bug me that the media, including those that really ought to know better, keeps referring to the victims of the Equifax hack as their "customers". With the exception of those who actually signed up to Equifax's credit checking service of their own volition they, or more accurately the data Equifax has about them, are either victims or the *product*. Equifax's actual customers are the banks, employers, stores, and other companies that buy the data Equifax holds on the victims of the hack, most of whom have no direct business relationship with Equifax beyond an agreement with a third party to have their credit checked that probably didn't even make it clear that it would be Equifax doing the checks.
Yeah, I know that. You know that. The average Joe who is used to Google/Facebook asking for their password to be re-entered (legitimately) at apparently random points in time though? Unless they've paid particular attention to blurb from Google/Facebook, or looked into how OAuth works, I can't imagine too many of them are going to think twice on the spur of the moment if the faked prompt is suitably convincing.
This is supposedly using some kind of federated authentication system like OAuth that doesn't require the password be exposed, but the idea is absolutely horrible from a phishing standpoint precisely because too many users are conditioned to blindly enter passwords on demand when confronted by an authentic enough looking prompt on what they consider to be a legit site. (In many cases, they'll even do it on a decidedly sketchy looking prompt on a highly suspect site as well, but that's kind of by the by.) The major flaw here is that there are far too many malicious sites, either deliberately so or through compromise and script injection, that could fake an OAuth style login then follow through with a request for the actual password. When even "trusted" companies that you'd expect to have near bulletproof security like Equifax are getting completely owned, how can you be sure that some random site claiming to use OAuth for your convenience is secure?
:)
I say we get a password manager, and for each site have a unique strong password. It's the only way to be secure!
I'm in the same boat - only at 1080p and 42" for my big screen video consumption of TV and movies. According to the math, my living room allows for an optimal viewing distance that' would support a 42" screen mid-way between 1080p and 4K, so I'd probably see *some* benefit from going to 4K, but I just don't see any point in trading in my current 1080p screen for it. That's not to say I don't know the difference between 1080p and 4K though - I already have a 4K monitor for video and image editing but, as AniMoJo noted above, that's a completely different usage case and the same rules don't apply. Since I'm currently only shooting video 4K, I don't see much need on a monitor upgrade either, although that might change if/when I start working at 8K.
Absolutely agree; if they are running the store, then they are both responsible and liable. An IRL analogy would be a brick and mortar mall; Amazon might have their own stores in the premesis, but they are also sub-letting storefronts to other retailers and it's entirely up to them to vet those retailers and ensuring that they and their products are complying with applicable laws and regulations. Statutory rights are also statutory rights - they cannot be waived (at least not in any sane legal jurisdiction) and Amazon is surely aware of that; it might be an independantly run department in the store, but it's still Amazon's store, I'm still paying Amazon, and in many cases the goods are also being shipped by Amazon, from Amazon's distribution centres. I buy groceries etc. from any number of manufacturers at the supermarket, but it's absolutely the supermarket that has to deal with any issues I might have with them, including any returns and refunds/replacements - operating online shouldn't (and doesn't) change that in the slightest.
The solar eclipse glasses example is particularly interesting. Apparently Amazon did realise that they had a bunch of sellars that were being "less than honest" about their glasses and tried to initiate a recall of any already shipped products - or at least prevent people from using potentially hazardous products. Unfortunately for Amazon there were a number of issues in this; firstly, they managed to sweep up some highly regarded and almost certainly 100% safe products from reputable vendors in their "recall", secondly they left it far too late for people to source an alternative product (from Amazon or elsewhere), and - perhaps because of the second issue, or perhaps because of the "where there's blame there's a claim" attitude of some sections of society - they got sued by people who claimed after the fact not to have seen Amazon's warnings.
That all opens up a number of issues for online retailers - not just Amazon - to do with timeliness, what to do with the inevitiable false positives, and just how much notification is enough to avoid being liable in a lawsuit. On the one hand, they probably want as light a regulatory touch as possible - especially when it might make them liable - but on the other, those self-same regulations may provide some protections against (for instance) those who don't realise that being able to see a lit light bulb through their solar eclipse glasses constitutes a warning that the product falls quite some way short of requirements and maybe they need to pay more attention to that email. I'm sure Amazon et al are making at least some effort to police its third party resellers - for their part Amazon have certainly booted a few vendors of sub-standard USB cables and solar eclipse glasses - but there is clearly a long way to go judging by the number of decidely dodgy looking retailers in the Amazon Marketplace, and "caveat emptor" only goes so far when Amazon is, in effect, responsible running the entire mall.
My take too - it's a cute touch, and they must have known what the code was when they used it or they would have just have grabbed something vaguely appropriate from the OSS code base - like the use of NMAP in The Matrix, and many similar examples since - or gone down the gibberish/pseudo code route. I think most directors are well aware by now that with high-def. video anything like that put up on the screen will be subjected to a freezeframe and analysis, so you either need to make it relevant or an easter egg if you want to avoid some mockery. Since we clearly don't have any actual code to deal with the analysis of quantum lifeforms yet, that just leaves the easter egg.
175.45.176.0/22 - this is directly assigned by APNIC and is the DPRK's only known native IP space allocation.
/24?) for the fixed line into Russia as well. All data obtained from Your Friendly North Korean Network Observer (no affiliation), which is worth a read if you're curious out the DPRK's Internet infrastructure, such as it is.
210.52.109.0/24 - this was assigned by China Unicom as part of their connectivity provision for the DPRK, also assigned from the APNIC RIR pool.
77.94.35.0/24 - assigned by SatGate, a Russian satellite communications provider, and is from the RIPE RIR pool.
Presumably, they'll now be adding a further allocation (another
And yet the spammers keep spamming. If spam was truly a solved problem, then there would be no money in it for them and they'd give up and move onto something else (actually some have - they've moved onto spam forums like Facebook and Twitter instead, or other aspects of cybercrime). Spam might *effectively* be a "solved" problem for you, and me for that matter, but it's clearly not a solved problem in the more general sense.
Also from that link:
I suspect Prince's powers of prognostication are no better than Gates'.
In an ideal world, yes. The examiners would do their supposedly pretty thankless jobs, and all the bad patents would be rejected while all the good ones would be approved - and since it is an ideal world everyone (except perhaps the submitters of rejected patents) would agree on which are "good" and "bad". Unfortunately, the current system in the US (and at various other PTOs) is to incentivise either approvals or throughput, both of which discourage fair evaluations, while a flat-rate salary system is potentially open to abuse because of the sums of money involved for patent trolls, or did you imagine a PTO staffed entirely by examiners who would never, ever, consider a bribe? There needs to be checks and balances - which is why I mentioned an appeals process which would help prevent bad assessments and weed out bad/corrupt examiners - but I think you've also got to provide some form of motivation for the examiners to do a *good* job rather than a quick one, and absolutely not just rubber stamp anything that's on the right form. A reasonable financial incentive is one fairly obvious way to go on that, perhaps offset against a lower base salary, but might not be the only one.
Alternatively, or additionally, you could also add an extra step where rather than simply have the PTO mark a patent as approved it goes into a "pending" state when the patent application paperwork is published and anyone can submit prior art to negate its final approval. Once that pending period is up, the examiner(s) can review any submissions and make a final decision on whether or not to approve the patent.
Sure, but which definition do you think that CBS is more likely to use - given that (for now, at least) they can hardly put together a bundle that includes content from other broadcasters? They've provided an option to acquire some of their content outside of a bundle - either standalone or in conjunction with another package - which is pretty much what people have been asking for. It's also potentially only a first step for them; maybe next, they'll go further down the pay-per-view route and let you pay for individual series, or perhaps even specific episodes. Or maybe they'll just scrap the whole idea because it turns out an insufficient number of people are prepared to pay, which - Devil's Advocacy aside - I suspect is actually more likely to be the case, popularity of Trek not withstanding.
FWIW, personally, I don't see much difference between monolithic cable bundles and the likes of Netflix/Amazon; sure the latter might be better value for money than a cable subscription, but there's still a huge amount of stuff I'd be paying for that I'm not just interested in given that I'm typically watching somwhere between two and maybe five or six shows a week, tops. Paying per broadcaster, per the CBS model, doesn't seem much better economically either; most viewer's shows will be scattered across multiple broadcasters, so the cost of subscribing to all the ones someone might want is going to add up fast and still includes a lot of unwanted content. It's even worse if you go full-on pay-per-view on a per-show or per-episode basis as that gets ridiculously expensive when you add it all up on the likes of Google Play or iTunes, and (so far at least) no one seems to be offering what I'd call true a-la-carte and offering a menu of *every* channel (or show) that I can build my own bundle of whatever I want from. Well, not legally anyway. The first company that offers a selection of package deals in the form of "Any X shows for $Y per month" that covers all (or perhaps even just most) of the shows I'm interested in, with bonus points if I get some form of credit for any unused shows in a given month, will get my money. Needless to say, I'm not holding out much hope.
Why *would* they realise this? People in the US have been asking for a-la-carte TV for years (decades?) rather than the bundles full of unwanted cable channels they've been forced to pay for in order to get the few they actually wanted. Now that they're finally on board with it, the Internet is providing broadcasters with a means to both cut out the cable middle-man and deliver those a-la-carte services, so of *course* they're expecting all those holdouts to finally cut the cord and just pay for the channels they want while dropping the rest.
Unless people want to replace their monopoly cable company bundles that are full of crap they don't need with a monopoly Netflix/Amazon/whatever Internet bundle that's also full of crap they don't need so they can continue to moan about the lack of an a-la-carte offering, of course.
It could be both, you know. Midland Beach (the area this happened according to TFS) apparently *is* a residential area in NYC that has a beach; it also has some parkland immediately to either side of it - all perfectly valid places for someone to be flying a drone in a safe and legal manner. It's also pretty close to an area of the US that's a high-profile target for any wannabe terrorist, so quite reasonable to assume that law enforcement and the military will be keeping a close eye on things, and that might potentially entail the use of Blackhawks flying at low altitude. Combine a drone pilot pushing the limits of where they were supposed to be with a pair of Blackhawks pushing the limits of where they were supposed to be *at the same time*, and accidents (which is what this almost certainly was) are just going to happen.
No, I didn't miss it, and I think the bond is potentially a good idea, but the problem isn't just turning it around to provide an incentive for examiners to reject bad patents - it's also figuring out a way to penalise the outright patent trolls and/or submitters of overly broad patents without placing an unfair burden on either lone inventors or the larger corporations/universities that produce genuine patent candidates in bulk. That's not entirely clear cut either, because for every pure patent troll, you've also got companies that apply for a mix of worthy and frivolous patents, and for many of those the cost of a bond (even one of $50k) is potentially just the cost of doing business. A company could afford to write off a lot of $50k bonds on rejected frivolous patents if they can get just one of them through and leverage it into settlements totalling ten of millions, or more, and that's the more fundamental issue with the system; the entire thing is too easily gamed by the big patent mills and the trolls.
The way to address that, and improve the signal to noise ratio across the board, is to increase the fees and/or bond for every rejected patent. e.g. say $5k for the first patent application, but if that gets rejected after any appeals then subsequent applications cost $10k, and it keeps going up, and up, and up, with each failed application and either doesn't come back down for quite some time, or maybe ever. That's necessary to prevent XKCD's bobcat scenario; large companies need to be prevented from gaming the system by trying to slip an overly broad patent through every now and then, then bringing the fees back down through more legitimate applications. Buying a patent portfolio? Congrats, you also bought their patent filing reputation and any increased fees that result from it. I'm still missing a way to deter patent trolls from filing each application as a new inventor or shell company to help keep their fees down, then transferring any successful applications to their patent pool though... Some kind of corporate registration and tax filings that could be cross-checked with other government agencies, perhaps?
I think you're under the mistaken impression that financial analyists looks at the world in the same way that regular, sane, people do. Some of these clowns actually think now is a good time to BUY Equifax stock. Well, either that, or they're currently holding a lot of Equifax stock themselves and are looking for some suckers who they intend to leave holding the bag.
Not true, it depends on how they adjust the rates they charge per timeslot vs. how many people were getting in under that 15 minute (or whatever it is) free window. If you are now going to be paying a total of $1/s for your EC2 server farm, then the breakeven point would be at $3,600/hour for that same server farm - if you're previous bill was more than $3,600/hour - including any dead time - then you are going to see a reduction in total costs. If you are in the situation where time is money and you are deliberately chopping up a task into a lot of parallel tasks so it finsishes faster and swallowing the resultant expense of having multiple servers sitting idle when the job completes, then the savings could add up pretty fast. The potential win for Amazon comes from all those who were previously getting free minutes through massive parallelisation to get under the free usage bar; that previously written off revenue is now going to be billed, and if Amazon has done their homework almost certainly will exceed the savings made by those in the former group.
I think the problem is more fundamental than that. By paying patent examiners to approve patents, you're also effectively encouraging them to fail to do their jobs properly and just rubber stamp any random patent that they review; whether or not the examiners are competent or not doesn't enter into it. The fix is to turn that on its head and pay the examiners a commission/bonus for each patent that they can find prior art on or find a justifiable reason to invalidate the claim. Better yet, start with a reasonable low fee and/or bond, but have the number of previous failed applications result in successively higher submission fees/bonds for subsequent patent applications. That way you don't discriminate against smaller inventors who may not be able to afford large application fees, or even larger companies that file a lot of valid patent applications, but you do have a clear financial deterrant against the patent trolls that churn out an endless stream of frivolous and/or over-reaching patents.
They're claiming it'll reduce them, but I suspect it's more nuanced than that. If you've been chopping your work up into smaller enough slices to qualified for free usage (15 minutes or less?) then it's absolutely going to cost you more, because that option seems to be going away. For everyone else though, I guess the de-facto subsidies of those in the former category are going to be coming off your bottom line, so yeah, there's probably going to a reduction for you.
You can bet that Amazon has crunched the numbers and the net overall revenue from EC2 will be going up though.
H1-Bees?
I was aiming to be more metaphorical and encompassing than the OP's more literal example of lifeboats, which is absolutely a women (and children) over men scenario, but even then - and regardless of the gender of the person who says "women and children first" - most people are going to try and get in the boat, even if it means sacrificing their principles to do so. The real point was that self-interest, whether instictive or reasoned, over principles isn't limited to any specific group - the aim is (supposedly) equality between the perceived group and "the rest", and usually that's only the case when it doesn't involve the sacrifice of a benefit that membership of the group being discriminated against does have. You can also turn things on their head; sometime the easiest (and sensible) path to equality is to grant something to the *other* group - entitling men to paternity leave, for instance, to stick with gender for examples - yet you don't tend to find as many people in discriminated groups that are willing to fight for that kind of change to achive the equality they supposedly seek, let alone the alternative of sacrificing one of the benefits they do have.
*ANY* boat - metaphorical or literal. It's a rare feminist, or any other disadvantaged group for that matter, that will stick to their principles when being a member of that group presents an opportunity to gain an advantage, as exemplified by the call "Women and children first!" in the rush to the lifeboats. The ability to put looking out for number one over our principles is one of the few things that seems to be a constant across pretty much any grouping of humankind you can imagine.
Actually, there's plenty of big storms in the records from the early colonists, but the focus is mostly on ships at sea, understandable since sea captains would have kept logs of such things, or from coastal settlements, again understandable since that where many early colonists settled. What is lacking is much in the way of evidence of either more frequent or more severe hurricane activity beyond a handful of exceptional storms that you'd kind of expect anyway, or reports of storm surges that were large enough to cause damage and flooding to areas further inland. There are a few examples of this, over the centuries, but seem more likely to be once in a life time/perfect storm type freak occurances rather than the kind of higher frequency or levels of destruction that would seem to support the idea that pollution (or lack there of) might be a significant factor in the strength of hurricanes.