The problem with that is that they become like the patent office and if they don't understand what they are looking at it can't be funded. It assumes they are technically more competent than anybody who would use the service. I never saw a javascript that allows somebody to teleport a physical device for them to look at, but I could have missed it.
Here's the dirty little secret though -- if you have a product that actually is valuable, actually could work, and prove you have the business experience and ability to deliver it, there's a whole WORLD of finance options available to you. Banks. Angels. VCs. Its not rocket science.
Kickstarter was meant for simpler things -- funding an indie band recording a CD, and things like that. Not "zomg, I'm building a $10m game!" or "Here's a new smartphone!" Kickstarter (or anyone else like IndieGoGo) projects that aren't simple little things are doing one of a few things: 1) scamming directly, 2) testing the waters for interest care of people's "loans" *cough*Ubuntu, or 3) have a good idea but aren't experienced enough to know how to deliver it.
All three of them aren't worth putting money into. Once in a blue moon you might get a successful delivery, and its really the project starters who shortchanged themselves. But more often that not you're getting screwed -- either deliberately or through inexperience or ineptitude.
You may disagree with it, but its completely orthogonal to the question of the usefulness of patents.
And "the question of the usefulness of patents" is completely orthogonal to the subject in discussion. Your attempt at redirection is noted.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just missed the parent post I replied to -- since that was the sole, and only point of it.
The subject of profiting off others work is not only in line with the article, but is also a patent troll's or NPE's sole reason for existence.
All businesses of greater size than a sole proprietorship exist to profit off others work. Any company with employees explicitly exists to magnify the value of the company based on the work of the employee. I'd say that if you didn't fundamentally understand that you should take an economics course, but its so self-evident, I doubt that would help.
People (and, frankly, any life form) collaborates with others because they expect to get a greater value out of it (ie, profit) as a result of others' labor. And anyone who hires an employee chooses to do so because the value to the business is greater than the cost. If it was even, you wouldn't waste the effort on it. A vanishingly few people are capable of supporting themselves on their own labor alone. If businesses didn't exist to provide resources back to people in exchange for their work -- leaving the complexity of exactly how to get those resources to others -- most people would be unable to support themselves.
... can't tell the difference between humour and reality.
Torvalds said no while nodding his head yes is a JOKE people, not a fucking admission. Please, save the tinfoil paranoia for Reddit, and keep the serious tech discussions here.
If you think tinfoil paranoia is a Reddit thing and not a Slashdot thing, you haven't spent much time here, or there. Are there subreddits with people as seething with zealotry as Slashdot? Sure... but they're easy to avoid.
(And, its an obvious joke to anyone who isn't fairly far down the autism spectrum or a tinfoil whackjob... unfortunately/. has plenty of both.)
1 inventor type that don't market anything (they invent and then sell to a Maker)
2 Makers that have on staff inventor types (they make stuff "with our patented..."
3 Leech types that just beg, borrow , steal and Buy patents (Holding Corps that only send bills around)
Trolls are type 3 not type 1
The problem is, there's really two kinds of companies in bucket #3 -- patent licensing companies that handle licensing (and sometimes legally holding) patents on behalf of the people in #1 and #2, and patent aggregators that seek out and buy up bad patents as companies are failing for the express purpose of monetizing them until they're found invalid. You can tell the latter by the random nature of their litigation and the tendency to keep licensing costs in the "extortion" range where its cheaper to pay than fight. The former won't do that -- their job is to get appropriate licensing, and the small fish are of no concern.
There are lots of stories on here that lump companies in #1 into #2 on grounds of anti-patent zealotry, not corporate behavior or intent.
I would go without the "if you didn't create it." I've yet to find a single patent case that wasn't trolling.
If you get your "news" from stories on Slashdot, that would make sense. All you see on here is the fringe ridiculous cases, and the high profile games played between multinational corporations using patent portfolios as pawns. The vast majority of patents do exactly what they're supposed to do, and the vast majority of patents are licensed fairly and appropriately.
I'm of the opinion that if you didn't create it, and your entity exists to do nothing than extort people for royalties on your patent... you are a patent troll.
At the risk of burning karma, I disagree... licensing organizations are not the problem. Bad patents are the problem.
Licensing organizations are very useful, to big companies, small companies and individuals.
There are a fairly large number of companies that exist to profit off bad patents, but that doesn't invalidate the work the "good" companies are doing.
Yeah, Edison profited off the research of his students, and everyone around him......a bad example to be used if they want to prove patents are useful.
There's no crime in profiting off the work of employees and students.
You may disagree with it, but its completely orthogonal to the question of the usefulness of patents.
As much as I hated a lot of the initial Xbox One launch ideas (especially the limit on how long you could play offline, which was just asinine), this was an idea they were trying to do, from what I understood of their press releases. I'm glad that Valve's doing it, it's a great idea, but I guarantee some of the people singing its praises are the same ones who hated the idea from Microsoft because it interfered with first sale.
Some? I'd be willing to bet its virtually all of them.
That hypocrisy has been pointed out to death, though -- people didn't flip out that Steam games can't be resold, nor will people flip out when the addition of sharing in Steam carries with it online requirements. Oh wait, of course, Steam DOES require the Internet.
A noisy bunch of morons made a mess of Microsoft's plans, and the same noisy bunch of morons are going to be bouncing up and down at how "innovative" this is...
You do realize that when you started copying files around on the volume that you already have full access right?
Most people who think they've found some sort of vulnerability in systems seem to lack an understanding of security barriers and what it means when you're on one side of one or the other.
Can't tell you how many times I've seen people start a security report of a vulnerability in one application or another with "if the user is root / administrator or can use an root / administrator exploit of some kind"... and completely missing the fact that the vulnerability doesn't matter one bit if that's the case.
Then he wonders why Linux adoption rate on the desktop is nearly zero.
Any soccer mom reading this will think Linux is an OS developed by some 12-year-old dumbass, and will obviously refuse to use it..
And believing stupid shit like this might have the slightest impact on why Linux adoption on the desktop is nearly zero and ignoring the real reasons why its nearly zero is why its nearly zero.
By my reckoning, I think next year will be the 20th year I've heard someone declare to be the year of the Linux Desktop, though, so lets just wait a few months and see!
It may be true in this case that a lack of understand of RDRAND is the root of the disagreement. But you can't generalize that logic. Just because I am not capable of building a nuclear bomb, doesn't mean I don't know enough about them to know they shouldn't be used.
That's a bad analogy. If you were capable of building a nuclear bomb, it *may* give you sufficient expertise to judge the appropriateness of, say, using plutonium in a RTG, but your non-expert level of understanding of nuclear engineering does, in fact, mean you've got absolutely no grounds to judge that appropriateness.
Yes, Matt did the right thing there and Linus' responses on the RdRand issue have seemed entirely out of character for him. So out of character I am sure I am not the only one wondering if he is being blackmailed somehow.
Yes, its a government conspiracy to keep people from changing a compile-time option for... um... secret... um... stuff.
I don't. I smell Visa and MasterCard... which is worse.
PayPal is on the hook for chargebacks when MaiPile doesn't deliver. They're on the hook based on their own internal policies, and the policies of the big card networks.
Given how many of the crowd sourced projects never come to fruition, it doesn't surprise me that there's pushback from the companies that handle the payments. (Especially now that so many of them are pushed as more than a simple donation and are really a pre-purchase of a product or service.)
While you and I may not want to live in such a society there are those who would like nothing better. Many of them fancy themselves as the enforcers in such a regime, a chance to be a master instead of one of the many slaves. For people who live to control others every unjust law that makes life unbearable for the rest is yet another opportunity for them to exert their authority and feel that blissful, euphoric sense of power that is for them the ultimate drug.
yeah something you run on your browser....that gives you access to the files.. CAN GIVE YOU ACCESS TO THE FILES.
wow what a shock! because in this case, MEGA can alter the js so that they get the keys. how this is is news I don't really get. it's just common sense.
the real question is, are there 3rd party mega clients that are not javascript or subject to changing without notice..
What is common sense to anyone who understands how a service is built is not necessarily common sense to those who use it.
The SLS is basically a big boondoggle forced on NASA by a bunch of congressmen who have factories in their districts that used to make Space Shuttle parts. These congressmen have basically forced NASA to produce some sort of space launch vehicle in a way that requires these Space Shuttle parts and therefore keeps the factories in their districts in business.
Its more insidious than that -- the Space Shuttle (and the ISS) largely existed to keep money pouring into defense contractors in those districts to maintain the skillset and brain trust around aerospace technologies. NASA would never be allowed to fund a lower-cost, more streamlined system to replace the STS program because the whole reason congress pumps that money into NASA is predicated on "big". Why do you think the NASA mission changed to the Moon and then Mars? As the cost and complexity of systems to get to the moon was coming down, the big project couldn't be justified. Mars had to be the target. If SpaceX actually figures out how to inexpensively get someone to Mars and back -- and starts making any progress at all towards it -- you better believe a manned mission to Jupiter or something will be the next NASA drum being beat.
I did a bit of work for NASA and can confirm that the politics can be insanely frustrating. I busted my ass for 12, 14 hours a day for a year and a half and do not regret it; I quit when it became apparent that the guy making the powerpoint slides describing my work was making more than me.
I recommend to work there for a bit as it's a cool experience, but couldn't imagine it as a career.
If I had to make PowerPoint slides instead of producing real results with my hands, I'd be wanting a lot more money, too.
Neil deGrasse Tyson says only the government can do Space.
NdGT is neither a politician or a businessman. He's a wonderful speaker and an astrophysicist.
Its an error to attribute to him greater insight than those bring. (And, FWIW, I'm a BIG fan of his... but his statements there start tiptoeing pretty close to the line where really smart and successful people in one field start thinking that holds true in others.)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that is that they become like the patent office and if they don't understand what they are looking at it can't be funded. It assumes they are technically more competent than anybody who would use the service. I never saw a javascript that allows somebody to teleport a physical device for them to look at, but I could have missed it.
Here's the dirty little secret though -- if you have a product that actually is valuable, actually could work, and prove you have the business experience and ability to deliver it, there's a whole WORLD of finance options available to you. Banks. Angels. VCs. Its not rocket science.
Kickstarter was meant for simpler things -- funding an indie band recording a CD, and things like that. Not "zomg, I'm building a $10m game!" or "Here's a new smartphone!" Kickstarter (or anyone else like IndieGoGo) projects that aren't simple little things are doing one of a few things: 1) scamming directly, 2) testing the waters for interest care of people's "loans" *cough*Ubuntu, or 3) have a good idea but aren't experienced enough to know how to deliver it.
All three of them aren't worth putting money into. Once in a blue moon you might get a successful delivery, and its really the project starters who shortchanged themselves. But more often that not you're getting screwed -- either deliberately or through inexperience or ineptitude.
Sex is for procreation not recreation! Sinner!
Sex is to quiet those voices... the voices that keep telling me to ...
Wait, nevermind.
Can you seriously not manage to add anchor tags to your link? A few extra characters to make everyone's life a bit easier, is that so much to ask?
After 15 years of Slashdot adding features no one wants to the site, could they not manage to add one they did? Like auto-linking?
(Although, if we're going down that route, please add story moderation first!)
That's the wrong kind of Plutonium. RTGs need Plutonium-238. That stockpile is Plutonium-239, 240, 241, and a bit of 242.
Yeah, but dat shiz is da BOMB.
And "the question of the usefulness of patents" is completely orthogonal to the subject in discussion. Your attempt at redirection is noted.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just missed the parent post I replied to -- since that was the sole, and only point of it.
The subject of profiting off others work is not only in line with the article, but is also a patent troll's or NPE's sole reason for existence.
All businesses of greater size than a sole proprietorship exist to profit off others work. Any company with employees explicitly exists to magnify the value of the company based on the work of the employee. I'd say that if you didn't fundamentally understand that you should take an economics course, but its so self-evident, I doubt that would help.
People (and, frankly, any life form) collaborates with others because they expect to get a greater value out of it (ie, profit) as a result of others' labor. And anyone who hires an employee chooses to do so because the value to the business is greater than the cost. If it was even, you wouldn't waste the effort on it. A vanishingly few people are capable of supporting themselves on their own labor alone. If businesses didn't exist to provide resources back to people in exchange for their work -- leaving the complexity of exactly how to get those resources to others -- most people would be unable to support themselves.
... can't tell the difference between humour and reality.
Torvalds said no while nodding his head yes is a JOKE people, not a fucking admission. Please, save the tinfoil paranoia for Reddit, and keep the serious tech discussions here.
If you think tinfoil paranoia is a Reddit thing and not a Slashdot thing, you haven't spent much time here, or there. Are there subreddits with people as seething with zealotry as Slashdot? Sure... but they're easy to avoid.
(And, its an obvious joke to anyone who isn't fairly far down the autism spectrum or a tinfoil whackjob... unfortunately /. has plenty of both.)
okay we have 3 different groups to deal with
1 inventor type that don't market anything (they invent and then sell to a Maker)
2 Makers that have on staff inventor types (they make stuff "with our patented..."
3 Leech types that just beg, borrow , steal and Buy patents (Holding Corps that only send bills around)
Trolls are type 3 not type 1
The problem is, there's really two kinds of companies in bucket #3 -- patent licensing companies that handle licensing (and sometimes legally holding) patents on behalf of the people in #1 and #2, and patent aggregators that seek out and buy up bad patents as companies are failing for the express purpose of monetizing them until they're found invalid. You can tell the latter by the random nature of their litigation and the tendency to keep licensing costs in the "extortion" range where its cheaper to pay than fight. The former won't do that -- their job is to get appropriate licensing, and the small fish are of no concern.
There are lots of stories on here that lump companies in #1 into #2 on grounds of anti-patent zealotry, not corporate behavior or intent.
I would go without the "if you didn't create it." I've yet to find a single patent case that wasn't trolling.
If you get your "news" from stories on Slashdot, that would make sense. All you see on here is the fringe ridiculous cases, and the high profile games played between multinational corporations using patent portfolios as pawns. The vast majority of patents do exactly what they're supposed to do, and the vast majority of patents are licensed fairly and appropriately.
I'm of the opinion that if you didn't create it, and your entity exists to do nothing than extort people for royalties on your patent ... you are a patent troll.
At the risk of burning karma, I disagree... licensing organizations are not the problem. Bad patents are the problem.
Licensing organizations are very useful, to big companies, small companies and individuals.
There are a fairly large number of companies that exist to profit off bad patents, but that doesn't invalidate the work the "good" companies are doing.
Yeah, Edison profited off the research of his students, and everyone around him......a bad example to be used if they want to prove patents are useful.
There's no crime in profiting off the work of employees and students.
You may disagree with it, but its completely orthogonal to the question of the usefulness of patents.
As much as I hated a lot of the initial Xbox One launch ideas (especially the limit on how long you could play offline, which was just asinine), this was an idea they were trying to do, from what I understood of their press releases. I'm glad that Valve's doing it, it's a great idea, but I guarantee some of the people singing its praises are the same ones who hated the idea from Microsoft because it interfered with first sale.
Some? I'd be willing to bet its virtually all of them.
That hypocrisy has been pointed out to death, though -- people didn't flip out that Steam games can't be resold, nor will people flip out when the addition of sharing in Steam carries with it online requirements. Oh wait, of course, Steam DOES require the Internet.
A noisy bunch of morons made a mess of Microsoft's plans, and the same noisy bunch of morons are going to be bouncing up and down at how "innovative" this is...
You do realize that when you started copying files around on the volume that you already have full access right?
Most people who think they've found some sort of vulnerability in systems seem to lack an understanding of security barriers and what it means when you're on one side of one or the other.
Can't tell you how many times I've seen people start a security report of a vulnerability in one application or another with "if the user is root / administrator or can use an root / administrator exploit of some kind"... and completely missing the fact that the vulnerability doesn't matter one bit if that's the case.
If you mount your Windows harddrive in Linux without using Encryption you can access all your Data?
Not news at all. You can do this on any operating system of any type assuming your not using an encrypted system.
Or dupe your Linux virtual harddrive in Linux... or Windows ... or OSX... and do the same thing.
Its a stupid flamebait article. Shame after all this time we still can't moderate the articles themselves on /.
Then he wonders why Linux adoption rate on the desktop is nearly zero.
Any soccer mom reading this will think Linux is an OS developed by some 12-year-old dumbass, and will obviously refuse to use it..
And believing stupid shit like this might have the slightest impact on why Linux adoption on the desktop is nearly zero and ignoring the real reasons why its nearly zero is why its nearly zero.
By my reckoning, I think next year will be the 20th year I've heard someone declare to be the year of the Linux Desktop, though, so lets just wait a few months and see!
It may be true in this case that a lack of understand of RDRAND is the root of the disagreement. But you can't generalize that logic. Just because I am not capable of building a nuclear bomb, doesn't mean I don't know enough about them to know they shouldn't be used.
That's a bad analogy. If you were capable of building a nuclear bomb, it *may* give you sufficient expertise to judge the appropriateness of, say, using plutonium in a RTG, but your non-expert level of understanding of nuclear engineering does, in fact, mean you've got absolutely no grounds to judge that appropriateness.
Yes, Matt did the right thing there and Linus' responses on the RdRand issue have seemed entirely out of character for him. So out of character I am sure I am not the only one wondering if he is being blackmailed somehow.
Yes, its a government conspiracy to keep people from changing a compile-time option for ... um ... secret ... um ... stuff.
I smell the NSA.
I don't. I smell Visa and MasterCard... which is worse.
PayPal is on the hook for chargebacks when MaiPile doesn't deliver. They're on the hook based on their own internal policies, and the policies of the big card networks.
Given how many of the crowd sourced projects never come to fruition, it doesn't surprise me that there's pushback from the companies that handle the payments. (Especially now that so many of them are pushed as more than a simple donation and are really a pre-purchase of a product or service.)
While you and I may not want to live in such a society there are those who would like nothing better. Many of them fancy themselves as the enforcers in such a regime, a chance to be a master instead of one of the many slaves. For people who live to control others every unjust law that makes life unbearable for the rest is yet another opportunity for them to exert their authority and feel that blissful, euphoric sense of power that is for them the ultimate drug.
Where do I apply?
I mean, that's terrible!
yeah something you run on your browser.. ..that gives you access to the files.. CAN GIVE YOU ACCESS TO THE FILES.
wow what a shock! because in this case, MEGA can alter the js so that they get the keys. how this is is news I don't really get. it's just common sense.
the real question is, are there 3rd party mega clients that are not javascript or subject to changing without notice..
What is common sense to anyone who understands how a service is built is not necessarily common sense to those who use it.
So it matters.
Not too long ago that most people in the US would be worried about Russia being the bad guy in such situations.
Times haven't changed -- just the viewpoint you're being presented with has.
Editors, it's never a bad idea to define less-than-ubiquitous acronyms.
Are you really hypothesizing that there is anyone who knows who Chris Kraft is, and/or cares in the least what he thinks, who doesn't know that?
The SLS is basically a big boondoggle forced on NASA by a bunch of congressmen who have factories in their districts that used to make Space Shuttle parts. These congressmen have basically forced NASA to produce some sort of space launch vehicle in a way that requires these Space Shuttle parts and therefore keeps the factories in their districts in business.
Its more insidious than that -- the Space Shuttle (and the ISS) largely existed to keep money pouring into defense contractors in those districts to maintain the skillset and brain trust around aerospace technologies. NASA would never be allowed to fund a lower-cost, more streamlined system to replace the STS program because the whole reason congress pumps that money into NASA is predicated on "big". Why do you think the NASA mission changed to the Moon and then Mars? As the cost and complexity of systems to get to the moon was coming down, the big project couldn't be justified. Mars had to be the target. If SpaceX actually figures out how to inexpensively get someone to Mars and back -- and starts making any progress at all towards it -- you better believe a manned mission to Jupiter or something will be the next NASA drum being beat.
I did a bit of work for NASA and can confirm that the politics can be insanely frustrating. I busted my ass for 12, 14 hours a day for a year and a half and do not regret it; I quit when it became apparent that the guy making the powerpoint slides describing my work was making more than me.
I recommend to work there for a bit as it's a cool experience, but couldn't imagine it as a career.
If I had to make PowerPoint slides instead of producing real results with my hands, I'd be wanting a lot more money, too.
Neil deGrasse Tyson says only the government can do Space.
NdGT is neither a politician or a businessman. He's a wonderful speaker and an astrophysicist.
Its an error to attribute to him greater insight than those bring. (And, FWIW, I'm a BIG fan of his... but his statements there start tiptoeing pretty close to the line where really smart and successful people in one field start thinking that holds true in others.)
The thing is, it's really hard to stop poverty and famine. It's not at all hard to not go somewhere and shoot people.
You mean impossible.