Not at all. There is a huge difference between *licensing* a patent and *selling* the patent. Licensing means someone pays you to use it. Selling it means someone buys it and can do whatever they want with it (and in fact, you have given up the right to use it).
If you invent something, you can have an exclusive on it, or you can license it to companies that want to use it. That's how the system was INTENDED to work, and how it has worked for a ling time. Patent trolls (usually companies made mostly of lawyers) buying up large quantities of questionable patents and speculatively suing anyone with a remotely related product are a relatively new thing (largely enabled by the crazy vagueness of software patents).
But how does that change my point? (and I know you don't necessarily disagree...)
Assign the patent to the corporation sponsoring the patent, fine, I agree with that. Just don't allow it to be transferred to another of those corporate peoples. Or hell, maybe if the corporation is bought outright, you could consider transferring *all* patents, etc. But the fact is many patent trolls just pick and choose absurd patents that their lawyers end up finding an angle that's good enough for the ignorant juries who decide the outcomes...
You are totally correct in that. And even 20+ years later, my mom was working in admissions at a major university and was passed up for promotion because she "was probably getting married soon, and would just have kids and leave" (which she did, ie. ME, but I still don't agree with that any more than "preexisting conditions").
But 60 years later, that argument is just not true any more (especially at Stanford, my alma mater), and should be put to bed. The GP comment was what I would call "totally douchey" but the article is also absurd in somehow claiming gender bias started at a single school in a single year. Bullshit sensationalistic headlines... because anyone who actually READ the article would probably find it interesting, and not particularly biased or inflammatory (besides the fact that, yes, Peter Thiel and David Sacks were total a-holes back then).
I was in Stanford class of 1994 - which means, yes, I started in 1990. And, yes, we barely knew what real "email" was, since pretty much no 18 year old in high school had it. I had been on BBSs for 4-5 years before that, but at that point for even the leading edge outside of academia it was private BBS or CompuServe, etc.
By 1994 email was ubiquitous, Usenet was already long in the tooth, the Mosaic browser had been released, and we all had wired Ethernet in our dorm rooms (which still was definitely NOT the norm for college campuses - but it was nice). I wrote the first TCP/IP driver for DOOM so we could play multiplayer in the dorms once they blocked IPX after the initial DOOM IPX driver killed a lot of campus networks;)
Anyway, the point is that range of 1990-1994 was in fact one of the critical periods for those developing the *commercial* Internet, and Stanford was at ground zero of a lot of it. And another point of the article is (if you read the whole thing) while at Stanford, Peter Thiel and David Sacks were not just the total dicks described in the article - they were WORSE. They basically started the Stanford Review to counter/insult any effort at racial or gender diversity/progress on campus. Even they apologized (according to the article) for the crap they wrote at the time (and Thiel came out of the closet eventually) and at the time it was BAD...
All that being said, the title of this slashdot post is FUCKING STUPID. It's in NO way what the article said, and as you know it's ridiculous to claim tech or ANY OTHER gender gap in business, engineering, or whatever somehow started in *1990* (more like 1790? 1690? 1690BC?) or at a single location...
Patents should be granted to an individual or their assigned company - and then NOT allowed to be transferred. If it's really intellectual property, require that it be used by the intellectual who came up with it, not randomly sold to some giant team of lawyers who try to "monetize" it 10 years after the fact.
That would allow any person - or company that person worked for at the time - to take full advantage of the patent for its original purpose (since almost all patent trolls are not the original inventors) while preventing the soul-sucking leeches on innovation who just want to buy up a bunch of "intellectual property" and speculatively sue anyone who might be doing something remotely similar.
No, I'm just saying that those here who keep saying "any 16 year old with a computer" could have done it are way underestimating it. Since I'm assuming most here are older than 16 and have a computer, are you all saying you could do this trivially given a few hours, a pizza, and a couple Mountain Dews? Bullshit.
Yeah, I had read that, too. By took control I meant literally "took control". They infiltrated it (and there are rumors there was an insider to help with that) but then they activated everything very quickly, without warning, and basically stole data and destroyed the servers before anyone had a chance to do anything.
My point was the overall attack was way WAY beyond some simple trojan worm getting an admin password...
Really? Apparently they quickly took control of almost every one one of Sony's servers and workstations. Literally took entire control, stole all of the useful data, wiped out all of their servers, and then owned all of the workstations so that they were useless but able to broadcast any message they wanted to them.
That's a *bit* more coordinated than "your average trojan worm". Unless you really think based on extremely limited information you know more than all of the security researchers and government investigators looking into it... (hint: sorry, you don't).
Not samba, SMB. Samba is just the name of the open source Windows SMB server implementation. Most likely they were targeting Windows machines (though I admit I haven't seen anything on that either way).
Also, it's highly unlikely (but also possible I guess) they had SMB open to the Internet. But they just needed to compromise one internal machine (almost trivial these days) to attack SMB...
Except for a privileged few, North Koreans are completely blocked off from the outside world
Umm, I think you answered that question already. You don't think North Korea's cyberterrorism military unit just might be part of those "privileged few"?
Why would North Korea reveal its capabilities and tactics in such dramatic fashion to achieve nothing of any value
Maybe because their Supreme Leader is a total loon? This is the same guy who has among hundreds of other insane actions decreed that anyone with his name needed to change it immediately. He lives for drama and vanity and wants his citizens to think of him as a demigod. He's a fucking international drama queen of the highest level...
Science, technology, engineering, and math. You are 25 years old, have a bachelors, and are beyond that. You can probably change fields if you have the aptitude, but you are way beyond "STEM". Those are basic education areas, not careers.
The main problem with desalination plants is that they are a risky investment. If the drought ever does end then you are basically priced out of the market
Not just risky in CA - impossible. Because everyone knows the drought *will* end in less than 20 years, so if there is enough rainwater to cover usage the plants will be shutdown and not profitable. The technological solution will be something that has a relatively low initial capital investment but a possibly high recurring cost.
The US government obviously secretly spies on citizens just like Russia and most other countries. Yeah, it's annoying but you are naive if you think it's not ubiquitous.
But the US does not imprison journalists and artists for things like speaking badly of the government or singing an "offensive" song in a church.
Google was worried their employees in Russia would be held criminally accountable for draconian spying and censorship laws, and so they decided it wasn't worth risking. They aren't worried their US employers will be held criminally accountable for not turning over data without a warrant or not censoring information, because those are not illegal.
Even more interesting related to this - a patent troll tried to sue ANY APP (yes, not just the hardware, but all apps) that used an auto-rotate feature. Even though their patent was granted 9 years after the Radius Pivot.
Luckily Backspace got pissed off when they were sued over it, and made sure it was invalidated...
People who actually have had severe reactions to vaccines are being modded down, even when their fear is fact-backed and entirely rational.
You say that, but when I went to look for these fact-based, entirely rational posts this is the first one I found:
The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine nearly killed me when I was a child.
Take a look at vaccine adjuvants. Doctors are not scientists, they are business people, and use a lot of hocus-pocus for financial and other reasons. For a large part doctors and biologists have no clue what they are really doing.
1. Who cares, it just took one case to invalidate it for everyone in that municipality. 2. We were talking about electricity, not water. But nonetheless, the water hookup was required because they *did* keep the sewer hookup, and they were part of the same package. The fact is the judge was reasonable. If they wanted to go completely off the grid they should move out to where they can use a septic tank and do whatever they want with their water.
Except those are all old and have been mostly dismissed by judges. Basically, the cities tried and the judges reasonably ruled the statutes were invalid. And if you look for other sources, you quickly realize these are the tiny minority, and most cities don't really care.
Actually already saw that one, and it's not a good example. It's from March, and if YOU had actually searched better (or found a less biased source), you'd have found that almost all (including the electricity requirement) was later dismissed by a judge.
Please provide relevant examples or citations of cities that *require* you to pay for a utility if you don't need it. It would be really interesting to see...
Actually, *many* utilities currently have net metering without significant minimum charges (like $5), usually decided by state utility commissions. Honestly who knows right now how well that covers their overhead. I'm sure utility companies claim is doesn't and customers claim it does.
But it's clear that charge is only going to go up as reliable non-renewable power gets more expensive to produce. Hopefully it's offset by the reduced hourly rates due to increased renewable use...
Actually, many homeowners putting up solar panels these days are just allowing solar power companies to put them up and then leasing back the power from them. That model is becoming more and more popular. Imagine if a traditional power company bought one of those solar lease companies - they'd now own the solar panels on your roof...
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. There is a huge difference between *licensing* a patent and *selling* the patent. Licensing means someone pays you to use it. Selling it means someone buys it and can do whatever they want with it (and in fact, you have given up the right to use it).
If you invent something, you can have an exclusive on it, or you can license it to companies that want to use it. That's how the system was INTENDED to work, and how it has worked for a ling time. Patent trolls (usually companies made mostly of lawyers) buying up large quantities of questionable patents and speculatively suing anyone with a remotely related product are a relatively new thing (largely enabled by the crazy vagueness of software patents).
But how does that change my point? (and I know you don't necessarily disagree...)
Assign the patent to the corporation sponsoring the patent, fine, I agree with that. Just don't allow it to be transferred to another of those corporate peoples. Or hell, maybe if the corporation is bought outright, you could consider transferring *all* patents, etc. But the fact is many patent trolls just pick and choose absurd patents that their lawyers end up finding an angle that's good enough for the ignorant juries who decide the outcomes...
You are totally correct in that. And even 20+ years later, my mom was working in admissions at a major university and was passed up for promotion because she "was probably getting married soon, and would just have kids and leave" (which she did, ie. ME, but I still don't agree with that any more than "preexisting conditions").
But 60 years later, that argument is just not true any more (especially at Stanford, my alma mater), and should be put to bed. The GP comment was what I would call "totally douchey" but the article is also absurd in somehow claiming gender bias started at a single school in a single year. Bullshit sensationalistic headlines... because anyone who actually READ the article would probably find it interesting, and not particularly biased or inflammatory (besides the fact that, yes, Peter Thiel and David Sacks were total a-holes back then).
I was in Stanford class of 1994 - which means, yes, I started in 1990. And, yes, we barely knew what real "email" was, since pretty much no 18 year old in high school had it. I had been on BBSs for 4-5 years before that, but at that point for even the leading edge outside of academia it was private BBS or CompuServe, etc.
By 1994 email was ubiquitous, Usenet was already long in the tooth, the Mosaic browser had been released, and we all had wired Ethernet in our dorm rooms (which still was definitely NOT the norm for college campuses - but it was nice). I wrote the first TCP/IP driver for DOOM so we could play multiplayer in the dorms once they blocked IPX after the initial DOOM IPX driver killed a lot of campus networks ;)
Anyway, the point is that range of 1990-1994 was in fact one of the critical periods for those developing the *commercial* Internet, and Stanford was at ground zero of a lot of it. And another point of the article is (if you read the whole thing) while at Stanford, Peter Thiel and David Sacks were not just the total dicks described in the article - they were WORSE. They basically started the Stanford Review to counter/insult any effort at racial or gender diversity/progress on campus. Even they apologized (according to the article) for the crap they wrote at the time (and Thiel came out of the closet eventually) and at the time it was BAD...
All that being said, the title of this slashdot post is FUCKING STUPID. It's in NO way what the article said, and as you know it's ridiculous to claim tech or ANY OTHER gender gap in business, engineering, or whatever somehow started in *1990* (more like 1790? 1690? 1690BC?) or at a single location...
Patents should be granted to an individual or their assigned company - and then NOT allowed to be transferred. If it's really intellectual property, require that it be used by the intellectual who came up with it, not randomly sold to some giant team of lawyers who try to "monetize" it 10 years after the fact.
That would allow any person - or company that person worked for at the time - to take full advantage of the patent for its original purpose (since almost all patent trolls are not the original inventors) while preventing the soul-sucking leeches on innovation who just want to buy up a bunch of "intellectual property" and speculatively sue anyone who might be doing something remotely similar.
No, I'm just saying that those here who keep saying "any 16 year old with a computer" could have done it are way underestimating it. Since I'm assuming most here are older than 16 and have a computer, are you all saying you could do this trivially given a few hours, a pizza, and a couple Mountain Dews? Bullshit.
Yeah, I had read that, too. By took control I meant literally "took control". They infiltrated it (and there are rumors there was an insider to help with that) but then they activated everything very quickly, without warning, and basically stole data and destroyed the servers before anyone had a chance to do anything.
My point was the overall attack was way WAY beyond some simple trojan worm getting an admin password...
Really? Apparently they quickly took control of almost every one one of Sony's servers and workstations. Literally took entire control, stole all of the useful data, wiped out all of their servers, and then owned all of the workstations so that they were useless but able to broadcast any message they wanted to them.
That's a *bit* more coordinated than "your average trojan worm". Unless you really think based on extremely limited information you know more than all of the security researchers and government investigators looking into it... (hint: sorry, you don't).
Not samba, SMB. Samba is just the name of the open source Windows SMB server implementation. Most likely they were targeting Windows machines (though I admit I haven't seen anything on that either way).
Also, it's highly unlikely (but also possible I guess) they had SMB open to the Internet. But they just needed to compromise one internal machine (almost trivial these days) to attack SMB...
Except for a privileged few, North Koreans are completely blocked off from the outside world
Umm, I think you answered that question already. You don't think North Korea's cyberterrorism military unit just might be part of those "privileged few"?
Why would North Korea reveal its capabilities and tactics in such dramatic fashion to achieve nothing of any value
Maybe because their Supreme Leader is a total loon? This is the same guy who has among hundreds of other insane actions decreed that anyone with his name needed to change it immediately. He lives for drama and vanity and wants his citizens to think of him as a demigod. He's a fucking international drama queen of the highest level...
Science, technology, engineering, and math. You are 25 years old, have a bachelors, and are beyond that. You can probably change fields if you have the aptitude, but you are way beyond "STEM". Those are basic education areas, not careers.
The main problem with desalination plants is that they are a risky investment. If the drought ever does end then you are basically priced out of the market
Not just risky in CA - impossible. Because everyone knows the drought *will* end in less than 20 years, so if there is enough rainwater to cover usage the plants will be shutdown and not profitable. The technological solution will be something that has a relatively low initial capital investment but a possibly high recurring cost.
Whoosh!
Oh bullshit.
The US government obviously secretly spies on citizens just like Russia and most other countries. Yeah, it's annoying but you are naive if you think it's not ubiquitous.
But the US does not imprison journalists and artists for things like speaking badly of the government or singing an "offensive" song in a church.
Google was worried their employees in Russia would be held criminally accountable for draconian spying and censorship laws, and so they decided it wasn't worth risking. They aren't worried their US employers will be held criminally accountable for not turning over data without a warrant or not censoring information, because those are not illegal.
Even more interesting related to this - a patent troll tried to sue ANY APP (yes, not just the hardware, but all apps) that used an auto-rotate feature. Even though their patent was granted 9 years after the Radius Pivot.
Luckily Backspace got pissed off when they were sued over it, and made sure it was invalidated...
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/...
People who actually have had severe reactions to vaccines are being modded down, even when their fear is fact-backed and entirely rational.
You say that, but when I went to look for these fact-based, entirely rational posts this is the first one I found:
The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine nearly killed me when I was a child.
Take a look at vaccine adjuvants. Doctors are not scientists, they are business people, and use a lot of hocus-pocus for financial and other reasons. For a large part doctors and biologists have no clue what they are really doing.
I'd happily mode that down if I had mod points...
*I* wouldn't, but the fact is probably something like 20% of the population would (ok, percentage made up but you *know* it's double digits...)
And you know, it might just be the kind of culling we need. Sort of a reverse-Idiocracy initiative.
1. Who cares, it just took one case to invalidate it for everyone in that municipality.
2. We were talking about electricity, not water. But nonetheless, the water hookup was required because they *did* keep the sewer hookup, and they were part of the same package. The fact is the judge was reasonable. If they wanted to go completely off the grid they should move out to where they can use a septic tank and do whatever they want with their water.
Except those are all old and have been mostly dismissed by judges. Basically, the cities tried and the judges reasonably ruled the statutes were invalid. And if you look for other sources, you quickly realize these are the tiny minority, and most cities don't really care.
Actually already saw that one, and it's not a good example. It's from March, and if YOU had actually searched better (or found a less biased source), you'd have found that almost all (including the electricity requirement) was later dismissed by a judge.
I agree - so I looked it up and apparently they *were* doing this (via investments):
http://www.solarcity.com/newsr...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
But then their new CEO decided to abandon them:
http://www.bizjournals.com/san...
And then they changed their mind *again* and wanted to invest, but the PUC decided against it:
https://gigaom.com/2012/05/10/...
So, basically WTF. It's a complicated situation...
Please provide relevant examples or citations of cities that *require* you to pay for a utility if you don't need it. It would be really interesting to see...
Actually, *many* utilities currently have net metering without significant minimum charges (like $5), usually decided by state utility commissions. Honestly who knows right now how well that covers their overhead. I'm sure utility companies claim is doesn't and customers claim it does.
But it's clear that charge is only going to go up as reliable non-renewable power gets more expensive to produce. Hopefully it's offset by the reduced hourly rates due to increased renewable use...
Bullshit.
"Night time" is not when you sleep, it's when it's dark. Which in the winter is still 14+ hours for the majority of the population and more for many.
Actually, many homeowners putting up solar panels these days are just allowing solar power companies to put them up and then leasing back the power from them. That model is becoming more and more popular. Imagine if a traditional power company bought one of those solar lease companies - they'd now own the solar panels on your roof...