Suicide chips were common for a long time. And although effective are MUCH more trouble than they're worth.
For example, you'll lose ten times more "genuine" evidence (e.g. witnesses willingly handing their phones over for evidence, then the chip dying while in court storage) than anything you'll save on personal privacy.
Not to mention, get one duff battery/capacitor and one day your phone just stops working permanently with no possibility of restoration whatsoever.
This isn't an attack stopped by a suicide chip, either. You buy one device, let it wipe itself a thousand times in testing, get the key out of it eventually, and then you can attack ALL the security chips in ALL the phones way within your "day or two".
Plus, there's almost no way to ensure the timer is running. Isolate the suicide chip's clock (especially if it has to track real time and be running all the time) and you can pretty much stop it dead so it never gets to the point it can do anything about wiping the data.
Look into the old arcade stuff. Lots of old arcade games had suicide chips. Lots of them are still emulated. In many cases, people just ignored it and - like this - determined the keys in other ways (lots of arcade games have the equivalent of rainbow tables for their encryption in common emulators because the key itself was never found), in others they de-capped and imaged the chips while they were still working, which lets you basically pluck the stored data and logic of their semiconductors out of a microscope image of the silicon.
It's a lot of effort to go to, for a lot of risk. But what you describe is basically a proper TPM chip. I don't think anyone has ever successfully broken a TPM chip / keys, have they?
I really couldn't care. I'd eat synthetic meat, and I'd also eat a ton of real meat, it doesn't bother me either way.
So if you're growing a replacement heart valve, it's not sterile? I think you need look up what we mean when we say synthetic meat, in my case I'm talking about lab-grown from pure proteins. Not "oh, we made a bit of pig from the local farm get bigger in a little dish".
As such, lab-grown meat in that way is BY DEFINITION sterile ("free from bacteria or other living microorganisms") when it's grown, and can be kept so until packaged in a sterile container, and eaten while still sterile. Surely one of the advantages of synthetic meat is that you COULD keep it 100% sterile until the point of delivery, hence it would last almost forever.
What kind of immune system does pasteurised milk have?
Though it does indeed present some problems (immuno-laxity is not a small issue, don't get me wrong), it's not the end of the world. Foods are already preserved to combat them being attacked, and a cucumber or potato has little more defence against bacterial infection than anything synthetic.
Basically, if you could grow this stuff in a sterile atmosphere, preserve it and package it, it's not going to be able to harbour anything nasty.
The fact that then you're basically eating "sterile" food is much more of an issue (i.e. you won't grow defences, and may be more likely to be "intolerant" or real food if you live entirely on this stuff), but basic food preservation combats what you're talking about.
The bigger issue really is - what's the cost of keeping it sterile and preserving it that way, after synthetically producing it? I'm guessing it adds yet-more-expense to an already expensive synthesised item.
A generator engine, a nautical engine, any other type of engine is generally an entirely different design, size, criteria, specification from a car engine. Economies of scale are small when every design is different (even year-to-year, model-to-model, let alone industry-industry).
And it will be 10 years before there's any decline whatsoever.
To be honest, by your reasoning, we should have thrown out all HDD's back when SSD's were only 100Mb maximum. There's been MILLIONS of them sold since then, and they're still going strong.
You mean, the 6-8 digit passwords that are basically useless? Exactly my point.
256^6 = 281 trillion combinations (i.e. Full ASCII, including unprintables / untypeables, but only 6 characters long, so basically the best 6 character password ever).
62^9 = 13,000 trillion combinations (i.e. upper and lower case letters, plus digits, but 9 characters long, orders of magnitude better, and not touching anything approaching a symbol).
Guess which one is easier to type, easier to remember, more acceptable in a password field, isn't unicode or local-codepage dependent?
8 is about the crossover point, below that, you can win with some examples. Beyond that, exponent wins hands down on virtually everything you ever try.
The exponent of the equation (alphabet_size)^(length of password) matters MUCH more than the mantissa.
Put another character on the end of an alphanumeric password and you're doing more than selecting even the weirdest of keyboard-typeable symbols.
And the change-your-password-every-X-days was always junk and just provide a route for social engineering of the password reset process on a pre-determined schedule. If your password hasn't been compromised in a reasonable time, it's not going to be compromised. If your system LETS you try trillions of passwords, it's game over whether you change every week or not.
Generators still exist. Petrol engines are in everyday tools. Ships and boats still run on diesel or petrol, and it might not be sensible to have a water-soaked battery. Hospitals and datacentres have backup generators
There is more of a market for engines than just cars. The tech is transferable. And while diesel is polluting worse than we thought, a new type of petrol engine isn't exactly a dead loss.
And you still have 10 years before anyone ditches the cars that are in the vast, vast, vast majority now. Then another 10 years after that at least. At that point, electric cars need to have moved on 20 years in tech (including range) to compete. If they don't, there's another 20 years of business up for grabs.
If anything I think that all the emissions controls have make car manufacturer eke more out of less. My car is a 1.5L and it performs admirably.
Petrol engines aren't going anywhere anytime soon. At best, we'll have hybrids for a long time yet. Because just on sheer range, electrics are losing badly. When a significant percentage of people have them and start plugging them in at peak periods forcing infrastructure change (at the moment charging is all very "just plug it in" at the moment, and that's not necessarily sustainable), you're going to hit their weaknesses more too.
I give petrol engines 20 years of commercial viability just in vehicles at least. That's more than enough of a future to get 4-5 models of car out, make money, and plough it into research while licensing out the patents on stuff like this.
If you don't own the patent, you have no standing to sue. So the shell company must at least own the patent in question.
If you own the patent and a court orders you to pay, the assets of that company are sold for the benefit of paying that court fine.
If someone tries to MOVE assets from a shell company to avoid paying a court order, holy cow are they in trouble.
I don't believe it's happening the way you state. And even if it is - same problem. Pay $600m to a shell company as profit/encouragement to sue again, or pay $600m to burn shell company to the ground and go after its parents if they try anything funny. Same cost, but one of them sends a clear message while also saying "Oh, by the way, you need a new patent now, because that one won't wash".
In terms of reputational damage, the same - settling is basically "admission of guilt", if you like. Even if legally it's not the same, that's basically what it's perceived as, by shareholders and customers. Not settling, burning them to the ground, for the same cost, is saying "Go on, try it". Has anyone tried the same to even IBM since? $600m is an AWFUL lot of legal work and chasing. You could bring almost anyone down for that if they're doing anything even slightly dodgy.
Also, if shell company has no assets, hence no value, except the IP value of its patent... bang... you have an exact upper limit on how much that patent is actually worth, to its own parent company. You've got them coming and going.
Any law firm, given $600m, would screw such organisations to the wall in one way or another. That's their job. But settling for $600m is just saying "Whoops, yeah, we agree your patent is probably valid, here have the cash we probably should have paid you." - i.e. all your own fault. So, no, you don't get your money back. Ever.
But see how much the shell company can afford to match in lawyers without having any assets or leaving a paper trail to funding by its parent. If they can't lawyer up as they have no assets or funds, you win. If they can lawyer up, you win the assets/funds used. If said assets/funds mysteriously disappear after you win, or only appear from the parent company when it looks like they are winning, well, $600m would get an awful lot of evidence of such foul play rather quickly.
At worst, you lose as bad as settling but with the chance for appeal when the patent is invalid.
At best, you take them out of the market entirely, send a strong warning not to mess with you, and maybe take down the real source / parent company too if they're playing shenanigans.
So? You've lost money either way. At least this way you can sue them to oblivion, or even buy up their other patents in the fire sale. And court judgements are high on the list of administration priorities, so they aren't going to get away with porting all the money and assets somewhere else to hide them from you.
Did IBM settle? No. Did Autozone settle? No. What became of SCO? Nothing. They may not have got all their money back, but they certainly cannot be sued over those things ever again.
So long as they only get paid when idiots break a clearly-stated, obviously-well-understood, well-known law. To be honest, at that point, all you've done is shove money from court fines to the police forces direct.
It's like charging people £10 for littering. They can't charge you £10 if you weren't littering. You can take it to court if you had exceptional circumstances or don't have the money. But if you're littering, and get fined, that money should quite rightly go towards further anti-littering and related measures. So long as the policeman isn't just pocketing it and it's all done by the book, I have zero problem with this.
No different to speeding fines being used to implement more cameras. You're basically PAYING for the exact thing that's charging you money. If they can profit from it, then it's a big problem that needs to be solved from more investment.
To be honest, in the same way that cold medication pays for anti-cancer drugs, I'm quite happy for the police to fund their riot squads by fining idiots who can't read a two-digit number and stick to it despite being licensed, tested and legally-required to do exactly that.
Lesson: Don't enter into settlements to shut up people who have absolutely no claim as to what they are holding over you.
Take them to court, drag it out, invalidate their patents and take their business from underneath them, instead of just capitulating and paying them money to avoid the hassle.
If you have $600m dollars to give away, you can fight in court for an AWFULLY long time, appeal multiple times and then reclaim all your costs from the company when they are proven wrong.
These people operate on the basis of extortion - I won't take you to court and risk winning my case against you, if you just give me lots of money now.
If their claims are baseless, ignore them. If their claims have standing, pay them a FRAND patent licence for failing to do your homework.
Don't "believe they have no case" but then settle to avoid the hassle. It allows them to continue doing that to yourself and others, and they'll come back for more.
What was stupid was entering into a $600m settlement, part of which - your lawyers would have instructed you - means that if it were invalidated, you'd get nothing.
Hell, for a couple of million you could do a full patent review and argue the case. If you lose, you probably still have to pay the $600m (to be honest, I can't imagine a reasonably licensed patent costing that much for such a company). But then if the patent is invalidated you automatically "win" on appeal and get your money and court-costs back.
Settling is really a stupid thing to do if you're innocent. To be honest, it's also a stupid thing to do if you're guilty (just pay the patent licence in the first place if you thought it had merit!).
It's the corporate equivalent of accepting a police caution when you're innocent. Easy to do, all the hassle goes away, you don't spend a night in the cell or have to hire a lawyer. But it will forever stain your record as, basically, an admission of guilt of that instance.
I live in London, this isn't new. In fact there's one down the road to me that's been there for 10+ years.
In the middle of a series of REAL bumps, there's a "fake" bump with the same painted lines, even ones that "narrow" for the bump, painted "up arrow" on the road itself, etc. But it's as flat as a pancake.
I tell you now - it must be extraordinarily cheaper. I've seen prices of speed bumps, they are NOT cheap. However, it's singularly ineffective. Basically if you've NEVER driven that road before, you slow for it. But every one else remembers it's there (it's actually odd enough to stick in your mind whether you want it to or not) and just goes over it.
If anything, it probably causes more problems.
Bear in mind, I'm all for traffic-calming measures, speed limit enforcement, etc. Yes, you can all hate me. But even I just look at it and go "Well, that's useless". It's not even worth the time to paint the lines, to be honest.
But then bumps are a pain in the arse and slow nobody, they just find alternative routes (i.e. the quiet backstreets you DON'T want them going down, near schools etc.) or bounce over them. Especially the stupid "narrow enough for you to drive straight over" ones that are supposed to slow normal traffic but allow emergency vehicles through. Those are a complete waste of time too.
Stop fucking about, and just put an average speed camera on every corner, that alerts nearby police cars if people go through it without a license plate. It solves SO MANY problems in one fell swoop - uninsured, untested cars are immediately flagged, you can't cheat it, you can't even zip down side-streets because the next average camera will know you went over 30mph by the shortest route to do so, etc. Evidence of you breaking the law (bumps do nothing for this). Not damaging to vehicles. Doesn't need tearing up the road for.
The only thing that actually SLOWS drivers is average cameras, proven by the M25's new cameras. And if you zoom through them, without a plate, there'll often be a cop at the next junction waiting for you and a photo of your car/face waiting for the court.
Stop faffing about with bumps, chicanes, signs, fake speed camera boxes, etc. and just nick people if they go over 30 in a way they can't just cheat by knowing where the camera is.
Not to mention - the designers WERE NOT DESIGNING IT TO DO THIS. It was supposed to visit the outer planets. Everything since is a bonus.
But, fuck, if you can find a power source that powers a craft like this for 40 years and that you can launch into space, please go tell NASA. I'm sure they'd love it.
Solar is useless when the sun is basically a dot. If you don't understand the words "inverse square law", then maybe you shouldn't be instructing others that do on how to power their spacecraft.
It's disingenuous to suggest that ONLY those 9 people can operate it. They may be most familiar (but, hey, can you remember the details of what you were doing 40 years ago?), but they're certainly not the only people precisely BECAUSE such documentation exists.
Hey, don't forget, we are still communicating with Voyager.
The problem is not that the tech was inherently more reliable back then, but it has a 40 year head-start. Sending out a probe today would give you pretty much the same kind of lag in technology by the time it gets to where these are, and nobody will really care much about what it's saying.
The problem we have is not that we can't go anywhere, or send another probe, or don't have the technology or know-how. It's that nobody wants to pay for it any more. You can't do much about that problem without finding someone willing to pay.
That's because Volvo sold 2.8m units of its predecessor model.
It's a little different to be sinking a few billion into tooling and initial production, with little history, few sales (only tens of thousands of Tesla actually SOLD already), and lots of other things on the go (the summary even mentions batteries, trucks, etc.).
Again, let's throw money at the problem. We don't have money left? Great, let's throw debts at the problem. To end up with a car that has few paying customers (reservations don't mean much unless there's a significant amount of money put down to secure them), and can be out-spent and shoved out of the market in a matter of months by any major car manufacturer even if it takes off.
They're using Musk as a canary. When his company gets something that actually sells, they'll make better versions, sell ten times as many and just price him completely out of the market. He's already running on zero-profit, it'll kill Tesla overnight if they do it right. Especially if they leverage a patent or two.
I'll give you the source code to systemd. You tell me what it's doing.
The "open" system is an absolute myth anyway. You have no idea what your computer is actually doing, no matter what it is or where it was bought from. Even the "open" / "coreboot" laptops do things like apply closed-source Intel microcode updates to the processors on boot or they wouldn't work properly at all,
- Block Windows Update - Provide a WSUS server and insist they use it (e.g. by blocking Windows Update), or even insist they use a proxy server of your choice (Windows Update will respect the one specified in Internet Settings, for instance). - Don't block Windows Update, and charge for your services appropriately.
To be honest, things like Apple Caching would be much more of a concern on my networks as I have no idea how they operate, how much they are transmitting, or what they are doing, without actually monitoring everything they do. At least with Windows Updates, you can just block a handful of URL's.
Newer Windows has the same kind of local sharing mechanisms in the pipeline, but that's not really going to help you either. You'd still need to set up controls for them, such as having a domain and an instruction of what to cache/update.
Personally, I'd just block Windows update and provide a WSUS server they could use.
There's no way that a Facebook app contains 200+Mbytes of code that are required to render a Facebook interface. It makes me wonder what ELSE it's doing.
Also, Facebook doesn't even contain messenger functionality, that's a separate app. A copy of Chromium, branded with the Facebook logo, with the titlebar removed, and locked to only accessing Facebook URL's, would be smaller and more featureful.
Facebook is the one app that I have had to advice my girlfriend to remove. Before we got new smartphones, the Facebook app filled her old one up with app and cached posts in a matter of days. Rather than transport that junk over to a newer phone when we got one, I told her to just use Chrome. At least then she can do all the same things, and do messenger too (alright, you have to click a bit, but it's there).
And what does the app add? Nothing. It's basically a copy of the website. Same for LinkedIn, etc.
Apps are the VRML fly-through, the MARQUEE tags, the pointless animated GIF, and the Flash-based swishy intro, of the modern age. "We have a website, we should have an app!"
But 200Mb just reeks of someone saying "Who cares?" and just lobbing everything into it rather than trying to actually make an app people want to use. My app for Google Drive is smaller than that and I yet it does a thousand times more.
Apple sells because it's a designer brand, no more, no less.
As someone who manages nearly 1000 iPad/iPhone devices, as well as a "normal" network of PC's and phones, let me tell you that Apple does almost nothing "well".
iCloud fell over in Februrary. You couldn't use any of the iPads, even if they weren't on iCloud, because the message had no "No to All" kind of button, and popped up every few seconds making them unusable for several days.
Just about every feature, gizmo or gadget is flawed on them. From the date-of-birth spinner on the initial account setup (Good luck! I usually end up having to do it for people), to the double/triple-negatives in the setup process (including moving the "Yes / Next / OK" line around at random and renaming it at each stage to trick people into enabling Siri, etc. to Siri itself, to the app store to the MDM solutions to the VPP. It's a mess from top to bottom.
I honestly pity someone non-technical who's told that Apple is so easy, intuitive, well-designed (design means USAGE as well as just PRETTINESS) and then picks one up in a shop and tries to set it up on their own.
From the packaging on the box (no finger-holes on iPads/iPhone boxes = vacuum = only way to open it is to tip upside-down = first thing that lands is a completely unprotected, unpackaged and laying-on-the-top iPad... it's only sheer chance on the first one and the "Oh, fuck" moment that took me to explicitly saving the rest of the several hundred I've opened from a stupid fate), to the design of the machines (iMacs with a power button that you can't feel, tucked around the back, out-of-reach, and easily-overlooked, plus that stupid "custom" power cable - I mean, sure that's the FIRST place I look for a power button, and of course I won't be groping blindly behind it trying to feel where the fucking thing is), to the software (where for years, "Hey Siri, call mom" automatically dialled her, put her on speakerphone and transmitted your voice to her - whoever said it in the work office, and where even just Hey Siri followed by one of DOZENS of commands would allow complete lock-screen bypasses).
They sell because they "are Apple". That's it. People have said you must have one, so you go out and buy one.
And at least one has blown up just shortly before then, resulting in total loss, pad cleanup, movement to a new spaceport, and resulting insurance increases in the interim.
It was founded 15 years ago, it's a bit premature to say "Yeah, but in the last six months things have been great" when only 6 months ago, it was still making basically zero profit.
And they now owe investors a ton of money/results. Though that may have worked for places like Amazon (whose initial investors were incredibly irate about such things), and though it might even make Musk richer (same as Jeff Bezos), it doesn't mean that it will translate into anything people can continue to use in the future when that investment doesn't pay off or provides only tiny margins at HUGE risk.
This is one of those times where you profit by knowing when to leave someone holding the hot potato.
Slashdot Mirror
Suicide chips were common for a long time. And although effective are MUCH more trouble than they're worth.
For example, you'll lose ten times more "genuine" evidence (e.g. witnesses willingly handing their phones over for evidence, then the chip dying while in court storage) than anything you'll save on personal privacy.
Not to mention, get one duff battery/capacitor and one day your phone just stops working permanently with no possibility of restoration whatsoever.
This isn't an attack stopped by a suicide chip, either. You buy one device, let it wipe itself a thousand times in testing, get the key out of it eventually, and then you can attack ALL the security chips in ALL the phones way within your "day or two".
Plus, there's almost no way to ensure the timer is running. Isolate the suicide chip's clock (especially if it has to track real time and be running all the time) and you can pretty much stop it dead so it never gets to the point it can do anything about wiping the data.
Look into the old arcade stuff. Lots of old arcade games had suicide chips. Lots of them are still emulated. In many cases, people just ignored it and - like this - determined the keys in other ways (lots of arcade games have the equivalent of rainbow tables for their encryption in common emulators because the key itself was never found), in others they de-capped and imaged the chips while they were still working, which lets you basically pluck the stored data and logic of their semiconductors out of a microscope image of the silicon.
It's a lot of effort to go to, for a lot of risk. But what you describe is basically a proper TPM chip. I don't think anyone has ever successfully broken a TPM chip / keys, have they?
Otherwise known as "Let's copy WhatsApp Web".
Is this news? He's "pledged" to give away 50% of his wealth (any timescale, I'm not sure?), this is about 5%.
Who'd have thought it would be so hard to give away money and just live on the billions you have left? Just ask Monty Brewster, I suppose.
But then, supposedly he gets a tax break, so is that defined as something that Monty's lawyers would class as an asset or profit?
I really couldn't care. I'd eat synthetic meat, and I'd also eat a ton of real meat, it doesn't bother me either way.
So if you're growing a replacement heart valve, it's not sterile? I think you need look up what we mean when we say synthetic meat, in my case I'm talking about lab-grown from pure proteins. Not "oh, we made a bit of pig from the local farm get bigger in a little dish".
As such, lab-grown meat in that way is BY DEFINITION sterile ("free from bacteria or other living microorganisms") when it's grown, and can be kept so until packaged in a sterile container, and eaten while still sterile. Surely one of the advantages of synthetic meat is that you COULD keep it 100% sterile until the point of delivery, hence it would last almost forever.
What kind of immune system does pasteurised milk have?
Though it does indeed present some problems (immuno-laxity is not a small issue, don't get me wrong), it's not the end of the world. Foods are already preserved to combat them being attacked, and a cucumber or potato has little more defence against bacterial infection than anything synthetic.
Basically, if you could grow this stuff in a sterile atmosphere, preserve it and package it, it's not going to be able to harbour anything nasty.
The fact that then you're basically eating "sterile" food is much more of an issue (i.e. you won't grow defences, and may be more likely to be "intolerant" or real food if you live entirely on this stuff), but basic food preservation combats what you're talking about.
The bigger issue really is - what's the cost of keeping it sterile and preserving it that way, after synthetically producing it? I'm guessing it adds yet-more-expense to an already expensive synthesised item.
A generator engine, a nautical engine, any other type of engine is generally an entirely different design, size, criteria, specification from a car engine. Economies of scale are small when every design is different (even year-to-year, model-to-model, let alone industry-industry).
And it will be 10 years before there's any decline whatsoever.
To be honest, by your reasoning, we should have thrown out all HDD's back when SSD's were only 100Mb maximum. There's been MILLIONS of them sold since then, and they're still going strong.
You mean, the 6-8 digit passwords that are basically useless? Exactly my point.
256^6 = 281 trillion combinations (i.e. Full ASCII, including unprintables / untypeables, but only 6 characters long, so basically the best 6 character password ever).
62^9 = 13,000 trillion combinations (i.e. upper and lower case letters, plus digits, but 9 characters long, orders of magnitude better, and not touching anything approaching a symbol).
Guess which one is easier to type, easier to remember, more acceptable in a password field, isn't unicode or local-codepage dependent?
8 is about the crossover point, below that, you can win with some examples. Beyond that, exponent wins hands down on virtually everything you ever try.
PASSWORD = 26^8 = 208bn (upper-case alpha only)
P4SSWORD = 36^8 = 2.8tn (upper case alpha + digits)
APASSWORD = 26^9 = 5.4tn (upper-case alpha only)
STOP PASSWORD SHARING.
If you need your assistant to see your email, adjust the permissions so he can.
And remove them when you're done. Or they are automatically removed when he's sacked and the account is disabled.
Password sharing is the dumbest way to give someone access. And a disciplinary offence in most places because it's counter to the data protection act.
LONG PASSWORDS.
The exponent of the equation (alphabet_size)^(length of password) matters MUCH more than the mantissa.
Put another character on the end of an alphanumeric password and you're doing more than selecting even the weirdest of keyboard-typeable symbols.
And the change-your-password-every-X-days was always junk and just provide a route for social engineering of the password reset process on a pre-determined schedule. If your password hasn't been compromised in a reasonable time, it's not going to be compromised. If your system LETS you try trillions of passwords, it's game over whether you change every week or not.
Generators still exist.
Petrol engines are in everyday tools.
Ships and boats still run on diesel or petrol, and it might not be sensible to have a water-soaked battery.
Hospitals and datacentres have backup generators
There is more of a market for engines than just cars. The tech is transferable. And while diesel is polluting worse than we thought, a new type of petrol engine isn't exactly a dead loss.
And you still have 10 years before anyone ditches the cars that are in the vast, vast, vast majority now. Then another 10 years after that at least. At that point, electric cars need to have moved on 20 years in tech (including range) to compete. If they don't, there's another 20 years of business up for grabs.
If anything I think that all the emissions controls have make car manufacturer eke more out of less. My car is a 1.5L and it performs admirably.
Petrol engines aren't going anywhere anytime soon. At best, we'll have hybrids for a long time yet. Because just on sheer range, electrics are losing badly. When a significant percentage of people have them and start plugging them in at peak periods forcing infrastructure change (at the moment charging is all very "just plug it in" at the moment, and that's not necessarily sustainable), you're going to hit their weaknesses more too.
I give petrol engines 20 years of commercial viability just in vehicles at least. That's more than enough of a future to get 4-5 models of car out, make money, and plough it into research while licensing out the patents on stuff like this.
If you don't own the patent, you have no standing to sue. So the shell company must at least own the patent in question.
If you own the patent and a court orders you to pay, the assets of that company are sold for the benefit of paying that court fine.
If someone tries to MOVE assets from a shell company to avoid paying a court order, holy cow are they in trouble.
I don't believe it's happening the way you state. And even if it is - same problem. Pay $600m to a shell company as profit/encouragement to sue again, or pay $600m to burn shell company to the ground and go after its parents if they try anything funny. Same cost, but one of them sends a clear message while also saying "Oh, by the way, you need a new patent now, because that one won't wash".
In terms of reputational damage, the same - settling is basically "admission of guilt", if you like. Even if legally it's not the same, that's basically what it's perceived as, by shareholders and customers. Not settling, burning them to the ground, for the same cost, is saying "Go on, try it". Has anyone tried the same to even IBM since? $600m is an AWFUL lot of legal work and chasing. You could bring almost anyone down for that if they're doing anything even slightly dodgy.
Also, if shell company has no assets, hence no value, except the IP value of its patent... bang... you have an exact upper limit on how much that patent is actually worth, to its own parent company. You've got them coming and going.
Any law firm, given $600m, would screw such organisations to the wall in one way or another. That's their job. But settling for $600m is just saying "Whoops, yeah, we agree your patent is probably valid, here have the cash we probably should have paid you." - i.e. all your own fault. So, no, you don't get your money back. Ever.
But see how much the shell company can afford to match in lawyers without having any assets or leaving a paper trail to funding by its parent. If they can't lawyer up as they have no assets or funds, you win. If they can lawyer up, you win the assets/funds used. If said assets/funds mysteriously disappear after you win, or only appear from the parent company when it looks like they are winning, well, $600m would get an awful lot of evidence of such foul play rather quickly.
At worst, you lose as bad as settling but with the chance for appeal when the patent is invalid.
At best, you take them out of the market entirely, send a strong warning not to mess with you, and maybe take down the real source / parent company too if they're playing shenanigans.
So? You've lost money either way. At least this way you can sue them to oblivion, or even buy up their other patents in the fire sale. And court judgements are high on the list of administration priorities, so they aren't going to get away with porting all the money and assets somewhere else to hide them from you.
Did IBM settle? No.
Did Autozone settle? No.
What became of SCO? Nothing.
They may not have got all their money back, but they certainly cannot be sued over those things ever again.
I'm cool with that.
So long as they only get paid when idiots break a clearly-stated, obviously-well-understood, well-known law. To be honest, at that point, all you've done is shove money from court fines to the police forces direct.
It's like charging people £10 for littering. They can't charge you £10 if you weren't littering. You can take it to court if you had exceptional circumstances or don't have the money. But if you're littering, and get fined, that money should quite rightly go towards further anti-littering and related measures. So long as the policeman isn't just pocketing it and it's all done by the book, I have zero problem with this.
No different to speeding fines being used to implement more cameras. You're basically PAYING for the exact thing that's charging you money. If they can profit from it, then it's a big problem that needs to be solved from more investment.
To be honest, in the same way that cold medication pays for anti-cancer drugs, I'm quite happy for the police to fund their riot squads by fining idiots who can't read a two-digit number and stick to it despite being licensed, tested and legally-required to do exactly that.
Lesson: Don't enter into settlements to shut up people who have absolutely no claim as to what they are holding over you.
Take them to court, drag it out, invalidate their patents and take their business from underneath them, instead of just capitulating and paying them money to avoid the hassle.
If you have $600m dollars to give away, you can fight in court for an AWFULLY long time, appeal multiple times and then reclaim all your costs from the company when they are proven wrong.
These people operate on the basis of extortion - I won't take you to court and risk winning my case against you, if you just give me lots of money now.
If their claims are baseless, ignore them. If their claims have standing, pay them a FRAND patent licence for failing to do your homework.
Don't "believe they have no case" but then settle to avoid the hassle. It allows them to continue doing that to yourself and others, and they'll come back for more.
What was stupid was entering into a $600m settlement, part of which - your lawyers would have instructed you - means that if it were invalidated, you'd get nothing.
Hell, for a couple of million you could do a full patent review and argue the case. If you lose, you probably still have to pay the $600m (to be honest, I can't imagine a reasonably licensed patent costing that much for such a company). But then if the patent is invalidated you automatically "win" on appeal and get your money and court-costs back.
Settling is really a stupid thing to do if you're innocent. To be honest, it's also a stupid thing to do if you're guilty (just pay the patent licence in the first place if you thought it had merit!).
It's the corporate equivalent of accepting a police caution when you're innocent. Easy to do, all the hassle goes away, you don't spend a night in the cell or have to hire a lawyer. But it will forever stain your record as, basically, an admission of guilt of that instance.
I live in London, this isn't new. In fact there's one down the road to me that's been there for 10+ years.
In the middle of a series of REAL bumps, there's a "fake" bump with the same painted lines, even ones that "narrow" for the bump, painted "up arrow" on the road itself, etc. But it's as flat as a pancake.
I tell you now - it must be extraordinarily cheaper. I've seen prices of speed bumps, they are NOT cheap. However, it's singularly ineffective. Basically if you've NEVER driven that road before, you slow for it. But every one else remembers it's there (it's actually odd enough to stick in your mind whether you want it to or not) and just goes over it.
If anything, it probably causes more problems.
Bear in mind, I'm all for traffic-calming measures, speed limit enforcement, etc. Yes, you can all hate me. But even I just look at it and go "Well, that's useless". It's not even worth the time to paint the lines, to be honest.
But then bumps are a pain in the arse and slow nobody, they just find alternative routes (i.e. the quiet backstreets you DON'T want them going down, near schools etc.) or bounce over them. Especially the stupid "narrow enough for you to drive straight over" ones that are supposed to slow normal traffic but allow emergency vehicles through. Those are a complete waste of time too.
Stop fucking about, and just put an average speed camera on every corner, that alerts nearby police cars if people go through it without a license plate. It solves SO MANY problems in one fell swoop - uninsured, untested cars are immediately flagged, you can't cheat it, you can't even zip down side-streets because the next average camera will know you went over 30mph by the shortest route to do so, etc. Evidence of you breaking the law (bumps do nothing for this). Not damaging to vehicles. Doesn't need tearing up the road for.
The only thing that actually SLOWS drivers is average cameras, proven by the M25's new cameras. And if you zoom through them, without a plate, there'll often be a cop at the next junction waiting for you and a photo of your car/face waiting for the court.
Stop faffing about with bumps, chicanes, signs, fake speed camera boxes, etc. and just nick people if they go over 30 in a way they can't just cheat by knowing where the camera is.
Not to mention - the designers WERE NOT DESIGNING IT TO DO THIS. It was supposed to visit the outer planets. Everything since is a bonus.
But, fuck, if you can find a power source that powers a craft like this for 40 years and that you can launch into space, please go tell NASA. I'm sure they'd love it.
Solar is useless when the sun is basically a dot. If you don't understand the words "inverse square law", then maybe you shouldn't be instructing others that do on how to power their spacecraft.
It's disingenuous to suggest that ONLY those 9 people can operate it. They may be most familiar (but, hey, can you remember the details of what you were doing 40 years ago?), but they're certainly not the only people precisely BECAUSE such documentation exists.
Hey, don't forget, we are still communicating with Voyager.
The problem is not that the tech was inherently more reliable back then, but it has a 40 year head-start. Sending out a probe today would give you pretty much the same kind of lag in technology by the time it gets to where these are, and nobody will really care much about what it's saying.
The problem we have is not that we can't go anywhere, or send another probe, or don't have the technology or know-how. It's that nobody wants to pay for it any more. You can't do much about that problem without finding someone willing to pay.
That's because Volvo sold 2.8m units of its predecessor model.
It's a little different to be sinking a few billion into tooling and initial production, with little history, few sales (only tens of thousands of Tesla actually SOLD already), and lots of other things on the go (the summary even mentions batteries, trucks, etc.).
Again, let's throw money at the problem. We don't have money left? Great, let's throw debts at the problem. To end up with a car that has few paying customers (reservations don't mean much unless there's a significant amount of money put down to secure them), and can be out-spent and shoved out of the market in a matter of months by any major car manufacturer even if it takes off.
They're using Musk as a canary. When his company gets something that actually sells, they'll make better versions, sell ten times as many and just price him completely out of the market. He's already running on zero-profit, it'll kill Tesla overnight if they do it right. Especially if they leverage a patent or two.
I'll give you the source code to systemd. You tell me what it's doing.
The "open" system is an absolute myth anyway. You have no idea what your computer is actually doing, no matter what it is or where it was bought from. Even the "open" / "coreboot" laptops do things like apply closed-source Intel microcode updates to the processors on boot or they wouldn't work properly at all,
You have a choice:
- Block Windows Update
- Provide a WSUS server and insist they use it (e.g. by blocking Windows Update), or even insist they use a proxy server of your choice (Windows Update will respect the one specified in Internet Settings, for instance).
- Don't block Windows Update, and charge for your services appropriately.
To be honest, things like Apple Caching would be much more of a concern on my networks as I have no idea how they operate, how much they are transmitting, or what they are doing, without actually monitoring everything they do. At least with Windows Updates, you can just block a handful of URL's.
Newer Windows has the same kind of local sharing mechanisms in the pipeline, but that's not really going to help you either. You'd still need to set up controls for them, such as having a domain and an instruction of what to cache/update.
Personally, I'd just block Windows update and provide a WSUS server they could use.
There is zero need for that size.
There's no way that a Facebook app contains 200+Mbytes of code that are required to render a Facebook interface. It makes me wonder what ELSE it's doing.
Also, Facebook doesn't even contain messenger functionality, that's a separate app. A copy of Chromium, branded with the Facebook logo, with the titlebar removed, and locked to only accessing Facebook URL's, would be smaller and more featureful.
Facebook is the one app that I have had to advice my girlfriend to remove. Before we got new smartphones, the Facebook app filled her old one up with app and cached posts in a matter of days. Rather than transport that junk over to a newer phone when we got one, I told her to just use Chrome. At least then she can do all the same things, and do messenger too (alright, you have to click a bit, but it's there).
And what does the app add? Nothing. It's basically a copy of the website. Same for LinkedIn, etc.
Apps are the VRML fly-through, the MARQUEE tags, the pointless animated GIF, and the Flash-based swishy intro, of the modern age. "We have a website, we should have an app!"
But 200Mb just reeks of someone saying "Who cares?" and just lobbing everything into it rather than trying to actually make an app people want to use. My app for Google Drive is smaller than that and I yet it does a thousand times more.
Ahhahahahahhahaha.
Sure. You keep believing that.
Apple sells because it's a designer brand, no more, no less.
As someone who manages nearly 1000 iPad/iPhone devices, as well as a "normal" network of PC's and phones, let me tell you that Apple does almost nothing "well".
iCloud fell over in Februrary. You couldn't use any of the iPads, even if they weren't on iCloud, because the message had no "No to All" kind of button, and popped up every few seconds making them unusable for several days.
Just about every feature, gizmo or gadget is flawed on them. From the date-of-birth spinner on the initial account setup (Good luck! I usually end up having to do it for people), to the double/triple-negatives in the setup process (including moving the "Yes / Next / OK" line around at random and renaming it at each stage to trick people into enabling Siri, etc. to Siri itself, to the app store to the MDM solutions to the VPP. It's a mess from top to bottom.
I honestly pity someone non-technical who's told that Apple is so easy, intuitive, well-designed (design means USAGE as well as just PRETTINESS) and then picks one up in a shop and tries to set it up on their own.
From the packaging on the box (no finger-holes on iPads/iPhone boxes = vacuum = only way to open it is to tip upside-down = first thing that lands is a completely unprotected, unpackaged and laying-on-the-top iPad... it's only sheer chance on the first one and the "Oh, fuck" moment that took me to explicitly saving the rest of the several hundred I've opened from a stupid fate), to the design of the machines (iMacs with a power button that you can't feel, tucked around the back, out-of-reach, and easily-overlooked, plus that stupid "custom" power cable - I mean, sure that's the FIRST place I look for a power button, and of course I won't be groping blindly behind it trying to feel where the fucking thing is), to the software (where for years, "Hey Siri, call mom" automatically dialled her, put her on speakerphone and transmitted your voice to her - whoever said it in the work office, and where even just Hey Siri followed by one of DOZENS of commands would allow complete lock-screen bypasses).
They sell because they "are Apple". That's it. People have said you must have one, so you go out and buy one.
And at least one has blown up just shortly before then, resulting in total loss, pad cleanup, movement to a new spaceport, and resulting insurance increases in the interim.
It was founded 15 years ago, it's a bit premature to say "Yeah, but in the last six months things have been great" when only 6 months ago, it was still making basically zero profit.
Any idiot with money to burn can throw billions at something.
Problem is that they aren't really profitable:
https://www.fool.com/investing...
And they now owe investors a ton of money/results. Though that may have worked for places like Amazon (whose initial investors were incredibly irate about such things), and though it might even make Musk richer (same as Jeff Bezos), it doesn't mean that it will translate into anything people can continue to use in the future when that investment doesn't pay off or provides only tiny margins at HUGE risk.
This is one of those times where you profit by knowing when to leave someone holding the hot potato.
Not at all true, in the slightest.
In fact, the wishlisted games I had that went on sale barely hit 20% for the most part.