It is about more than just laws, principles and precedent. It really is about operational security, as well as the kind of oversight (or complete lack thereof) we have on the application of cyber-surveillance by government institutions. As Apple have said:
"The notion that this is something only about opening one lock or that there is some degree of locks that can't be opened with the tool that they're asking us to create, is a misnomer," Sewell added.
Apple evidently worries that the FBI will keep whatever tool Apple creates, and use it to break into other iPhones in other cases. Those cases are most likely not always legit, and there is a further risk of the tool getting into the hands of others. At best that will be allied secret services, but who knows. The point is: giving this tool to the FBI ultimately compromises the security of every single iPhone out there, or so Apple claim. It is the same as using encryption with the governent having a back-door key, and we should not want that, for the same reasons.
Stole what idea? The idea of an electronic facebook? When Facebook started there were already similar services out there. He implemented a competing service that people liked better for whatever reason, and was able to raise capital and expand FB into a global service, which is not a mean feat, despite the fact that indeed copious amounts of luck were involved. Most successful startups involve luck, but you have to position yourself well in order to take advantage of a lucky strike when it comes your way. You and I would not have done better in his position, I bet.
Don't get me wrong: I hate FB as much as the next guy here, and Zuckerberg does seem like a giant douche. I'm not sure what the deal is with that guy he allegedly screwed out of a partnership. He is known for similar stunts, like when he fired a whole bunch of people who had been there from the start, just before their stock options were to vest. But other than that I have no issues with the guy. What pisses me off is that FB once again proves that our entire economy evidently evolves around eyeballs and advertising.
That sounds about right... I remember a porn mag circulating amongst the boys back in elementary school. We were suitably impressed but only because it was "forbidden stuff"; it was way before anyone got sexually active and the actual content was, well, boring as hell. And not one little bit scary
Of course it helps if you get a bit of sex ed beforehand. And I don't mean the careful and considerate way modern educators go about it. Our sex ed consisted of one lesson slipped into biology class, with a drawing of a naked adult man and woman on the blackboard and the teacher talking a little about reproduction. Let the kids ask their inevitable questions, and I assure you they will quickly get bored and move on. That and the porn mag was enough to convince us kids that sex and porn are firmly in the "boring adult stuff" category.
Or the shareholders will agree with the board that taking harassment seriously and demonstrating effectiveness in culling hate speech actually enhances the credibility of the service. At least that is how I would pitch it to them. And sadly, they and the general public might well agree that it's good to turn Twitter into a safe zone. Most people don't really want free speech, they just want to be able to say what they want and not have to listen to "undesirable" opinions.
Business ethics and net neutrality go hand in hand. In a world where there is plenty of competition in access and content, net neutrality is rarely an issue. But in reality where there are usually only a few ISPs to choose from and some very powerful content providers, there will be a tremendous pressure on ISPs to take money from content providers to limit access to competitors. And it is far worse when the content provider and ISP are one and the same. Which will be the case in Facebook's plan for India.
This is not the same as your dial up services that limit access. As long as you are free to dial into another service. But imagine your phone company limiting which ISP you're allowed to dial into.
Yes there are banks out there that expect that. And by the same token, there are apparently a few banks that now have negative mortgage interst rates as well. In Denmark there are some people who receive money from the bank every month as interest on their mortgage.
That is what I like about the old systems: it certainly was feasible to develop an awesome game all by yourself. Even doing the artwork was doable if you're not an artist; making great pixel art takes artistic skill but pixels are forgiving enough to let anyone make something passable. I wrote a few C64 games for fun back in the days, and one of them even ended up being published (a horse riding game I wrote for our riding academy's 150th anniversary). It wasn't very good but in terms of complexity and performance it was comparable to some of the big titles out there. Just me, (literally) in my mum's basement.
Some modern titles credit hundreds of people, but developing something on your own seems possible today. These days there are a lot of free-ish tools, engines and resources available that a few years ago were out of reach of hobbyists. Still, you're not going to get anything good in 8k and 5 weeks...
That's a rather short-sighted view. Other countries have shown that providing people in underdeveloped regions with access to information can have a big quality on their quality of life and their income. If you're in a remote region, it helps a lot if you can get up-to-date info on markets, weather, agricultural data, and this can provide medical info, education, and access to governmental services as well. If you're a farmer, this can help protect your crops, improve the yield, and get a better price. If you provide other services you can expand your market (it may be worth travelling to the next village to provide your service, but only if you know that there's someone in the village who actually needs you).
For people whom I know but don't have an email address for (or their address might have changed)
To rediscover people I know but forgot about (plenty of those). I could ask for and save businesscards from every person I meet but LinkedIn is just that much handier.
To keep track of people; I don't have contact with every single person in my network on a regular basis, and it's handy to know if they change jobs or switch companies. That's one of the good things of social networks: you don't have to keep your contact list up to date, your contacts will do that for you.
In my last position I needed to find certain professionals in other companies from time to time, and "cold call" them (no, nothing to do with marketing or recruitment). LinkedIn actually made that very easy, certainly easier than going in through the front door and the receptionist, and no one minded being contacted in that way. Sometimes I found a mutual connection to introduce me to the other person. Similarly, several people from ther businesses found and contacted me through LinkedIn. It's a good tool for business networking if you treat it as a service for just that, and limit your connections to people whom you actually know.
I have the same mixed feelings about LinkedIn as I have for Apple: I don't like their corporate policy but I do use their products because I find them very useful. As for them selling on the data: all of my data on their service is a matter of public record anyway. And that's how you should treat any social network: everything you put on there and (not unimportantly) what you do in there is public, mined and/or sold.
Meh. Some endorsements I got on LinkedIn make sense, others don't. The more useful ones are from people who took the trouble to write a short recommendation for me instead of treating endorsements as "like" buttons. And this has been my experience with my yearly appraisals as well, back when I was an employee. Most managers just tick a few boxes while only a few of them take it seriously.
By torrenting a movie, you are not just taking a copy for yourself and for however many people you are seeding to; you are, in the words of the mobie studios, "enabling piracy". The people who get their copy from you also seed to 10 people, who each seed to another 10, and so on and so forth. So by their logic, you are on the hook for every copy that originated from yours, and the studio gets to claim insane amounts of damages from whomever they catch. As someone once calculated, if every pirate was caught and fined according to the studio's schedule, the fines would exceed the total GDP of *Earth*. Now there's a business model for you...
I think that it's ok to go after pirates, but I agree that the punishment should be more realistic: based on nr. of movies downloaded and the seed ratio, times a reasonable (maybe 2) punitive factor, with an additional fine (not damages) imposed. Torrenting a movie is in the same league (but not the same thing, before anyone starts...) as shoplifting, not Enron-level fraud. By the way, I pirate movies... I wouldn't if they would just let me pay for a format that has the quality, convenience, lack of ads and ability to time- and format-shift as the files I get from my favorite seeders. Music studios already offer this, and I'm happy to give them my money.
Is it wrong to pirate? Meh. Let's not forget that copyright is not a natural right, but an artificial and temporary monopoly granted by society expressly for the benefit of society, not authors. Let's not call it "intellectual property" anymore either, for the same reason. I don't feel very bad about pirating movies as long as movie studios continue to abuse copyright the way they do. And this is the stance that our government (in the Netherlands) has held for a good while: as long as movie studios refuse to offer a reasonable selection of normally priced digital content that honours fair use to a good degree, the government refused to do much about upholding copyright law in case of individual infringers. Sadly this policy was recently abandoned.
And if it turns out that Google tracks individual browsers through sites using Google API, they are in violation of privacy regulations in France and many other countries just like Facebook.
Fair points, but those concerned with privacy take issue with that last remark, that you can use that data however you want. Many countries have laws that may not forbid the collection of data outright, but put limitations on how you can use the data and what for. Often, there is a law that says that you may only use the data for the stated reasons you collected it, and never sell it on to third parties. And there's such a thing as implied reasons and reasonable expectations: the purpose of Facebook's "like" button is ostensibly to allow FB members to show approval for a site, and perhaps to entice non members to sign up. Visitors and site owners rightfully do not expect that button to track them. By the same token, people can reasonably expect to end up in a server log if they visit a site with embedded images. But the implied reason for collecting a server log is to diagnose issues and compile aggregated site statistics, not to track individual users. And tracking cookies can get a lot more information than you can glean from your server logs.
FB's practise of tracking users through their Like button clearly violates privacy regulations in a number of countries. And even so, I don't think legislators are looking to stop people from collecting server logs or to ban 3rd party cookies. They are however putting limits on what companies can do with the data.
I think the engineers came to the same conclusion. They don't do this anymore along an entire road, but there are still places where the tree line will move in closer towards the road at the entrance of town, with the idea of making motorists slow down instead of barreling through town at 80.
This is about visual modifications. There is no actual lane narrowing nor are there hourglasses, the road is only made to look narrower, either for the entire length of the road, or at a place where the speed limit changes. In places where they painted red "bike paths" on the roads, the road was already quite narrow and shared between cyclists and motorists; the red path is not an actual bike path that is exclusive to bikes. On those roads, there is no room for 2 cars and a cyclist to ride abreast. Observation and statistics have shown that these are effective measures on most of the roads where they were tried.
I agree that hourglasses are horrible. We have a lot of them in my town, though they are made to let cyclists pass safely to the right of them. But it definitely encourages speeding: the road near my house is a 30 km/h road, but many motorists who see an oncoming car at an hourglass will speed up to get there first... of course the other car also speeds up so they sometimes end up doing 70.
No idea why this got modded down (perhaps it was the SJW remark?). The comment is right on the mark though: in this region there has been a lot of research into influencing motorists with visual "tricks". We're not talking about removing the center divider on the highways, but about modifying the smaller roads where speed limits of 60 or 80 km/h are in effect. Some of our roads never had a central line to begin with. Other roads have been made to appear narrower by coloring a strip on each side of the road in red (the colour used for bike paths), leaving a black space that is too narrow for two cars to pass. This has had a measurable effect on the speed at which motorists drive there. Other tricks include using lines, fences or even planting trees to make a road appear to narrow on the approach to small towns (where a lower speed limit is in effect). This also results in motorists slowing down unconsciously.
Most accidents happen on these crappy little roads, and speed is a large factor in most of these accidents. In the past two decades or so there has been a lot of attention to safety on those roads, and numbers show they have succeeded in making them safer. Social / environmental engineering of roads is a relatively new phenomenon, and measures do not always work out the way they planned it, but it generally works well. Also keep in mind that over here at least these changes are not designed by idiot council members with an agenda; there are engineers involved who know about this stuff. And in some cases, instead of removing the white line, they add a center divider.
I agree: disorganisation can be managable in smaller companies but it doesn't scale well. But a flat org chart and a meritocracy is not the same as disorganisation. I've no idea about GitHub (I don't use their services) and perhaps they had a problem with disconnected employees and a lack of organisation. Their management structure might well have been one of the causes of that, but not the simple fact that their management structure is flat. My point being that there are successful companies with a flat org chart. Maybe the company can be successful under a stricter hierarchy, but going that route is bound to piss off a lot of people, not just the ones who feel sleighted. Corporate culture is an important factor in choosing where to work.
Sounds like you're working for a decent company, by the way.
By ditching their management structure they threw out an important part of their corporate culture as well. Not smart. Instead, they might have looked at ways to make the existing structure scale up. There are other large organisations with a flat org chart and seniority based on merit, like W. L. Gore. Go talk to them instead of the regular MBAs.
By the way, I don't know if I'd have an issue with a lack of remote working options or a shift to a more hierarchical management structure, but what I read about their diversity and social impact team would certainly be enough to make me run, screaming. Also, they brought in a former Yahoo exec...
apply those [responsible and irresponsible] behaviors to protect original ideas.
That sounds a lot like kids will learn to protect the original ideas of others, in other words to respect the stakes driven into the ground by the incumbent corporations in prior intellectual land-grabs. Sure, if you come acros an original idea yourself, you might be able to stake your own claim, but most of these "ideas" are already locked up tight.
Not everyone can; in most European countries guns are strictly regulated. But it sure looks like 3d printed guns are improving; I expect that they will soon be more reliable than what a regular person can cobble together himself. Not reliable enough to fire 100 rounds at the range every week, and certainly not better than real guns, but better than a baseball bat for home defense in countries where you're not allowed to have a firearm of any kind.
Of course for this design you'll still need a barrel, which is a strictly controlled part in such countries, and which can't be 3d-printed reliably even for.22lr rounds. Oh, and you'll need ammo. Not easy to get either. Unless you manage to convince that Romanian bloke in the pub down the road. And in that case he'll probably sell you a perfectly good "real" firearm as well.
That doesn't solve anything, this isn't just about submarine patents. As soon as a patent troll is awarded their patent on "Activity X that has been practised for millennia, but on the Internet", they can start "defending" it by having their lawyer sent letters to any infringing party who started using it after the application was filed.
Maybe we shouldn't have software patents at all, nor award patents on stupid, trivial stuff. Or, since it is rather hard to define exactly what is trivial and what isn't, we could adjust the duration of a patent instead. Invest a few billion in discovering a new medicine, and yeah maybe you deserve a couple of patents with a long validity. Spend a few million on a think tank to come up with good ideas, and you'd deserve some patents with a duration that depends on how good those ideas are. Be the first to come up with a clever little algo in the course of your normal work, and maybe you ought to get a patent as well even if it's for something more or less "obvious to someone skilled in the arts"... but only one valid for a few years.
For a simple speed test the Raspberry Pi might well suffice. I'd be interested in this Internet monitor if it could perform a few more checks. We offer WiFi in a few of our rental properties, and it's frustrating when the tenants complain about intermittent connectivity issues or slowness: by the time I get to the property, the problems have of course magically disappeared. Besides I don't want to get up at all hours to go and check the equipment. Would be great to have a Raspberry Pi monitoring the WiFi and wired connections and performance, logging the results.
Slashdot Mirror
"The notion that this is something only about opening one lock or that there is some degree of locks that can't be opened with the tool that they're asking us to create, is a misnomer," Sewell added.
Apple evidently worries that the FBI will keep whatever tool Apple creates, and use it to break into other iPhones in other cases. Those cases are most likely not always legit, and there is a further risk of the tool getting into the hands of others. At best that will be allied secret services, but who knows. The point is: giving this tool to the FBI ultimately compromises the security of every single iPhone out there, or so Apple claim. It is the same as using encryption with the governent having a back-door key, and we should not want that, for the same reasons.
Yeah, "An anonymous reader writes" my left foot.
Stole what idea? The idea of an electronic facebook? When Facebook started there were already similar services out there. He implemented a competing service that people liked better for whatever reason, and was able to raise capital and expand FB into a global service, which is not a mean feat, despite the fact that indeed copious amounts of luck were involved. Most successful startups involve luck, but you have to position yourself well in order to take advantage of a lucky strike when it comes your way. You and I would not have done better in his position, I bet.
Don't get me wrong: I hate FB as much as the next guy here, and Zuckerberg does seem like a giant douche. I'm not sure what the deal is with that guy he allegedly screwed out of a partnership. He is known for similar stunts, like when he fired a whole bunch of people who had been there from the start, just before their stock options were to vest. But other than that I have no issues with the guy. What pisses me off is that FB once again proves that our entire economy evidently evolves around eyeballs and advertising.
That sounds about right... I remember a porn mag circulating amongst the boys back in elementary school. We were suitably impressed but only because it was "forbidden stuff"; it was way before anyone got sexually active and the actual content was, well, boring as hell. And not one little bit scary
Of course it helps if you get a bit of sex ed beforehand. And I don't mean the careful and considerate way modern educators go about it. Our sex ed consisted of one lesson slipped into biology class, with a drawing of a naked adult man and woman on the blackboard and the teacher talking a little about reproduction. Let the kids ask their inevitable questions, and I assure you they will quickly get bored and move on. That and the porn mag was enough to convince us kids that sex and porn are firmly in the "boring adult stuff" category.
Or the shareholders will agree with the board that taking harassment seriously and demonstrating effectiveness in culling hate speech actually enhances the credibility of the service. At least that is how I would pitch it to them. And sadly, they and the general public might well agree that it's good to turn Twitter into a safe zone. Most people don't really want free speech, they just want to be able to say what they want and not have to listen to "undesirable" opinions.
Business ethics and net neutrality go hand in hand. In a world where there is plenty of competition in access and content, net neutrality is rarely an issue. But in reality where there are usually only a few ISPs to choose from and some very powerful content providers, there will be a tremendous pressure on ISPs to take money from content providers to limit access to competitors. And it is far worse when the content provider and ISP are one and the same. Which will be the case in Facebook's plan for India.
This is not the same as your dial up services that limit access. As long as you are free to dial into another service. But imagine your phone company limiting which ISP you're allowed to dial into.
Yes there are banks out there that expect that. And by the same token, there are apparently a few banks that now have negative mortgage interst rates as well. In Denmark there are some people who receive money from the bank every month as interest on their mortgage.
That is what I like about the old systems: it certainly was feasible to develop an awesome game all by yourself. Even doing the artwork was doable if you're not an artist; making great pixel art takes artistic skill but pixels are forgiving enough to let anyone make something passable. I wrote a few C64 games for fun back in the days, and one of them even ended up being published (a horse riding game I wrote for our riding academy's 150th anniversary). It wasn't very good but in terms of complexity and performance it was comparable to some of the big titles out there. Just me, (literally) in my mum's basement.
Some modern titles credit hundreds of people, but developing something on your own seems possible today. These days there are a lot of free-ish tools, engines and resources available that a few years ago were out of reach of hobbyists. Still, you're not going to get anything good in 8k and 5 weeks...
That's a rather short-sighted view. Other countries have shown that providing people in underdeveloped regions with access to information can have a big quality on their quality of life and their income. If you're in a remote region, it helps a lot if you can get up-to-date info on markets, weather, agricultural data, and this can provide medical info, education, and access to governmental services as well. If you're a farmer, this can help protect your crops, improve the yield, and get a better price. If you provide other services you can expand your market (it may be worth travelling to the next village to provide your service, but only if you know that there's someone in the village who actually needs you).
For people whom I know but don't have an email address for (or their address might have changed)
To rediscover people I know but forgot about (plenty of those). I could ask for and save businesscards from every person I meet but LinkedIn is just that much handier.
To keep track of people; I don't have contact with every single person in my network on a regular basis, and it's handy to know if they change jobs or switch companies. That's one of the good things of social networks: you don't have to keep your contact list up to date, your contacts will do that for you.
In my last position I needed to find certain professionals in other companies from time to time, and "cold call" them (no, nothing to do with marketing or recruitment). LinkedIn actually made that very easy, certainly easier than going in through the front door and the receptionist, and no one minded being contacted in that way. Sometimes I found a mutual connection to introduce me to the other person. Similarly, several people from ther businesses found and contacted me through LinkedIn. It's a good tool for business networking if you treat it as a service for just that, and limit your connections to people whom you actually know.
I have the same mixed feelings about LinkedIn as I have for Apple: I don't like their corporate policy but I do use their products because I find them very useful. As for them selling on the data: all of my data on their service is a matter of public record anyway. And that's how you should treat any social network: everything you put on there and (not unimportantly) what you do in there is public, mined and/or sold.
Meh. Some endorsements I got on LinkedIn make sense, others don't. The more useful ones are from people who took the trouble to write a short recommendation for me instead of treating endorsements as "like" buttons. And this has been my experience with my yearly appraisals as well, back when I was an employee. Most managers just tick a few boxes while only a few of them take it seriously.
By torrenting a movie, you are not just taking a copy for yourself and for however many people you are seeding to; you are, in the words of the mobie studios, "enabling piracy". The people who get their copy from you also seed to 10 people, who each seed to another 10, and so on and so forth. So by their logic, you are on the hook for every copy that originated from yours, and the studio gets to claim insane amounts of damages from whomever they catch. As someone once calculated, if every pirate was caught and fined according to the studio's schedule, the fines would exceed the total GDP of *Earth*. Now there's a business model for you...
I think that it's ok to go after pirates, but I agree that the punishment should be more realistic: based on nr. of movies downloaded and the seed ratio, times a reasonable (maybe 2) punitive factor, with an additional fine (not damages) imposed. Torrenting a movie is in the same league (but not the same thing, before anyone starts...) as shoplifting, not Enron-level fraud. By the way, I pirate movies... I wouldn't if they would just let me pay for a format that has the quality, convenience, lack of ads and ability to time- and format-shift as the files I get from my favorite seeders. Music studios already offer this, and I'm happy to give them my money.
Is it wrong to pirate? Meh. Let's not forget that copyright is not a natural right, but an artificial and temporary monopoly granted by society expressly for the benefit of society, not authors. Let's not call it "intellectual property" anymore either, for the same reason. I don't feel very bad about pirating movies as long as movie studios continue to abuse copyright the way they do. And this is the stance that our government (in the Netherlands) has held for a good while: as long as movie studios refuse to offer a reasonable selection of normally priced digital content that honours fair use to a good degree, the government refused to do much about upholding copyright law in case of individual infringers. Sadly this policy was recently abandoned.
And if it turns out that Google tracks individual browsers through sites using Google API, they are in violation of privacy regulations in France and many other countries just like Facebook.
Fair points, but those concerned with privacy take issue with that last remark, that you can use that data however you want. Many countries have laws that may not forbid the collection of data outright, but put limitations on how you can use the data and what for. Often, there is a law that says that you may only use the data for the stated reasons you collected it, and never sell it on to third parties. And there's such a thing as implied reasons and reasonable expectations: the purpose of Facebook's "like" button is ostensibly to allow FB members to show approval for a site, and perhaps to entice non members to sign up. Visitors and site owners rightfully do not expect that button to track them. By the same token, people can reasonably expect to end up in a server log if they visit a site with embedded images. But the implied reason for collecting a server log is to diagnose issues and compile aggregated site statistics, not to track individual users. And tracking cookies can get a lot more information than you can glean from your server logs.
FB's practise of tracking users through their Like button clearly violates privacy regulations in a number of countries. And even so, I don't think legislators are looking to stop people from collecting server logs or to ban 3rd party cookies. They are however putting limits on what companies can do with the data.
I think the engineers came to the same conclusion. They don't do this anymore along an entire road, but there are still places where the tree line will move in closer towards the road at the entrance of town, with the idea of making motorists slow down instead of barreling through town at 80.
This is about visual modifications. There is no actual lane narrowing nor are there hourglasses, the road is only made to look narrower, either for the entire length of the road, or at a place where the speed limit changes. In places where they painted red "bike paths" on the roads, the road was already quite narrow and shared between cyclists and motorists; the red path is not an actual bike path that is exclusive to bikes. On those roads, there is no room for 2 cars and a cyclist to ride abreast. Observation and statistics have shown that these are effective measures on most of the roads where they were tried.
I agree that hourglasses are horrible. We have a lot of them in my town, though they are made to let cyclists pass safely to the right of them. But it definitely encourages speeding: the road near my house is a 30 km/h road, but many motorists who see an oncoming car at an hourglass will speed up to get there first... of course the other car also speeds up so they sometimes end up doing 70.
No idea why this got modded down (perhaps it was the SJW remark?). The comment is right on the mark though: in this region there has been a lot of research into influencing motorists with visual "tricks". We're not talking about removing the center divider on the highways, but about modifying the smaller roads where speed limits of 60 or 80 km/h are in effect. Some of our roads never had a central line to begin with. Other roads have been made to appear narrower by coloring a strip on each side of the road in red (the colour used for bike paths), leaving a black space that is too narrow for two cars to pass. This has had a measurable effect on the speed at which motorists drive there. Other tricks include using lines, fences or even planting trees to make a road appear to narrow on the approach to small towns (where a lower speed limit is in effect). This also results in motorists slowing down unconsciously.
Most accidents happen on these crappy little roads, and speed is a large factor in most of these accidents. In the past two decades or so there has been a lot of attention to safety on those roads, and numbers show they have succeeded in making them safer. Social / environmental engineering of roads is a relatively new phenomenon, and measures do not always work out the way they planned it, but it generally works well. Also keep in mind that over here at least these changes are not designed by idiot council members with an agenda; there are engineers involved who know about this stuff. And in some cases, instead of removing the white line, they add a center divider.
I agree: disorganisation can be managable in smaller companies but it doesn't scale well. But a flat org chart and a meritocracy is not the same as disorganisation. I've no idea about GitHub (I don't use their services) and perhaps they had a problem with disconnected employees and a lack of organisation. Their management structure might well have been one of the causes of that, but not the simple fact that their management structure is flat. My point being that there are successful companies with a flat org chart. Maybe the company can be successful under a stricter hierarchy, but going that route is bound to piss off a lot of people, not just the ones who feel sleighted. Corporate culture is an important factor in choosing where to work.
Sounds like you're working for a decent company, by the way.
By ditching their management structure they threw out an important part of their corporate culture as well. Not smart. Instead, they might have looked at ways to make the existing structure scale up. There are other large organisations with a flat org chart and seniority based on merit, like W. L. Gore. Go talk to them instead of the regular MBAs.
By the way, I don't know if I'd have an issue with a lack of remote working options or a shift to a more hierarchical management structure, but what I read about their diversity and social impact team would certainly be enough to make me run, screaming. Also, they brought in a former Yahoo exec...
apply those [responsible and irresponsible] behaviors to protect original ideas.
That sounds a lot like kids will learn to protect the original ideas of others, in other words to respect the stakes driven into the ground by the incumbent corporations in prior intellectual land-grabs. Sure, if you come acros an original idea yourself, you might be able to stake your own claim, but most of these "ideas" are already locked up tight.
Not everyone can; in most European countries guns are strictly regulated. But it sure looks like 3d printed guns are improving; I expect that they will soon be more reliable than what a regular person can cobble together himself. Not reliable enough to fire 100 rounds at the range every week, and certainly not better than real guns, but better than a baseball bat for home defense in countries where you're not allowed to have a firearm of any kind.
.22lr rounds. Oh, and you'll need ammo. Not easy to get either. Unless you manage to convince that Romanian bloke in the pub down the road. And in that case he'll probably sell you a perfectly good "real" firearm as well.
Of course for this design you'll still need a barrel, which is a strictly controlled part in such countries, and which can't be 3d-printed reliably even for
That doesn't solve anything, this isn't just about submarine patents. As soon as a patent troll is awarded their patent on "Activity X that has been practised for millennia, but on the Internet", they can start "defending" it by having their lawyer sent letters to any infringing party who started using it after the application was filed.
Maybe we shouldn't have software patents at all, nor award patents on stupid, trivial stuff. Or, since it is rather hard to define exactly what is trivial and what isn't, we could adjust the duration of a patent instead. Invest a few billion in discovering a new medicine, and yeah maybe you deserve a couple of patents with a long validity. Spend a few million on a think tank to come up with good ideas, and you'd deserve some patents with a duration that depends on how good those ideas are. Be the first to come up with a clever little algo in the course of your normal work, and maybe you ought to get a patent as well even if it's for something more or less "obvious to someone skilled in the arts"... but only one valid for a few years.
That looks very promising, thanks!
For a simple speed test the Raspberry Pi might well suffice. I'd be interested in this Internet monitor if it could perform a few more checks. We offer WiFi in a few of our rental properties, and it's frustrating when the tenants complain about intermittent connectivity issues or slowness: by the time I get to the property, the problems have of course magically disappeared. Besides I don't want to get up at all hours to go and check the equipment. Would be great to have a Raspberry Pi monitoring the WiFi and wired connections and performance, logging the results.