Rather than simply mod your post flamebait, I think I'll respond to it point-by-point.
For one, software. At the time Linux didn't (and in many ways still doesn't) have a robust commercial software library.
Pure 100% distilled fanboy bullcrap. Posix. Go read up on it. Java might be a nice follow up read - Linux runs that just fine too. I'll leave it up to you to determine their industry impact.
Next, there is the Unix philosophy and culture, which for many of us seemed like yet another group of people desperately holding onto the past.
Seemed is the big word in this sentence. The Internet is still primarily Un*x boxes. You know it, we know it. Get over it.
This isn't the first time I've had to defend Amiga from Linux zealots like you. We do not like Linux and don't wish to ever be associated with it, period.
All of us, huh? I loved my Amiga too. In fact I still own one. But that doesn't mean you get the right to speak for me.
About the only thing we had in common was a juvenile dislike for anything Microsoft simply because it was the competition. Well, guess what. Some of us grew up. The ones who didn't? Well, I bet you can figure out what happened to them.
I have no problem with Microsoft. Juvenile hate is juvenile hate - even yours.
I was hired in to a firm to write Linux drivers in my post Amiga days. That same firm gave me a job that paid off my mortgage. That's what happened to one of them.
And yes, I also do Microsoft work there too. I'm not a platform bigot of any kind. Some problems require a hammer, other problems a screwdriver. Use the appropriate tool for the job. Learn them all. Limiting your worldview simply makes you less useful. Learn MacOS, learn Linux, learn Windows. Know what each does best and use where appropriate.
And that's exactly why I'm rooting for the crash. The system as it is completely stifles innovation. We're going to wind up as a digital third world. Nothing new, no innovation, no nothing as the rest of the world races right past us.
So let IBM patent all this goofy crap. The more it happens the sooner the crash will come and things will get back to normal. It's going to suck, it's going to be expensive, a lot of 401ks are going to wind up useless because stocks are going to crash when it happens - but happen it must.
This is why process/programming patents are a bad idea. Not just a bad idea for business but a bad idea for the economy. When the patent crash comes - then they'll know. All that IP value will suddenly evaporate. It's going to be horrific.
And the big companies know it too. That's why MS isn't trying to collect for the FAT file system. They know that they'd take in X amount of dollars, but they're risking a patent war where they may lose X*10,000 if their IP portfolio is suddenly invalidated in a patent war. It's not worth the risk. That's why you see these big idiot companies patenting all this crap but never trying to collect on any of it. They know what would happen.
And the nice side effect is that they never ever have to worry about Joe's New Idea ever putting them out of business too. That's nice, of course.
Don't blame IBM. They're not "schizophrenic". They are merely in the game playing by the rules as they are written, because that's what everyone else on the field is doing. What if a football team suddenly decided throwing passes was dishonorable, and they wished other people wouldn't do it? They'd get hammered. They'd lose all over the place.
Same for IBM. They can wish for change and still play a mean game. Nothing wrong with that at all. In fact - the more the merrier, says I. Why? Because the more idiot patents like this that get granted, the sooner this mess will end. For two reasons.
First reason - the dumber a patent is, and the more obvious it is that you are merely patenting something someone else came up with - the more likely it is that a judge somewhere will get that clue we've all been waiting for.
Second reason - World War I.
How did WWI start? The assassination of Franz Ferdinand of Austria. A single death. That's all it took. All of the alliances and counter-alliances of the time made an extremely unstable system. All it took was the right nudge, a single assassination, and all those alliances got called up. Countries picked sides and it was off to war. Where 15 million people died. Imagine that. Fifteen million people all killed, and it all traces to a single assassination.
Remind you of anything?
All of these companies today have these IP portfolios, and an uneasy truce in between them that says "you nail us and we'll nail you". Strategic partnerships, licensed IP - a tangled web of legal rights. Just like the tangled web of alliances pre-WWI.
All it will take is our Ferdinand.
Remember the hubub over the FAT file system, how MS holds the patent on it? Why aren't they suing everyone for their legally due royalties? They could nail everyone from Samsung to Nokia. So why not do it? Because everyone would nail MS for other trivial things they are in violation of. It would be Patent WW I.
So let these companies patent trivial crap like LOL. Why not? It will make the crater bigger when The Big One happens. And nobody wants that because in this case it won't be soldiers dying, it will be money evaporating. IP portfolios are insanely overpriced. If PWI happens, the courts will be *swamped*. The only fix will be to invalidate software/process patents or spend every single minute of court time available until 2142 sorting out the mess. And that means those portfolios will suddenly be useless. As will all the license agreements. That's a lot of money to go *poof*. It'll make the housing market bubble of 2008 look like a hiccup. We're talking many many billions of dollars here.
So let the current cold war continue. Go ahead. Patent LOL. Patent emoticons. Patent tying your right shoe before your left - I don't care.
Just know that it's going to end, it's going to end soon, and it's going to end badly. And there will be blame enough to go around for everyone. In fact, the end may be beginning right now. We may have had our Ferdinand just recently.
It's going to be a hell of a ride when this whole mess hits the fan.
It's easy enough for them to redirect all your traffic to a web page with the removal code available there. And since it is easy enough to identify the zombies, their IP addresses and their ISP's... that should be easy, right?
Have ISPs (who are controlling the local machines DNS) identify bot infected machines, and redirect them to a drive by webpage that will "infect" the visiting machine with a bot cure.
All they did was get the DCs hosting the command and control servers to shut them down and register the spare domain names.
Obviously this was a temporary solution.
Yeah, it sort of seems like they could have done a better job. If they could get cooperation from the primary ISP of the main C&C controller, and they could even set up honeypots that would accept connections to count the number of computers in the botnet - why not do more than simply remove the command servers?
Why not set up a bogus C&C server to have the botnet erase itself?
I'm not promoting a "format c:" option here (although that would work, obviously) - but why not have the botnet destroy itself once you breach it's command structure? Have the botnet pass around a binary that erases the botnet binaries from the infected PC on the next reboot, then force a reboot? The researchers certainly know enough to create such a binary. And they obviously know enough about command parsing if they can make honeypots. Why not go that extra 2% and kill the thing?
The hard work was already done it seems. This botnet could be completely dead, not just disconnected and waiting.
The FBI is probing the case, the report said. It was not known whether the money had been recovered and a Citibank representative said the company denied any system breach or losses, according to the report.
There was no system breach! And the money was probably recovered anyways!
Unless Wi-Fi is blacked out for the driver, the safety implications of this development are worrisome.
Good grief. Yes - by all means, let's put the driver in a freaking faraday cage so they don't surf porn while they drive. That will make the world safe from the abomination that is mobile internet.
The only worrisome thing on the road to me is the judgment of the people around me. The idiots who can't read the "keep left" signs on the on ramp. Those people. Deal with them first - then you won't need the faraday cage.
No, I don't think most scientists are like that. I provided a counterexample to make my point, that's all. This guy is the opposite - far opposite - to my counterexample.
I'm not saying he's a bad person. I'm saying his position on money and math is very narrow and eccentric. I don't see how this corresponds to ethical genius. You clearly do. Please explain it to me.
Global warming.
Look at how many dollars are being sent towards that. How much certain political agendas are spending to have guys in white coats say what whey wish them to say. And now the issue is so muddied nobody can say for certain what the facts actually are. Money and science are occasionally poor bedfellows. And getting paid puts you in someone's pocket.
That seems like the antithesis of this guy. Money and truth are very nearly orthogonal - he knows this. So he doesn't wish to have the shadow of someone else's influence over his work. He wishes it to be pure math and nothing else.
Communism implies the subordination of the individual to the state. In a true communist society there is no concept of private ownership. All assets, including human capital are owned by the state. If you don't see how much a system is inherently incompatible with freedom, liberty and individuality then we are probably too far apart to have a meaningful dialog on the issue.
All assets are owned by the state anyways. Yes, even in the USA. Your problem is that you don't realize it.
You don't own your house, even if it doesn't have a mortgage against it. Property tax. You rent it from the state. Stop paying your property tax and what do they do? Put a lien on your house. Kick you out. Sell it for the back taxes. Still think you own your home? You don't.
Eminent domain. They can take your house anyways even if you do pay your taxes. Or a business interest can do it if they persuade (read that as "pay") the local government and make a compelling argument they could bring in more tax revenue with your property than you can.
Mineral rights. You can lose your home if there is something interesting buried under it.
Bankruptcy court. If you don't pay your taxes they'll sell your car, your computer, even your shoes. It all comes out in the audit, and if the powers that be decide you owe them money they'll take anything you think you own and sell it in a Sheriff's sale.
Forfeiture laws. Even if you have a pocket full of bills they can claim you are probably up to something and declare the money itself guilty of a crime and take it. They don't like it when you sidestep banks and have money they can't track, count, and make you pay tax on. They can take your car, your boat, anything you own for any reason at all.
The only reason you own anything you currently have right now is because the government hasn't said otherwise at the moment. They can change their minds anytime they like and take anything they want. Legally. You don't own jack.
Subordination of the individual to the state? Hell. The great bulk of humanity has never been free and never will be. Not here, not there, not anywhere.
One of the advantages of having several search sites is that if one site doesn't find what you're looking for, another site might. That's why it makes sense to have multiple search engines. Now there is no point in going to Yahoo if Microsoft can't find it. Same engine - same results.
That's probably the actual reason murder is even illegal in the first place - you're depriving society of the future revenue that person would have provided.
MS, or any large company, will rightly ignore any form of minor nuisance - including being sued for patent infringement - as long as it remains a minor nuisance. "Hey, we can either swat these flies one by one, or we can lobby for changes to the law and in the process lose the leverage we get with patents under today's system?" Guess which one they'll choose.
That's exactly it. The trial isn't about righting a wrong, it's about the patent troll being able to broadcast the strength of their hand. If it's a weak hand MS will prior art them. If it's a strong hand then the trial will continue. But only up to a point - MS will evaluate the probable damages and pitch them a settlement number based on the perceived strength of their position.
The whole patent thing isn't going away any time soon. I'd love to see it die as much as the next/.er, but it won't. There is an insane amount of money in patent portfolios. That's a lot of cash to suddenly invalidate.
For example, my last job.
I worked at a company that made a widget. I'm not going to talk about the widget because that might attract unwanted attention. Nonetheless though - a widget. In a tightly controlled abusive patent space competing against maybe six other companies who make a similar widget.
We would hold meetings to come up with patent ideas, to beat our competition over the heads with. Cross licensing was rampant just so anyone could put a widget - any widget - on the market. There was one famous event where our sales team got in a fist fight with another company's sales team at a trade show. Throwing punches. No kidding. Lots of hard feelings, lots of abuse of the system. And about $50 million in sales every year from our company alone hanging in the balance.
So along comes this Megacorp. Our owner wants to retire, so Megacorp comes in and buys us. A few months pass...then they buy out our rival FistFight. And a couple others! They want to be the only company who makes this widget, and the easiest way to insure that is to purchase entire companies simply for their patent wealth.
The problem? That's all they wanted. MegaCorp has sufficient manufacturing and engineering resources already, thank you very much. And despite reassurances that they intended the company to continue it was evident they did not. The companies were purchased, stripped of their IP, and closed down. Everybody loses.
It's a cautionary tale about abusive patents, sure. But consider MegaCorp. They now own half a dozen companies purchased for God-Knows-What. My company was pulling in $50 million a year. I can only imagine what the sale price was. And half a dozen others. Probably half a billion dollars if I had to guess for the whole lot. Just to own the patents. And for no competition in that particular widget space. They actually got to purchase a monopoly. Think about that - the advantage they hope to gain with this move. And how much money that advantage is worth.
Now imagine if someone comes along and kills software patents. Half a billion bucks spent and it - overnight - becomes worthless. The monopoly goes away like a puff of dust. Sure, they deserve it. They closed half a dozen engineering firms, fired people that had worked on assembly lines for 30 years (no kidding). They totally deserve this.
But at the money they must have paid, I'm sure they'd fight this to the death. And that's just one company. Imagine the wealth tied up in patents from someone truly huge like IBM or Microsoft. No. This isn't going away anytime soon. God knows I'd love it if it did, but there is simply too much money that would go *poof* if that happened. It might even cause the kind of financial meltdown we had last year over housing. Really - there is that much money in this. Odd to think about but true.
I agree with your analysis, I'm just wondering why it would work out that way.
The police aren't going to want to deal with it
Why exactly? I know you're right, but I'd love to know the reason why. A law has been broken. The police have been notified. They aren't in the revenue stream for content producers, so there is no financial motive for them to ignore it. And yet we both know that this will come to naught.
This *will* get buried, but I'd love to know exactly the reasons why.
The entire site screams PHB. It takes five minutes to load a single gif comic with all the extra crap and flash and popups that go along with it.
Seriously - it's like an act of self parody. I just picture Scott Adams sitting in a cube somewhere trying to draw comics while tearing his hair out and a PHB over his shoulder saying "We'll call it Dilbert.com BETA! And we'll have MASHUPS! OooooOOOooo!!"
I asked him to explain why stable versions (some of these stable releases were several years old, too) of the software he was recommending contained over 100 bug fixes. He couldn't provide a suitable answer, and thus management gave him the boot. And so we're not using Drupal.
You are out of your mind. Bug fixes to a stable release is your metric of quality?
May I ask what OS you guys are using in your bug-free paradise? You know, the OS that doesn't need any bug fixes after release. That one. I'd like to go buy myself a copy because that sure sounds great.
'Businesses such as ISPs want to enjoy the benefit of being able to make money out of the provision of Internet service facilities and they enjoy that benefit. But it carries with it a responsibility,' said Tony Bannon SC, the film industry's lawyer. 'They provide a facility that is able to be used for copyright infringement purposes. If they don't like having to deal with copyright notices then they should get out of the business.'
Could read like this:
'Businesses such as car manufacturers want to enjoy the benefit of being able to make money out of the provision of automobiles and they enjoy that benefit. But it carries with it a responsibility,' said Tony Bannon SC, the film industry's lawyer. 'They provide a product that is able to be used for vehicular homicide. If they don't like having to deal with accessory to murder charges they should get out of the business.'
Slashdot Mirror
...and it was Profane MuthaFucka who had to do it. So pay attention, k?
Rather than simply mod your post flamebait, I think I'll respond to it point-by-point.
For one, software. At the time Linux didn't (and in many ways still doesn't) have a robust commercial software library.
Pure 100% distilled fanboy bullcrap. Posix. Go read up on it. Java might be a nice follow up read - Linux runs that just fine too. I'll leave it up to you to determine their industry impact.
Next, there is the Unix philosophy and culture, which for many of us seemed like yet another group of people desperately holding onto the past.
Seemed is the big word in this sentence. The Internet is still primarily Un*x boxes. You know it, we know it. Get over it.
This isn't the first time I've had to defend Amiga from Linux zealots like you. We do not like Linux and don't wish to ever be associated with it, period.
All of us, huh? I loved my Amiga too. In fact I still own one. But that doesn't mean you get the right to speak for me.
About the only thing we had in common was a juvenile dislike for anything Microsoft simply because it was the competition. Well, guess what. Some of us grew up. The ones who didn't? Well, I bet you can figure out what happened to them.
I have no problem with Microsoft. Juvenile hate is juvenile hate - even yours.
I was hired in to a firm to write Linux drivers in my post Amiga days. That same firm gave me a job that paid off my mortgage. That's what happened to one of them.
And yes, I also do Microsoft work there too. I'm not a platform bigot of any kind. Some problems require a hammer, other problems a screwdriver. Use the appropriate tool for the job. Learn them all. Limiting your worldview simply makes you less useful. Learn MacOS, learn Linux, learn Windows. Know what each does best and use where appropriate.
And cease with the fanboy whining.
And that's exactly why I'm rooting for the crash. The system as it is completely stifles innovation. We're going to wind up as a digital third world. Nothing new, no innovation, no nothing as the rest of the world races right past us.
So let IBM patent all this goofy crap. The more it happens the sooner the crash will come and things will get back to normal. It's going to suck, it's going to be expensive, a lot of 401ks are going to wind up useless because stocks are going to crash when it happens - but happen it must.
This is why process/programming patents are a bad idea. Not just a bad idea for business but a bad idea for the economy. When the patent crash comes - then they'll know. All that IP value will suddenly evaporate. It's going to be horrific.
And the big companies know it too. That's why MS isn't trying to collect for the FAT file system. They know that they'd take in X amount of dollars, but they're risking a patent war where they may lose X*10,000 if their IP portfolio is suddenly invalidated in a patent war. It's not worth the risk. That's why you see these big idiot companies patenting all this crap but never trying to collect on any of it. They know what would happen.
And the nice side effect is that they never ever have to worry about Joe's New Idea ever putting them out of business too. That's nice, of course.
Don't blame IBM. They're not "schizophrenic". They are merely in the game playing by the rules as they are written, because that's what everyone else on the field is doing. What if a football team suddenly decided throwing passes was dishonorable, and they wished other people wouldn't do it? They'd get hammered. They'd lose all over the place.
Same for IBM. They can wish for change and still play a mean game. Nothing wrong with that at all. In fact - the more the merrier, says I. Why? Because the more idiot patents like this that get granted, the sooner this mess will end. For two reasons.
First reason - the dumber a patent is, and the more obvious it is that you are merely patenting something someone else came up with - the more likely it is that a judge somewhere will get that clue we've all been waiting for.
Second reason - World War I.
How did WWI start? The assassination of Franz Ferdinand of Austria. A single death. That's all it took. All of the alliances and counter-alliances of the time made an extremely unstable system. All it took was the right nudge, a single assassination, and all those alliances got called up. Countries picked sides and it was off to war. Where 15 million people died. Imagine that. Fifteen million people all killed, and it all traces to a single assassination.
Remind you of anything?
All of these companies today have these IP portfolios, and an uneasy truce in between them that says "you nail us and we'll nail you". Strategic partnerships, licensed IP - a tangled web of legal rights. Just like the tangled web of alliances pre-WWI.
All it will take is our Ferdinand.
Remember the hubub over the FAT file system, how MS holds the patent on it? Why aren't they suing everyone for their legally due royalties? They could nail everyone from Samsung to Nokia. So why not do it? Because everyone would nail MS for other trivial things they are in violation of. It would be Patent WW I.
So let these companies patent trivial crap like LOL. Why not? It will make the crater bigger when The Big One happens. And nobody wants that because in this case it won't be soldiers dying, it will be money evaporating. IP portfolios are insanely overpriced. If PWI happens, the courts will be *swamped*. The only fix will be to invalidate software/process patents or spend every single minute of court time available until 2142 sorting out the mess. And that means those portfolios will suddenly be useless. As will all the license agreements. That's a lot of money to go *poof*. It'll make the housing market bubble of 2008 look like a hiccup. We're talking many many billions of dollars here.
So let the current cold war continue. Go ahead. Patent LOL. Patent emoticons. Patent tying your right shoe before your left - I don't care.
Just know that it's going to end, it's going to end soon, and it's going to end badly. And there will be blame enough to go around for everyone. In fact, the end may be beginning right now. We may have had our Ferdinand just recently.
It's going to be a hell of a ride when this whole mess hits the fan.
"You know, the Nazis had pieces of flair that they made the Jews wear."
It's easy enough for them to redirect all your traffic to a web page with the removal code available there. And since it is easy enough to identify the zombies, their IP addresses and their ISP's ... that should be easy, right?
Hah! That's brilliant.
If these machines are infected with the bot, that means they are probably unpatched machines. Maybe the bot installed by drive by.
Have ISPs (who are controlling the local machines DNS) identify bot infected machines, and redirect them to a drive by webpage that will "infect" the visiting machine with a bot cure.
All they did was get the DCs hosting the command and control servers to shut them down and register the spare domain names.
Obviously this was a temporary solution.
Yeah, it sort of seems like they could have done a better job. If they could get cooperation from the primary ISP of the main C&C controller, and they could even set up honeypots that would accept connections to count the number of computers in the botnet - why not do more than simply remove the command servers?
Why not set up a bogus C&C server to have the botnet erase itself?
I'm not promoting a "format c:" option here (although that would work, obviously) - but why not have the botnet destroy itself once you breach it's command structure? Have the botnet pass around a binary that erases the botnet binaries from the infected PC on the next reboot, then force a reboot? The researchers certainly know enough to create such a binary. And they obviously know enough about command parsing if they can make honeypots. Why not go that extra 2% and kill the thing?
The hard work was already done it seems. This botnet could be completely dead, not just disconnected and waiting.
The FBI is probing the case, the report said. It was not known whether the money had been recovered and a Citibank representative said the company denied any system breach or losses, according to the report.
There was no system breach! And the money was probably recovered anyways!
Unless Wi-Fi is blacked out for the driver, the safety implications of this development are worrisome.
Good grief. Yes - by all means, let's put the driver in a freaking faraday cage so they don't surf porn while they drive. That will make the world safe from the abomination that is mobile internet.
The only worrisome thing on the road to me is the judgment of the people around me. The idiots who can't read the "keep left" signs on the on ramp. Those people. Deal with them first - then you won't need the faraday cage.
No, I don't think most scientists are like that. I provided a counterexample to make my point, that's all. This guy is the opposite - far opposite - to my counterexample.
Seriously - go read this book, and then get back to us.
I'm not saying he's a bad person. I'm saying his position on money and math is very narrow and eccentric. I don't see how this corresponds to ethical genius. You clearly do. Please explain it to me.
Global warming.
Look at how many dollars are being sent towards that. How much certain political agendas are spending to have guys in white coats say what whey wish them to say. And now the issue is so muddied nobody can say for certain what the facts actually are. Money and science are occasionally poor bedfellows. And getting paid puts you in someone's pocket.
That seems like the antithesis of this guy. Money and truth are very nearly orthogonal - he knows this. So he doesn't wish to have the shadow of someone else's influence over his work. He wishes it to be pure math and nothing else.
It's inspiring, actually.
Ted Alvin Klaudt! Ted Alvin Klaudt!
Hm. So that's what it feels like to spend a million dollars.
Less satisfying than I had imagined.
Communism implies the subordination of the individual to the state. In a true communist society there is no concept of private ownership. All assets, including human capital are owned by the state. If you don't see how much a system is inherently incompatible with freedom, liberty and individuality then we are probably too far apart to have a meaningful dialog on the issue.
All assets are owned by the state anyways. Yes, even in the USA. Your problem is that you don't realize it.
You don't own your house, even if it doesn't have a mortgage against it. Property tax. You rent it from the state. Stop paying your property tax and what do they do? Put a lien on your house. Kick you out. Sell it for the back taxes. Still think you own your home? You don't.
Eminent domain. They can take your house anyways even if you do pay your taxes. Or a business interest can do it if they persuade (read that as "pay") the local government and make a compelling argument they could bring in more tax revenue with your property than you can.
Mineral rights. You can lose your home if there is something interesting buried under it.
Bankruptcy court. If you don't pay your taxes they'll sell your car, your computer, even your shoes. It all comes out in the audit, and if the powers that be decide you owe them money they'll take anything you think you own and sell it in a Sheriff's sale.
Forfeiture laws. Even if you have a pocket full of bills they can claim you are probably up to something and declare the money itself guilty of a crime and take it. They don't like it when you sidestep banks and have money they can't track, count, and make you pay tax on. They can take your car, your boat, anything you own for any reason at all.
The only reason you own anything you currently have right now is because the government hasn't said otherwise at the moment. They can change their minds anytime they like and take anything they want. Legally. You don't own jack.
Subordination of the individual to the state? Hell. The great bulk of humanity has never been free and never will be. Not here, not there, not anywhere.
And it only took them ten years.
Funny how the government doesn't even give you ten days past the due date of a parking violation though, isn't it?
Yahoo's Web search would be powered by Bing
One of the advantages of having several search sites is that if one site doesn't find what you're looking for, another site might. That's why it makes sense to have multiple search engines. Now there is no point in going to Yahoo if Microsoft can't find it. Same engine - same results.
That's probably the actual reason murder is even illegal in the first place - you're depriving society of the future revenue that person would have provided.
That's because nobody cares if you die - they only care if they don't get paid.
MS, or any large company, will rightly ignore any form of minor nuisance - including being sued for patent infringement - as long as it remains a minor nuisance. "Hey, we can either swat these flies one by one, or we can lobby for changes to the law and in the process lose the leverage we get with patents under today's system?" Guess which one they'll choose.
That's exactly it. The trial isn't about righting a wrong, it's about the patent troll being able to broadcast the strength of their hand. If it's a weak hand MS will prior art them. If it's a strong hand then the trial will continue. But only up to a point - MS will evaluate the probable damages and pitch them a settlement number based on the perceived strength of their position.
The whole patent thing isn't going away any time soon. I'd love to see it die as much as the next /.er, but it won't. There is an insane amount of money in patent portfolios. That's a lot of cash to suddenly invalidate.
For example, my last job.
I worked at a company that made a widget. I'm not going to talk about the widget because that might attract unwanted attention. Nonetheless though - a widget. In a tightly controlled abusive patent space competing against maybe six other companies who make a similar widget.
We would hold meetings to come up with patent ideas, to beat our competition over the heads with. Cross licensing was rampant just so anyone could put a widget - any widget - on the market. There was one famous event where our sales team got in a fist fight with another company's sales team at a trade show. Throwing punches. No kidding. Lots of hard feelings, lots of abuse of the system. And about $50 million in sales every year from our company alone hanging in the balance.
So along comes this Megacorp. Our owner wants to retire, so Megacorp comes in and buys us. A few months pass...then they buy out our rival FistFight. And a couple others! They want to be the only company who makes this widget, and the easiest way to insure that is to purchase entire companies simply for their patent wealth.
The problem? That's all they wanted. MegaCorp has sufficient manufacturing and engineering resources already, thank you very much. And despite reassurances that they intended the company to continue it was evident they did not. The companies were purchased, stripped of their IP, and closed down. Everybody loses.
It's a cautionary tale about abusive patents, sure. But consider MegaCorp. They now own half a dozen companies purchased for God-Knows-What. My company was pulling in $50 million a year. I can only imagine what the sale price was. And half a dozen others. Probably half a billion dollars if I had to guess for the whole lot. Just to own the patents. And for no competition in that particular widget space. They actually got to purchase a monopoly. Think about that - the advantage they hope to gain with this move. And how much money that advantage is worth.
Now imagine if someone comes along and kills software patents. Half a billion bucks spent and it - overnight - becomes worthless. The monopoly goes away like a puff of dust. Sure, they deserve it. They closed half a dozen engineering firms, fired people that had worked on assembly lines for 30 years (no kidding). They totally deserve this.
But at the money they must have paid, I'm sure they'd fight this to the death. And that's just one company. Imagine the wealth tied up in patents from someone truly huge like IBM or Microsoft. No. This isn't going away anytime soon. God knows I'd love it if it did, but there is simply too much money that would go *poof* if that happened. It might even cause the kind of financial meltdown we had last year over housing. Really - there is that much money in this. Odd to think about but true.
May I ask how would you find out about that task on a Windows machine?
I agree with your analysis, I'm just wondering why it would work out that way.
The police aren't going to want to deal with it
Why exactly? I know you're right, but I'd love to know the reason why. A law has been broken. The police have been notified. They aren't in the revenue stream for content producers, so there is no financial motive for them to ignore it. And yet we both know that this will come to naught.
This *will* get buried, but I'd love to know exactly the reasons why.
Principia Discordia.
Disorganized religion. There you go. Read it now, thank me later fnord.
Dilbert.com
The entire site screams PHB. It takes five minutes to load a single gif comic with all the extra crap and flash and popups that go along with it.
Seriously - it's like an act of self parody. I just picture Scott Adams sitting in a cube somewhere trying to draw comics while tearing his hair out and a PHB over his shoulder saying "We'll call it Dilbert.com BETA! And we'll have MASHUPS! OooooOOOooo!!"
I asked him to explain why stable versions (some of these stable releases were several years old, too) of the software he was recommending contained over 100 bug fixes. He couldn't provide a suitable answer, and thus management gave him the boot. And so we're not using Drupal.
You are out of your mind. Bug fixes to a stable release is your metric of quality?
May I ask what OS you guys are using in your bug-free paradise? You know, the OS that doesn't need any bug fixes after release. That one. I'd like to go buy myself a copy because that sure sounds great.
'Businesses such as ISPs want to enjoy the benefit of being able to make money out of the provision of Internet service facilities and they enjoy that benefit. But it carries with it a responsibility,' said Tony Bannon SC, the film industry's lawyer. 'They provide a facility that is able to be used for copyright infringement purposes. If they don't like having to deal with copyright notices then they should get out of the business.'
Could read like this:
'Businesses such as car manufacturers want to enjoy the benefit of being able to make money out of the provision of automobiles and they enjoy that benefit. But it carries with it a responsibility,' said Tony Bannon SC, the film industry's lawyer. 'They provide a product that is able to be used for vehicular homicide. If they don't like having to deal with accessory to murder charges they should get out of the business.'