I couldn't agree more. Hell, if they don't want to change their process, the mirror is also a nice backup tool. If they already have five, why not just set up a sixth? It doesn't have to be a powerful server, it won't handle any load. It's only function would be to take it down for backups at scheduled intervals between syncs. They don't have to change anything at the main server this way.
If I feel I absolutely need to do offsite backup for my own private files, which are not crucial even to me (just a pendrive I carry, but still), how can they possibly think mirrors are enough for a large project? Knowledge about proper backup procedures was built on terabytes of lost data (in the times when a megabyte was a lot). They failed to learn from that history. And the shocking thing is, when it finally did repeat, they didn't learn from that either.
Most IT people would have said "Where are your backups?" When the programmers say "We're using mirrors", the IT person would say, "Where are your backups?" a second time.
Read the comments under TFA and answers to them. You're 100% right, this is exactly what happens there.
And it's not going to get better. Read the comments at the site. Most of them are surprised that no backup procedure was implemented and most of the answers to those comments are "I'm telling you, there were backups! The mirrors. And if you mean old-school backup, that's not easy for a live git repository".
They simply Know Better (TM). Discussion is useless, arguments are not even being parsed fully - the token "backup" throws an exception in their minds. They had the closest thing to a lose-it-all lesson you can get without... well... losing it all and they still do not see the problem. Sort of impressive, if you ask me. In a bad way, of course.
Exactly. There are only two fair solutions to this. Either you need to follow the law of all countries in which your service is reachable - fair, but against the spirit of the internet and perhaps not possible at all without self-filtering.
OR: dear US, next time you want to enforce your own laws abroad - go F yourself. High time to be clear about this. The only law that should concern me is the law of the country I'm in at the moment - and possibly the law of my home country (the price of citizenship). Extraditions ONLY for crimes committed abroad. Zero effect of US law on others (and vice versa).
Anyway this goes - we desperately need as many cases like this as possible. And, for visibility, we need collateral damage - executives landing in jail during Paris vacation with zero reaction to embassy's intervention, etc. That's the only way to make it clear that either laws get harmonized through negotiations (which can be blocked in a democracy, see ACTA) or they simply do not work outside the border.
Otherwise it's not a fair world, just a dominium of the one country with the biggest guns. And if you're american and like that thought, learn some world history and consider the fact, that maybe not in 10 years, but in 50, 100, 200... it might not be the USA anymore. How would you like your grandchildren having to observe the laws of, say, China? Or the United States of Arabia, or whatever...
Me, for example. As a browser and e-mail client. Almost exclusively, on Linux, Windows and Symbian. Since the 6.x days. I've even beta-tested for a while in the 7.x - 9.5 times. After getting used to Opera, Firefox always seemed so unwieldy, I found it funny it was so popular. Even funnier was every time Firefox itself or some plugin brought some "amazing innovation" which I had been using for months already. The newest versions unfortunately are a bit worse, but every change breaks someone's workflow (who will link xkcd?) and I'm still very satisfied.
Firefox without plugins sucks. Firefox with plugins is a unique setup, so in case of any problems you're on your own. Opera is great out of the box and actually feels more customizable, not less - the things you need are right there, no need for a plugin. Whatever works for you, of course - I don't care what you use, I'm happiest with Opera.
I'm sorry about this development. Presto was great - fast, accurate & standards-compliant. Some rare, ancient pages break in it to this day, but that's just a good hint to avoid a given page. And the more implementations are there, the better - if all of them stick to the standards, then standards are the only way to go for webmasters. If only two implementations exist - well, we've already been there in the Netscape vs. IE times. So, Opera, allow me to voice my opinion: THIS MOVE SUCKS.
The switch to V8 on the other hand is much welcome. JS engine in Opera is too slow at times, and with modern pages this usually decides whether the browsing feels smooth.
We'll see how this goes. For now, I think I'll stick with Opera. I really don't want to go through the process of getting Firefox to work how I like (remember that as a non-user I don't know which plugins do what), IE's not an option as I rarely use Windows, and Chrome... Well... Let's just say I'm not inclined to run Google's browser. They already know too much. Chromium, or whatever the open-source version is called, well, maybe...
Who am I kidding? I'm stuck with Opera and I like it (at least until it begins to clearly suck, then I will change, just as I switched to Opera years ago).
What does "illegal to distribute" have to do with "copyrightable"? Having a copyright does not imply distribution. And lack of distribution does not imply impossibility of copyright breach (hint: "leak"). I'd argue that if it was illegal, the position of a copyright owner might even be stronger, since permission to distribute could not have been legally given - unless his intention to distribute can be proven, the mere fact of distribution could be viewed as proof of copyright violation (in addition to being illegal anyway).
See? That's more-or-less what I meant and it can clearly work well. Good for you, that you live in a place where this is legal. Where I leave (not US, obviously) a couple of christian holidays (and national ones as well, but as I said, I'm ok with these) are so free, that in most businesses (most visibly retail) it is actually illegal for your employee to work for you then. Exemptions are only available for the owner and his/her family and anyone they hire specifically for that day (not a regular employee). Fun, isn't it?
Hey, it's just thinking about families! We want the families to be together on important holidays, don't we? And after all, every family is christian, right?
Indeed. I've wondered for a long time why the holiday system is fixed almost everywhere in the world. Sure, it's easy to manage, but seriously, in a mixed society it makes no sense! National holidays are ok, but mandating religious ones is simply stupid. Just legalize a set of religious calendars with a preset number of holidays. This number should be fixed. If there's more in a given religion - have the church choose. If there's less - fix the ones that exist and have the employee choose any other days to fill the limit. These days are free for that person, period. If you have an atheist, just let him choose whatever. Just make that calendar fixed for an employee, unless he changes religion.
Now have the employer decide how to proceed. Keep the business running on a given holiday with reduced mancount, close it and let the employees who should be working on that day take overtime on different days instead... There are many ways to solve this. Any such elastic system is better than the current one. The end result will be that in any given place the locally dominant religion will practically set the holidays when everything closes, while minorities can have theirs without problems. And smaller bussinesses can be built by minorities to offer services during holidays - $$$profit$$$!
I have a colleague in my team with a different religion than the rest (and most of our country). He has to "waste" vacation days for his holidays, at the same time he gets to sit at home on days which are not special for him in any way. He seems used to it, but I find it unfair.
I smell a troll (hint - first sentence), but I'll bite. At least partially.
First of all - thank you for explaining to me what peer review is. Having been on both sides of it and working every day with other scientists, some a lot better than me, I must have completely misunderstood. What I meant was: your paper will only be shown to a few selected reviewers and if they say no, it won't make it into the journal. That's quite incompatible with strict (or rather "fanatic") "information wants to be free" approach.
Why does science have to be about adding value? Because that's the whole point. You add nothing - you shouldn't publish. Or are you really arguing for publishing papers on new results from a well known experiment just to say "nothing new or unexpected was seen"? Ah, I get it. You only see "value" as something monetary. Well, sorry about that, too much time spent with corpo-drones, I guess. I meant scientific value - discoveries, nontrivial new data, hypotheses, etc.
What if the original scientist missed something? Well, you cite him and write a short paper explaining what you found. Why republish the graphs, pictures, original text?
If you think that half-open or half-closed positions are hard to argue - why do you discuss CC licenses? They are half-open. Only public domain is fully open. Anything else imposes some restrictions.
If your monkey guy already died, in any sane copyright system his work would be fair game very, very soon. Unfortunately most copyright systems are now insane. Anyway - in that case just cite, don't republish. You have the right to do that.
Is there anything special about having a doctorate? Well, being a PhD and knowing a lot of people with different degrees, I can tell you - absolutely nothing. It is sometimes useful with people who trust titles, but the reality is: not everyone can get one, but at the same time not everyone who can, does (and some who really shouldn't somehow do). A doctorate is a weak hint about how good someone is, at most.
What I meant about "specialized stuff" is that few people are competent to judge a given paper. It is very hard to build a more open trust-based system. I'm competent in some fields, so I might be trusted, but who will stop me from rating a paper on quantum physics? It's much easier with code or art.
The reason for ND is exactly what you said - clear divisions are easiest. Plagiarism is ethically very bad in science. A paper getting most of it's quality from the original is a clear case, but one that clearly adds something very important may not be, even if they both are equally similar to the original. Amount of text/graphs/whatever is not enough to judge that. So the dominant choice is to disallow any reuse beyond fair use unless you get permission first. Simple and works well. Sometimes too limiting? True. Oh, well. The other clear option is worse - allow any reuse, and you'll get too many very weak papers. Why is it worse? MONEY. Criteria for scientists are clear - number of publications and general quality of the journals. It's a flawed system, but that's real life - the people doing the evaluation cannot review every paper separately. If full reuse is ok, you can try to flood with small changes to good papers, something will squeeze through - and the system breaks.
Anyway, feel free to not use ND in your papers, I don't mind. As you can see, most scientists think otherwise. Given that most of those I know think that way and at the same time willingly make their own code open source, I'm willing to assume that there really is a difference. Unless most(*) of the scientists are just stupid or misguided. Go ahead, preach.
You're completely missing the idea of copyright as applied to a paper. The work that is copyrighted is the paper itself, not the research described within. You can build your research on the results of others absolutely normally - and that's what Newton meant. Read, do research based on it, write a new paper. Fair use makes it even possible to cite the parts you want to discuss, if necessary. I can't really think of anything more you could ask for, anything "more free".
On the other hand, building your paper on someone else's paper by just modyfing the relevant parts is not in any way helpful for science - and that's the definition of derivative work here. In fact, if you do something like this, you're a lousy, lazy scientist - if you can fit your results into an existing paper like that, you probably haven't done anything new and worth reading. ND-free licenses are extremely useful for code, potentially useful in art, but worthless in science. There's no value added here.
I think the idea of labeling your research as "ND" is pretty anti-social. If you don't want other people to use your stuff, then fine, don't show it to anyone. Why would anyone submit a paper to an "Open Access" journal, and then label their paper as "No Derivatives."
Seriously? You consider only completely open or completely closed position as non-hypocritical? What you're saying is just pseudophilosophical mumbo-jumbo, based on a fundamentalist understanding of "information wants to be free". Is you believe that, peer reviewed papers should not exist - you should publish everything, whether or not competent peers think it's utter BS. Sorry, but this does not work for stuff as specialized as scientific papers.
Pfff... Great show of insecurity and patriotic oversensitivity. Are you seriously that nervous about the public opinion about NASA? I don't really see it's accomplishments being questioned that much. And a pathetic screwup like this metric vs. imperial one fully deserves being joked about, if only to keep it from repeating. Joke about a particular failure is not a joke about the one who failed, not getting this leads to "political correctness" type of ethics.
About your unprovoked "Nobody, but nobody can even compare" - man, Amuricah is just so grate. Sorry, but you're just being funny. And yes, you're right at the moment. Let's talk about it in 10-20 years though. The way things are going (funding-wise and political ambition-wise) the situation might be much less clear then. For example, it really doesn't seem at the moment like NASA will be the first to get a human to Mars...
Feel free to mod me down, oversensitive clods, I have karma to burn and no intention to hide my thoughts behind AC status.
Not a fan of this particular politician, but... "Fact that he is suppose to be baffled by IT's access to his emails just proves how tech savvy he is."
Why exactly? I can tell you I'd be pissed if I found out that our company's IT had access to my private e-mails. They're on a different server and I use TLS, so that would mean remote access, backups in background, etc. If that was part of the rules, I'd be fine with that - a bit irked, maybe, but rules are rules, no reason to be angry if you were informed in advance. And I'm just a guy in a medium-sized company.
BTW - having access to emails is not the same as having access to the system where you open them, decrypt, save, etc.
It seems that in this case nobody told the politicians that everything is backed up without their knowledge. That is serious. They shouldn't use the tablets for strictly classified information, but they do plenty of, well, sensitive communications. These backups are fine if they know about them, a serious problem if they don't. Now this can be done well. Encryption, procedures, etc. But how do you do blind backups if the user - who's supposed to be the only one able to access the backup - doesn't even know they exist? If the IT has the keys...
Or, less officially: imagine you learn just now that your porn and browser history was being backed up and accessible since you got your computer (laptop, tablet, whatever). Nice, huh?
Well, they're not the first to try this path (forcing touch-oriented interface on desktop users in order to unify the developer pool and beta-testing population). What else is Unity? The effect is simple - users revolt, Mint eats up Ubuntu's marketshare. Still, the case is open - Ubuntu's still popular, we'll see how this develops. And this is Linux world, where if you don't like something, you can always fork.
Windows world already knows how this works. Look at the lousy attempts to kill off XP with Vista in the market. Can you kill support for a system your clients use, when they're telling you "no, we will NOT buy your new product, it sucks"? Sure, most of them would change their minds once support is missing, but way too many might start looking for alternatives. And MS knows, that potential alternatives are there: Apple, Linux... Not a big threat yet (on desktops), but giving reasons to try them out would be stupid. So, the upgrade path XP->7 changed priority from "no way" to "default". Don't like Vista? No problem, here's our new product, and guess what - it actually works.
My bet? Windows 8 is not a really a one-way route for MS. It's just a well calculated bet. It will be as good, as they can possibly make it - MS knows the risks of Vista-like performance. And we'll see. If the people buy it, they win - unified user base, unified developer pool. Whether they can get a significant mobile market share out of this is a different question, but the chances are definitely better this way. But I would be very surprised if there is no semi-secret Windows 9 Desktop project. If Windows 8 does not sell, it will be top priority. Requirements are simple. Win7-like desktop. Win7 compatibility, possibly XP as well. Windows 8 compatibility. Metro option, may be as a default, but no longer forced. Old APIs still supported, but still marked as obsolete. A slow march towards easy portability between future Windows Phone and Windows Desktop, instead of unification. Get this to market in less than 2 years after Windows 8, before Windows 7 support ends, and they're safe, just as with Vista.
Will this work? Maybe. Why try this, when Apple clearly chose a different route? Because they CAN. The chance is too tempting. If it works, MS gets a real chance to attack the mobile market, a chance the current WP7 Lumia route does not offer. If it doesn't - oh, well. They'll just take the slow route. The current partnership with Nokia keeps them in the market, if they have to grow slowly, they will. If they can, that is. We'll see.
On the other hand, LinkedIn has had "institutionalization" in its definition from the start - it was supposed to be a place your (future) employer or colleague might visit. Cool kids get LinkedIn accounts when they grow old enough to understand that being cool is cool, but empty wallet is not. How much purely "social" traffic do you see there?
FB on the other hand is all about "friends", "look at the krAAAzy sh.. I just did", statuses, etc. Made for cool kids, evolved to handle other things, like companies. If it's not cool, it loses it's original appeal.
That's definitely true. I visited Paris a few times and a quick bonjour, parlez vous... helps a lot. Anyway, this is stupid. I'm usually not a tourist - if I go somewhere, it's a bussiness trip and it's not always planned weeks in advance. Show enough interest? But what if I'm not interested? It's not really snubbing - I'm at work here, next evening I'll be back home, give me a break! I had tickets for a good play for today and I had to cancel to get here, so excuse me if I just want to get to the right place, get the work done and leave. I may come again later, as a tourist - then I'll be sure to learn a few words, the local customs, etc. I usually do.
I don't expect people in a non-English speaking country to necessarily know English. If they don't, I'll try communicating with gestures, no problem, or just look for someone who does. But if you do know English - why make things difficult? I'm not a native speaker either, so WTF?
Still, it IS getting better in Paris. On my first visit, a long time ago, the few words of French were absolutely necessary. And still, not always sufficient. We couldn't even communicate at a supposed tourist information stand in a train station! And the clerk's eyes said enough about what he thought about us. Seriously, WTF? On my last visit there was no problem. People in hotels, etc. speak English by default. If you're nice, most people on the street will at least try to understand you and help you, even if they can't really speak English. I still try to open the conversation with a few French words, because I can and it feels polite, but it's not absolutely necessary anymore.
But act as if you assume everybody speaks English - good luck finding anybody who does. On the other hand, if you do act like that, count me out as well. Przepraszam, nie rozumiem, po jakiemu Pan w ogole mowi?
Blah... Trivial indeed. I didn't know this. Without those the iPhone would indeed be way better. Oh, well, luckily I'm in Europe.
On the other hand this means that Nokia is shooting itself in the foot - one of the main driving forces for the iPhone in Europe was the pre-existing hype from US. Since you suggest that the best choices (well, almost the best - European market is still way behind Japan) are not available there, this hype was much easier to create than it should.
O-kay... Now WHY is parent modded as funny? Fanboy mods probably think that any comment suggesting that some product is better than iPhone must be tongue-in-cheek (with the possible exception of Android).
Just like iPod never was the perfect MP3 player, iPhone is not and never will be the perfect phone. Sure, for many users, including a couple of my friends, the iPhone is great and nothing comes close, but "many" isn't the same as "all".
I played a bit with the iPhone. It's fun. It's well designed. It's not for me. I definitely wouldn't exchange my Nokia E61i for it, and that's an old phone now, better ones are available. If I had a choice - get iPhone for free or buy E61, E71, or something like that - I'd reach for my wallet. For me it's far more functional.
For example - I don't really like touchscreen interfaces, especially with small (<10") screens, multitouch doesn't change this. Typing an SMS or working with SSH is so much faster on a full qwerty keyboard, after you get used to it you can actually touch-type with your thumbs.
Still, I read articles in newspapers and feel that I'm expected to want an iPhone. Even here on/. it's the same thing - it seems that I should want one. So many interesting designs on the market, but only iPhone and Android seem to get any attention.
So, the parent was right in both the title and the comment. The iPhone is not for everyone and it is a bit irritating to see it mentioned everywhere and get weird looks from iPhone owners when they show it to you and you say "It's nice, but I prefer something else".
What problems in applications? As far as I can see, most pro-ext4 comments bash applications for not doing fsync(), calling this a bug in the application. The problem is that if we fix this "bug" in the applications, ext4 becomes useless! If you fsync() everything, write caching doesn't have a chance of speeding things up - and you'd have to fsync() most files...
The point is that there are three types of files, not two as is usually implied in this discussion. Some files are not important, data loss is acceptable, so they can be cached. Some files are important and should be written to disk ASAP - fsync() gives you that. But many files in the real world (I'd risk saying that "most" would be the better word) do not fit in either category. They're not just created, read and deleted - they're mostly modified. The point is that the changes are in the "unimportant" category, the file itself is not. So, if you lose your changes, too bad, you probably lost some time, that's it. But if you lose the file, you lost a LOT of work, or potentially end up with a system that will not even boot.
The proper, but costly solution is a transactional filesystem. Using a database as a workaround is sometimes suggested (KDE should use sqllite for config, etc.), but how would you use it for your normal files? A transactional FS would be great, but unnecessarily slow. Most files don't need something like that.
The workaround is writing to a temporary file then renaming. This works if order of these two operations is enforced. POSIX does not specify clearly a good enough consistency model for an FS. A causal or even FIFO model would suffice in this case. It's so simple to solve - if two operations on the same file by the same process (or by any process) are done in a given sequence, do not reorder them. If this limits write reordering too much for your taste, another approach might be to sync metadata and data changes - don't rename a file until pending writes to it are synced and don't write anything to a file until pending create/rename/whatever is completed (well, this is a bit more complicated that it seems - the directory is a separate file after all). Sure, this isn't in POSIX, but it is a basic usability requirement.
Another way is to extend the API, adding something like a rename_on_sync() or fclose_with_rename() call - that would be the simplest solution to the problem of low priority updates to high priority files, extremely easy to implement in most filesystems (that's how they do the normal renames, so it's just a #define macro), a bit more work in Ext4. If this is implemented, then applications can actually be fixed and everybody's happy. Don't worry about POSIX compatibility - pure POSIX programs can still use fsync, while smarter ones can add a macro to use the new function if available and replace it with a normal rename otherwise, this will work everywhere, never worse than pure POSIX.
So many solutions. Pick one and everybody's happy. Or keep shooting yourself in the foot with the fsync() BS - if application authors start doing this, everything will be slow and your precious advanced write caching will actually be used once in a blue moon.
POSIX is broken in this aspect - there is NO way to implement the behavior that is required for most files (cache writes all you want, but leave the old version until the update's on disk) based on explicit POSIX guarantees. The only choice: forget write caching or pray that your system doesn't crash before the write is performed. Since this is a very common requirement, any aggresively caching FS must offer a way to do this or risk getting abandoned by users after sufficiently many horror stories.
I agree, it is possible. Not even very difficult - the lack of need for retrasmissions, packet ordering etc. makes it much easier to implement than full TCP. That is not the problem I was thinking about.
The problem is the combo of lack of built-in, system level congestion control, open source and egoistic users. With TCP, whatever you do, the protocol limits you. The most you can do is use multiple connections - a bit complicated and still only giving relative advantage. You can get more than your fair share of bandwidth on a path, but you can't dominate it.
With UDP "playing nice" depends on application-level limits. Before deploying something like that (we're not talking about a niche application here, this is a huge share of todays traffic), rigorous tests should be run to verify how this protocol interacts with TCP. However, even supposing that everything works fine and the new BT works as intended, how long will it take until we see a fork, with the limits turned off? Of course, a single client built like that will not be a problem - other nodes won't let it reach full speed, unless the authors make a mistake, but if it catches on... It makes sense for the user - you can get a lot more speed. Then the web will become slow, mail will trickle and every user will bitch on every possible forum about ISPs not increasing bandwidth enough, while downloading the newest game/movie/whatever at 10x the speed he should. More bandwidth will just mean faster BT transfers, with no change to WWW etc.
So, in fact, this is VERY difficult to implement properly. BT must not only make sure that they get the congestion avoidance right and leave enough room for TCP, it must also make sure that any client with a modified protocol will be unable to connect to normal peers at all, to block the adoption of any BT-on-steroids. Even that is easy to circumvent by using a "dual-protocol" client.
I expect this change to backfire. You don't - fine. We won't know until after the fact. Still, I think that BT should stay on TCP - the solution to the problems is forcing ISPs to act fairly. How to do that, or if it's even possible in less than a decade is a different question, but I don't think switching to UDP will do the trick.
Use round trip time? Try increasing TTL to find the closest nodes with the desired content? Why would you need a central database, when many end-to-end metrics can give you information about distance?
Because I'm a bit egoistic, like most people, except fanatics? I don't use BT, although I do see the value in it - I just don't really need it. As long as it uses TCP it doesn't cause me much harm. I think arbitrary caps on a protocol are not ethical and a breach of contract, so I side with BT, even if some of the uses are disputable (IP law is blown way out of proportion, harming fair use, but there is something wrong in getting everything for free on the day of release). Maybe I could get a slightly better connection if TCP BT was capped, but I'm not willing to support this solution for ethical reasons. But in an arms race you have to look out for collateral damage. UDP in BT will affect my daily, TCP-centric use of the net. Why should I support that?
This is actually important. If Joe Sixpack starts seeing its connection slow down to a crawl, hears that BT is the cause and sees a dramatic change after strict UDP caps are introduced, then instead of not caring, he will be against Beat-Tow-End, or whatever that thing is. What then?
It's hard to side with protesting masses, when they burn tires right under your window. BT just rolled out the tires in all corners of the Internet and is looking for matches. Yes, it will be noticed by those who don't use it yet. No, they will not be supportive.
Sure, there must be some overselling, but how much?
The sensible way to do this is to watch what's in the pipes and use this information. For a long time over 90% of traffic was TCP. Now suddenly one class of high-volume traffic will switch to UDP. Ooops. Should ISPs have seen this coming? I don't think so. This is not expected traffic growth, this is different.
UDP is a very bad protocol to use for mass transmission. There is no built-in feedback loop. Unless the protocol running over UDP is very well designed (basically mimicking TCP), UDP will always saturate the bottleneck on any path. If the upper level protocol accepts losses, it gets worse.
Of course, this can be done well - just put rate caps on each transfer, inside the client. But hey, everybody wants their new movie asap! With open source this will not fly. With TCP the transfers were at least competing fairly with other flows. With UDP bittorrent will soon start competing only with itself. More bandwidth won't cut it, TCP will suffocate.
So far ISPs tried to fight bittorrent for all the wrong reasons - it's a useful technology with many positive uses, just a bit heavy on the backbone and with the stigma of piracy. Limiting it was the wrong choice, but an easy one. Fighting the caps was the right thing to do, whether you actually use bittorrent or not. Switching to UDP changes the game.
Switching to UDP will make it public enemy number one. Watch for new contracts specifically disallowing it, heavy caps on all UDP traffic, and so on. Even worse than before, but now ISPs will have my full support.
I have no idea whether there is an obligation to use the patent (I don't think so), but even if there is - so what? The whole business model of this company is to get paid for eliminating patents. If they become invalid - great, goal achieved. Of course, without RTFA i can't tell if they are just planning a pool of free-to-use patents or some sort of patent NATO, where if a contributing partner is attacked by a patent troll, they join the war by suing the troll using their patent pool. Invalid patents would break the latter strategy, but it wouldn't really work anyway against true patent trolls that usually have no products at all, making them immune to patent attacks. So, I think they are only pooling patents to never use them, in which case invalidating their patent changes nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree more. Hell, if they don't want to change their process, the mirror is also a nice backup tool. If they already have five, why not just set up a sixth? It doesn't have to be a powerful server, it won't handle any load. It's only function would be to take it down for backups at scheduled intervals between syncs. They don't have to change anything at the main server this way.
If I feel I absolutely need to do offsite backup for my own private files, which are not crucial even to me (just a pendrive I carry, but still), how can they possibly think mirrors are enough for a large project? Knowledge about proper backup procedures was built on terabytes of lost data (in the times when a megabyte was a lot). They failed to learn from that history. And the shocking thing is, when it finally did repeat, they didn't learn from that either.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Most IT people would have said "Where are your backups?" When the programmers say "We're using mirrors", the IT person would say, "Where are your backups?" a second time.
Read the comments under TFA and answers to them. You're 100% right, this is exactly what happens there.
Wall, meet Head.
And it's not going to get better. Read the comments at the site. Most of them are surprised that no backup procedure was implemented and most of the answers to those comments are "I'm telling you, there were backups! The mirrors. And if you mean old-school backup, that's not easy for a live git repository".
They simply Know Better (TM). Discussion is useless, arguments are not even being parsed fully - the token "backup" throws an exception in their minds. They had the closest thing to a lose-it-all lesson you can get without... well... losing it all and they still do not see the problem. Sort of impressive, if you ask me. In a bad way, of course.
Exactly. There are only two fair solutions to this. Either you need to follow the law of all countries in which your service is reachable - fair, but against the spirit of the internet and perhaps not possible at all without self-filtering.
OR: dear US, next time you want to enforce your own laws abroad - go F yourself. High time to be clear about this. The only law that should concern me is the law of the country I'm in at the moment - and possibly the law of my home country (the price of citizenship). Extraditions ONLY for crimes committed abroad. Zero effect of US law on others (and vice versa).
Anyway this goes - we desperately need as many cases like this as possible. And, for visibility, we need collateral damage - executives landing in jail during Paris vacation with zero reaction to embassy's intervention, etc. That's the only way to make it clear that either laws get harmonized through negotiations (which can be blocked in a democracy, see ACTA) or they simply do not work outside the border.
Otherwise it's not a fair world, just a dominium of the one country with the biggest guns. And if you're american and like that thought, learn some world history and consider the fact, that maybe not in 10 years, but in 50, 100, 200... it might not be the USA anymore. How would you like your grandchildren having to observe the laws of, say, China? Or the United States of Arabia, or whatever...
Me, for example. As a browser and e-mail client. Almost exclusively, on Linux, Windows and Symbian. Since the 6.x days. I've even beta-tested for a while in the 7.x - 9.5 times. After getting used to Opera, Firefox always seemed so unwieldy, I found it funny it was so popular. Even funnier was every time Firefox itself or some plugin brought some "amazing innovation" which I had been using for months already. The newest versions unfortunately are a bit worse, but every change breaks someone's workflow (who will link xkcd?) and I'm still very satisfied.
Firefox without plugins sucks. Firefox with plugins is a unique setup, so in case of any problems you're on your own. Opera is great out of the box and actually feels more customizable, not less - the things you need are right there, no need for a plugin. Whatever works for you, of course - I don't care what you use, I'm happiest with Opera.
I'm sorry about this development. Presto was great - fast, accurate & standards-compliant. Some rare, ancient pages break in it to this day, but that's just a good hint to avoid a given page. And the more implementations are there, the better - if all of them stick to the standards, then standards are the only way to go for webmasters. If only two implementations exist - well, we've already been there in the Netscape vs. IE times. So, Opera, allow me to voice my opinion: THIS MOVE SUCKS.
The switch to V8 on the other hand is much welcome. JS engine in Opera is too slow at times, and with modern pages this usually decides whether the browsing feels smooth.
We'll see how this goes. For now, I think I'll stick with Opera. I really don't want to go through the process of getting Firefox to work how I like (remember that as a non-user I don't know which plugins do what), IE's not an option as I rarely use Windows, and Chrome... Well... Let's just say I'm not inclined to run Google's browser. They already know too much. Chromium, or whatever the open-source version is called, well, maybe...
Who am I kidding? I'm stuck with Opera and I like it (at least until it begins to clearly suck, then I will change, just as I switched to Opera years ago).
What does "illegal to distribute" have to do with "copyrightable"? Having a copyright does not imply distribution. And lack of distribution does not imply impossibility of copyright breach (hint: "leak"). I'd argue that if it was illegal, the position of a copyright owner might even be stronger, since permission to distribute could not have been legally given - unless his intention to distribute can be proven, the mere fact of distribution could be viewed as proof of copyright violation (in addition to being illegal anyway).
See? That's more-or-less what I meant and it can clearly work well. Good for you, that you live in a place where this is legal. Where I leave (not US, obviously) a couple of christian holidays (and national ones as well, but as I said, I'm ok with these) are so free, that in most businesses (most visibly retail) it is actually illegal for your employee to work for you then. Exemptions are only available for the owner and his/her family and anyone they hire specifically for that day (not a regular employee). Fun, isn't it?
Hey, it's just thinking about families! We want the families to be together on important holidays, don't we? And after all, every family is christian, right?
Indeed. I've wondered for a long time why the holiday system is fixed almost everywhere in the world. Sure, it's easy to manage, but seriously, in a mixed society it makes no sense! National holidays are ok, but mandating religious ones is simply stupid. Just legalize a set of religious calendars with a preset number of holidays. This number should be fixed. If there's more in a given religion - have the church choose. If there's less - fix the ones that exist and have the employee choose any other days to fill the limit. These days are free for that person, period. If you have an atheist, just let him choose whatever. Just make that calendar fixed for an employee, unless he changes religion.
Now have the employer decide how to proceed. Keep the business running on a given holiday with reduced mancount, close it and let the employees who should be working on that day take overtime on different days instead... There are many ways to solve this. Any such elastic system is better than the current one. The end result will be that in any given place the locally dominant religion will practically set the holidays when everything closes, while minorities can have theirs without problems. And smaller bussinesses can be built by minorities to offer services during holidays - $$$profit$$$!
I have a colleague in my team with a different religion than the rest (and most of our country). He has to "waste" vacation days for his holidays, at the same time he gets to sit at home on days which are not special for him in any way. He seems used to it, but I find it unfair.
I smell a troll (hint - first sentence), but I'll bite. At least partially.
First of all - thank you for explaining to me what peer review is. Having been on both sides of it and working every day with other scientists, some a lot better than me, I must have completely misunderstood. What I meant was: your paper will only be shown to a few selected reviewers and if they say no, it won't make it into the journal. That's quite incompatible with strict (or rather "fanatic") "information wants to be free" approach.
Why does science have to be about adding value? Because that's the whole point. You add nothing - you shouldn't publish. Or are you really arguing for publishing papers on new results from a well known experiment just to say "nothing new or unexpected was seen"? Ah, I get it. You only see "value" as something monetary. Well, sorry about that, too much time spent with corpo-drones, I guess. I meant scientific value - discoveries, nontrivial new data, hypotheses, etc.
What if the original scientist missed something? Well, you cite him and write a short paper explaining what you found. Why republish the graphs, pictures, original text?
If you think that half-open or half-closed positions are hard to argue - why do you discuss CC licenses? They are half-open. Only public domain is fully open. Anything else imposes some restrictions.
If your monkey guy already died, in any sane copyright system his work would be fair game very, very soon. Unfortunately most copyright systems are now insane. Anyway - in that case just cite, don't republish. You have the right to do that.
Is there anything special about having a doctorate? Well, being a PhD and knowing a lot of people with different degrees, I can tell you - absolutely nothing. It is sometimes useful with people who trust titles, but the reality is: not everyone can get one, but at the same time not everyone who can, does (and some who really shouldn't somehow do). A doctorate is a weak hint about how good someone is, at most.
What I meant about "specialized stuff" is that few people are competent to judge a given paper. It is very hard to build a more open trust-based system. I'm competent in some fields, so I might be trusted, but who will stop me from rating a paper on quantum physics? It's much easier with code or art.
The reason for ND is exactly what you said - clear divisions are easiest. Plagiarism is ethically very bad in science. A paper getting most of it's quality from the original is a clear case, but one that clearly adds something very important may not be, even if they both are equally similar to the original. Amount of text/graphs/whatever is not enough to judge that. So the dominant choice is to disallow any reuse beyond fair use unless you get permission first. Simple and works well. Sometimes too limiting? True. Oh, well. The other clear option is worse - allow any reuse, and you'll get too many very weak papers. Why is it worse? MONEY. Criteria for scientists are clear - number of publications and general quality of the journals. It's a flawed system, but that's real life - the people doing the evaluation cannot review every paper separately. If full reuse is ok, you can try to flood with small changes to good papers, something will squeeze through - and the system breaks.
Anyway, feel free to not use ND in your papers, I don't mind. As you can see, most scientists think otherwise. Given that most of those I know think that way and at the same time willingly make their own code open source, I'm willing to assume that there really is a difference. Unless most(*) of the scientists are just stupid or misguided. Go ahead, preach.
(*) see percentages in the summary
You're completely missing the idea of copyright as applied to a paper. The work that is copyrighted is the paper itself, not the research described within. You can build your research on the results of others absolutely normally - and that's what Newton meant. Read, do research based on it, write a new paper. Fair use makes it even possible to cite the parts you want to discuss, if necessary. I can't really think of anything more you could ask for, anything "more free".
On the other hand, building your paper on someone else's paper by just modyfing the relevant parts is not in any way helpful for science - and that's the definition of derivative work here. In fact, if you do something like this, you're a lousy, lazy scientist - if you can fit your results into an existing paper like that, you probably haven't done anything new and worth reading. ND-free licenses are extremely useful for code, potentially useful in art, but worthless in science. There's no value added here.
I think the idea of labeling your research as "ND" is pretty anti-social. If you don't want other people to use your stuff, then fine, don't show it to anyone. Why would anyone submit a paper to an "Open Access" journal, and then label their paper as "No Derivatives."
Seriously? You consider only completely open or completely closed position as non-hypocritical? What you're saying is just pseudophilosophical mumbo-jumbo, based on a fundamentalist understanding of "information wants to be free". Is you believe that, peer reviewed papers should not exist - you should publish everything, whether or not competent peers think it's utter BS. Sorry, but this does not work for stuff as specialized as scientific papers.
Pfff... Great show of insecurity and patriotic oversensitivity. Are you seriously that nervous about the public opinion about NASA? I don't really see it's accomplishments being questioned that much. And a pathetic screwup like this metric vs. imperial one fully deserves being joked about, if only to keep it from repeating. Joke about a particular failure is not a joke about the one who failed, not getting this leads to "political correctness" type of ethics.
About your unprovoked "Nobody, but nobody can even compare" - man, Amuricah is just so grate. Sorry, but you're just being funny. And yes, you're right at the moment. Let's talk about it in 10-20 years though. The way things are going (funding-wise and political ambition-wise) the situation might be much less clear then. For example, it really doesn't seem at the moment like NASA will be the first to get a human to Mars...
Feel free to mod me down, oversensitive clods, I have karma to burn and no intention to hide my thoughts behind AC status.
Not a fan of this particular politician, but...
"Fact that he is suppose to be baffled by IT's access to his emails just proves how tech savvy he is."
Why exactly? I can tell you I'd be pissed if I found out that our company's IT had access to my private e-mails. They're on a different server and I use TLS, so that would mean remote access, backups in background, etc. If that was part of the rules, I'd be fine with that - a bit irked, maybe, but rules are rules, no reason to be angry if you were informed in advance. And I'm just a guy in a medium-sized company.
BTW - having access to emails is not the same as having access to the system where you open them, decrypt, save, etc.
It seems that in this case nobody told the politicians that everything is backed up without their knowledge. That is serious. They shouldn't use the tablets for strictly classified information, but they do plenty of, well, sensitive communications. These backups are fine if they know about them, a serious problem if they don't. Now this can be done well. Encryption, procedures, etc. But how do you do blind backups if the user - who's supposed to be the only one able to access the backup - doesn't even know they exist? If the IT has the keys...
Or, less officially: imagine you learn just now that your porn and browser history was being backed up and accessible since you got your computer (laptop, tablet, whatever). Nice, huh?
Well, they're not the first to try this path (forcing touch-oriented interface on desktop users in order to unify the developer pool and beta-testing population). What else is Unity? The effect is simple - users revolt, Mint eats up Ubuntu's marketshare. Still, the case is open - Ubuntu's still popular, we'll see how this develops. And this is Linux world, where if you don't like something, you can always fork.
Windows world already knows how this works. Look at the lousy attempts to kill off XP with Vista in the market. Can you kill support for a system your clients use, when they're telling you "no, we will NOT buy your new product, it sucks"? Sure, most of them would change their minds once support is missing, but way too many might start looking for alternatives. And MS knows, that potential alternatives are there: Apple, Linux... Not a big threat yet (on desktops), but giving reasons to try them out would be stupid. So, the upgrade path XP->7 changed priority from "no way" to "default". Don't like Vista? No problem, here's our new product, and guess what - it actually works.
My bet? Windows 8 is not a really a one-way route for MS. It's just a well calculated bet. It will be as good, as they can possibly make it - MS knows the risks of Vista-like performance. And we'll see. If the people buy it, they win - unified user base, unified developer pool. Whether they can get a significant mobile market share out of this is a different question, but the chances are definitely better this way. But I would be very surprised if there is no semi-secret Windows 9 Desktop project. If Windows 8 does not sell, it will be top priority. Requirements are simple. Win7-like desktop. Win7 compatibility, possibly XP as well. Windows 8 compatibility. Metro option, may be as a default, but no longer forced. Old APIs still supported, but still marked as obsolete. A slow march towards easy portability between future Windows Phone and Windows Desktop, instead of unification. Get this to market in less than 2 years after Windows 8, before Windows 7 support ends, and they're safe, just as with Vista.
Will this work? Maybe. Why try this, when Apple clearly chose a different route? Because they CAN. The chance is too tempting. If it works, MS gets a real chance to attack the mobile market, a chance the current WP7 Lumia route does not offer. If it doesn't - oh, well. They'll just take the slow route. The current partnership with Nokia keeps them in the market, if they have to grow slowly, they will. If they can, that is. We'll see.
On the other hand, LinkedIn has had "institutionalization" in its definition from the start - it was supposed to be a place your (future) employer or colleague might visit. Cool kids get LinkedIn accounts when they grow old enough to understand that being cool is cool, but empty wallet is not. How much purely "social" traffic do you see there?
FB on the other hand is all about "friends", "look at the krAAAzy sh.. I just did", statuses, etc. Made for cool kids, evolved to handle other things, like companies. If it's not cool, it loses it's original appeal.
Apples to oranges, man.
All the other browsers? Sorry, but how is Opera Mobile 9.7 beta a full production release?
That's definitely true. I visited Paris a few times and a quick bonjour, parlez vous... helps a lot. Anyway, this is stupid. I'm usually not a tourist - if I go somewhere, it's a bussiness trip and it's not always planned weeks in advance. Show enough interest? But what if I'm not interested? It's not really snubbing - I'm at work here, next evening I'll be back home, give me a break! I had tickets for a good play for today and I had to cancel to get here, so excuse me if I just want to get to the right place, get the work done and leave. I may come again later, as a tourist - then I'll be sure to learn a few words, the local customs, etc. I usually do.
I don't expect people in a non-English speaking country to necessarily know English. If they don't, I'll try communicating with gestures, no problem, or just look for someone who does. But if you do know English - why make things difficult? I'm not a native speaker either, so WTF?
Still, it IS getting better in Paris. On my first visit, a long time ago, the few words of French were absolutely necessary. And still, not always sufficient. We couldn't even communicate at a supposed tourist information stand in a train station! And the clerk's eyes said enough about what he thought about us. Seriously, WTF? On my last visit there was no problem. People in hotels, etc. speak English by default. If you're nice, most people on the street will at least try to understand you and help you, even if they can't really speak English. I still try to open the conversation with a few French words, because I can and it feels polite, but it's not absolutely necessary anymore.
But act as if you assume everybody speaks English - good luck finding anybody who does. On the other hand, if you do act like that, count me out as well. Przepraszam, nie rozumiem, po jakiemu Pan w ogole mowi?
Blah... Trivial indeed. I didn't know this. Without those the iPhone would indeed be way better. Oh, well, luckily I'm in Europe.
On the other hand this means that Nokia is shooting itself in the foot - one of the main driving forces for the iPhone in Europe was the pre-existing hype from US. Since you suggest that the best choices (well, almost the best - European market is still way behind Japan) are not available there, this hype was much easier to create than it should.
Maybe, but it's the only thing that gets any attention on /. except the iPhone.
O-kay... Now WHY is parent modded as funny? Fanboy mods probably think that any comment suggesting that some product is better than iPhone must be tongue-in-cheek (with the possible exception of Android).
Just like iPod never was the perfect MP3 player, iPhone is not and never will be the perfect phone. Sure, for many users, including a couple of my friends, the iPhone is great and nothing comes close, but "many" isn't the same as "all".
I played a bit with the iPhone. It's fun. It's well designed. It's not for me. I definitely wouldn't exchange my Nokia E61i for it, and that's an old phone now, better ones are available. If I had a choice - get iPhone for free or buy E61, E71, or something like that - I'd reach for my wallet. For me it's far more functional.
For example - I don't really like touchscreen interfaces, especially with small (<10") screens, multitouch doesn't change this. Typing an SMS or working with SSH is so much faster on a full qwerty keyboard, after you get used to it you can actually touch-type with your thumbs.
Still, I read articles in newspapers and feel that I'm expected to want an iPhone. Even here on /. it's the same thing - it seems that I should want one. So many interesting designs on the market, but only iPhone and Android seem to get any attention.
So, the parent was right in both the title and the comment. The iPhone is not for everyone and it is a bit irritating to see it mentioned everywhere and get weird looks from iPhone owners when they show it to you and you say "It's nice, but I prefer something else".
Unless of course I missed the joke?
What problems in applications? As far as I can see, most pro-ext4 comments bash applications for not doing fsync(), calling this a bug in the application. The problem is that if we fix this "bug" in the applications, ext4 becomes useless! If you fsync() everything, write caching doesn't have a chance of speeding things up - and you'd have to fsync() most files...
The point is that there are three types of files, not two as is usually implied in this discussion. Some files are not important, data loss is acceptable, so they can be cached. Some files are important and should be written to disk ASAP - fsync() gives you that. But many files in the real world (I'd risk saying that "most" would be the better word) do not fit in either category. They're not just created, read and deleted - they're mostly modified. The point is that the changes are in the "unimportant" category, the file itself is not. So, if you lose your changes, too bad, you probably lost some time, that's it. But if you lose the file, you lost a LOT of work, or potentially end up with a system that will not even boot.
The proper, but costly solution is a transactional filesystem. Using a database as a workaround is sometimes suggested (KDE should use sqllite for config, etc.), but how would you use it for your normal files? A transactional FS would be great, but unnecessarily slow. Most files don't need something like that.
The workaround is writing to a temporary file then renaming. This works if order of these two operations is enforced. POSIX does not specify clearly a good enough consistency model for an FS. A causal or even FIFO model would suffice in this case. It's so simple to solve - if two operations on the same file by the same process (or by any process) are done in a given sequence, do not reorder them. If this limits write reordering too much for your taste, another approach might be to sync metadata and data changes - don't rename a file until pending writes to it are synced and don't write anything to a file until pending create/rename/whatever is completed (well, this is a bit more complicated that it seems - the directory is a separate file after all). Sure, this isn't in POSIX, but it is a basic usability requirement.
Another way is to extend the API, adding something like a rename_on_sync() or fclose_with_rename() call - that would be the simplest solution to the problem of low priority updates to high priority files, extremely easy to implement in most filesystems (that's how they do the normal renames, so it's just a #define macro), a bit more work in Ext4. If this is implemented, then applications can actually be fixed and everybody's happy. Don't worry about POSIX compatibility - pure POSIX programs can still use fsync, while smarter ones can add a macro to use the new function if available and replace it with a normal rename otherwise, this will work everywhere, never worse than pure POSIX.
So many solutions. Pick one and everybody's happy. Or keep shooting yourself in the foot with the fsync() BS - if application authors start doing this, everything will be slow and your precious advanced write caching will actually be used once in a blue moon.
POSIX is broken in this aspect - there is NO way to implement the behavior that is required for most files (cache writes all you want, but leave the old version until the update's on disk) based on explicit POSIX guarantees. The only choice: forget write caching or pray that your system doesn't crash before the write is performed. Since this is a very common requirement, any aggresively caching FS must offer a way to do this or risk getting abandoned by users after sufficiently many horror stories.
I agree, it is possible. Not even very difficult - the lack of need for retrasmissions, packet ordering etc. makes it much easier to implement than full TCP. That is not the problem I was thinking about.
The problem is the combo of lack of built-in, system level congestion control, open source and egoistic users. With TCP, whatever you do, the protocol limits you. The most you can do is use multiple connections - a bit complicated and still only giving relative advantage. You can get more than your fair share of bandwidth on a path, but you can't dominate it.
With UDP "playing nice" depends on application-level limits. Before deploying something like that (we're not talking about a niche application here, this is a huge share of todays traffic), rigorous tests should be run to verify how this protocol interacts with TCP. However, even supposing that everything works fine and the new BT works as intended, how long will it take until we see a fork, with the limits turned off? Of course, a single client built like that will not be a problem - other nodes won't let it reach full speed, unless the authors make a mistake, but if it catches on... It makes sense for the user - you can get a lot more speed. Then the web will become slow, mail will trickle and every user will bitch on every possible forum about ISPs not increasing bandwidth enough, while downloading the newest game/movie/whatever at 10x the speed he should. More bandwidth will just mean faster BT transfers, with no change to WWW etc.
So, in fact, this is VERY difficult to implement properly. BT must not only make sure that they get the congestion avoidance right and leave enough room for TCP, it must also make sure that any client with a modified protocol will be unable to connect to normal peers at all, to block the adoption of any BT-on-steroids. Even that is easy to circumvent by using a "dual-protocol" client.
I expect this change to backfire. You don't - fine. We won't know until after the fact. Still, I think that BT should stay on TCP - the solution to the problems is forcing ISPs to act fairly. How to do that, or if it's even possible in less than a decade is a different question, but I don't think switching to UDP will do the trick.
Use round trip time? Try increasing TTL to find the closest nodes with the desired content? Why would you need a central database, when many end-to-end metrics can give you information about distance?
Because I'm a bit egoistic, like most people, except fanatics? I don't use BT, although I do see the value in it - I just don't really need it. As long as it uses TCP it doesn't cause me much harm. I think arbitrary caps on a protocol are not ethical and a breach of contract, so I side with BT, even if some of the uses are disputable (IP law is blown way out of proportion, harming fair use, but there is something wrong in getting everything for free on the day of release). Maybe I could get a slightly better connection if TCP BT was capped, but I'm not willing to support this solution for ethical reasons. But in an arms race you have to look out for collateral damage. UDP in BT will affect my daily, TCP-centric use of the net. Why should I support that?
This is actually important. If Joe Sixpack starts seeing its connection slow down to a crawl, hears that BT is the cause and sees a dramatic change after strict UDP caps are introduced, then instead of not caring, he will be against Beat-Tow-End, or whatever that thing is. What then?
It's hard to side with protesting masses, when they burn tires right under your window. BT just rolled out the tires in all corners of the Internet and is looking for matches. Yes, it will be noticed by those who don't use it yet. No, they will not be supportive.
Sure, there must be some overselling, but how much?
The sensible way to do this is to watch what's in the pipes and use this information. For a long time over 90% of traffic was TCP. Now suddenly one class of high-volume traffic will switch to UDP. Ooops. Should ISPs have seen this coming? I don't think so. This is not expected traffic growth, this is different.
UDP is a very bad protocol to use for mass transmission. There is no built-in feedback loop. Unless the protocol running over UDP is very well designed (basically mimicking TCP), UDP will always saturate the bottleneck on any path. If the upper level protocol accepts losses, it gets worse.
Of course, this can be done well - just put rate caps on each transfer, inside the client. But hey, everybody wants their new movie asap! With open source this will not fly. With TCP the transfers were at least competing fairly with other flows. With UDP bittorrent will soon start competing only with itself. More bandwidth won't cut it, TCP will suffocate.
So far ISPs tried to fight bittorrent for all the wrong reasons - it's a useful technology with many positive uses, just a bit heavy on the backbone and with the stigma of piracy. Limiting it was the wrong choice, but an easy one. Fighting the caps was the right thing to do, whether you actually use bittorrent or not. Switching to UDP changes the game.
Switching to UDP will make it public enemy number one. Watch for new contracts specifically disallowing it, heavy caps on all UDP traffic, and so on. Even worse than before, but now ISPs will have my full support.
I have no idea whether there is an obligation to use the patent (I don't think so), but even if there is - so what? The whole business model of this company is to get paid for eliminating patents. If they become invalid - great, goal achieved. Of course, without RTFA i can't tell if they are just planning a pool of free-to-use patents or some sort of patent NATO, where if a contributing partner is attacked by a patent troll, they join the war by suing the troll using their patent pool. Invalid patents would break the latter strategy, but it wouldn't really work anyway against true patent trolls that usually have no products at all, making them immune to patent attacks. So, I think they are only pooling patents to never use them, in which case invalidating their patent changes nothing.