They don't have to patent everything. Option 2 can be defended against quite nicely by publishing your ideas in an official magazine or publication, creating prior art with well established credentials and timelines.
Philips used to have their own publication especially set up for this (may even still have it), were they would just publish interesting ideas that they considered too costly to patent, but too dangerous to allow others to patent it against them. You don't need to patent something to defend, you just have to make it impossible for others to win lawsuits against you when you ignore their stupid patents.
- You claim 4000 patients a year are euthanized. That's not true: the peak year was in 2009, with 2500 cases. It rises by about 200 a year, mostly in line with the rise of the age in the population as a whole. This is still WAY down from 1995 when the number was around 3600. Better palliative care and pain treatments have reduced the need for euthanasia.
- Every year more than 10000 people request euthanasia. Two thirds of those applications are denied outright. The others are granted but not everyone then uses the opportunity. Some people die before they get euthanasia, others reconsider.
- A large part of what you quote is outright untrue. It is a clear warning sign that most of the articles you link don't provide citations.
- The article in the Weekly Standard is written by a fellow of the Discovery Institute, best known for its promotion of "Intelligent Design" creationism.
All in all, your view is biased, based on hyperbole, and is in need of re-evaluation.
When querying for anti-euthanasia cards you will find exactly ONE hit in the Dutch language, from someone who asks if you can get one, on a forum. That's it. All other articles mentioning this stem from a publication on a catholic website. Not a Dutch one either. It's extreme rightwing scaremongering, using the fact that most people can't read Dutch to spread FUD about the issue.
The amount of force wasn't justified. How many people beating up one guy on the ground? And while an arrest would not have been the issue, the beating they gave him certainly was an issue. And from there on it was a classic case of the loaded powderkeg meeting the proverbial spark.
yfrog uses a special mailaccount that you can send pictures to, that are uploaded automatically to your account if you include the right number in the subject or mail (not sure about the details on the location of the PIN). Not secure, so they have shut it down today.
No - that's the best part of it. It's a "go to jail when I want you to" ticket for those in power. Sort of like in North Korea, China and the Mid-East. Except that in China and the Mid-East the people are getting restless about it.
Occam + transputer boards was a brilliant idea. Didn't work out so well in practice but that wasn't due to Occam. It's about the most elegant language I've ever seen.
However, writing an Occam compiler would run into the same sort of issues as the article describes, I fear. Unless CPU-cores take some of the transputer lessons to heart.
Sandboxing is a great concept and lots of people have proposed it. If I could restrict a program's access to just its own homedirectory and a designated datastorage location that would already be an amazing improvement.
I was bitten last year because a major website for my profession ran a twitter feed and someone managed to inject malicious code into that, and Chrome happily executed it, I just saw my PDFreader start up, then close again (thank you, Adobe). And I was infected right there.
Using my PC as springboard the hackers managed to plant another infected php-file on one of the sites I run. Good fun all around and it took me a while to find and clean everything. I've since switched to a non-standard PDF-reader that doesn't execute javascript.
Ah no... remember zovirax, the stuff that makes herpes simplex go away sooner? Thats basically an antiviral, and doctors are already pretty wary of the abuse of that type of antiviral (which is really a last resort medication) for curing a minor infection one day earlier. Same with anti-cold medication with antivirals. If these patients ever do get a real infection that needs antivirals, they're going to be in trouble much more than other people.
If raising cattle on antiobiotics is standard practice in most European countries, you can bet it's standard in the USA as well - they're producing for the same global market.
We have 10 casualties in the last 3 days in Germany because of EHEC, a superbug resistant to most antibiotics. About 1000 people are sick, and a handfull in critical condition. Cause: cucumbers contaminated with the strain. Likely contaminated with dung from a farm using antiobiotics as growth enhancer.
Two weeks ago, in The Netherlands, research was published showing that 100% (yes, 100% - every single last sample) of tested chicken meat in supermarkets was contaminated with resistant bacteria. These bacteria are now being found on tomatoes and cucumbers as well - a main ingredient in salads and usually consumed raw (cleaned, but raw). Oh yeah - this was also happening with eco-tomatoes. Apparently contaminated by using the cow dung from a non-biological farm.
It sounds like a pun, but we're in deep shit already. And you know what? If my kid were to die from this, I'd kill every meatfarmer I could find before they could stop me. And the veterinarians as well: only recently they are introducing laws banning vets from also selling antiobiotics. I mean: wtf? These people are supposed to make cows better, right? Not sell as much antibiotics as possible to shore up their income and damn the consequences.
And did you know that it is now standard practice to isolate farmers that enter the hospital? They are so often carriers of resistant strains (and die more of that as well) that they are a healthrisk to everyone.
People are dying already. Only the ones who stand to lose money are denying this - and then only because they thing they won't be affected.
No more so than accepting the agreement that paper currency holds a value does.
Paper was an arbitrary currency. Bitcoins are too. Their value depends only in how much trust people put in the economy behind it - and a whole host of countries is currently providing examples for that statement.
Yep. I remember vividly that I went into my first course (math, ofcourse) and the professor told us that we'd be doing 5 weeks of repeating all of the math we'd had at high school. Everything after would be new, and at the same speed. And he was right. If you hadn't done math, you were in a world of hurt.
Cobol survived for much longer than 30 years, so if that is the argument I expect most universities to teach Cobol. And I actually apply automata theory regularly because that's the way most workflows are modelled.
But to put this in perspective: after 20 years, the thing that has been of most use to me is the fact that learning hard subjects expanded and trained my brains, so I could acquire everything else I needed to know on my own.
In The NEtherlands, the onliest CS courses where you get electronics (elective) and robotics (elective) as a mandatory part of CS is in the so-called Technical Universities that are oriented towards physics and hardware. I studied CS at a university that prided itself in being home to the national institute of Mathematics teaching standards. The faculty was called "Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science". So to me your CS sounds like its hardware-oriented and while you can certainly opt to go that route, it is by no means the standard.
On that note: if I read about 200K debts: why don't American students come to Holland to study Comp Sci? Price is much lower, standards are higher in most cases (we have a lof of Nobelprize winners as well, even as recent as last year) and the country ranks as one of the nicest places to live in. If you study in Amsterdam you get taught by Andy Tanenbaum - which should certainly satisfy all requirements regarding learning more about operating systems, compilers and emulators:)
In this discussion there are two types of people replying: those who see the avalanche coming and either seek shelter or use dynamite to trigger it when harmless, and those who say "hah, I've always skied down this slope and I'm going to finish my run no matter what!".
The main problem I keep encountering in discussions like this is the idea that security on the client is all that matters. It's not. It's not even the beginning. It's a nice extra to have because it reduces your IT-costs *when you're the one fixing equipment*. When you're no longer responsible for the equipment, it doesn't even matter if it gets rooted. You just have to make sure that the second something fishy happens, the rooted equipment is quarantined. There are solutions (hard- and software) out there that can do that automatically.
Most universities (i'm currently consulting for one) have solved this problem years ago, together with hardware and software vendors. Why can't you?
So the question becomes: how can we support our CEO with a mobile solution that is compliant with all rules and regulations we have in place. And that is (I think) the right question. For the CEO. But for large companies, giving their employees mobile phones is expensive, and if they already own one, why not allow them to use it?
So to rephrase the question: which mobile solutions are acceptable for whom, and under what conditions? And how can the IT department support their company with that question? Is it a question of providing gateways and good firewalls? Do we need secure proxies for mobile access? Do we need subsets of data that are less dangerous if they fall into the wrong hands? Do we need to secure the phone, or just guard the data really well? And answering each of these questions, and providing solutions for them, should also help to raise our overall level of security for the company as well.
Unfortunately, the first response from a lot of people seems to be "how can we prevent this from happening", which is IMO the wrong question to ask and the short road to being outsourced. This whole tidal wave is an *opportunity* for IT, not a threat.
If you are in a market where qualified technical workers are a dime a dozen, sure, you can try and do it your way. But if you do it like this you will find both recruitment AND retainment increasingly problematic. And HR *will* put the blame on IT, if they're not completely stupid. Given the shortages in qualified IT-workers, this movement towards more personalized devices on the network will have to be accomodated.
Consider it an opportunity to secure your network for real. Come on: having the security on the clients instead of the servers is one of the factors in network penetrations. And if you say you don't trust the clients, then what's the difference with the new situation? So treat it as a chance to boost server and internal core network security. On HR's budget.
So your CEO walks in with his new iPhone and wants to access his mobile reporting solution. The one containing all his sales information. You're telling him he can't? And if the CEO has it, his underlings will have it a few weeks later. They still outrank you. You're going to tell them they can't have it? And when all the managers have it, how long will it be before EVERYONE has access?
Seriously: start preparing, because the tidal wave is coming. It is already happening. 17% of companies now have a "bring-your-own-device" policy in place (a quote from 2 weeks ago by Claudia Imhoff, she spoke at a BI-event I was at). Some provide a choice: company laptop with maintenance or your own device but you do the maintenance. This will grow rapidly.
Philips was migrating to this policy about 5 years ago. Big companies I'm working for are already preparing for that transition. The ones who are not, will find it very hard to satisfy their interal customers. They will also find retainment of new workers a big problem.
Ofcourse this is difficult: it is most difficult for those companies that still have software in place with dedicated clientsoftware, beyond MS Office. Companies (like a few where I worked) that started moving away from that and to webbased apps, are in good position to actually profit from this move.
The artist and Tyson explicitly arranged a copyright transfer to the tattoo artist, which is why he has a rather strong case at the moment: he can show a contract between him and Tyson giving him the rights to everything that's based on that tattoo. The contract also predates the movie by several years.
Now you can argue about the silliness of copyright on this, but he is an artist and copyright does work this way, even if the canvas is a person. And Warner Brothers is about the last entity in the world that can claim ignorance on copyright issues, so they're probably going to try and get a deal, because if it goes to trial I wouldn't give them much chance. Not when every good defense will also backfire onto your own use of copyright to intimidate people.
All in all: good news. I hope the artist takes them to the cleaners. Perhaps that will teach them something about why abusing copyright is similar to wielding a bioweapon: it tends to backfire.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't have to patent everything. Option 2 can be defended against quite nicely by publishing your ideas in an official magazine or publication, creating prior art with well established credentials and timelines.
Philips used to have their own publication especially set up for this (may even still have it), were they would just publish interesting ideas that they considered too costly to patent, but too dangerous to allow others to patent it against them. You don't need to patent something to defend, you just have to make it impossible for others to win lawsuits against you when you ignore their stupid patents.
First, your facts.
- You claim 4000 patients a year are euthanized. That's not true: the peak year was in 2009, with 2500 cases. It rises by about 200 a year, mostly in line with the rise of the age in the population as a whole. This is still WAY down from 1995 when the number was around 3600. Better palliative care and pain treatments have reduced the need for euthanasia.
- Every year more than 10000 people request euthanasia. Two thirds of those applications are denied outright. The others are granted but not everyone then uses the opportunity. Some people die before they get euthanasia, others reconsider.
- A large part of what you quote is outright untrue. It is a clear warning sign that most of the articles you link don't provide citations.
- The article in the Weekly Standard is written by a fellow of the Discovery Institute, best known for its promotion of "Intelligent Design" creationism.
All in all, your view is biased, based on hyperbole, and is in need of re-evaluation.
When querying for anti-euthanasia cards you will find exactly ONE hit in the Dutch language, from someone who asks if you can get one, on a forum. That's it. All other articles mentioning this stem from a publication on a catholic website. Not a Dutch one either. It's extreme rightwing scaremongering, using the fact that most people can't read Dutch to spread FUD about the issue.
The amount of force wasn't justified. How many people beating up one guy on the ground? And while an arrest would not have been the issue, the beating they gave him certainly was an issue. And from there on it was a classic case of the loaded powderkeg meeting the proverbial spark.
yfrog uses a special mailaccount that you can send pictures to, that are uploaded automatically to your account if you include the right number in the subject or mail (not sure about the details on the location of the PIN). Not secure, so they have shut it down today.
No - that's the best part of it. It's a "go to jail when I want you to" ticket for those in power. Sort of like in North Korea, China and the Mid-East. Except that in China and the Mid-East the people are getting restless about it.
Occam + transputer boards was a brilliant idea. Didn't work out so well in practice but that wasn't due to Occam. It's about the most elegant language I've ever seen.
However, writing an Occam compiler would run into the same sort of issues as the article describes, I fear. Unless CPU-cores take some of the transputer lessons to heart.
Sandboxing is a great concept and lots of people have proposed it. If I could restrict a program's access to just its own homedirectory and a designated datastorage location that would already be an amazing improvement.
I was bitten last year because a major website for my profession ran a twitter feed and someone managed to inject malicious code into that, and Chrome happily executed it, I just saw my PDFreader start up, then close again (thank you, Adobe). And I was infected right there.
Using my PC as springboard the hackers managed to plant another infected php-file on one of the sites I run. Good fun all around and it took me a while to find and clean everything. I've since switched to a non-standard PDF-reader that doesn't execute javascript.
Sometimes you're just SOL.
Ah no... remember zovirax, the stuff that makes herpes simplex go away sooner? Thats basically an antiviral, and doctors are already pretty wary of the abuse of that type of antiviral (which is really a last resort medication) for curing a minor infection one day earlier. Same with anti-cold medication with antivirals. If these patients ever do get a real infection that needs antivirals, they're going to be in trouble much more than other people.
If raising cattle on antiobiotics is standard practice in most European countries, you can bet it's standard in the USA as well - they're producing for the same global market.
We have 10 casualties in the last 3 days in Germany because of EHEC, a superbug resistant to most antibiotics. About 1000 people are sick, and a handfull in critical condition. Cause: cucumbers contaminated with the strain. Likely contaminated with dung from a farm using antiobiotics as growth enhancer.
Two weeks ago, in The Netherlands, research was published showing that 100% (yes, 100% - every single last sample) of tested chicken meat in supermarkets was contaminated with resistant bacteria. These bacteria are now being found on tomatoes and cucumbers as well - a main ingredient in salads and usually consumed raw (cleaned, but raw). Oh yeah - this was also happening with eco-tomatoes. Apparently contaminated by using the cow dung from a non-biological farm.
It sounds like a pun, but we're in deep shit already. And you know what? If my kid were to die from this, I'd kill every meatfarmer I could find before they could stop me. And the veterinarians as well: only recently they are introducing laws banning vets from also selling antiobiotics. I mean: wtf? These people are supposed to make cows better, right? Not sell as much antibiotics as possible to shore up their income and damn the consequences.
And did you know that it is now standard practice to isolate farmers that enter the hospital? They are so often carriers of resistant strains (and die more of that as well) that they are a healthrisk to everyone.
People are dying already. Only the ones who stand to lose money are denying this - and then only because they thing they won't be affected.
Man look at all we've lost since then ...
Lots of hair, mostly.
Oh dear, sounds like it may burst at any time now, then! :)
No more so than accepting the agreement that paper currency holds a value does.
Paper was an arbitrary currency. Bitcoins are too. Their value depends only in how much trust people put in the economy behind it - and a whole host of countries is currently providing examples for that statement.
I'm not involved but would like to know more. Care to enlighten me?
Yep. I remember vividly that I went into my first course (math, ofcourse) and the professor told us that we'd be doing 5 weeks of repeating all of the math we'd had at high school. Everything after would be new, and at the same speed. And he was right. If you hadn't done math, you were in a world of hurt.
Cobol survived for much longer than 30 years, so if that is the argument I expect most universities to teach Cobol. And I actually apply automata theory regularly because that's the way most workflows are modelled.
But to put this in perspective: after 20 years, the thing that has been of most use to me is the fact that learning hard subjects expanded and trained my brains, so I could acquire everything else I needed to know on my own.
In The NEtherlands, the onliest CS courses where you get electronics (elective) and robotics (elective) as a mandatory part of CS is in the so-called Technical Universities that are oriented towards physics and hardware. I studied CS at a university that prided itself in being home to the national institute of Mathematics teaching standards. The faculty was called "Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science". So to me your CS sounds like its hardware-oriented and while you can certainly opt to go that route, it is by no means the standard.
On that note: if I read about 200K debts: why don't American students come to Holland to study Comp Sci? Price is much lower, standards are higher in most cases (we have a lof of Nobelprize winners as well, even as recent as last year) and the country ranks as one of the nicest places to live in. If you study in Amsterdam you get taught by Andy Tanenbaum - which should certainly satisfy all requirements regarding learning more about operating systems, compilers and emulators :)
Because they relied on end-point security. Which is going the way of the dodo, and rightly so.
Sorry but you have the wrong analogy.
In this discussion there are two types of people replying: those who see the avalanche coming and either seek shelter or use dynamite to trigger it when harmless, and those who say "hah, I've always skied down this slope and I'm going to finish my run no matter what!".
The main problem I keep encountering in discussions like this is the idea that security on the client is all that matters. It's not. It's not even the beginning. It's a nice extra to have because it reduces your IT-costs *when you're the one fixing equipment*. When you're no longer responsible for the equipment, it doesn't even matter if it gets rooted. You just have to make sure that the second something fishy happens, the rooted equipment is quarantined. There are solutions (hard- and software) out there that can do that automatically.
Most universities (i'm currently consulting for one) have solved this problem years ago, together with hardware and software vendors. Why can't you?
So the question becomes: how can we support our CEO with a mobile solution that is compliant with all rules and regulations we have in place. And that is (I think) the right question. For the CEO. But for large companies, giving their employees mobile phones is expensive, and if they already own one, why not allow them to use it?
So to rephrase the question: which mobile solutions are acceptable for whom, and under what conditions? And how can the IT department support their company with that question? Is it a question of providing gateways and good firewalls? Do we need secure proxies for mobile access? Do we need subsets of data that are less dangerous if they fall into the wrong hands? Do we need to secure the phone, or just guard the data really well? And answering each of these questions, and providing solutions for them, should also help to raise our overall level of security for the company as well.
Unfortunately, the first response from a lot of people seems to be "how can we prevent this from happening", which is IMO the wrong question to ask and the short road to being outsourced. This whole tidal wave is an *opportunity* for IT, not a threat.
If you are in a market where qualified technical workers are a dime a dozen, sure, you can try and do it your way. But if you do it like this you will find both recruitment AND retainment increasingly problematic. And HR *will* put the blame on IT, if they're not completely stupid. Given the shortages in qualified IT-workers, this movement towards more personalized devices on the network will have to be accomodated.
Consider it an opportunity to secure your network for real. Come on: having the security on the clients instead of the servers is one of the factors in network penetrations. And if you say you don't trust the clients, then what's the difference with the new situation? So treat it as a chance to boost server and internal core network security. On HR's budget.
So your CEO walks in with his new iPhone and wants to access his mobile reporting solution. The one containing all his sales information. You're telling him he can't?
And if the CEO has it, his underlings will have it a few weeks later. They still outrank you. You're going to tell them they can't have it? And when all the managers have it, how long will it be before EVERYONE has access?
Seriously: start preparing, because the tidal wave is coming. It is already happening. 17% of companies now have a "bring-your-own-device" policy in place (a quote from 2 weeks ago by Claudia Imhoff, she spoke at a BI-event I was at). Some provide a choice: company laptop with maintenance or your own device but you do the maintenance. This will grow rapidly.
Philips was migrating to this policy about 5 years ago. Big companies I'm working for are already preparing for that transition. The ones who are not, will find it very hard to satisfy their interal customers. They will also find retainment of new workers a big problem.
Ofcourse this is difficult: it is most difficult for those companies that still have software in place with dedicated clientsoftware, beyond MS Office. Companies (like a few where I worked) that started moving away from that and to webbased apps, are in good position to actually profit from this move.
The artist and Tyson explicitly arranged a copyright transfer to the tattoo artist, which is why he has a rather strong case at the moment: he can show a contract between him and Tyson giving him the rights to everything that's based on that tattoo. The contract also predates the movie by several years.
Now you can argue about the silliness of copyright on this, but he is an artist and copyright does work this way, even if the canvas is a person. And Warner Brothers is about the last entity in the world that can claim ignorance on copyright issues, so they're probably going to try and get a deal, because if it goes to trial I wouldn't give them much chance. Not when every good defense will also backfire onto your own use of copyright to intimidate people.
All in all: good news. I hope the artist takes them to the cleaners. Perhaps that will teach them something about why abusing copyright is similar to wielding a bioweapon: it tends to backfire.