Yup, that works. But only after at least 20 years (often more) of extortion level pricing that puts a great many peoples health at risk especially lower income people who can't afford to pay off politicians to pass laws allowing them to get rich extorting money from people by threatening their lives.
organizing and sifting through thousands of patents to pick out ones for further review by humans....
Give me a break. Have you ever read a patent? There's this huge disconnect in that patents are written by lawyers for things developed by computer geeks. The languages these 2 groups speak have NOTHING in common.
Name an example of where that is actually working with the pharm industry....still waiting....
Name one example where capitalism is working in the pharma industry. Hell, name a place where capitalism exists in the pharma industry. It might be nice to give at least some form capitalism a try. Sure as hell couldn't be any worse than the corporate totalitarianism system currently in place.
When most of the time, it just doesn't matter. Such things are expensive, and in the long run it's cheaper to be fast and sloppy than slow and lean.
You have GOT to be in management. The vast majority of the cost of a software project go into the support. If it cost twice as much to do it right up front you will save 10 times that amount in support cost down the road. You can then spend that money evolving and improving your software rather than being forced to spend it trying to keep it going day to day. Attitudes like your's are the number one thing wrong with the software industry (well, besides software patients but that's another argument).
I suppose artists should be celebrating getting 0.00029c per play
Yeah you're golden...except for the hundreds of thousands you'll spend on lawyers trying to convince a jury that you don't infringe. Especially when both the Judge and the jury members probably still believe you have to have annual internet cleanings.
Since the vast majority is on Windows and DNS settings can be changed by the registry all one would have to do is post a zipped reg files to mediafire and the like and voila! The majority can bypass the bullshit as easy as "clicky clicky reboot".
Good point. And once again half such files would point to bogus DNS servers with obvious results.
typical users lack the expertise to select a different DNS server
is definitely a true statement.
What it is is bullshit. There would be directions floating around everywhere written at a second grade level on how to do it. If they couldn't figure it out from there they'd ask that tech suave friend or relative to do it. Linux would come pre-configured to hit OpenDNS.
Where in the problem lies is that half the instructions floating around would be pointing to compromised servers. Thus by eliminating the trust aspect that is key to DNS working and making DNSSEC essentially illegal they're going to create exactly what they claim to be trying to prevent, turning the internet into a lawless wild west. I find it absolutely amazing that congress is going to pass a law that will make implementing security measures on the internet illegal. Tells you how deep our government representatives are in the pockets of the RIAA/MPAA crowd.
You mean, other than the "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" part which you conveniently left out.
I didn't conveniently leave it out. That isn't the justification. That's the Constitutionally defined method. There's a difference between the two. The section you quote has nothing to do with why congress has the power to make laws "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". The reason why Congress can make such laws is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". If the laws don't do that they're unjustified.
Patents are there to allow the disclosure of what would otherwise have been a trade secret, *without* screwing over the person who invested time/money to discover it.
Although you're right that's how the current patent regime is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" it definitely doesn't serve that purpose in practice.
Cell phone patent thicket. You're in research. Think of where we'd be if all the money being wasted on lawyers was instead being invested in research on better cell phone technology. And it's gonna get worse once the Apple/Microsoft/RIM consortium get all the patents they bought from the Nortel dissolution sorted. All three are renowned for spending money on lawyers rather than on innovating.
Meanwhile, the Courts are continuing to defer to the expertise of the patent office, and are EXTREMELY "reluctant" to void patents.
The problem isn't reluctance but rather the current legal standard for invalidating a patent. Once a patent is granted it requires "clear and convincing" evidence to invalidate it. It's neigh impossible come up with "clear and convincing" evidence of anything relating to something like software that your average ditch digger or housewife, hell, or even your average judge has little understanding of. All the defense has to do is throw out just a little baffling bullshit and there goes "clear and convincing" out the door. And we won't even go into the expense involved which is unrecoverable even when the patent is invalidated.
I guess you have no understanding of patents... There were meant to protect inventors of things from those that would steal the ideas.
I guess you have no understanding of patents or at least not if you're from the US. They were never indented to protect inventors from anything. You might want to take just a little peek at Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution. The only Constitutional justification for granting monopoly rights to something is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Nothing in there about protecting inventors from anything. And seems to me that justification is pretty focused on the greater good of society.
They certainly don't have a sign that says "Install whatever you like", and the article makes no mention that he asked permission to install such software. In short, he broke the law, and installed software which 'spies' on people without their consent.
Wrong on so many levels. First they are publicly accessible machines on display specifically for public like people to use. So unless there was a sign saying "do not install software on these computers" I don't see how he did anything wrong. Second you need to show me the law that states it's illegal to install any software on private computers put out in public for use by the public. The only possible criminal case would be if he bypassed some sort of protection that was designed to prevent people from installing software. Otherwise at worse there might be a case for civil tort. Third unless you're a cop (being facetious here) it's not spying to take pictures of people in a public space. There is no expectation of privacy. And yes a privately owned store that allows the general public in is a public place.
This appears to be another case of a police agency bending a law that was intended for complete other purposes and that the people were assured that it would not be used this way when passed to prosecute someone because they simple didn't like what the person done. Just wait until PROTECT IP act gets passed. That one turns pretty much anyone who access the interenet into a criminal. But of course it won't be used to go after those people.
so if you make us a US territory it'll work out for everyone!
Except for the fact all three branches of the government here are making toilet paper out of the constitution so we have very little in the way of those protections left either.
No, it's not. It's here and at my offsite location (girlfriends house atm).
Also, good luck rotating 24TB of removable storage; with a budget of $6500
There's no rotation required. Once it's set up the only time you have to touch a drive is to replace a bad one. With well less than half that I could build a backup server with 24TB. For that much I could have RAID 1 on the backup server. Not only that but I can have backup images at, say, 4 hour intervals instantly available at any given moment. No trying to get an offsite tape hoping they get the right one or haven't lost it or get the right tape and find it's not readable. All of which I've had happen, mind you.
without awful wonky drivers (ala REV), or dealing with possibly changing drive letters (under windows), or changing device identifiers (under linux-- though as I have only once dealt with tape vs external HDD on linux, there may be a way around this that I am unaware of).
None of this is an issue. Setting up SAS drives with RAID and hot swapable is trivial in both cost and time these days and has been for years (unless you're stupid enough to use windows for this kind of thing). With tape you have to constantly check each and every tape to ensure it's still readable. You have to worry about transporting tapes. With 24 TB you could spend days searching tapes looking for some specific files in a certain state.
There are fortune 500 companies with $1mil tape libraries, and its not because their CTOs are incompetent;
I learned early in my career that going to tape was a terrifying experience. The odds of data lose at that point were always much higher than any level I would consider expectable. No company I've every worked for, and this includes at least one fortune 500 company at the time, had the time money or procedures in place to ensure secure good reliable backups on tape.
There is a reason that tape is used a lot-- it is cheap, it is very reliable, and it is trivial to swap out storage.
Have you ever hot swapped a hard drive? What could be more trivial than that. And I know you can't be claiming that tape drives and, god forbid, tapes are more reliable than hard drives. From my experience tape is way too far towards the unreliable side of the scale for my comfort.
Claiming that "tape is obsolete" just makes you look ignorant.
Hmmm...interesting. You call someone ignorant yet you have no understanding or knowledge of (by your own admission in some areas even) what they're talking about. But it's much easier to just declare everyone else ignorant rather than actually making an effort and learning about new things that might upset your world view. I'll say it again. Tape is obsolete. There are MUCH faster, cheaper, less labor intensive, more reliable and more secure ways to do backups if you take the time to learn all the new tools and options that are available.
Your backup solution sounds like it gets knocked out if someone introduces bogus data into your system; once the backup occurs, it overwrites all your good backups.
Ummm...you need to look at what cp -il and rsync -H does. Let's just say you're completely and utterly wrong to be polite about it. I have exact images of my systems at 4 hour intervals available instantly just by going to my backup drive. No need to go digging through tapes, spending hours looking through dumps and incrementals or trying to figure out if it's on an offsite tape. I suspect you're one of those people who set up the backups for one the companies I've worked for. Tape is utterly useless in this day and age. The volume of data is just to great for any tape system to be manageable. Incrementals on tape are impossible to manage for more than a very small amount of data in this day and age. Just the problem of consistently checking your tapes to ensure you got a good backup is outrageously expensive in manhours.
Until she dumps you and throws your backup drives out her window that is.
She'd have to come here and trash those also. That'd be a trick though. I have some 10 computers spread over several rooms here and a dozen or more external drives. I never said it was perfect. Just better than any enterprise setup I've seen. The malicious insider is always the toughest hole to cover in any data protection scheme.
Do you know how much it would cost to remote push 10TB of data once a week?
If you're generating 10TB of data weekly you're talking about an extremely rare situation that would require a specialized solution anyway since no backup solution out there can support that.
If your talking about have around 10TB of data total that's what rsync is for. You do fast incrementals on the local system over a high bandwith pipe (sata, sas). Then you have 2 options depending on your system requirements. You either run a daily rsync of one of the incermentals directly offsite over a separate network pipe or you dump to an onsite backup server over a fat network pipe and then do your remotes from there. You're isolating your backup bandwith from your production systems and with rsync only modified portions of files are sent greatly reducing bandwith requirements. The cp -il gives you point in time backup images (say every four hours) while only needing disk space for modified files to allow finely incremented recoveries (e.g. I need a file that was created Tuesday morning and deleted that afternoon). Your offsites are really only for major disaster like a plane crashing into the building. If you use an onsite backup server put it in a different location than your servers. That way when the server room floods you still have your incermentals.
All this can be done in a highly reliable fashion with a few hundred lines of bash scripting including the email warnings.
well, the a data center run by amazon certainly has more rigorous backup and maintenance schedules than anything I could personally come up with
It's funny. Not a single place I've worked at has had as good of backups as I have for my personal stuff. And I didn't even spend 6 figures for some useless enterprise backup solution. Some scripting, cp -al, rsync, dmcrypt, ssh and a remote PC at my girlfriends house and you have an incremental backup solution more secure and more robust than any enterprise solution I've ever seen, and it only cost a couple hundred for the drives.
If you haven't noticed, it is a war out there. The criminals don't have much to lose and figure on taking a few cops out with them.
Ummm, except violent crime rates, which I'm guessing includes shooting cops, have been radically dropping for the last 20 years. They're almost half what they were at the peak 20 years ago.
Now what was that you were saying about it being a war out there?
So you don't even believe in the justice system at all, even when this is an example of times when it actually *works*?
It worked? So those poor innocent people are given the choice of paying 1tens of thousands on lawyers to defend themselves or paying blood money to lawyers filing frivolous lawsuits whose sole intention is to extort money from people. That's a working legal system to you?
It's generally done in order to prevent the destruction of evidence. An "officer with a slip of paper" is the equivalent of saying "please wipe all your drives before coming to the door".
Gee, you think the guy might actually leave his house occasionally? How hard would it be to have 2 cops watch for him come back and catch him before he goes in the house. Or you could have a non-uniform cop serve the warrant. I really doubt the perp would wipe the drives every time someone knocked on the door. Holy cow. You just got in the guys house such that he can't wipe the drives and you didn't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars, destroy private property and risk both innocent and police lives.
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generic drugs.
Yup, that works. But only after at least 20 years (often more) of extortion level pricing that puts a great many peoples health at risk especially lower income people who can't afford to pay off politicians to pass laws allowing them to get rich extorting money from people by threatening their lives.
organizing and sifting through thousands of patents to pick out ones for further review by humans....
Give me a break. Have you ever read a patent? There's this huge disconnect in that patents are written by lawyers for things developed by computer geeks. The languages these 2 groups speak have NOTHING in common.
Name an example of where that is actually working with the pharm industry....still waiting....
Name one example where capitalism is working in the pharma industry. Hell, name a place where capitalism exists in the pharma industry. It might be nice to give at least some form capitalism a try. Sure as hell couldn't be any worse than the corporate totalitarianism system currently in place.
When most of the time, it just doesn't matter. Such things are expensive, and in the long run it's cheaper to be fast and sloppy than slow and lean.
You have GOT to be in management. The vast majority of the cost of a software project go into the support. If it cost twice as much to do it right up front you will save 10 times that amount in support cost down the road. You can then spend that money evolving and improving your software rather than being forced to spend it trying to keep it going day to day. Attitudes like your's are the number one thing wrong with the software industry (well, besides software patients but that's another argument).
I suppose artists should be celebrating getting 0.00029c per play
Yeah you're golden...except for the hundreds of thousands you'll spend on lawyers trying to convince a jury that you don't infringe. Especially when both the Judge and the jury members probably still believe you have to have annual internet cleanings.
Since the vast majority is on Windows and DNS settings can be changed by the registry all one would have to do is post a zipped reg files to mediafire and the like and voila! The majority can bypass the bullshit as easy as "clicky clicky reboot".
Good point. And once again half such files would point to bogus DNS servers with obvious results.
typical users lack the expertise to select a different DNS server
is definitely a true statement.
What it is is bullshit. There would be directions floating around everywhere written at a second grade level on how to do it. If they couldn't figure it out from there they'd ask that tech suave friend or relative to do it. Linux would come pre-configured to hit OpenDNS.
Where in the problem lies is that half the instructions floating around would be pointing to compromised servers. Thus by eliminating the trust aspect that is key to DNS working and making DNSSEC essentially illegal they're going to create exactly what they claim to be trying to prevent, turning the internet into a lawless wild west. I find it absolutely amazing that congress is going to pass a law that will make implementing security measures on the internet illegal. Tells you how deep our government representatives are in the pockets of the RIAA/MPAA crowd.
You mean, other than the "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" part which you conveniently left out.
I didn't conveniently leave it out. That isn't the justification. That's the Constitutionally defined method. There's a difference between the two. The section you quote has nothing to do with why congress has the power to make laws "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". The reason why Congress can make such laws is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". If the laws don't do that they're unjustified.
Patents are there to allow the disclosure of what would otherwise have been a trade secret, *without* screwing over the person who invested time/money to discover it.
Although you're right that's how the current patent regime is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" it definitely doesn't serve that purpose in practice.
Cell phone patent thicket. You're in research. Think of where we'd be if all the money being wasted on lawyers was instead being invested in research on better cell phone technology. And it's gonna get worse once the Apple/Microsoft/RIM consortium get all the patents they bought from the Nortel dissolution sorted. All three are renowned for spending money on lawyers rather than on innovating.
Meanwhile, the Courts are continuing to defer to the expertise of the patent office, and are EXTREMELY "reluctant" to void patents.
The problem isn't reluctance but rather the current legal standard for invalidating a patent. Once a patent is granted it requires "clear and convincing" evidence to invalidate it. It's neigh impossible come up with "clear and convincing" evidence of anything relating to something like software that your average ditch digger or housewife, hell, or even your average judge has little understanding of. All the defense has to do is throw out just a little baffling bullshit and there goes "clear and convincing" out the door. And we won't even go into the expense involved which is unrecoverable even when the patent is invalidated.
I guess you have no understanding of patents... There were meant to protect inventors of things from those that would steal the ideas.
I guess you have no understanding of patents or at least not if you're from the US. They were never indented to protect inventors from anything. You might want to take just a little peek at Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution. The only Constitutional justification for granting monopoly rights to something is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Nothing in there about protecting inventors from anything. And seems to me that justification is pretty focused on the greater good of society.
They certainly don't have a sign that says "Install whatever you like", and the article makes no mention that he asked permission to install such software. In short, he broke the law, and installed software which 'spies' on people without their consent.
Wrong on so many levels. First they are publicly accessible machines on display specifically for public like people to use. So unless there was a sign saying "do not install software on these computers" I don't see how he did anything wrong. Second you need to show me the law that states it's illegal to install any software on private computers put out in public for use by the public. The only possible criminal case would be if he bypassed some sort of protection that was designed to prevent people from installing software. Otherwise at worse there might be a case for civil tort. Third unless you're a cop (being facetious here) it's not spying to take pictures of people in a public space. There is no expectation of privacy. And yes a privately owned store that allows the general public in is a public place.
This appears to be another case of a police agency bending a law that was intended for complete other purposes and that the people were assured that it would not be used this way when passed to prosecute someone because they simple didn't like what the person done. Just wait until PROTECT IP act gets passed. That one turns pretty much anyone who access the interenet into a criminal. But of course it won't be used to go after those people.
so if you make us a US territory it'll work out for everyone!
Except for the fact all three branches of the government here are making toilet paper out of the constitution so we have very little in the way of those protections left either.
How come no one's mentioned USENET yet?
Being against western beliefs doesnt mean that he was Amish;
If that's the case they're gonna be really disappointed when they start going through all that data and all they find is porn.
all of your history is in one place.
No, it's not. It's here and at my offsite location (girlfriends house atm).
Also, good luck rotating 24TB of removable storage; with a budget of $6500
There's no rotation required. Once it's set up the only time you have to touch a drive is to replace a bad one. With well less than half that I could build a backup server with 24TB. For that much I could have RAID 1 on the backup server. Not only that but I can have backup images at, say, 4 hour intervals instantly available at any given moment. No trying to get an offsite tape hoping they get the right one or haven't lost it or get the right tape and find it's not readable. All of which I've had happen, mind you.
without awful wonky drivers (ala REV), or dealing with possibly changing drive letters (under windows), or changing device identifiers (under linux-- though as I have only once dealt with tape vs external HDD on linux, there may be a way around this that I am unaware of).
None of this is an issue. Setting up SAS drives with RAID and hot swapable is trivial in both cost and time these days and has been for years (unless you're stupid enough to use windows for this kind of thing). With tape you have to constantly check each and every tape to ensure it's still readable. You have to worry about transporting tapes. With 24 TB you could spend days searching tapes looking for some specific files in a certain state.
There are fortune 500 companies with $1mil tape libraries, and its not because their CTOs are incompetent;
I learned early in my career that going to tape was a terrifying experience. The odds of data lose at that point were always much higher than any level I would consider expectable. No company I've every worked for, and this includes at least one fortune 500 company at the time, had the time money or procedures in place to ensure secure good reliable backups on tape.
There is a reason that tape is used a lot-- it is cheap, it is very reliable, and it is trivial to swap out storage.
Have you ever hot swapped a hard drive? What could be more trivial than that. And I know you can't be claiming that tape drives and, god forbid, tapes are more reliable than hard drives. From my experience tape is way too far towards the unreliable side of the scale for my comfort.
Claiming that "tape is obsolete" just makes you look ignorant.
Hmmm...interesting. You call someone ignorant yet you have no understanding or knowledge of (by your own admission in some areas even) what they're talking about. But it's much easier to just declare everyone else ignorant rather than actually making an effort and learning about new things that might upset your world view. I'll say it again. Tape is obsolete. There are MUCH faster, cheaper, less labor intensive, more reliable and more secure ways to do backups if you take the time to learn all the new tools and options that are available.
Your backup solution sounds like it gets knocked out if someone introduces bogus data into your system; once the backup occurs, it overwrites all your good backups.
Ummm...you need to look at what cp -il and rsync -H does. Let's just say you're completely and utterly wrong to be polite about it. I have exact images of my systems at 4 hour intervals available instantly just by going to my backup drive. No need to go digging through tapes, spending hours looking through dumps and incrementals or trying to figure out if it's on an offsite tape. I suspect you're one of those people who set up the backups for one the companies I've worked for. Tape is utterly useless in this day and age. The volume of data is just to great for any tape system to be manageable. Incrementals on tape are impossible to manage for more than a very small amount of data in this day and age. Just the problem of consistently checking your tapes to ensure you got a good backup is outrageously expensive in manhours.
Until she dumps you and throws your backup drives out her window that is.
She'd have to come here and trash those also. That'd be a trick though. I have some 10 computers spread over several rooms here and a dozen or more external drives. I never said it was perfect. Just better than any enterprise setup I've seen. The malicious insider is always the toughest hole to cover in any data protection scheme.
Do you know how much it would cost to remote push 10TB of data once a week?
If you're generating 10TB of data weekly you're talking about an extremely rare situation that would require a specialized solution anyway since no backup solution out there can support that.
If your talking about have around 10TB of data total that's what rsync is for. You do fast incrementals on the local system over a high bandwith pipe (sata, sas). Then you have 2 options depending on your system requirements. You either run a daily rsync of one of the incermentals directly offsite over a separate network pipe or you dump to an onsite backup server over a fat network pipe and then do your remotes from there. You're isolating your backup bandwith from your production systems and with rsync only modified portions of files are sent greatly reducing bandwith requirements. The cp -il gives you point in time backup images (say every four hours) while only needing disk space for modified files to allow finely incremented recoveries (e.g. I need a file that was created Tuesday morning and deleted that afternoon). Your offsites are really only for major disaster like a plane crashing into the building. If you use an onsite backup server put it in a different location than your servers. That way when the server room floods you still have your incermentals.
All this can be done in a highly reliable fashion with a few hundred lines of bash scripting including the email warnings.
well, the a data center run by amazon certainly has more rigorous backup and maintenance schedules than anything I could personally come up with
It's funny. Not a single place I've worked at has had as good of backups as I have for my personal stuff. And I didn't even spend 6 figures for some useless enterprise backup solution. Some scripting, cp -al, rsync, dmcrypt, ssh and a remote PC at my girlfriends house and you have an incremental backup solution more secure and more robust than any enterprise solution I've ever seen, and it only cost a couple hundred for the drives.
and the investigation continues
Except it seems they forgot this part. Unless a military style raid is considered "investigating" these days.
If you haven't noticed, it is a war out there. The criminals don't have much to lose and figure on taking a few cops out with them.
Ummm, except violent crime rates, which I'm guessing includes shooting cops, have been radically dropping for the last 20 years. They're almost half what they were at the peak 20 years ago.
Now what was that you were saying about it being a war out there?
So you don't even believe in the justice system at all, even when this is an example of times when it actually *works*?
It worked? So those poor innocent people are given the choice of paying 1tens of thousands on lawyers to defend themselves or paying blood money to lawyers filing frivolous lawsuits whose sole intention is to extort money from people. That's a working legal system to you?
It's generally done in order to prevent the destruction of evidence. An "officer with a slip of paper" is the equivalent of saying "please wipe all your drives before coming to the door".
Gee, you think the guy might actually leave his house occasionally? How hard would it be to have 2 cops watch for him come back and catch him before he goes in the house. Or you could have a non-uniform cop serve the warrant. I really doubt the perp would wipe the drives every time someone knocked on the door. Holy cow. You just got in the guys house such that he can't wipe the drives and you didn't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars, destroy private property and risk both innocent and police lives.