Each time a Dotcom story comes up we get exactly the same type of post from an AC, so he obviously was hit personally by the guy.
But the problem is he's obviously very biased against him, if you read what Dotcom was actually guilty of then much of it is not that big a deal. Where he was done for fraud for example he really did nothing different to what many investment organisations get away with every day, his problem is that he was a little guy with no government links to allow him to get away with it unlike the large investment organisations.
People lose money all the time on the stock market getting duped on bad deals, they have to - that's how others make their profit. This guy needs to get over it, it's tiresome.
No, it's that many muslims in Western society, particularly in the UK have a different view on how society should act, behave, and be run, based on the teachings of their faith that they have been brought up with.
The problem is that that conflicts with Western ideals, for example, many muslims believe that females should be covered up completely whilst in public, but men need not be, and this conflicts with the Western view that women should be treated as equals to men.
Similarly, some muslim communities in the UK have created their own Shariah courts, which is fine, that's upto said communities, but there has been a push to give them legal status and that's where conflict is created, because Shariah law often goes against the very principles of western justice principles.
This isn't a my god vs. your god debate, I agree other religions have and cause their own problems. Certainly some of the African religious practices we've seen carried to the UK have been downright evil being the root of some of the most horrific child abuse cases we've seen in this country. Christianity has always tried to influence government and law in our country often for the worse in trying to decrease women's rights and oppress homosexuals treating them as lesser people who deserve less rights. I think this is a pattern repeated in most western nations.
Right I see where you're struggling now, the problem is that you're speculating about a completely different problem.
The issue is that you're talking about a broken, or possibly broken legal system, which is all well and good, but that's not the discussion here.
Importantly, the reason why your change of subject is irrelevant is because it's that way whatever patent system you have an so has no relevance. It doesn't matter if a garage inventor doesn't have to defend his patent immediately or not, he'll still be the little guy so I don't even know why you've suddenly changed to this topic. I can only assume it's because as I say, you're one of those people who doesn't like being wrong, so when they realise they've lost the argument, they simply try and change the argument. That's fine if you want to do that, but it's not a game I play.
Fundamentally your change of subject doesn't change the fact that a patent has a fixed worth and that that fixed worth remains the same whether said patent is owned by a company or an individual, and defending that fixed worth will remain a question of how much a company or individual feels is worth investing in protecting that fixed worth. That much is a constant, any arguments about other elements of the US' broken legal system are not what I (or anyone else) have been discussing and nothing you mentioned applies specifically to the suggestion I originally made but affect the law and patents in general because the US legal system as a whole is stacked in favour of the big guy vs. the little guy regardless.
It seems in your apparent anger you've completely lost sight of the discussion at hand.
I think you should go and lie down, you now seem not only confused but rather angry too.
If you'd like to elaborate on the problem you're having with this concept then maybe I can explain it to you but whilst you spout insults and vagueness I can only assume that you're one of those people who doesn't like being wrong.
"The burning poppies arrest was made "under section 127 of the Communications Act" - from 2003."
I'm not terribly sure what your point is here? The date the law came into place is irrelevant as I was merely commenting on when it started being used for this purpose.
"You do realize that all those generalizations make your statement either a phenomenal pile of bullshit - or a conscious lie."
You do realise that the problem is that you've read far more hatred into my statement than is actually there? are you suggesting the West hasn't had a battle to get to grips with the issues raised by the Islamic faith and the culture surrounding it? Are you seriously suggesting that as the world has become globalised and the West has become more multicultural that everything has gone perfectly?
If you believe that you're so far lost in the world of political correctness in pretending there aren't issues that you've clearly lost all sight of the real world.
Still I'm not really sure what your point is as you then seemed to basically go on to agree with me for the most part. Were you just looking for a fight for the sake of it, or what? I think your mistake may have been in deciding to enforce some kind of political correctness where it made no sense to.
I'm a live and let live type of person, I don't really like religion and I think it's foolish to believe in such tosh nowadays, but if people want to then that's their choice. I'm not going to close my eyes, cover my ears, and pretend that there isn't a conflict of ideologies going on between the west and Islam however.
It's got nothing to do with sifting through other people's patents - they'll automatically be invalidated by your prior art if someone files something they shouldn't have.
It's about whether someone is using YOUR patent and that's about keeping an eye on the markets where your patent is relevant.
You know, pointing out that a particular issue results from a governments misguided attempts at tackling the different value systems between a society and the views of certain members of a particular religion doesn't make someone Islamophobic.
Nor do I think Christianity deserves a free pass, if anything it's Christianity that's create this mindset in government of wrapping everyone in cotton wool in the hope that they don't hurt themselves by offending each other.
No, I'm not really a fan of religion in general, I guess you could even call me a religionophobe, because yes, religion does indeed scare me. It scares me that in this day and age with all the things humanity has achieved that grown adults can still believe and even kill over the content of written fiction.
Yeah, I guess he's learning though. I mean, he's just learnt the basic principle of business that if a company has a sudden increase in costs of doing business, like say, a flawed $1.05bn patent verdict against them, then they have to up their prices to make up for it.
Don't worry Tim, soon you'll get to learn about other business things like redundancy terms, but at least being in the position you're in you'll probably also get to learn all about golden parachutes too which will be nice for you.
Of course huge corporations can allocate more, but the result is that it costs them more.
The point is that whatever size you are, the cost of defending the patent is either worth it, or it isn't, and whatever size you are, the more time you spend defending a particular patent, the more it will cost you. The question is, is it worth it?
If a small garage guy feels he can make $1million a year from his patent, he can just as well hire a few staff to chase it for him for that value as a large company can because of the implicit value of it, but it's not worth a large company paying 20 lawyers to defend it, because then the cost of it just isn't worth it.
I wasn't referring to British symbols per-se but burning anything people may deem offensive - in this case, poppys, which would clearly not fall under treason laws.
Use of the law for that sort of thing has most definitely come about in response to the religious hatred laws because it specifically came about when there was a showdown between the EDL and the "Muslims against crusades" group:
Size of business has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of what you invent and how much time you want to spend enforcing it.
Or are you saying garage inventors should be able to just patent shit and screw large and small businesses alike out of cash without ever actually offering anything of value to society?
Nothing I said prevents a garage inventor protecting his/her patent, the only question is whether they feel their patent is worth their time protecting.
You can argue businesses have more resources to pay to protect their patents but they still have to pay for staff to do exactly that. If they similarly have a patent that is going to require someone to spend 5 days a week looking after it's protection then they've still got to hire a full time staff member for it to be worth it, just as a garage inventor must decide if his/her patent is important enough and will bring them enough income to justify dedicating themselves to full time.
This is in part, part of the West's battle with Islam, and is not the first time this has been done.
The government introduced a law some time ago against inciting religious hatred and so forth to prevent people burning Korans and starting a riot amongst muslims in the UK as a result.
The problem is then that some of the Islamic extremists in the UK started burning things like poppies on remembrance day, and burning the British flag and so forth. Obviously a lot of people were pissed off at the hypocrisy of this, so the Police then started enforcing the law against this sort of burning too.
Whether the guy in this case is an Islamic extremist or just a general dick who knows, but that's why we're at the point were at.
Honestly, the lesson is that this is why we can't create laws against burning the Koran - because it is fucking hypocritical for there to be protection against burning something one group holds sacred, but not things other groups hold sacred and having people hence burn them. This really is a case of the slippery slope in action - what started out as a noble plan to prevent anger in UK's Islamic population over the burning of a Koran, has now created awareness of assholes everywhere burning all sorts of different things due to it getting in the news and resulted in a complete waste of police time, time and time again.
I don't blame the police, they're simply enforcing the law fairly and making it clear that it's a two way street. The problem is that in this case, the law shouldn't exist at all whether it's for the Koran, a flag, or a poppy, but fundamentally it's got to be one or the other, either you can burn poppies, flags, and Korans, or you can burn none of them. Currently it's the latter case, so at least the law is being applied consistently and fairly which is more than can be said for a lot of laws.
"Because most inventors have other things to do with their time then comb through every new technological application"
As I see it it's quite simple. If you don't feel you have time to protect your patent then you obviously don't put enough value in it to believe it's worth protecting.
Look, either your patent is such a unique and cutting edge innovation that you want to protect it and want to make money from it, or it's not. You can't just patent some trivial little turd of an idea that others have/will come up with independently and expect the money come flowing through to you for it.
The "I don't have time" argument is bollocks, the time you invest in protecting your patent should be relative to the value you place in that patent. If you think it's a super patent then spend your life protecting it and milking money from it, if you think it's marginally useful then go after uses as soon as they're obviously there - i.e. PS3 controllers. If you don't value it at all then don't enforce it and let people use it how they want by letting it expire as trademarks do. That's how it should work. The patenting of turds and just sitting around waiting for them to mature and then attacking has to stop. Patents shouldn't be a license to cash in left and right 17 years after a patent was filed for some arbitrary idea no matter how little effort went into it, they should be worth bothering to protect and if they're not, they shouldn't be patentable ideas in the first place.
Besides, the test for trademark genericisation is if your trademark has entered common usage, if your patent has come close to entering common usage across a wide range of users like SSL has and you haven't noticed and bothered to defend it then laziness has nothing to do with it. That's apathy towards enforcement, and apathy shouldn't be an excuse to be able to turn around many years later and suddenly decide to cash in either.
Personally I think the point there is that if someone files a patent, and doesn't enforce anything about it, then someone else buys it 17 years later by which time due to lack of enforcement around it such that everyone has used it it's become part of essential every day tools, then some dick shouldn't then be able to start suing over it.
In this respect patents should act like trademarks - if you don't defend against illegal use of it at or near the time of infringement and as a result everyone starts using tools built upon it, then it should be invalidated.
This idea that you can file a patent, sit quietly on it, and wait until something related to it has become massively widely used and THEN you sue everyone left, right and centre, is fucking absurd.
The other point is that patent terms are supposed to expire after 20 years. As such can anyone tell me why this guy has another 6 years to sue? Is this about legal limits and he is effectively suing for past infringement even though the patent should've expired 3 years ago? If so then that's another change that needs making to the law - you either sue when the patent is valid, or you don't sue at all.
"You clearly aren't an engineer and have never written any part of a finite element code. They're not written by programmers, they're written by mathematicians and engineers."
Re-read my post. You'll note I pointed out my degree was in Mathematics so thank you for admitting that Engineers like yourself need people like me to even be able to do your profession.
You're right, I'm not an engineer. But I do have the underlying knowledge on which their entire profession is based to see why their view of themselves is nothing more than snobbery.
Amusingly, I even assisted in the development of a number of patents that were due to be applied for, precisely because the engineering team did need someone with the level of rigorous mathematical background I have, and that they didn't.
So have fun with your professional engineering title, I'll enjoy not having mine, yet still being more competent at the most complex part of engineering than many engineers - that of developing, using, and implementing software tools that utilise the math that underpins everything they do.
So exactly like the Savile investigation that ITV was praised for a few weeks beforehand for whilst the BBC was criticised for not publishing their version of over those exact fears you mean?
The only difference seems to be that ITV was lucky enough that their accusers had got it right, whilst the BBC's had got it wrong. ITV even named the accused, something BBC had the journalistic integrity not to do based on the level of proof it had.
People seem to have short memories though, ITV was being criticised in the exact same way before during and after it's report on Savile, with suggestions they should never have broadcast it. Luckily for them a small army of other victims then came forward. Had ITV listened to those criticising them over the show before they even aired it and hence cancelled it like the BBC did then the 300 victims to date wouldn't have had the opportunity to finally see a proper investigation into the abuse of them.
This is a lose-lose situation for the BBC, they're being told they were wrong whatever they did. Not broadcasting an investigation based on accusations? Wrong. Broadcasting an investigation based on accusations? Wrong - even where they took the precaution not to name.
The worst part is that McAlpine wasn't even anywhere near the top of the list of names in these internet rumours. This means if some of those other names are in fact guilty then McAlpine linking himself so publicly to this whilst being able to prove he was innocent by having a log of where he was and what he was doing 30 years ago has pulled a pretty effective shield up for those who may well in fact have been guilty. Certainly at least one dead Tory has been linked to this much more strongly but now we can't talk about it nor can anyone investigate it because "Oh look, the BBC was wrong about one person, it's DG even resigned, so the whole story must be false!".
But the problem is that the ITV investigation was of exactly the same standard of journalistic integrity as the newsnight investigation - arguably lower in fact because it outright named Savile, and it too was criticised in the same way this one was until other people started coming forward.
The problem is you either do investigations like this, being cautious not to name names if you only have accusations and not solid evidence and succeed in exposing a many decades long coverup, or you don't report it at all and the problem remains covered up.
I hope McAlpine doesn't win, the BBC did everything right by not naming. If he wins then it basically writes off any ability for journalists to investigate anything whether that's MPs expenses, phone hacking, Jimmy Savile, or whatever else - it'd mean the danger of getting it wrong would simply be too high to risk even bothering investigating it in the first place.
The problem is that the only person to so prominently and publicly tie his name to the report was Lord McAlpine himself.
The way before it all came out I was intrigued to see who the supposed politicians are and I searched online. After a fair bit of searching I was able to find two deceased Tory MPs named, and two living Tory MPs named. Neither of these however were McAlpine.
There's something fishy going on. Maybe McAlpine really is guilty of something like this and is trying to take the fight to those trying to expose it? Maybe McAlpine decided to throw himself into the line of fire, knowing he was innocent, to try an discredit the investigation because him and his friends were scared of what it might really uncover and expose? Or maybe McAlpine is simply more paranoid than the other MPs named online and hence the only one who decided to go Streisand on the issue and link himself so publicly to it.
Either way the BBC cannot be held accountable for online speculation. It's stupid and is being used by Murdoch and friends to attack the BBC in revenge for it's thorough coverage of phone hacking and also to deflect attention away from the underlying issue - child abuse by high profile figures.
Thankfully, from public comments I've read on the issue it seems most of the public can see it for what it is, so for all the talk of BBC this, BBC that, most people recognise it's not the BBC that's the problem. It's just a shame the BBC itself hasn't realised this and hence stood up for itself - not naming people when you don't have solid enough evidence, but you do have some potential evidence is the proper journalistic way of doing things. They did everything right, certainly much more so than say, Philip Schofield and compared to people like Jeremy Hunt and the Murdochs who appeared to lie under oath during the Leveson enquiry it's not as if they have done anything criminal, yet those people all got promotions. It's all very well for the Tories to demand BBC resignations, but how can they do that with a straight face when the politicians at the centre of the phone hacking scandal are still in their jobs and getting paid more than ever?
Entwistle shouldn't have resigned, he should've just pointed out the double standards, about how he was being told off only a week before by the same MPs for not broadcasting the Savile investigation because all they had was say-so whilst ITV did broadcast a similar investigation with equally weak evidence as Newsnight had this time around (i.e. relying on people's say so) and yet ITV outright named Savile despite the same level of evidence. Either you demand stronger standards of evidence, or you stick to not naming when you don't have said evidence - the BBC has been told it's wrong whatever it does, it's critics are enforcing double standards. The only flipside is that because Entwistle clearly didn't have the strength of character to stand up for the organisation then maybe it's best he does go - it's just a shame it allowed the organisations critics to say "We were right, now let's sweep this child abuse issue back under the carpet and stick to focussing on celebs, not politicians who may have also been involved.".
Here in sensible land, we simply solve that problem by suing people regardless of what their fucking title is if they've been incompetent and let the courts figure out blame.
Does this mean in Canada, say a labourer that doesn't have a protected title is immune from being sued if they build a dodgy building that collapses and kills people regardless of what the Engineer said to do? Does the engineer get sued anyway because of his magical title?
This "Engineer" snobbery doesn't seem too prominent in the UK thankfully, but I've seen this debate a lot on Slashdot, mostly from North American folks so it's a big deal there I guess.
The reason I find the whole debate stupid is that it seems to be framed round this idea that Engineers are magical people, who believe they're superior to others and that no one else should are be able to claim their title.
The problem is that Engineers aren't at the top of the chain, not by any measure. What they learn is a subset of science and maths, so their claim to be special is false as any say, physicist or mathematician will have no problem learning their trade, and then some.
This is where I have a problem with it, I was a developer/software engineer/whatever in an engineering firm, but my degree is in Mathematics. I had absolutely no, and I mean no problem whatsoever dealing with the mathematics and rigour the engineers there had to know and created bits of software they all found very useful on that knowledge. Worse, not even all the engineers understood the math involved and it was only really the principal engineers there who knew it better than me (it was they who taught me) such that there was this absurd scenario that within the company, as a software developer I had better understanding and competence of the actual engineering knowledge than many of the engineers themselves and still had time to be good at my software development role to boot.
So you'll have to excuse me if engineering snobbery doesn't really cut it with me, the idea that I shouldn't call myself a software engineer, because I'm not an engineer, and yet was still more competent in that particular field of engineering than many of the engineers. Case in point, you only have to look at software like Inventor etc. that do a ton of stuff that 90% of engineers couldn't do themselves (like FEA for example). That had to be built by developers, so don't pretend developers aren't capable of being engineers.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter, the fact is having some engineering title doesn't make you special, doesn't make you inherently more competent. Engineers are for the most part extremely smart, and intelligent people, but if they think they're the smartest and most intelligent profession out there, and that they're inherently more smart than say, software engineers, then they can simply go fuck themselves because that's little more than ignorant arrogance. They're not, not by any measure and I suspect that for every great engineer, I could find an equally smart and competent software developer to match them, similarly I suspect I could find even smarter physicists and mathematicians.
As you say it's about being honest about your competence that matters and allowing software developers to call themselves a type of engineer isn't exactly going to bring down the engineering profession - there's enough over-inflated ego engineers who aren't actually that great out there already to do that by themselves. Looking at the complexity of software and hence skill required to build it that's developed nowadays I suspect if anything it may raise standards.
...and yet British and other army rations have contained constipation crackers as they're sometimes called and fruit since well before Hathcock was even born for precisely this reason. The British army was doing it in at least the 18th century to keep soldiers moving and in formation on long marches during the height of the British empire and it's included conquests. Snipers in stalingrad on both sides were using their diet to control the time they'd need to shit the year Hathcock was born also for example. Most importantly though food has been used in this way for hundreds of years in the worlds of medicine and so forth. How exactly do you think Hathcock found out the effects of his dietary options? He likely found out from a doctor in the first place who already was aware of the types of food to give him the effect he wanted. Athletes are an example of another profession that was experimenting this sort of thing long before he was born.
Which really proves the point- many military tactics are obvious to other military, or in other walks of life but when someone else finds them out they believe, like you do, that you've created some super secret new tactic. It's pretty obvious that if you want to stay still as long as possible that you need to eliminate reasons to move, and shitting is a pretty obvious one, and the obvious solution is a diet that slows down your digestive system. It's nothing to do with hindsight and everything to do with being plain obvious.
I find it rather ironic that you suggest I get educated, yet you find this very obvious thing to be something miraculous, and something invented by a guy who was born well after it was commonplace. You may want to take your own advice on this one.
It sounds like you've been fed a patriotic tale about an American legend and swallowed every ounce of it as fact, rather than recognising that some of it may not actually all have been his invention.
It sounds like he doesn't have that military training in the SAS, that he hadn't heard of those tactics, that he hadn't figured it out on hindsight.
He'd figured out because it's obvious - because it's common sense.
The whole point is that if it's common sense then it's not something you'd need to learn through hindsight, it's something that is the most sensible rational option given what you have at your disposal.
I agree there are plenty of people out there who lack common sense, and have to be taught common sense things, some I've encountered seem entirely of even ever being able to grasp common sense ideas, but the point is that they are the sorts of things that people are going to figure out (and probably already have) regardless.
As I pointed out elsewhere, common sense is the Taliban recognising it can't go toe to toe with special forces so instead resorting to tactics like IEDs. Common sense is that if there are known to be IEDs on the roads, then don't travel via the fucking roads.
Sure there are some tactics that are quite clever and do fall outside the realm of common sense, but I see no evidence of these being given away in games like Medal of Honor.
"it may seem like common sense, but that's after years of work creating it, during which some men probably died before it was figured out."
Actually, as the SAS guys involved themselves told it, they came up with the idea only hours before they stormed the place.
"And while it may seem common sense to us, it frequently isnt to many combatants around the world. the majority of the taliban and iraqi insurgents have no training whatsoever, and those that do have very little discipline. many many of them emply spray and pray tactics, full of bravado and give em hell, but little thought, little planning, no tactical sensibilities, etc."
This isn't really about common sense. Common sense in the Taliban's case would be recognising that they're not very good at going head to head with special forces and simply waiting for them to fly off and then popping out of cover to blow their Chinook out the sky with an RPG, or simply laying down IEDs at a choke point you know they have to pass through. That is common sense - it doesn't take a genius to figure out you've got more chance that way.
As you say yourself though, much of the reason they can't go head to head is because they don't have the training and discipline and some don't even have common sense - running in because they believe Allah will magically protect them only to get immediately gunned down. The point is though that no amount of playing Medal of Honour or reading books is going to magically instill that into them, they just come from a background where they have little or no education and what the Seals do or don't do isn't going to change that fact.
"These people are human beings, physically fit and specially trained to be sure, but regular human beings with an immense logistical system to support them."
To be fair it's the level of physical fitness and training that matters and makes a large difference as much as anything.
When I was younger I was in the army cadets in the UK, and on an annual camp once we were sent through a fairly small forested area to try and find 5 professional soldiers hidden in there camo'd up. We did find one, hidden up a tree, but still hard to see, he was in the TA and fairly new to it at that though.
When we'd given up we walked to the edge of the forest and they were told to come out of hiding. One guy comes out with his face covered in mud with some pretty clear signs of a boot print on it. It was my boot print, as he'd been led down in a narrow gully deep with leaf litter which I'd walked straight through. The guy was a gurkha, who aren't even really classed as special forces, but it was this experience above all else that made me realise the gap between what we think is realistically possible, and what is actually possible can sometimes be quite large such that we don't even entertain it. When he showed us exactly where he'd been hidden he literally had his face covered in mud with only his eyes showing through and leaf litter on top, the amazing part was how quickly and quietly he was able to disguise himself the way he did- you could be chasing him, lose him from sight for 20 seconds and he'd have all but vanished. I'm glad I was just an army cadet and this wasn't a real war, as otherwise I suspect he may well have chopped my balls off with his kukri, and I'm kind of fond of my balls being left where they are. Between the softness of the deep leaf litter and the thick sole on my boots, I simply hadn't realised I'd walked right over someone's face.
So if this guy, not even selected for the SAS was this talented, I've always wondered what sort of things the special forces themselves get upto, and get away with. Everyone watches war films, and plays Call of Duty or whatever and thinks "Yeah, I could be that badass if I joined the military", but to most of those people you couldn't, you really couldn't. It takes a steely determination and years of practice, exercise to achieve the things they do and these people, the best of the best are the people who if they hadn't gone down the military route and joined the special forces would likely have been Olympic athletes, or other stand out professionals. It's not the sort of thing your average person has the patience and determination for.
Slashdot Mirror
Each time a Dotcom story comes up we get exactly the same type of post from an AC, so he obviously was hit personally by the guy.
But the problem is he's obviously very biased against him, if you read what Dotcom was actually guilty of then much of it is not that big a deal. Where he was done for fraud for example he really did nothing different to what many investment organisations get away with every day, his problem is that he was a little guy with no government links to allow him to get away with it unlike the large investment organisations.
People lose money all the time on the stock market getting duped on bad deals, they have to - that's how others make their profit. This guy needs to get over it, it's tiresome.
No, it's that many muslims in Western society, particularly in the UK have a different view on how society should act, behave, and be run, based on the teachings of their faith that they have been brought up with.
The problem is that that conflicts with Western ideals, for example, many muslims believe that females should be covered up completely whilst in public, but men need not be, and this conflicts with the Western view that women should be treated as equals to men.
Similarly, some muslim communities in the UK have created their own Shariah courts, which is fine, that's upto said communities, but there has been a push to give them legal status and that's where conflict is created, because Shariah law often goes against the very principles of western justice principles.
This isn't a my god vs. your god debate, I agree other religions have and cause their own problems. Certainly some of the African religious practices we've seen carried to the UK have been downright evil being the root of some of the most horrific child abuse cases we've seen in this country. Christianity has always tried to influence government and law in our country often for the worse in trying to decrease women's rights and oppress homosexuals treating them as lesser people who deserve less rights. I think this is a pattern repeated in most western nations.
Right I see where you're struggling now, the problem is that you're speculating about a completely different problem.
The issue is that you're talking about a broken, or possibly broken legal system, which is all well and good, but that's not the discussion here.
Importantly, the reason why your change of subject is irrelevant is because it's that way whatever patent system you have an so has no relevance. It doesn't matter if a garage inventor doesn't have to defend his patent immediately or not, he'll still be the little guy so I don't even know why you've suddenly changed to this topic. I can only assume it's because as I say, you're one of those people who doesn't like being wrong, so when they realise they've lost the argument, they simply try and change the argument. That's fine if you want to do that, but it's not a game I play.
Fundamentally your change of subject doesn't change the fact that a patent has a fixed worth and that that fixed worth remains the same whether said patent is owned by a company or an individual, and defending that fixed worth will remain a question of how much a company or individual feels is worth investing in protecting that fixed worth. That much is a constant, any arguments about other elements of the US' broken legal system are not what I (or anyone else) have been discussing and nothing you mentioned applies specifically to the suggestion I originally made but affect the law and patents in general because the US legal system as a whole is stacked in favour of the big guy vs. the little guy regardless.
It seems in your apparent anger you've completely lost sight of the discussion at hand.
I think you should go and lie down, you now seem not only confused but rather angry too.
If you'd like to elaborate on the problem you're having with this concept then maybe I can explain it to you but whilst you spout insults and vagueness I can only assume that you're one of those people who doesn't like being wrong.
"The burning poppies arrest was made "under section 127 of the Communications Act" - from 2003."
I'm not terribly sure what your point is here? The date the law came into place is irrelevant as I was merely commenting on when it started being used for this purpose.
"You do realize that all those generalizations make your statement either a phenomenal pile of bullshit - or a conscious lie."
You do realise that the problem is that you've read far more hatred into my statement than is actually there? are you suggesting the West hasn't had a battle to get to grips with the issues raised by the Islamic faith and the culture surrounding it? Are you seriously suggesting that as the world has become globalised and the West has become more multicultural that everything has gone perfectly?
If you believe that you're so far lost in the world of political correctness in pretending there aren't issues that you've clearly lost all sight of the real world.
Still I'm not really sure what your point is as you then seemed to basically go on to agree with me for the most part. Were you just looking for a fight for the sake of it, or what? I think your mistake may have been in deciding to enforce some kind of political correctness where it made no sense to.
I'm a live and let live type of person, I don't really like religion and I think it's foolish to believe in such tosh nowadays, but if people want to then that's their choice. I'm not going to close my eyes, cover my ears, and pretend that there isn't a conflict of ideologies going on between the west and Islam however.
It's got nothing to do with sifting through other people's patents - they'll automatically be invalidated by your prior art if someone files something they shouldn't have.
It's about whether someone is using YOUR patent and that's about keeping an eye on the markets where your patent is relevant.
You know, pointing out that a particular issue results from a governments misguided attempts at tackling the different value systems between a society and the views of certain members of a particular religion doesn't make someone Islamophobic.
Nor do I think Christianity deserves a free pass, if anything it's Christianity that's create this mindset in government of wrapping everyone in cotton wool in the hope that they don't hurt themselves by offending each other.
No, I'm not really a fan of religion in general, I guess you could even call me a religionophobe, because yes, religion does indeed scare me. It scares me that in this day and age with all the things humanity has achieved that grown adults can still believe and even kill over the content of written fiction.
Yeah, I guess he's learning though. I mean, he's just learnt the basic principle of business that if a company has a sudden increase in costs of doing business, like say, a flawed $1.05bn patent verdict against them, then they have to up their prices to make up for it.
Don't worry Tim, soon you'll get to learn about other business things like redundancy terms, but at least being in the position you're in you'll probably also get to learn all about golden parachutes too which will be nice for you.
Of course huge corporations can allocate more, but the result is that it costs them more.
The point is that whatever size you are, the cost of defending the patent is either worth it, or it isn't, and whatever size you are, the more time you spend defending a particular patent, the more it will cost you. The question is, is it worth it?
If a small garage guy feels he can make $1million a year from his patent, he can just as well hire a few staff to chase it for him for that value as a large company can because of the implicit value of it, but it's not worth a large company paying 20 lawyers to defend it, because then the cost of it just isn't worth it.
I wasn't referring to British symbols per-se but burning anything people may deem offensive - in this case, poppys, which would clearly not fall under treason laws.
Use of the law for that sort of thing has most definitely come about in response to the religious hatred laws because it specifically came about when there was a showdown between the EDL and the "Muslims against crusades" group:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-11744811
What are you on about?
Size of business has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of what you invent and how much time you want to spend enforcing it.
Or are you saying garage inventors should be able to just patent shit and screw large and small businesses alike out of cash without ever actually offering anything of value to society?
Nothing I said prevents a garage inventor protecting his/her patent, the only question is whether they feel their patent is worth their time protecting.
You can argue businesses have more resources to pay to protect their patents but they still have to pay for staff to do exactly that. If they similarly have a patent that is going to require someone to spend 5 days a week looking after it's protection then they've still got to hire a full time staff member for it to be worth it, just as a garage inventor must decide if his/her patent is important enough and will bring them enough income to justify dedicating themselves to full time.
This is in part, part of the West's battle with Islam, and is not the first time this has been done.
The government introduced a law some time ago against inciting religious hatred and so forth to prevent people burning Korans and starting a riot amongst muslims in the UK as a result.
The problem is then that some of the Islamic extremists in the UK started burning things like poppies on remembrance day, and burning the British flag and so forth. Obviously a lot of people were pissed off at the hypocrisy of this, so the Police then started enforcing the law against this sort of burning too.
Whether the guy in this case is an Islamic extremist or just a general dick who knows, but that's why we're at the point were at.
Honestly, the lesson is that this is why we can't create laws against burning the Koran - because it is fucking hypocritical for there to be protection against burning something one group holds sacred, but not things other groups hold sacred and having people hence burn them. This really is a case of the slippery slope in action - what started out as a noble plan to prevent anger in UK's Islamic population over the burning of a Koran, has now created awareness of assholes everywhere burning all sorts of different things due to it getting in the news and resulted in a complete waste of police time, time and time again.
I don't blame the police, they're simply enforcing the law fairly and making it clear that it's a two way street. The problem is that in this case, the law shouldn't exist at all whether it's for the Koran, a flag, or a poppy, but fundamentally it's got to be one or the other, either you can burn poppies, flags, and Korans, or you can burn none of them. Currently it's the latter case, so at least the law is being applied consistently and fairly which is more than can be said for a lot of laws.
"Because most inventors have other things to do with their time then comb through every new technological application"
As I see it it's quite simple. If you don't feel you have time to protect your patent then you obviously don't put enough value in it to believe it's worth protecting.
Look, either your patent is such a unique and cutting edge innovation that you want to protect it and want to make money from it, or it's not. You can't just patent some trivial little turd of an idea that others have/will come up with independently and expect the money come flowing through to you for it.
The "I don't have time" argument is bollocks, the time you invest in protecting your patent should be relative to the value you place in that patent. If you think it's a super patent then spend your life protecting it and milking money from it, if you think it's marginally useful then go after uses as soon as they're obviously there - i.e. PS3 controllers. If you don't value it at all then don't enforce it and let people use it how they want by letting it expire as trademarks do. That's how it should work. The patenting of turds and just sitting around waiting for them to mature and then attacking has to stop. Patents shouldn't be a license to cash in left and right 17 years after a patent was filed for some arbitrary idea no matter how little effort went into it, they should be worth bothering to protect and if they're not, they shouldn't be patentable ideas in the first place.
Besides, the test for trademark genericisation is if your trademark has entered common usage, if your patent has come close to entering common usage across a wide range of users like SSL has and you haven't noticed and bothered to defend it then laziness has nothing to do with it. That's apathy towards enforcement, and apathy shouldn't be an excuse to be able to turn around many years later and suddenly decide to cash in either.
Personally I think the point there is that if someone files a patent, and doesn't enforce anything about it, then someone else buys it 17 years later by which time due to lack of enforcement around it such that everyone has used it it's become part of essential every day tools, then some dick shouldn't then be able to start suing over it.
In this respect patents should act like trademarks - if you don't defend against illegal use of it at or near the time of infringement and as a result everyone starts using tools built upon it, then it should be invalidated.
This idea that you can file a patent, sit quietly on it, and wait until something related to it has become massively widely used and THEN you sue everyone left, right and centre, is fucking absurd.
The other point is that patent terms are supposed to expire after 20 years. As such can anyone tell me why this guy has another 6 years to sue? Is this about legal limits and he is effectively suing for past infringement even though the patent should've expired 3 years ago? If so then that's another change that needs making to the law - you either sue when the patent is valid, or you don't sue at all.
"You clearly aren't an engineer and have never written any part of a finite element code. They're not written by programmers, they're written by mathematicians and engineers."
Re-read my post. You'll note I pointed out my degree was in Mathematics so thank you for admitting that Engineers like yourself need people like me to even be able to do your profession.
You're right, I'm not an engineer. But I do have the underlying knowledge on which their entire profession is based to see why their view of themselves is nothing more than snobbery.
Amusingly, I even assisted in the development of a number of patents that were due to be applied for, precisely because the engineering team did need someone with the level of rigorous mathematical background I have, and that they didn't.
So have fun with your professional engineering title, I'll enjoy not having mine, yet still being more competent at the most complex part of engineering than many engineers - that of developing, using, and implementing software tools that utilise the math that underpins everything they do.
You are not as special as you think you are.
So exactly like the Savile investigation that ITV was praised for a few weeks beforehand for whilst the BBC was criticised for not publishing their version of over those exact fears you mean?
The only difference seems to be that ITV was lucky enough that their accusers had got it right, whilst the BBC's had got it wrong. ITV even named the accused, something BBC had the journalistic integrity not to do based on the level of proof it had.
People seem to have short memories though, ITV was being criticised in the exact same way before during and after it's report on Savile, with suggestions they should never have broadcast it. Luckily for them a small army of other victims then came forward. Had ITV listened to those criticising them over the show before they even aired it and hence cancelled it like the BBC did then the 300 victims to date wouldn't have had the opportunity to finally see a proper investigation into the abuse of them.
This is a lose-lose situation for the BBC, they're being told they were wrong whatever they did. Not broadcasting an investigation based on accusations? Wrong. Broadcasting an investigation based on accusations? Wrong - even where they took the precaution not to name.
The worst part is that McAlpine wasn't even anywhere near the top of the list of names in these internet rumours. This means if some of those other names are in fact guilty then McAlpine linking himself so publicly to this whilst being able to prove he was innocent by having a log of where he was and what he was doing 30 years ago has pulled a pretty effective shield up for those who may well in fact have been guilty. Certainly at least one dead Tory has been linked to this much more strongly but now we can't talk about it nor can anyone investigate it because "Oh look, the BBC was wrong about one person, it's DG even resigned, so the whole story must be false!".
But the problem is that the ITV investigation was of exactly the same standard of journalistic integrity as the newsnight investigation - arguably lower in fact because it outright named Savile, and it too was criticised in the same way this one was until other people started coming forward.
The problem is you either do investigations like this, being cautious not to name names if you only have accusations and not solid evidence and succeed in exposing a many decades long coverup, or you don't report it at all and the problem remains covered up.
I hope McAlpine doesn't win, the BBC did everything right by not naming. If he wins then it basically writes off any ability for journalists to investigate anything whether that's MPs expenses, phone hacking, Jimmy Savile, or whatever else - it'd mean the danger of getting it wrong would simply be too high to risk even bothering investigating it in the first place.
The problem is that the only person to so prominently and publicly tie his name to the report was Lord McAlpine himself.
The way before it all came out I was intrigued to see who the supposed politicians are and I searched online. After a fair bit of searching I was able to find two deceased Tory MPs named, and two living Tory MPs named. Neither of these however were McAlpine.
There's something fishy going on. Maybe McAlpine really is guilty of something like this and is trying to take the fight to those trying to expose it? Maybe McAlpine decided to throw himself into the line of fire, knowing he was innocent, to try an discredit the investigation because him and his friends were scared of what it might really uncover and expose? Or maybe McAlpine is simply more paranoid than the other MPs named online and hence the only one who decided to go Streisand on the issue and link himself so publicly to it.
Either way the BBC cannot be held accountable for online speculation. It's stupid and is being used by Murdoch and friends to attack the BBC in revenge for it's thorough coverage of phone hacking and also to deflect attention away from the underlying issue - child abuse by high profile figures.
Thankfully, from public comments I've read on the issue it seems most of the public can see it for what it is, so for all the talk of BBC this, BBC that, most people recognise it's not the BBC that's the problem. It's just a shame the BBC itself hasn't realised this and hence stood up for itself - not naming people when you don't have solid enough evidence, but you do have some potential evidence is the proper journalistic way of doing things. They did everything right, certainly much more so than say, Philip Schofield and compared to people like Jeremy Hunt and the Murdochs who appeared to lie under oath during the Leveson enquiry it's not as if they have done anything criminal, yet those people all got promotions. It's all very well for the Tories to demand BBC resignations, but how can they do that with a straight face when the politicians at the centre of the phone hacking scandal are still in their jobs and getting paid more than ever?
Entwistle shouldn't have resigned, he should've just pointed out the double standards, about how he was being told off only a week before by the same MPs for not broadcasting the Savile investigation because all they had was say-so whilst ITV did broadcast a similar investigation with equally weak evidence as Newsnight had this time around (i.e. relying on people's say so) and yet ITV outright named Savile despite the same level of evidence. Either you demand stronger standards of evidence, or you stick to not naming when you don't have said evidence - the BBC has been told it's wrong whatever it does, it's critics are enforcing double standards. The only flipside is that because Entwistle clearly didn't have the strength of character to stand up for the organisation then maybe it's best he does go - it's just a shame it allowed the organisations critics to say "We were right, now let's sweep this child abuse issue back under the carpet and stick to focussing on celebs, not politicians who may have also been involved.".
Right and why does that need a protected title?
Here in sensible land, we simply solve that problem by suing people regardless of what their fucking title is if they've been incompetent and let the courts figure out blame.
Does this mean in Canada, say a labourer that doesn't have a protected title is immune from being sued if they build a dodgy building that collapses and kills people regardless of what the Engineer said to do? Does the engineer get sued anyway because of his magical title?
This "Engineer" snobbery doesn't seem too prominent in the UK thankfully, but I've seen this debate a lot on Slashdot, mostly from North American folks so it's a big deal there I guess.
The reason I find the whole debate stupid is that it seems to be framed round this idea that Engineers are magical people, who believe they're superior to others and that no one else should are be able to claim their title.
The problem is that Engineers aren't at the top of the chain, not by any measure. What they learn is a subset of science and maths, so their claim to be special is false as any say, physicist or mathematician will have no problem learning their trade, and then some.
This is where I have a problem with it, I was a developer/software engineer/whatever in an engineering firm, but my degree is in Mathematics. I had absolutely no, and I mean no problem whatsoever dealing with the mathematics and rigour the engineers there had to know and created bits of software they all found very useful on that knowledge. Worse, not even all the engineers understood the math involved and it was only really the principal engineers there who knew it better than me (it was they who taught me) such that there was this absurd scenario that within the company, as a software developer I had better understanding and competence of the actual engineering knowledge than many of the engineers themselves and still had time to be good at my software development role to boot.
So you'll have to excuse me if engineering snobbery doesn't really cut it with me, the idea that I shouldn't call myself a software engineer, because I'm not an engineer, and yet was still more competent in that particular field of engineering than many of the engineers. Case in point, you only have to look at software like Inventor etc. that do a ton of stuff that 90% of engineers couldn't do themselves (like FEA for example). That had to be built by developers, so don't pretend developers aren't capable of being engineers.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter, the fact is having some engineering title doesn't make you special, doesn't make you inherently more competent. Engineers are for the most part extremely smart, and intelligent people, but if they think they're the smartest and most intelligent profession out there, and that they're inherently more smart than say, software engineers, then they can simply go fuck themselves because that's little more than ignorant arrogance. They're not, not by any measure and I suspect that for every great engineer, I could find an equally smart and competent software developer to match them, similarly I suspect I could find even smarter physicists and mathematicians.
As you say it's about being honest about your competence that matters and allowing software developers to call themselves a type of engineer isn't exactly going to bring down the engineering profession - there's enough over-inflated ego engineers who aren't actually that great out there already to do that by themselves. Looking at the complexity of software and hence skill required to build it that's developed nowadays I suspect if anything it may raise standards.
...and yet British and other army rations have contained constipation crackers as they're sometimes called and fruit since well before Hathcock was even born for precisely this reason. The British army was doing it in at least the 18th century to keep soldiers moving and in formation on long marches during the height of the British empire and it's included conquests. Snipers in stalingrad on both sides were using their diet to control the time they'd need to shit the year Hathcock was born also for example. Most importantly though food has been used in this way for hundreds of years in the worlds of medicine and so forth. How exactly do you think Hathcock found out the effects of his dietary options? He likely found out from a doctor in the first place who already was aware of the types of food to give him the effect he wanted. Athletes are an example of another profession that was experimenting this sort of thing long before he was born.
Which really proves the point- many military tactics are obvious to other military, or in other walks of life but when someone else finds them out they believe, like you do, that you've created some super secret new tactic. It's pretty obvious that if you want to stay still as long as possible that you need to eliminate reasons to move, and shitting is a pretty obvious one, and the obvious solution is a diet that slows down your digestive system. It's nothing to do with hindsight and everything to do with being plain obvious.
I find it rather ironic that you suggest I get educated, yet you find this very obvious thing to be something miraculous, and something invented by a guy who was born well after it was commonplace. You may want to take your own advice on this one.
It sounds like you've been fed a patriotic tale about an American legend and swallowed every ounce of it as fact, rather than recognising that some of it may not actually all have been his invention.
No, see this guy's post for example:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3240925&cid=41932109
It sounds like he doesn't have that military training in the SAS, that he hadn't heard of those tactics, that he hadn't figured it out on hindsight.
He'd figured out because it's obvious - because it's common sense.
The whole point is that if it's common sense then it's not something you'd need to learn through hindsight, it's something that is the most sensible rational option given what you have at your disposal.
I agree there are plenty of people out there who lack common sense, and have to be taught common sense things, some I've encountered seem entirely of even ever being able to grasp common sense ideas, but the point is that they are the sorts of things that people are going to figure out (and probably already have) regardless.
As I pointed out elsewhere, common sense is the Taliban recognising it can't go toe to toe with special forces so instead resorting to tactics like IEDs. Common sense is that if there are known to be IEDs on the roads, then don't travel via the fucking roads.
Sure there are some tactics that are quite clever and do fall outside the realm of common sense, but I see no evidence of these being given away in games like Medal of Honor.
"it may seem like common sense, but that's after years of work creating it, during which some men probably died before it was figured out."
Actually, as the SAS guys involved themselves told it, they came up with the idea only hours before they stormed the place.
"And while it may seem common sense to us, it frequently isnt to many combatants around the world. the majority of the taliban and iraqi insurgents have no training whatsoever, and those that do have very little discipline. many many of them emply spray and pray tactics, full of bravado and give em hell, but little thought, little planning, no tactical sensibilities, etc."
This isn't really about common sense. Common sense in the Taliban's case would be recognising that they're not very good at going head to head with special forces and simply waiting for them to fly off and then popping out of cover to blow their Chinook out the sky with an RPG, or simply laying down IEDs at a choke point you know they have to pass through. That is common sense - it doesn't take a genius to figure out you've got more chance that way.
As you say yourself though, much of the reason they can't go head to head is because they don't have the training and discipline and some don't even have common sense - running in because they believe Allah will magically protect them only to get immediately gunned down. The point is though that no amount of playing Medal of Honour or reading books is going to magically instill that into them, they just come from a background where they have little or no education and what the Seals do or don't do isn't going to change that fact.
I'm not sure what the point of that would be. I certainly don't have the training or level of fitness they do.
It doesn't mean I don't have an equivalent or better level of common sense though.
They'd win on their physical fitness and training alone, regardless of that.
"These people are human beings, physically fit and specially trained to be sure, but regular human beings with an immense logistical system to support them."
To be fair it's the level of physical fitness and training that matters and makes a large difference as much as anything.
When I was younger I was in the army cadets in the UK, and on an annual camp once we were sent through a fairly small forested area to try and find 5 professional soldiers hidden in there camo'd up. We did find one, hidden up a tree, but still hard to see, he was in the TA and fairly new to it at that though.
When we'd given up we walked to the edge of the forest and they were told to come out of hiding. One guy comes out with his face covered in mud with some pretty clear signs of a boot print on it. It was my boot print, as he'd been led down in a narrow gully deep with leaf litter which I'd walked straight through. The guy was a gurkha, who aren't even really classed as special forces, but it was this experience above all else that made me realise the gap between what we think is realistically possible, and what is actually possible can sometimes be quite large such that we don't even entertain it. When he showed us exactly where he'd been hidden he literally had his face covered in mud with only his eyes showing through and leaf litter on top, the amazing part was how quickly and quietly he was able to disguise himself the way he did- you could be chasing him, lose him from sight for 20 seconds and he'd have all but vanished. I'm glad I was just an army cadet and this wasn't a real war, as otherwise I suspect he may well have chopped my balls off with his kukri, and I'm kind of fond of my balls being left where they are. Between the softness of the deep leaf litter and the thick sole on my boots, I simply hadn't realised I'd walked right over someone's face.
So if this guy, not even selected for the SAS was this talented, I've always wondered what sort of things the special forces themselves get upto, and get away with. Everyone watches war films, and plays Call of Duty or whatever and thinks "Yeah, I could be that badass if I joined the military", but to most of those people you couldn't, you really couldn't. It takes a steely determination and years of practice, exercise to achieve the things they do and these people, the best of the best are the people who if they hadn't gone down the military route and joined the special forces would likely have been Olympic athletes, or other stand out professionals. It's not the sort of thing your average person has the patience and determination for.