"The page linked to by this summary did not explain why the patent trolls are going after the users of WiFi devices, rather than vendors."
actually it did:
"The company is demanding a one-time lump sum licensing payment between $2,300 and $5,000 from each of the several hundred defendants targeted in its lawsuits, McAndrews said. Some of the defendants have already settled, he added."
"In casting such a wide net, Innovatio (it means “innovation” in Latin, McAndrews said) displays a new approach in patent enforcement. In a field where patent-holding companies often demand six- or seven-figure dollar amounts for damages, five-figure settlements are considered basement-low. By demanding a few thousand dollars, Innovatio ensures that, for many small business owners, taking up a legal defense won’t make financial sense."
They are suing when they can pursue action cheaper than the defendant can defend. If the patent were strong they'd go after big money, but the big money will fight and since the patent is weak, they will instead play spam.
Also, by suing a large number of people in diverse locations and jurisdictions they will make it difficult for defendants to defend collectively and economically.
Think of all the Jobs Being Created by the Job Creator Class, isn't it lovely?
"Nope...this is ALL about Politics. Otherwise, all these climatologists would be going in front of government bodies and saying that we need to go nuclear and switch."
And why is that? Why should they jump out, in public, of their personal area of true expertise into something which is not their job?
Maybe they're doing their work and analyzing data and experiments about their field? And what does the actual science show? It shows that to slow down or stop climate change humans need to do things which reduce the infrared emissivity of the stratosphere. How that happens is not a matter of physics, but of human decisions.
Many people, especially scientists, think that increasing nuclear power will be needed.
Somebody who is an expert in analyzing temperature data from aircraft in the tropics is not an expert on the economic modelling and analysis. There are experts on that who do that for a living, and they come up with more quantitatively justified and realistic scenarios (as in everything needs to be done, not just nuclear power) and they do go in front of government bodies. There are IPCC reports on mitigation strategies and scientists and others who contribute to those as well.
"Second, climatology has a problem common to geology, economics, and astronomy, namely, that it is extremely hard to conduct reproducible experiments. This is a crucial flaw of climate modeling and prediction that routinely gets ignored."
And yet astronomers and geologists and climatologists make good predictions which are upheld and the understanding is very certain in many areas because they are all based on the laws of physics.
Let's come back to the core physical fact. The atmosphere is shining more in infrared than it used to, and this is because the molecules in the atmosphere have a different population and this is because of human activity. These are not subject for debate, they are rock solid experimentally confirmed *fact*.
There is more electromagnetic radiation coming down from the stratosphere than before, and thus it is quite literally physically impossible for the climate NOT to change, and from human activity.
"For example, the Goddard Institution of Space Science (a NASA-run organization) and the before-mentioned Climate Research Institute have both been headed by people who have made extreme claims about the effects of global warming for decades. How would research from someone lower down in the hierarchy that doesn't fit the message coming from the top of the organization fare?"
If there are supporting data and theory and its good then it gets published.
"Computer modelers have noted the bizarre spaghetti code that builds crucial datasets (such as the Climate Research Unit's paleoclimate temperature estimate built on a huge number of datasets."
Yup, and that's because climatology is in fact not well funded at all. No doubt they would love long-term funding for software infrastructure and data processing, but they don't have it. NASA might be better at this, and its data sets show the same thing as everybody else's.
And what about the skeptical Berkeley stats professor who thought the data processing was fishy? He did quite an extensive study, and what did he find? To his surprise, and not to mine, the results were the same as what the mainstream climatologists said.
"Those people know what they're doing, they know they're storing even "deleted" data and they know they're building very detailed profiles on every user. They also, unlike most of actual Facebook users, probably have the intelligence and foresight to imagine how it all may be used for horrible things"
OMG.
Zuckerberg's ambition isn't limited to being CEO of Facebook, bitch.
Zuckerberg will run for Governor and then President. Information is power. Personal information is personal power.
since the radiation hazard (if any) from phones is from the transmitter next to the ear, you want the base station as close as possible because the phone will adjust the transmit power accordingly.
"In the case of IBM, IBM cannibalized some of it's internal proprietary software sales, but in turn sold more services, a lesson it learned back with the original IBM 5150 BIOS and MS-DOS."
I think this is trying to suggest that IBM intentionally opened the early 80's PC architecture and then sold more as services.
That wasn't true. IBM certainly sued the first cloner (Compaq) early and often, but didn't win---maybe today it would. Then, because of the anti-trust restrictions that IBM was under at the time, it couldn't get an exclusive contract to buy-out PC-DOS (official IBM distribution of DOS) code, so Microsoft was allowed to sell for non PC computers. At the time, it was not anticipated that there would be compatible clones (i.e. MS-DOS on non-PC's would not run PC software). The combination of the two resulted in a very poor outcome for IBM, and they certainly didn't make it up in "services" in the slightest---it created a fierce and suddenly powerful competitor, Microsoft.
If Apple 'opened up the iPad' to cloners and then try to sell "services", would it be as profitable for Apple? No way.
The Swiss National Bank had previously been complaining about the value of the franc and had, within the year, previously intervened to raise EUR/CHF, but the intervention didn't stick then. This time they promised a much more forceful and permanent intervention and for some reason the market believed them this time instead of trading against them like previous times.
So the fact that the CHF would be subject to national bank intervention was hardly an unpredictable 'black swan'---it was an ordinary grey pigeon crapping on somebody's portfolio.
This guy just cheated (probably doing what his bosses wanted him to do) to take on directional bets when he was nominally not supposed to.
You've just rediscovered stochastic volatility. A few people got the Nobel prize for work they did decades earlier.
Yes, the assumption of strict normality and constant variance has been falsified a long time ago. Nobody pricing even vanilla options will use these. It's obvious from the implied volatility smile (which wouldn't exist in the classical case).
"I'm sorry, but all the smart mathematicians and physicists in the world can only derive better models and better algorithms. What the financial sector seems to have failed to do is to employ enough psychologists. Taleb isn't wrong; he has pointed out that the models cannot account for random political events, for psychological forcing, or natural disasters. The probability of these cannot be reliably assessed."
So, can psychologists assess the probability of these events better than mathemeticians and physicists working with Bayesian extreme value Pareto tail estimators?
Is this one which was paid for and not launched due to some bureaucratic/political SNAFU?
Is this a dummy test article?
Was it retrieved by the shuttle in the 80's in a classified mission? (if it were launched in 71 it was designed prior to the shuttle era and there's no obvious reason it would be compatible---unless the shuttle was designed to be compatible with HEXAGON's hardware).
So you admit that a couple of degrees of temperature change can have catastrophic consequences? But somehow when people do it on the hot side, there's no problem?
(Already in the USA crop yields for corn were down because nighttime temperatures were so hot---increase of nightime temperatures is precisely the effect from global warming).
Yes. The animals and birds and glaciers don't respond to human biases, and what they're doing is clear indication of warming.
The denialists are getting worse---they started out saying "there's no warming" (after the 1990's volcano had some temporary cooling), and then when the warming got clear, they said "well we don't know that people are responsible" (after all it could be magic fairys who just happen to change infrared emissivity of the atmosphere in exactly the way predicted by liberal-infected chemistry professors say that greenhouse gases do, when of course they don't, because in the atmosphere they're special and closer to heaven and don't have the same vibrational modes that they do in the lab). And now they're going back to denying that there's warming at all?
Argh, blargh. I really hate it when people are so sure about completely wrong science, especially as their aggressive misinformation is being exploited by civilizational sociopaths.
I am usually nice on the internet, but this will be an exception.
Slashdot posters usually have some knowledge of Newtonian mechanics 101 and will rightly laugh at those who don't believe in say, conservation of momentum.
Well, this is the same level of blunder, so here goes the explanation, as nice as I can make it without wanting to strangle internet ignoramuses.
Yes, water is a greenhouse gas, and yes every climate scientist since 1900 or whatever has known this, and there has never been any conspiracy to "suppress" this, especially given that the water cycle is at the core of every weather and climate model and observational data set.
And human "emissions" of water are completely and totally irrelevant (say like the post above) because the planet is in statistical equilibrium with those very large sources of water known as "oceans". Water, namely vapor and clouds, are *feedbacks* with timescales of two weeks, vs dozens to thousands of years for carbon dioxide. For example, if you magically took all the water out of the atmosphere, how long would it take to get back to normal? A few weeks. If you magically saturated the atmosphere completely with water, how long would it take to get back to normal? A few weeks. If you magically took all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, how long would it take to get back to normal? Many, many millions of years.
The amount of water in the atmosphere is determined in large measure, by,what---yes the temperature! Hotter air absorbs more water, and yes, the water vapor will add its own greenhouse effect. The water vapor amplifies global warming which was induced by the excess of long-lived greenhouse gases like CO2 (and others) introduced by human activity. (Clouds are less certain---they may go both ways for heating/cooling in various cases, this is a complex area of current study---but the base level effect of vapor {clear, humid air} is undisputed and significant)
The scientists who have been studying this for decades know what they're talking about.
It's decided that the advantages of patenting have started to flow less and less to companies like Intel, and more to patent trolls. Intel is not the bad guy here.
Therefore, it is in Intel's interest to fund research in areas it may want to commercialize, and simultaneously preclude patenting by insisting on open publication and no patenting.
In this scenario, the entity with the most money (i.e. somebody like Intel) wins if they have sufficient drive.
More realistically, they want to preclude the people funded by Intel to set up a startup on their own, one whose primary asset is the people and the patent estate. This way Intel can hire them as ordinary employees who are impoverished postdocs instead of having to first buy them out and then hire them.
In the USA, average people are much more exposed to the financial costs of their individual medical procedures (even with insurance, there are deductibles, HSA's, HRA's etc etc) than any other developed nation. The notion of "medical bankruptcy" is preposterous anywhere else, and it is common in the USA.
And yet, US health care costs are much, much, higher for little or no better quality.
And some people say that the reason for this is that average American people aren't taking on enough financial risk with their health care and they should take on more.
Does the empirical evidence support such a conclusion?
Slashdot Mirror
Hat Guy is in it for the movie rights.
"The page linked to by this summary did not explain why the patent trolls are going after the users of WiFi devices, rather than vendors."
actually it did:
"The company is demanding a one-time lump sum licensing payment between $2,300 and $5,000 from each of the several hundred defendants targeted in its lawsuits, McAndrews said. Some of the defendants have already settled, he added."
"In casting such a wide net, Innovatio (it means “innovation” in Latin, McAndrews said) displays a new approach in patent enforcement. In a field where patent-holding companies often demand six- or seven-figure dollar amounts for damages, five-figure settlements are considered basement-low. By demanding a few thousand dollars, Innovatio ensures that, for many small business owners, taking up a legal defense won’t make financial sense."
They are suing when they can pursue action cheaper than the defendant can defend. If the patent were strong they'd go after big money, but the big money will fight and since the patent is weak, they will instead play spam.
Also, by suing a large number of people in diverse locations and jurisdictions they will make it difficult for defendants to defend collectively and economically.
Think of all the Jobs Being Created by the Job Creator Class, isn't it lovely?
Only statist liberals call them ""pirates"".
They're maritime entrepreneurs. Individualist achievers, aka Job Creators, fighting against excess government regulation.
Or maybe the Tesla has a whole bunch more battery in it.
In the USA a small chunk of the price of a gallon of gasoline is taxes.
In Europe an large chunk to majority of the price of petrol is taxes.
The rate of sea level rise has recently started to accelerate substantially.
"Nope...this is ALL about Politics. Otherwise, all these climatologists would be going in front of government bodies and saying that we need to go nuclear and switch."
And why is that? Why should they jump out, in public, of their personal area of true expertise into something which is not their job?
Maybe they're doing their work and analyzing data and experiments about their field?
And what does the actual science show? It shows that to slow down or stop climate change humans need to do things which reduce the infrared emissivity of the stratosphere. How that happens is not a matter of physics, but of human decisions.
Many people, especially scientists, think that increasing nuclear power will be needed.
Somebody who is an expert in analyzing temperature data from aircraft in the tropics is not an expert on the economic modelling and analysis. There are experts on that who do that for a living, and they come up with more quantitatively justified and realistic scenarios (as in everything needs to be done, not just nuclear power) and they do go in front of government bodies. There are IPCC reports on mitigation strategies and scientists and others who contribute to those as well.
"Second, climatology has a problem common to geology, economics, and astronomy, namely, that it is extremely hard to conduct reproducible experiments. This is a crucial flaw of climate modeling and prediction that routinely gets ignored."
And yet astronomers and geologists and climatologists make good predictions which are upheld and the understanding is very certain in many areas because they are all based on the laws of physics.
Let's come back to the core physical fact. The atmosphere is shining more in infrared than it used to, and this is because the molecules in the atmosphere have a different population and this is because of human activity. These are not subject for debate, they are rock solid experimentally confirmed *fact*.
There is more electromagnetic radiation coming down from the stratosphere than before, and thus it is quite literally physically impossible for the climate NOT to change, and from human activity.
"For example, the Goddard Institution of Space Science (a NASA-run organization) and the before-mentioned Climate Research Institute have both been headed by people who have made extreme claims about the effects of global warming for decades. How would research from someone lower down in the hierarchy that doesn't fit the message coming from the top of the organization fare?"
If there are supporting data and theory and its good then it gets published.
"Computer modelers have noted the bizarre spaghetti code that builds crucial datasets (such as the Climate Research Unit's paleoclimate temperature estimate built on a huge number of datasets."
Yup, and that's because climatology is in fact not well funded at all. No doubt they would love long-term funding for software infrastructure and data processing, but they don't have it. NASA might be better at this, and its data sets show the same thing as everybody else's.
And what about the skeptical Berkeley stats professor who thought the data processing was fishy? He did quite an extensive study, and what did he find? To his surprise, and not to mine, the results were the same as what the mainstream climatologists said.
"Those people know what they're doing, they know they're storing even "deleted" data and they know they're building very detailed profiles on every user. They also, unlike most of actual Facebook users, probably have the intelligence and foresight to imagine how it all may be used for horrible things"
OMG.
Zuckerberg's ambition isn't limited to being CEO of Facebook, bitch.
Zuckerberg will run for Governor and then President. Information is power. Personal information is personal power.
since the radiation hazard (if any) from phones is from the transmitter next to the ear, you want the base station as close as possible because the phone will adjust the transmit power accordingly.
In some alternate Universe known as the Theatrical Release, Greedo didn't shoot anybody at all, much less shoot first.
All indications are that this is only a hypothetical and mythical construct, though some crazed hippies still insist it was real.
"Anyway, why would they sell such a huge profit center?"
Because they can make lots and lots of money by selling unique, valuable data to companies who have more capability in extracting money from data.
"In the case of IBM, IBM cannibalized some of it's internal proprietary software sales, but in turn sold more services, a lesson it learned back with the original IBM 5150 BIOS and MS-DOS."
I think this is trying to suggest that IBM intentionally opened the early 80's PC architecture and then sold more as services.
That wasn't true. IBM certainly sued the first cloner (Compaq) early and often, but didn't win---maybe today it would. Then, because of the anti-trust restrictions that IBM was under at the time, it couldn't get an exclusive contract to buy-out PC-DOS (official IBM distribution of DOS) code, so Microsoft was allowed to sell for non PC computers. At the time, it was not anticipated that there would be compatible clones (i.e. MS-DOS on non-PC's would not run PC software). The combination of the two resulted in a very poor outcome for IBM, and they certainly didn't make it up in "services" in the slightest---it created a fierce and suddenly powerful competitor, Microsoft.
If Apple 'opened up the iPad' to cloners and then try to sell "services", would it be as profitable for Apple? No way.
The Swiss National Bank had previously been complaining about the value of the franc and had, within the year, previously intervened to raise EUR/CHF, but the intervention didn't stick then. This time they promised a much more forceful and permanent intervention and for some reason the market believed them this time instead of trading against them like previous times.
So the fact that the CHF would be subject to national bank intervention was hardly an unpredictable 'black swan'---it was an ordinary grey pigeon crapping on somebody's portfolio.
This guy just cheated (probably doing what his bosses wanted him to do) to take on directional bets when he was nominally not supposed to.
You've just rediscovered stochastic volatility. A few people got the Nobel prize for work they did decades earlier.
Yes, the assumption of strict normality and constant variance has been falsified a long time ago. Nobody pricing even vanilla options will use these. It's obvious from the implied volatility smile (which wouldn't exist in the classical case).
Neither academics or practicing quants actually use thin-tail Gaussian models for practical pricing.
"I'm sorry, but all the smart mathematicians and physicists in the world can only derive better models and better algorithms. What the financial sector seems to have failed to do is to employ enough psychologists. Taleb isn't wrong; he has pointed out that the models cannot account for random political events, for psychological forcing, or natural disasters. The probability of these cannot be reliably assessed."
So, can psychologists assess the probability of these events better than mathemeticians and physicists working with Bayesian extreme value Pareto tail estimators?
Is this one which was paid for and not launched due to some bureaucratic/political SNAFU?
Is this a dummy test article?
Was it retrieved by the shuttle in the 80's in a classified mission? (if it were launched in 71 it was designed prior to the shuttle era and there's no obvious reason it would be compatible---unless the shuttle was designed to be compatible with HEXAGON's hardware).
A 1% change in the Solar constant would be catastrophic for civilization.
yes, climate is that sensitive for humans.
So you admit that a couple of degrees of temperature change can have catastrophic consequences? But somehow when people do it on the hot side, there's no problem?
(Already in the USA crop yields for corn were down because nighttime temperatures were so hot---increase of nightime temperatures is precisely the effect from global warming).
Yes. The animals and birds and glaciers don't respond to human biases, and what they're doing is clear indication of warming.
The denialists are getting worse---they started out saying "there's no warming" (after the 1990's volcano had some temporary cooling), and then when the warming got clear, they said "well we don't know that people are responsible" (after all it could be magic fairys who just happen to change infrared emissivity of the atmosphere in exactly the way predicted by liberal-infected chemistry professors say that greenhouse gases do, when of course they don't, because in the atmosphere they're special and closer to heaven and don't have the same vibrational modes that they do in the lab). And now they're going back to denying that there's warming at all?
Argh, blargh. I really hate it when people are so sure about completely wrong science, especially as their aggressive misinformation is being exploited by civilizational sociopaths.
I am usually nice on the internet, but this will be an exception.
Slashdot posters usually have some knowledge of Newtonian mechanics 101 and will rightly laugh at those who don't believe in say, conservation of momentum.
Well, this is the same level of blunder, so here goes the explanation, as nice as I can make it without wanting to strangle internet ignoramuses.
Yes, water is a greenhouse gas, and yes every climate scientist since 1900 or whatever has known this, and there has never been any conspiracy to "suppress" this, especially given that the water cycle is at the core of every weather and climate model and observational data set.
And human "emissions" of water are completely and totally irrelevant (say like the post above) because the planet is in statistical equilibrium with those very large sources of water known as "oceans". Water, namely vapor and clouds, are *feedbacks* with timescales of two weeks, vs dozens to thousands of years for carbon dioxide. For example, if you magically took all the water out of the atmosphere, how long would it take to get back to normal? A few weeks. If you magically saturated the atmosphere completely with water, how long would it take to get back to normal? A few weeks. If you magically took all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, how long would it take to get back to normal? Many, many millions of years.
The amount of water in the atmosphere is determined in large measure, by,what---yes the temperature! Hotter air absorbs more water, and yes, the water vapor will add its own greenhouse effect. The water vapor amplifies global warming which was induced by the excess of long-lived greenhouse gases like CO2 (and others) introduced by human activity. (Clouds are less certain---they may go both ways for heating/cooling in various cases, this is a complex area of current study---but the base level effect of vapor {clear, humid air} is undisputed and significant)
The scientists who have been studying this for decades know what they're talking about.
It's decided that the advantages of patenting have started to flow less and less to companies like Intel, and more to patent trolls. Intel is not the bad guy here.
Therefore, it is in Intel's interest to fund research in areas it may want to commercialize, and simultaneously preclude patenting by insisting on open publication and no patenting.
In this scenario, the entity with the most money (i.e. somebody like Intel) wins if they have sufficient drive.
More realistically, they want to preclude the people funded by Intel to set up a startup on their own, one whose primary asset is the people and the patent estate. This way Intel can hire them as ordinary employees who are impoverished postdocs instead of having to first buy them out and then hire them.
So why aren't there more lawyers, logistics SNAFU's, medical illnesses, auto accidents and pettifogging government bureaucrats in a war-video game?
Why isn't there a video game of Working Pathetic Service Jobs At Low Wages To Pay Off Your Student Loans And Medical Bills?
Unless you get to shoot them, it just Is Not Fun At All.
In the USA, average people are much more exposed to the financial costs of their individual medical procedures (even with insurance, there are deductibles, HSA's, HRA's etc etc) than any other developed nation. The notion of "medical bankruptcy" is preposterous anywhere else, and it is common in the USA.
And yet, US health care costs are much, much, higher for little or no better quality.
And some people say that the reason for this is that average American people aren't taking on enough financial risk with their health care and they should take on more.
Does the empirical evidence support such a conclusion?