That sounds more like a critique of large corporations than a defense of patent trolls, combined with a description of someone who went into a business market with insufficient resources. Perhaps a better plan would be to seek venture capital to help cover legal fees before directly approaching a large corporation, or to find a business partner to help you in seeking venture capital.
Patent trolls are a problem; being a consequence of a larger problem does not make patent trolls any less problematic, much in the same way that a stomach infection causing one to vomit does not make the vomiting itself less problematic. An economy based on deciding who came up with an idea first is completely ludicrous, and companies that thrive in such an economy are emblematic of the problem.
It is one thing if the invention is actually being marketed by the patent holder or his representative. That is not what patent trolls do. Patent trolls are parasites, in that they produce nothing at all but still turn a profit, by legally manipulating companies that actually produce and market their products into paying royalties. It does not encourage invention, because the "inventor" who gets royalties never actually shared his invention with the companies that are paying him, not even under a loose definition of "share" that involves selling the product and having the other companies copy it.
This is dangerous behavior. There is no incentive for a patent troll to enter into a cross-licensing scheme, because they have no need for a license from someone else. There is no incentive for a patent troll to ever collaborate with anyone, because the patent troll just bought its patents rather than develop the ideas. The threat to actual inventors and companies that produce actual products is enormous, especially for small companies in obscure markets.
Attacking your friend's accounts is a good way to lose your friends. Most people don't take very kindly to that sort of practical demonstration without first giving their permission.
Absolutely. People don't really care if the government is reading their email, or if Google is indexing every word they say, or if Facebook keeps permanent logs on everything they click on. People do care about real life examples of how cryptography could have protected someone, whether a fake email or a message read out of context, especially when they can relate to the situation. It also helps if the system is quick and easy to use, like OTR (or PGP if your friends aren't too attached to webmail).
"Food for thought: when we get all riled up about privacy, are we any better than the crazies who rail about pedophiles on the internet and make it seem like there are bogeymen around every corner?"
No, because in the case of privacy, people are constantly trying to pry into each other's business. Speaking personally, I have had it confirmed at least once that an email sent to me had been maliciously faked in order to manipulate me, and I have had some circumstantial evidence that someone was reading email conversations I had with someone else. I've been approached by people who know that I am a programmer, and want to know if I could "hack into" someone else' email account so that they could read through it. This stuff isn't about the boogeyman government, it is about ordinary people who actually do have no respect for the privacy of others.
Here's another angle to consider: sometimes, a message is easily misinterpreted when read by an uninformed party. When I was in Junior High School, I was once accused of plotting to blow up the school because of a note I had written to a friend, which had been misread by a teacher who found it after class. It isn't so uncommon. There are a dozen different situations like this, where some message is ambiguous and should only be read by someone who is fully informed on the context.
I've said for a while that patents should be non-transferable and automatically revoked if the patent holder does not market the idea. Lawsuits are, of course, not a form of marketing. Patent trolls add nothing to society, and therefore defeat the point of the patent system. Why do we still tolerate them? Virtually every company that produces something is threatened by patent trolling, and patent royalties significantly increase the price of consumer goods. We can have a patent system, we just need to completely reform it.
SCO isn't a patent troll. SCO does have a business that is not based on suing others for patent infringement, and that's why they are in so much trouble now: countersuits. A patent troll is immune to being sued because it does not distribute anything, it just makes money through royalties and lawsuits, and so can't really be sued for anything. It is actually a very dangerous entity, because it has nothing to lose.
Not sure if you are joking, but for anyone who is wondering what a patent troll is, it is a company that makes money simply by suing other companies for patent infringement. This is different from a company like Microsoft, that creates and sells other products, and is therefore stuck in a mutually-assured-destruction situation that prevents them from suing others for key patents. The problem with patent trolls is that they add absolutely nothing to society; most don't even invent the patented idea, they just buy it from someone else.
I'm convinced that Carlyle is actually headed by Satan. Let's see, they have MAJOR financial involvement with the Bush administration's wars, and now a major investment in SCO. Where is Jimmy the Reptile to burn a couple Unixware discs (I am listening to that old Iron Maiden song at the moment...)?
Suppose that they do deserve lifetime income -- I won't argue against it, since few people make millions of euros from just one creative work -- how does extending the copyright term to 95 years accomplish this? Why not instead make the copyright term, "The lifetime of the creator?" Nobody will be deprived of anything after they die, and nobody will ever outlive their copyrights.
Of course, tying copyrights to the creator of a work would deprive certain interested businesses. 95 years is a victory for a record company, which can continue to profit decades after the death of an artist (suppose the song is recorded when the artist is 75?).
Economists love to talk about "loss" due to an item not being sold. Yes, according to economists, accountants, and the companies they work for, you can turn a profit and still take a loss. You could sell your entire stock, but it would be considered a loss if you could have sold it all twice as fast.
It is basically changing the meaning of the word, "loss." The record companies "lose $511 million per year due to copyright infringement" actually translates to, "had all the songs that were downloaded in a given year been purchased at the current market rate, the record companies would have made $511 million more than they did." For someone who is aware of the economist's meaning of "loss," this is obvious and the record companies don't seem that badly off (imagine if they said that they were actually spending $500 million more than they were taking in; they would be going bankrupt). For someone who is not aware of it, it is deceptive -- it makes it sound like the record companies are in serious financial peril, which is about as far from the truth as claiming that 2+2 = -8 i. That's what the companies want, of course.
Of course, even the economic sense of the word "loss" is dishonest, because the sales probably wouldn't have happened, especially in the case of students or people living in China (where the price of a CD is, for some people, equivalent to 1 week's pay).
That much is true, and I have made references to the state that I live in. Still, it is an entirely different level of data collection. Facebook tracks everything, and you MUST be logged in to even view the site. Slashdot is accessible to everyone, even when they aren't logged in, and there is no requirement that you supply any actual information about yourself. I do see your point, though.
Funny in this context? Yes. Seriously though, Slashdot has a lot less information about its users than Facebook. You don't have real names, or pictures with people's real names, or graphs of who knows who and when they met, or anything to that effect on Slashdot. Using my Slashdot account or posting history, I'd be impressed if you could figure out where I live or go to school to within less than 300 miles; compare with Facebook, which has my real name and the name and location of my school.
The worst part is that if you are permanently banned from the site, they still keep all your data on their servers. That is as low as they can get, because once banned a user cannot come back to delete their personal info, as they could if they voluntarily leave. The only real answer is to simply not use Facebook, at all. Flood it with false information to mask the real info., and then leave and never look back.
TFA doesn't say, but how is the UK going to define what an "ISP" is, anyway? What if I make a wireless mesh network in my neighborhood, and one of the nodes happens to have a DSL connection, would that make me and my mesh an ISP? Would I have to police that? How would a network like Fidonet factor into all this?
Yeah, I wonder if the politicians who proposed this law were even aware of things like encryption. Perhaps they thought that there was no way for 6 million people to hide their activities online. Politicians need a lesson on computing, before they make more tubesque laws.
I agree with you, but it is ironic that the same group of people running around suing college students and claiming that illegal copying is depriving directors and scriptwriters of their paychecks is refusing to honor the very same copyright laws. Funnier still is that the movie studios lobbied to have the length of copyright extended!
It isn't mentioned, but the company should have probably posted some information on its website or sent a notice to its customers that the laptop had been taken. How is this situation any different from a hacker gaining access to one of their servers and downloading client data? Their customers have a right to know that the laptop has been compromised.
Most people don't know what an application is, and just go around browsing the net and checking email. Maybe writing a quick paper, but OOo looks close enough to MSO that most end users never really notice the difference. Linux will be adopted when it is both shipped on systems that are actually advertised, by a big vendor, to end users. We are pretty close to it with the Eee.
The year of Linux will come when there are prime time advertisements for systems with Linux preloaded.
We have solutions to both problems. People just don't want to put in the time, effort, and of course, money to implement the solutions. Would you want to pay higher taxes to help subsidize the creation of bioplastics and wind power? Would you want to pay higher taxes to help subsidize an upgrade to broadband access and IPv6 use in your country?
How many times are we going to read the same headline? "SCO is bankrupt," "SCO filed a report with the SEC declaring bankruptcy," "SCO doesn't believe they can survive this lawsuit." They're dead. This is old news.
This is nothing more than a mere glance at the true extend of the RIAA's campaign. The number of students the RIAA has sued, most of whom couldn't hope to pay off a settlement or a lawyer to bring the case to trial, numbers way into the thousands. The truly insidious part is just that: the RIAA has billions of dollars available to sue people, and could keep the cases in litigation until the defendant just runs out of money and is forced to settle. There is no due process here, there never could be in cases like these.
No, but that means that everyone planning to run non-Python3 code will have to maintain two parallel Python installations. With package management that's not so bad, but it still puts a bit of pain on distro maintainers.
Yet everyone makes fun of me when I say that I am a C++ programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
Patent trolls are a problem; being a consequence of a larger problem does not make patent trolls any less problematic, much in the same way that a stomach infection causing one to vomit does not make the vomiting itself less problematic. An economy based on deciding who came up with an idea first is completely ludicrous, and companies that thrive in such an economy are emblematic of the problem.
This is dangerous behavior. There is no incentive for a patent troll to enter into a cross-licensing scheme, because they have no need for a license from someone else. There is no incentive for a patent troll to ever collaborate with anyone, because the patent troll just bought its patents rather than develop the ideas. The threat to actual inventors and companies that produce actual products is enormous, especially for small companies in obscure markets.
Attacking your friend's accounts is a good way to lose your friends. Most people don't take very kindly to that sort of practical demonstration without first giving their permission.
Absolutely. People don't really care if the government is reading their email, or if Google is indexing every word they say, or if Facebook keeps permanent logs on everything they click on. People do care about real life examples of how cryptography could have protected someone, whether a fake email or a message read out of context, especially when they can relate to the situation. It also helps if the system is quick and easy to use, like OTR (or PGP if your friends aren't too attached to webmail).
No, because in the case of privacy, people are constantly trying to pry into each other's business. Speaking personally, I have had it confirmed at least once that an email sent to me had been maliciously faked in order to manipulate me, and I have had some circumstantial evidence that someone was reading email conversations I had with someone else. I've been approached by people who know that I am a programmer, and want to know if I could "hack into" someone else' email account so that they could read through it. This stuff isn't about the boogeyman government, it is about ordinary people who actually do have no respect for the privacy of others.
Here's another angle to consider: sometimes, a message is easily misinterpreted when read by an uninformed party. When I was in Junior High School, I was once accused of plotting to blow up the school because of a note I had written to a friend, which had been misread by a teacher who found it after class. It isn't so uncommon. There are a dozen different situations like this, where some message is ambiguous and should only be read by someone who is fully informed on the context.
I've said for a while that patents should be non-transferable and automatically revoked if the patent holder does not market the idea. Lawsuits are, of course, not a form of marketing. Patent trolls add nothing to society, and therefore defeat the point of the patent system. Why do we still tolerate them? Virtually every company that produces something is threatened by patent trolling, and patent royalties significantly increase the price of consumer goods. We can have a patent system, we just need to completely reform it.
SCO isn't a patent troll. SCO does have a business that is not based on suing others for patent infringement, and that's why they are in so much trouble now: countersuits. A patent troll is immune to being sued because it does not distribute anything, it just makes money through royalties and lawsuits, and so can't really be sued for anything. It is actually a very dangerous entity, because it has nothing to lose.
Not sure if you are joking, but for anyone who is wondering what a patent troll is, it is a company that makes money simply by suing other companies for patent infringement. This is different from a company like Microsoft, that creates and sells other products, and is therefore stuck in a mutually-assured-destruction situation that prevents them from suing others for key patents. The problem with patent trolls is that they add absolutely nothing to society; most don't even invent the patented idea, they just buy it from someone else.
Oh, their business is roughly equivalent to that of a blackjack player: they keep throwing money into the game, but never profiting from any of it.
I'm convinced that Carlyle is actually headed by Satan. Let's see, they have MAJOR financial involvement with the Bush administration's wars, and now a major investment in SCO. Where is Jimmy the Reptile to burn a couple Unixware discs (I am listening to that old Iron Maiden song at the moment...)?
Of course, tying copyrights to the creator of a work would deprive certain interested businesses. 95 years is a victory for a record company, which can continue to profit decades after the death of an artist (suppose the song is recorded when the artist is 75?).
It is basically changing the meaning of the word, "loss." The record companies "lose $511 million per year due to copyright infringement" actually translates to, "had all the songs that were downloaded in a given year been purchased at the current market rate, the record companies would have made $511 million more than they did." For someone who is aware of the economist's meaning of "loss," this is obvious and the record companies don't seem that badly off (imagine if they said that they were actually spending $500 million more than they were taking in; they would be going bankrupt). For someone who is not aware of it, it is deceptive -- it makes it sound like the record companies are in serious financial peril, which is about as far from the truth as claiming that 2+2 = -8 i. That's what the companies want, of course.
Of course, even the economic sense of the word "loss" is dishonest, because the sales probably wouldn't have happened, especially in the case of students or people living in China (where the price of a CD is, for some people, equivalent to 1 week's pay).
That much is true, and I have made references to the state that I live in. Still, it is an entirely different level of data collection. Facebook tracks everything, and you MUST be logged in to even view the site. Slashdot is accessible to everyone, even when they aren't logged in, and there is no requirement that you supply any actual information about yourself. I do see your point, though.
Not to be a fanboy.
The worst part is that if you are permanently banned from the site, they still keep all your data on their servers. That is as low as they can get, because once banned a user cannot come back to delete their personal info, as they could if they voluntarily leave. The only real answer is to simply not use Facebook, at all. Flood it with false information to mask the real info., and then leave and never look back.
TFA doesn't say, but how is the UK going to define what an "ISP" is, anyway? What if I make a wireless mesh network in my neighborhood, and one of the nodes happens to have a DSL connection, would that make me and my mesh an ISP? Would I have to police that? How would a network like Fidonet factor into all this?
Yeah, I wonder if the politicians who proposed this law were even aware of things like encryption. Perhaps they thought that there was no way for 6 million people to hide their activities online. Politicians need a lesson on computing, before they make more tubesque laws.
I agree with you, but it is ironic that the same group of people running around suing college students and claiming that illegal copying is depriving directors and scriptwriters of their paychecks is refusing to honor the very same copyright laws. Funnier still is that the movie studios lobbied to have the length of copyright extended!
It isn't mentioned, but the company should have probably posted some information on its website or sent a notice to its customers that the laptop had been taken. How is this situation any different from a hacker gaining access to one of their servers and downloading client data? Their customers have a right to know that the laptop has been compromised.
The year of Linux will come when there are prime time advertisements for systems with Linux preloaded.
We have solutions to both problems. People just don't want to put in the time, effort, and of course, money to implement the solutions. Would you want to pay higher taxes to help subsidize the creation of bioplastics and wind power? Would you want to pay higher taxes to help subsidize an upgrade to broadband access and IPv6 use in your country?
An ingenious solution like...IPv6? We have the solution already. We just need to get people off their behinds and get it implemented.
How many times are we going to read the same headline? "SCO is bankrupt," "SCO filed a report with the SEC declaring bankruptcy," "SCO doesn't believe they can survive this lawsuit." They're dead. This is old news.
This is nothing more than a mere glance at the true extend of the RIAA's campaign. The number of students the RIAA has sued, most of whom couldn't hope to pay off a settlement or a lawyer to bring the case to trial, numbers way into the thousands. The truly insidious part is just that: the RIAA has billions of dollars available to sue people, and could keep the cases in litigation until the defendant just runs out of money and is forced to settle. There is no due process here, there never could be in cases like these.
Yet everyone makes fun of me when I say that I am a C++ programmer.