* Posts by tom dial

2187 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2011

The Spherical Cow lands, spits out Anaconda

tom dial Silver badge

Re: Hyper-V support?

A virtualisation solution that won't run a mainstream Linux or FreeBSD out of the box is one I would avoid. Although I haven't tried with Fedora, I would guess that either qemu-kvm or virtualbox would do so without a whimper. With MS, although they are not agents of the devil, one always must wonder whether there is an unpublished agenda.

France stalls plan to make Google and pals foot broadband rollout

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Re: Backwards people?

This is not a snarky comment.

In just what sense do Google "operate" in a country? Is it by having a datacenter there? Is it enough that residents of the country type the Google URL into their browsers? Is it only by having a "headquarters" of some kind in a country?

We can expect that international companies, Google and others, will analyze the tax laws of all the countries in which they have a presence and make placements and adjustments to improve profits, which is very likely to mean reduce their tax total across all countries. The also will petition or agitate otherwise to have laws that don't work too heavily against their profit objective. Those who expect otherwise are dreamers and are likely to be disappointed and angry. If the French are unhappy about the tax revenue they get from Google their legislators can change their tax laws, to the extent they are not constrained by treaty agreements, or negotiate with other nation-states to change matters. Whining about bad google not paying its "rightful" share of taxes, however that might be defined, is unlikely to be useful.

Anger grows over the death of Aaron Swartz

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Re: Re: Many changes need to be brought on.

Further clarification of point 2: A good deal of the joint public/private collaboration is either pure contract work or government efforts to spur development in a certain direction (Solyndra, for example) and would not be undertaken at all but for government participation, often solicited by the promoters. In such cases I see no harm in requiring that all resulting IP be assigned to the government, as agent for the citizens. To use Solyndra as an example, the projected net cost to the government is a $500 million. It seems unlikely that the activity that bought in a field of relatively rapidly growing technology did not result in some patents. Those who buy the carcass at the end of the bankruptcy have less right to them, in my view, than those whose money was spent to get them issued.

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Stop

Re: Many changes need to be brought on.

Compromise certainly would be possible.

1. As far as I know, the articles cited inf Mr. Swartz's indictment were unrestricted as to where they could be sent or downloaded from. The only requirement was that someone pay (again) for the access. That said, the major part of the intent could be met while allowing classified research to remain unpublished or restricted, as it largely is at present.

2. It is doubtful that inventive people would stop inventing. At present, those working in the private sector are mostly, I believe, under contractual requirement to assign their patents to their employer; this does not stop them from inventing. If the taxpayers provide a share of the money that pays an inventor's salary or wage, they should be as entitled to share in any resulting patents or copyrights as the employer of record. As things now stand, the result is private gain from public expenditures - but not necessarily to the inventor, who may receive only a lump sum bonus.

There is at-least-somewhat-respectable economic research suggesting that patents may not be of great benefit to society as a whole.

tom dial Silver badge

Many changes need to be brought on.

Aaron Swartz's death, whether prompted by the prospect of a lengthy prison term and subsequent poverty, or by his own private demons, is a loss for us all.

A great deal of the research done in the U. S. is funded either partly or fully by the U. S. Government. It very probably would be a major contribution to "Progress of Science and useful Arts" if:

1) all research publication and other copyright eligible material paid for in part or whole by the government were required to be made freely available to all of the taxpayers who contributed;

2) all patents issued based on such research funded in part or whole by the government were required to be assigned to the government and licensed at no charge to any citizen;

I propose that the above be enacted as the Aaron Swartz Patent and Copyright Act. The U. S. Constitution allows the Congress to provide for patents and copyrights It does not say how it must do so, or even that it must do so at all.

New tool jailbreaks Microsoft Surface slabs in 20 SECONDS

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Re: Bizarre

Correct on both counts. However, the second needs correction:

They release a locked down OS which can't run anything that's not signed and obtained from a known source, attempting thereby to create a monopoly on the distribution of software to run on the OS.

They are doing this in a somewhat mature market to which they are a newcomer (or failed entrant, if we consider the smartphone to be part of it), completely ignoring that they became big partly by providing an OS platform for which a large number of vendors could write and sell programs. I should have sold my MS shares years ago, but don't have a great deal and kept it, hoping they would manage to do something sensible.

tom dial Silver badge
WTF?

Hypothetical question

Hypothetically. Only.

It's MY computer; ought I need to "jailbreak" it to install and run programs of my choice?

It is my (hypothetical) computer isn't it? If not, what did I actually buy for my hypothetical $500 or more? Was it merely a one-time, periodically renewable, license to purchase programs, for additional (hypothetical) dollars, from Microsoft's store?

While cryptographic signing of software and secure boot are not bad by themselves, they are not likely to be infallible, as key compromises related to SSL show; and Microsoft has not given strong reason over the last 30 or so years to trust them. More than Microsoft I blame hardware manufacturers for not simply providing the software to generate and replace the platform key, sign software, and maintain the internal key database. Most people would forget or never use it, but it is true equally that most people do not use the BIOS, either with or without a password.

Texas schoolgirl loses case over RFID tag suspension

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Stop

A nation of the risk-averse.

A straightforward case of "my power to enforce half baked and mildly creepy controls trumps your liberty." Endorsed by the court, so it must be right. The program is a trivial corollary to intrusive airplane boarding procedures, national email slurping, and public building entry controls. All of them are designed to prevent things that already have occurred or to make it appear that risks are being addressed, irrespective of whether the countermeasure mitigates or even is related to a defined risk or whether the cost and risk are commensurate.

San Antonio officials need to read and be required to report on, Orwell' "1984.'"

Senator threatens FAA with legislation over in-flight fondleslabbing

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Re: Seriously?

Senator McCaskill may feel a bit full of herself after a come-from-behind win in November over a pretty clueless opponent. However, answering such questions as which, if any, electronic devices to allow to operate during flight far exceeds the knowledge and skills of all or almost all legislators and the executives who sign the laws they pass. These questions should be left to executive branch agencies such as the FAA and FCC who employ people who have the required knowledge and skills (but may be too risk-averse to act on them). Overly detailed laws are a problem because of the difficulty of changing them.

'Facebook is completely undreamt of even by the worst spying nation'

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Stop

Hypocracy

I caught this story in today's New York Times, noting that Starbucks is promising to pay some millions of pounds that it is not legally required to do. I think this is a mistake; they should not pay one penny more (of less) than legally required. If the politicians don't like that they should correct the laws they passed rather than griping about the nasty capitalists and the accountants and lawyers who advise them. They made the problem and they should correct it, even at the cost of some embarrassment, or should be turned out by their constituents in favor of legislators who will act more honestly.

Ready for ANOTHER patent war? Apple 'invents' wireless charging

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Patents

Patents are, and always have been, evidence of successful rent seeking. There *may* be some social benefit from the fact that the patent documents must disclose the invention so that others may build upon it (the alternative being to keep the invention a trade secret). My admittedly untrained observation is that many or even most most of the software related patents I have read tend strongly to obscure the nature of the invention, which turns out after study to be pretty obvious to anyone even moderately skilled in the arts of programming. Indeed, it has for some years been my opinion that a programmer who fails to infringe at least a patent a day is not being very productive.

UK's planned copyright landgrab will spark US litigation 'firestorm'

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Re: Wishing into existence

Hacking into a computer, then copying and publishing the contents, violates much more than copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but have a strong suspicion that copyright applies in practice only to published works. It is quite a stretch to argue that material on my PC that I do not explicitly share has been "published". That governments create rights is, of course, a matter of opinion, but many or most would agree that one of the core functions of a government is to enforce rights, however created. If for no other reason, it is much more efficient than for everyone to have a private armory and security staff to do so; and in the case of "intellectual property" which has been created by fiat, there really is no other way. At least with physical property, there is something that has dimensions and mass to discuss.

What some of us consider a problem with IP is that over its history it has been extensively redefined in scope (patentability, for instance) and extent (copyright , for example). As I understand it copyright initially was 14 years with a possible renewal for another 14. It is far longer now, and it is not clear that the monopoly benefits society as a whole. It is not even obvious in detail how it benefits the actual creative human beings.

It is fairly clear that the patent thicket and resulting Apple/Motorola/Microsoft/etc lawsuits around cell phones do not involve much more than classic rent seeking, in which the participants are effectively petitioning the government, as the monopolist of the lawful use of force, to act to their benefit. The same is true for copyright. Whatever the outcome, it will not benefit consumers. One also might reasonably ask how a creator of books or pictures benefits from a monopoly that survives him or her by 50 to 70 years.

Widow lost savings in Facebook stock, sues all concerned for $1.9m

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Re: First rule of share trading (well mine anyway)

Rule 2: Avoid investing in a company if you don't understand how its operation will generate a continuing and growing cash flow - e. g., by selling product or providing a service. IBM has done rather well for quite a while.

Rule 3: If you expect to make a profit in under a few years, recognize that you are gambling just about as much as if you went to a casino. Depending on your choice of games, the casino odds could be better.

Long term (~40 year) investment in equity securities, sensibly chosen, historically has provided decent returns. Day traders as a group, I suspect, have not done very well. The real way to make money trading stocks is to be the broker earning commissions.

Apple engineers 'pay no attention to anyone's patents', court told

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Linux

Question

After looking at the patent, I conclude it is mostly a patent on using a DNS server for something else in addtion. And it clearly is a patent on doing something as much as or more than on a method for doing something. I can't decide, however, whether TOR is prior art or infringes it; and similarly for FreeSWAN. Opinions?

Businessweek: 'It's Global Warming, Stupid'

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Re: Why the Denial? @ Sean Timarco Baggaley

I'm not really much of a skeptic about the fact of global warming or the fact that human activity doubtless is a contributor. I do doubt that we are likely to have will to take the actions that would reverse it or even slow it a lot in the next generation or two. Politically, it seems likely to be a very difficult thing to sell. However, I wonder whether sedimentation rates and ice cores tell the story in enough detail or have been obtained from enough different places to finger long-past global changes with a precision better than a few hundred years, and so question whether the observed change in the last 30 or 40 needs discounting.

APPLE: SCREW YOU, BRITS, everyone else says Samsung copied us

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Meh

Apple

Collecting down (and possibly up) votes here.

Apple slips bomb into ITC filing: Samsung being PROBED by US gov

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Stop

Re: How can you patent something that's "Standards Essential"?

I call BS. The manufacturing companies make the real money by selling physical things that do work, and others buy them because the salesman convinces them the part is, in some sense, optimal for the desired purpose. The Patents probably are mostly defensive in two respects. First, having them included in the standard limits the extortion of others, and second, depending on the distribution of standards essential patents in the field, they may be an additional source of income.

TiVo: Cisco and pals could owe us BILLIONS over DVR patents

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Re: A bit of info ...

Given the missing patent references in the article and my inability to find the reference manuals, I can't be sure, but the description in this post seems a lot like what the Next (in 1989) was doing with its DSP chip.

Salesforce CEO Benioff: Win 8 is 'the end of Windows'

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And one more thing ..

I am retired now, but my former employer kept the organization's data on its own servers - many of them mainframes - behind carefully maintained and highly restrictive firewalls. By now they probably will have established some degree of internal cloudiness within their enclave. They allow access from the outside using equipment owned by the company and maintained by employees. They have had very few "problems," none, as far as I know, of much significance. I doubt they will deviate from this largely successful approach. I have followed the same approach for my own data.

The last I heard, a few months back, they were moving gradually toward deployment of Windows 7 (upgrading from XP Pro) and are most unlikely to be thinking about Windows 8 for quite some time,. Given their apparent good results, and my satisfaction with a combination of Windows 7, Debian Linux, and FreeBSD, I will emulate them in that also.

State of Minnesota bans free online education

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Re: Must be Republicans running Minnesota!

A not very exceptional example of unintended consequences, perhaps. A better way to accomplish the apparent intent might be to legislate that educational debts to unregistered schools would not be enforceable in Minnesota courts. I don;t really believe that would solve the problem, but it would, at least, eliminate harassment of the likes of Coursera while limiting somewhat the fraudulent "schools."

McKinnon will not be extradited to the US, says Home Secretary

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Re: Good, but he should still stand trial for his alleged crimes

Reasonable order in society depends very heavily on the self control of almost all citizens. If Mr. McKinnon's understanding of right and wrong actions is so skew to the laws and understanding of most people, is there not an argument that he should not be allowed personal liberty? I realize that's a dangerous argument, but there also are dangers in excusing antisocial or illegal behavior based on claims of illness.

'Stop-gap' way to get Linux on Windows 8 machines to be issued

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Re: The keys are not controlled by the owner.

You have just explained fairly well why those of us who use Gnu/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc, might want to use Secure Boot. You have not explained why we should not have the platform key and sign boot and other software as we choose, or delegate that to a key authority of our choice rather than to Microsoft, whom some, at least consider a bit untrustworthy. I see no reason why I should have less trust in a key that I generate myself than one generated by a third party. The risk of a self-generated key is not that it (or its controller) is untrustworthy, but that I will use it unwisely and thereby harm myself (or my computer system). But it is my system, and my risk.

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Linux

Re: You know what?

Secure Boot is not a bad idea in itself, although the security benefit seems to me to be fairly small. Secure Boot only makes sense if you trust the signer of the key exchange keys that control booting and software installation. Since these keys need to be signed using the platform key, you also must trust the platform key signer. Please tell me why I should trust Microsoft.

So Secure Boot where Microsoft owns the platform key is a Bad Idea.

tom dial Silver badge

Re: One word: What The F***!

If you buy a 'PC version of Windows 8' you may have trouble installing it on a platform of your choice. If you buy a 'PC that runs Windows 8' it will be Windows certified and according to Microsoft's plan you will not own the platform key. Accordingly, you will not be allowed to install a boot loader that is not signed by Microsoft for Secure Boot. And if the equipment is ARM you will not be able even to turn off Secure Boot and boot an unsigned boot loader, which many of us have been doing for years without serious problems.

What irritates ne most about Secure Boot (Windows 8 and RT style) is that the security benefits are marginal and the inconvenience, for anyone who wants anything but Windows, is not. It is fairly clear that Microsoft is implementing it to reduce the risks associated with Windows software vulnerabilities; constrain the spread of non-Microsoft (and older Microsoft) operating systems; and possibly manage Windows licensing for virtual machine environments. I haven't heard the wailing, but Secure Boot affects other OS like FreeBSD equally with Linux.

tom dial Silver badge

BS!

If I purchase a piece of hardware, that should include both the platform key and the software to generate and install a new one. Anything less is, to my way of thinking, a security vulnerability. On my hardware, I should be in position to control the installation of the keys that are used to manage software installation.

If, on a machine with Windows I choose (either actively or passively, as most purchasers will) to delegate my rightful authority to Microsoft, that is my right. And although it is Microsoft's right to restrict certification of a system for Windows if they wish, it is not their right to control the platform key to a system that they do not own.

Ballmer aims chair at Apple after Windows package miss

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Stop

Re: Linux et al :Dave 126

Debian install is the same, more or less, as CentOS (and presumably Fedora). You recommend yum, proving you are smart enough to use a command line and find the program you want. apt-get, in the same circumstances, works as well or better for Debian. So what's your beef? The only benefit I see from Ubuntu is automatic access to non-free software repositories andnice pointy-clicky progam installation that works almost as often as APT. What's your real problem?

Bloomberg's bomb: How SEC shredded Facebook's pre-IPO claims

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Re: wealthy sheep.

First: nobody should invest in common stocks unless they can afford to lose their entire investment and understand that they might do so.

Second: nobody should invest in a company without understanding either how it is going to make a profit into the distant future or that they are gambling just as much as if they were gaming in a casino.

So I didn't invest in Facebook. If mom & pop did, I hope the cost of the lesson didn't empty their retirement fund, but I don't have a great deal of sympathy.

Assange chums must cough up £93,500 bail over embassy lurk

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Stop

Nonsense.

Bradley Manning is in trouble for allegedly copying and providing to Wikileaks classified materials which he had no authorization for access.

Julian Assange, as point man for Wikileaks, might be wanted for actually publishing those materials. But the U. S. government has no need of information from Bradley Manning or, indeed, anyone else, to charge, if they can, on that. The fact of publication speaks for itself. I am not a lawyer and have no knowledge of the laws, if any, that would apply to a foreign national (e. g., Assange) who publishes U. S. classified information outside the U. S. The whole "getting JA to Sweden so the U. S. authorities can extradite him" is rubbish.

Samsung claims Apple jury foreman LIED to get REVENGE

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Perhaps you are right, perhaps not. WE can't know, and that is why the verdict is arguably worthless and needs a redo. The issue is not whether the motivation was an ancient lawsuit, a patent holder's pro-patent bias, or maybe just an irrepressible need to feel important. The problem is the publicly stated misbehavior during deliberations.

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Re: Seagate?

The juror's motivation is not, in the end, at all important. The jury room behavior he and others described, however motivated, was over the limits.

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Stop

Apple is not an innovator. It is a good integrator of available technology and an outstanding polisher of the products they develop. It remains to be seen how long this survives the passing of Steve Jobs, who by all reports was the central driver in this.

Let the downvoting begin.

Iran linked to al-Qaeda's web jihadi crew by old-school phone line

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Re: clue

If I remember correctly, Iran and Iraq had a long and nasty war back in the days of Saddam. It is hardly unthinkable that the government of Iran would feel more secure with various Iraqi factions fighting and killing each other than with a unified Iraq. Similarly with Afghanistan, with the bonus that keeping the local factions at war also targets US/NATO forces. If supporting some Sunnis is what it takes, I guess they would be alright with that.

Nokia offers its maps to enterprise: Deal inked with Oracle

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Meh

Optional

So I thought I'd give Nokia maps a try: map the route from my house in Ohio to my daughter's in Utah, 1820 miles, all but 6 on interstate highways. Google maps gave a good answer in under 5 seconds. Nokia maps, although it found the addresses quite quickly, still is wheezing and puffing after about 15 minutes and has not returned anything useful. To be fair, Bing maps, which I understand use Nokia's mapping, returned driving instructions about as fast as google, and nearly as good.

The satellite view from Google also was better than Nokia in both size and resolution, and better than Bing in size.

I'll stay with Google for a while, thanks.

US said to designate Assange 'enemy' of the state

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Stop

The large number of civilian and military employees and government contractors with secret or higher clearances has to be understood in the correct context. Having clearance to access secret or top secret classified material means only that one may see classified material needed to perform job duties that is classified at a level no higher than one's clearance permits. Bradley Manning, e. g., although possibly cleared for access to secret-classfied data, is alleged to have gone well beyond his assigned duties in accessing such data and to have released it to individuals who were not authorized to have access to it. Both types of action are violations.

When Wikileaks released the initial group of diplomatic cables, all USDoD military and civilian employees were cautioned that, as ludicrous as it seemed, the material had not been declassified and access to it via Wikileaks would be unauthorized access to classified materials and could be punished. I worked at the time for a DoD agency and we all understood that web accesses from the workplace were likely to be logged and reviewed if they showed "inappropriate" activity. There was no hint of entrapment.

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Stop

Re: You what?

You might have read something correctly, but if so, what you read was quite false.

tom dial Silver badge
Stop

Re: Bit late with this news then?

This whole thing is getting tiresome. The Slashdot item is not even as good as the Sydney Morning Herald article. The diplomatic cables have been public for a while and although embarrassing to quite a number of people who consider themselves important, have not caused the world to end or even cause major inconvenience to the U. S. Indeed, it appears to me Mr. Assange would be at greater risk from various Middle Eastern/North African political actors who lost jobs recently or are fighting to retain them. They have a stronger motive and, perhaps, fewer scruples about extreme measures than the U. S. government.

Send him back to Sweden, where I suspect the pending charges will be found unwarranted, and let him go wherever he wishes and can gain admission. He is not in the U. S. military and therefore not subject to the UCMJ. He also is a self-important twit and does not warrant U. S. government attention. Wikileaks would be better off without him.

World's power-grid cyber breach traced to notorious Chinese crew

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FAIL

Ignoramuses

Everything connected to a power distribution control system should be by wire, preferably with extra shielding - absolutely no WiFi or similar - and fully disconnected from the normal office network and the internet. Any connected system or workstation not within a secured and guarded room should have its CD and floppy disk drives removed and any serial, parallel, or USB ports plugged with epoxy. Even better, the internal disk drive should be removed and the storage be supplied by NFS or iSCSI from servers within the above mentioned secured and guarded room. Measures need to be in place to ensure physical network security and integrity as well. Engineers and technicians who don't want to have to come to the installation to work need to find other employment. Have we learned nothing from the Iranians' atomic energy "misfortune?"

Microsoft drives German patent tank into Google's front room

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As well as going back ~50 years, in its basic conception, to OS/360 device independence.

Brains behind Kazaa and Morpheus unleash patent storm

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Flame

Disgusting

I do not have the stomach right now even to read the patents. Their titles alone make me want to throw up.

I concluded long ago that no competent programmer could work for as much as a day without inadvertently infringing one or more patents.

Apple wins second round of Samsung patent slugfest

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I have no special sympathy for Samsung, nor own any Samsung kit other than TV, Blue Ray, and monitor. Neither can I find any rational justification for buying a tablet or new phone (2009 Droid still works well). It appears to me, as a somewhat detached observer, that current Samsung phones and tablets (except for latest iPad display) equal or superior to Apple's on a hardware basis, and the OS/software interface is a matter of taste. Anybody actually confused enough to buy a Samsung phone or tablet thinking they were getting an Apple product is not smart enough to be trusted with the amount of money spent. Apple (in Apple v Samsung, recently decided) appeared to benefit significantly from trial court decisions and jury conduct that some might characterize as bias and improper conduct, respectively. Apple's efforts to exclude competitors based on the flimsy patents offered won't hurt Samsung much in the long run, but suggests it has lost confidence in its ability to design outstanding products and lost faith in its customers ability to recognize them.

Apple hoards LTE patents to deflect Samsung attack

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Re: Apple needs some help

Mr. Hogan's statement, if properly quoted, suggests he holds himself an expert on patent law and possibly claimed that during jury discussions. If I recall the Judge's instructions from my own jury experience, that would be serious misbehavior indeed.

Voyager's 35th birthday gift: One-way INTERSTELLAR ticket

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Incorrect. They send back the data they want us to see.

Torvalds bellows: 'The GNOME PEOPLE are in TOTAL DENIAL'

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Stop

Re: Linux problem...

For Debian (Ubuntu should be similar):

# apt-get install bugzilla

=> gives an error saying there is no bugzilla, but that bugzilla3 replaces it.

# apt-get install bugzilla3

=> would install it, along with necessary prerequisites, including many Perl modules. Whether it sets up Bugzilla I don't know and don't plan to find out. It seems reasonable that the installer-administrator might need to do some local post-installation configuration, though.

Experience with Centos or Red Hat might differ; I found a clearly stated recipe from three years ago suggesting some possible difficulty at that time. Google returned that in about 0.23 seconds. More recent pages suggest it is straightforward, but a bit more involved than for Debian. The Wiki/FAQ at the Bugzilla site are seriously backlevel for Debian and possibly others.

Now Apple wants Samsung S III, Galaxy Notes off the shelves too

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FAIL

Apple's crown jewels of innovation

Consider the patents at issue in Apple v. Samsung (II), due for trial in early 2014.

5,946,647, filed Feb 1, 1996 and granted Aug 31, 1999: To a first approximation, this is a patent on a class of computer programs - a general flow chart is provided to facilititate understanding - to perform functions such as those for which Perl was developed and has been used since 1988. For doubters who would point to the patent's mention of mouse selection, TkPerl was released in 1994 and Perl/Tk in 1995. As for mentions of audio interfaces, it would be quite unsurprising if CPAN did not contain modules before 1996 for interaction with sound transducers, both input and output.

6,847,959, filed Jan 5, 2000, granted Jan 25, 2005: This patent appears to cover any modular application that searches more than one source and optionally filters the resulting matches using a ranking algorithm. This seems a bit wide ranging, not to say obvious; likely to have been done using Perl and available CPAN modules before 2000.

8,046,721, filed Jun 2, 2009, granted Oct 25, 2011: Unlocking a device using a gesture. Much already has been written on that.

8,074,172, filed Jan 5, 2007, granted Dec 6,2011: GUI for offering and accepting completions for partial words on a touch screen. Maybe novel, but possibly already done earlier in substance in keyboard based word processing programs. It might be good, if you like software patents and agree that a new patent should be given for an obvious use of a new type of input device. Patent 5,896,321, filed Nov 14, 1997 and granted to Microsoft on Apr 20, 1999 might otherwise be considered prior art. That one seems to have quite a load of references, suggesting, if it needed to be any more, that software patents are a nasty problem.

8,014,760, filed Jun 27,2007, granted Sep 6,2011. Patenting a computer program for managing email or missed telephone calls in a graphic environment using a touch screen display. All the claims are rather obvious (suggesting there might be prior art from, e. g., Samsung, Sony, LG, Nokia ...). Additionally, a skilled practitioner of the application design art would be likely to develop an application very like that described if told to provide an application for managing contact information and the related telephone calls, email, and text messages.

5,666,502, filed Aug 7, 1995, granted Sep 9, 1997: Patenting prioritized drop-down selection lists for a pen-based computer system (claims 1 - 7, and 13). Claims 8 - 11 and 14 - 26 do not specify the type of selection tool, and claim 12 lays claim to doing this on a "pointer-based computer system." I believe I learned in a PowerBuilder developer class (probably 1993 or 1994) how to do this in a Windows environment, so it was likely not new in mid-1995. It might come down to whether something already current can be patented in a new environment or should simply be considered an obvious adaptation to be made in passing by the skilled practitioners of the art.

7,761,414, filed Jan 7, 2007, granted Jul 20, 2010: Asynchronous Data Synchronization Amongst Devices. This patents a program similar to RSync (released initially on Jun 19, 1996) with, in some claims, file locking or a shell script using rcp or scp together with flock as described in section 1 of the Unix Programmer's Manual. It seems pretty aggressive to claim a patent on using a standard Unix command for its intended purpose. Some claims refer specifically to one of the systems being hand held, but most do not. The specification of "asynchronous" is in that it is obvious on any multitasking OS. This should be ditched for both obviousness and prior art, and the approving patent examiner cautioned.

8,086,604, filed Dec 1 2004, granted Dec 27 2011: Another search patent, extending 6,847,959. Another example of the mischief of software patents. At first glance it looks the same as the earlier patent. I've been at this a while and have no patience for a second.

I will treasure my 1995 Powermac 8500 (with Debian Squeeze) until it dies. Apple has joined Sony on my no-buy list.

Apple: I love to hate, and hate to love thee

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Microsoft had a monopoly and tried to extend it using shady business practices. Apple doesn't have a monopoly (yet) and is using shady legal process to attempt to attain one.

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Stop

(Untitled)

It might be that they would, if they could. But they can't, and they won't. My business, should I ever figure out how I can use an *pad for effective work against the seriously damaged US patent regime, probably will go to Asus or Samsung. Apple's innovation is in the same category as that of Louis Vuitton

Why the Apple-Samsung verdict is good for you, your kids and tech

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Re: No innovation without patents? Seriously?

That's the beauty - or redeeming characteristic - of contingent fees for attorneys in the U. S. legal system. With a plausible claim you can get an attorney to work for you on the basis that he or she will be paid, if successful, a fraction of the award. This has both good and bad points.

Apple's patent insanity infects Silicon Valley

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Re: I've said it before and I'll say it again

Stated in the link: [The patent system] may have had a purpose once ...

An earlier post in this thread (about Watt and the steam engine) suggests things might have been no better 200+ years ago, and that the purpose then may have been essentially the same as it is now.

I have not seen a detailed analysis proving that the first mover advantage, which Apple has in abundance with the iPhone and even more so with the iPad, is insufficient to enough to reward inventors.

Oracle: Google impurifying media's precious bodily fluids

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Keep Florian

F. Mueller provides an extensive stream of spin that on initial reading sometimes appears plausible but in hindsight often have missed the mark rather badly. Nonetheless, it represents a point of view that allows readers to refine their own thinking. Not only that, his posts occasionally are quite entertaining in the same sense as the U. S. Presidential campaign now beginning.

My suggestion would be to accompany any report of Florian Mueller's "analysis" with a scorecard of past output.