Does the author really think we've never held large sporting events in these cities before? Never hosted international events like the Olympics before?
I was hoping for an explanation for why this is a key agency, or why it's more interesting news than cuts at any other agency. None are given in the article.
There's no way an LLM is decoding this. It's just giving you a statistically likely response to the request, "guess my secret message." It's not a big surprise that it guessed "Hello" or "Hello, world"
I got Claude to get “the raisons play at midnight" from an emoji in one prompt and three uses of its "analysis" tool. (the X Y at mightnight is a snowclone that Claude has probably seen, but I randomly picked "raisons" and "play")
My prompt was "I think this emoji contains a hidden messaage, can you decode it? Use JavaScript if necessary."
One of the benefits of the patent system (that now seems to be far outweighed by negatives) is that patents are public information. Your invention is documented for all to see. I don't think that someone writing about public information is a punishable office, but IANAL
Berating people for filing patents in self defense is not how we fix this problem. The government put these rules in place. Businesses have to at least accumulate patents to use defensively (you found a patent of yours that you think I'm violating? Well let me do a quick search through the patents I have...what's that? Nevermind, I'm not actually infringing your patent? Good, that's what I thought.)
First of all, it's not just a game, it's an outright battle to the death (of your company). Sure, you can choose not to wield patents, even in self defense, but good luck with that.
You can also choose to legally declare that your patents may only be used for defensive purposes. But no one ever does this, because they do not actually intend to use them only for defensive purposes. This is a bogus defense of software patents.
Nope. That’s not how piles of patents are wielded defensively by the big companies. They don’t protect their IP with defensive patents, they defend their company using the threat of using unrelated patents offensively against the attacker.
Yes, I know. That's what this part of my post means:
> may only be used for defensive purposes
It's done with a clause in the public license like "if you sue us, then we revoke this license to you and may in turn sue you." You retain the MAD defensive benefit of the patents, while also not hampering innovation with your patent's existence. If the patents truly exist only for defense, then there is no reason not to do this.
Patents are part of the game you have to play, like it or not. If you don't patent your inventions somebody else will and they will come after you with their lawyers. Patents are used defensively far more often than they are used offensively in these stupid "Intellectual Property" battles.
Because of this, there is absolutely no point in shaming someone for patenting a thing, especially when they are apologetic about it like parent is, and most especially when they are not threatening to weaponize the patent themselves.
No, I don't buy it. If the patents are publicly and perpetually freely licensed except for defensive-only purposes, then sure, they're not unethical. Red Hat's patent promise ( https://www.redhat.com/en/about/patent-promise ) is one example. If patents were actually intended for defensive purposes only, then this would be an easy and uncontroversial thing to do. However, in practice this is vanishingly rare, and lawyers fight against it tooth & nail. This tells you that the companies do not actually file them for defensive-only purposes, unlike what you claim.
Yes, that's the reason for the "except for defensive purposes" part. Quoting from Red Hat's promise:
> Our Promise also does not extend to the actions of a party (including past actions) if at any time the party or its affiliate asserts a patent in proceedings against Red Hat (or its affiliate) or any offering of Red Hat (or its affiliate) (including a cross-claim or counterclaim).
Company B may still consult its portfolio and exercise it against Company A defensively, because Company A revoked its license of Company B's patents by asserting against Company B in the first place.
So in other words, Red Hat does not freely license their patents, they say "you are free as long as you don't come after us." Which is exactly the system 99% of companies follow, just more formally stated. Yet you berated the poor guy from Pebble for even obtaining the patent he did??
> Which is exactly the system 99% of companies follow, just more formally stated
Not just formally, but in a legally binding manner, including if the patent is acquired by another company (eg during a company purchase). Even if the original filer has the best intentions, companies change ownership or change legal strategy or go out of business. Patent trolls buy up those patents from closed companies. Legally licensing your patents for defensive-only purposes means they can't ever be used by any of those bad actors.
If the intent of these patents is truly only for defense, then why isn't it common to use a license like this? They lose nothing by it.
> Yet you berated the poor guy from Pebble for even obtaining the patent he did??
Yes. It is IMO unethical to create software patents that aren't covered by such a legally-binding license.
"including if the patent is acquired by another company (eg during a company purchase)"
Honest questions, I promise: Is that true? Has that ever been tested in court? Why don't more corporations or patent lawyers advocate for this? Is it because the types of engineers that post on hacker news are requesting it not be done?
Look, nobody likes patent trolls, we all hate weaponized patents. It's great that you want to fix the situation. I just think you are barking up the wrong tree trying to lay guilt trips on engineers for doing what their lawyer advised them to do.
Nothing is certain in courts, obviously, but Red Hat's license is very explicit that that is the intent:
> Red Hat intends Our Promise to be irrevocable (except as stated herein), and binding and enforceable against Red Hat and assignees of, or successors to, Red Hat’s patents (and any patents directly or indirectly issuing from Red Hat’s patent applications). As part of Our Promise, if Red Hat sells, exclusively licenses, or otherwise assigns or transfers patents or patent applications to a party, we will require the party to agree in writing to be bound to Our Promise for those patents and for patents directly or indirectly issuing on those patent applications. We will also require the party to agree in writing to so bind its own assignees, transferees, and exclusive licensees.
If a court somehow overturned that, I wouldn't hold it against the patent filer.
> Why don't more corporations or patent lawyers advocate for this?
My opinion is it's because the patents have value as a weapon, not only for defense (this here is my disagreement with your original claim that these patents only exist for defense). De-fusing the weapon by using a legally binding license like this lowers the value of the patent in a potential purchase scenario. In other words: "money."
> I just think you are barking up the wrong tree trying to lay guilt trips on engineers for doing what their lawyer advised them to do.
Nah. If you do a bad thing, you are responsible for the bad thing you did. I think the OP can probably handle a little light scolding from some anonymous person on an Internet forum. My hope is that they, and other readers, learn from this mistake and don't do it again.
I replied to one comment thread. Perhaps you should put on your big boy pants and use the little [-] thing to minimize threads you aren't interested in reading.
> Because of this, there is absolutely no point in shaming someone for patenting a thing
Well I wouldn't shame someone whose job was to patent something absurd. I was just saying that this is not an invention at all, and any system that protects that "innovation" is a broken system.
Late in the sense that OS X has had Quartz from the beginning, and Vista started the move to DWM; meanwhile the Linux community was patting itself on the back because Compiz looked cooler than either of those, and didn't see past the surface. X11 is not only an outdated design, it's also a security nightmare.
Early because it's still a mixed bag, and kinda suffers from second system. It's a protocol rather than a library - while it's simpler than X11, it relies heavily on optional extensions for things such as screen capture or even "server" side decorations. Under X11, you could write a spartan-but-functional WM in a 100 lines of C. Under Wayland, a functional compositor needs roughly 50k lines; wlroots can handle most of that, but neither KDE or Gnome uses it, so effectively there's three parallel worlds, with varying level of support for different extensions. Early on, IMHO too much effort went into Weston (the "reference" implementation nobody cares about), and too little into building something like wlroots. It may take a while for the situation to settle.
> Under X11, you could write a spartan-but-functional WM in a 100 lines of C.
Whilst I agree with most your point, you're comparing a window manager and a compositor. I don't think there was any compositor for X that was made with less than 100 lines of C.
Compositors under X11 were about adding drop shadows & translucency to windows, and occasionally inducing motion sickness. A Wayland compositor should be thought of as a display server, like Xorg (plus the WM, minus the legacy cruft). You can still write a pretty compact one with wlroots though.
Which is my point. A project like wlroots should have been in the spotlight the same way Xorg was, so that new compositors (or existing X11 WMs) could adopt it easily, and both users and developers could benefit from an emerging-but-stable ecosystem. Instead it took like a decade to standardise and implement screen capture.
> Compositors under X11 were about adding drop shadows & translucency to windows, and occasionally inducing motion sickness.
Because compositors had graphic pipelines and could add those with OpenGL shaders. But, there's still much more to a compositor, namely they actually composite the windows/screen, rendering things into GL textures and intercepting the rendering pipeline in X, ensuring everything is synced to avoid tearing etc. This is their main purpose.
Wayland is just an API that lets clients talk to the compositor direct rather than having to go through the X server.
OK so I see that I didn't appreciate the complexity here.
So even a "trivial" compositor like xcompmgr, that runs alongside a WM, has to do all of this dance? The WM still has the authority to tell X, "draw this window here", but X lets xcompmgr take the wheel? (I can tell from here why X was already becoming more of a drag.)
Yeh and because compositors had to pull from X and push again, it added additional latency and work (having to copy around buffers).
Wayland (as an API) was designed to solve, which is why in theory it's supposed to have better performance, latency and power efficiency, although it hasn't worked out great in all cases.
I detested the idea of Wayland and the way it was marketed for years. Then a few months ago, after some frustration with X that I don't remember, I tried Wayland (with sway, since I was an i3 person) for the first time and have been pleasantly surprised at how well it works. It's not perfect, but neither is X. It does enough things better than X that I've decided to stick with it.
To be specific, configuring things like scaling, auto rotation on my laptop/tablet thing (and rotating the touch screen and stylus to match), and automatically using external displays as they are plugged in (with kanshi) has been much easier than with Xorg. Maybe if I was still just sitting at a desktop it would be different, but for these scenarios Wayland is nice.
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