No, I am the eggman. You are the walrus.

I doubt the intent is to actually absorb the territory. The Crimea is the only space they actually want. This is just a buffer, either to distract focus from continuing to hold the Crimea ( best defense, is a good offense you know) with the small added possibility of generating a real buffer state during settlements out of the Eastern Ukraine past the Dnieper.

*facepalm*

It really has been a long time since I've posted to Slashdot! Thanks.

I had all these lovely blank lines delineating my paragraphs, l wonder what happened to them...

Assuming that mind transfers were easy to enough to be in our grasp, of course. After all, can you imagine how valuable it would be to an organism's offspring if the parent were able to simply transfer all its experience,into it? Not having already evolved it isn't really a convincing argument,but it's worth a thought. Then again, there is instinct which, while for more primitive and less flexible than Knowledge (as well as in most cases relying heavily on complimentary learned experience to function, contrary to popular belief), does have similar aspects. Perhaps its actually less helpful (in the long run) to do a total transfer than it is to have a mix of "relearning" and certain forms of passed knowledge like an instinct. This reminds me of a rambling bit of philosophy I recently read in a Sci-fi novel. In discussing why apparent aliens had briefly stopped on Earth before continuing on without ever making contact with anyone, the idea was considered that perhaps what we consider intelligence is infact a primitive evolution of an instinct; inefficient, prone to error but still successful. Perhaps the alien's had a more refined instinct and no longer had need of the excess of culture and irrelevant communications that ours seemingly needs. That they had no need or even ability to communicate socially and contact us.

Forget the garden, I'll settle for a cheap, effective automated lawnmower! Currently, they're all high-priced for cutting dozens or hundreds of acres. Yet, most of them still can't tell when they're about to run over a poor baby rabbit...

Anything that inflates the Exploit/Vul marketplace just hurts us all. We can fight hackers. We can even fight governments. But, we can't fight economics. If economics strongly encourage the discovery and secret utilization of exploit, we are all doomed. A few may experience a short-term benefit from a booming market in exploit and vulnerability, but the consequences of that marketplace will harm all the rest of us. The only sane behavior is to do everything we can to depress the market for vulnerability and exploit. We have to change the economics.

• 1) The government must always, immediately, publicly, disclose any purchased vulnerability or exploit. Once they are for sale, there is no point in keeping them secret. Secrecy inflates the market. Then the market creates more vulnerability and exploit.
• 2) Any benevolent government should target the exploit marketplace. This is a sensible and reasonable target for the NSA and the FBI. The exploit market creates the uncontrollable weapons of the internet apocalypse. Any exploit or vulnerability that the FBI or NSA can seize from others should be immediately published. This will suppress the desirability of the goods in the exploit marketplace.
  • * The legal fictions of intellectual property should never be allowed to adhere to exploit information.
  • * There is no public interest in preserving exploit.
  • * There is a great deal of public harm in encouraging exploit.
• 3) For the good of us all, we need to beat the NSA black and blue and force them to publicly disclose any of their vulnerabilities and exploits that are over a year old.
  • * This provides the NSA with tangible deliverables that they can use to justify their existence and we can use to measure their competence.
  • * This gives them a year to play with their toys.
  • * This will greatly suppress the exploit marketplace.

"I don't get it, almost all his passwords should be Shift+v! Why isn't this working?"

"Read out says CTRL+v, boss."

"Don't be stupid! It has to be Shift!"

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

I heartily agree. Improving the process of litigating patents is nice, but we really need to improve the quality of granted patents. I believe that this problem is solvable, if we can muster the courage to admit that we have made mistakes in managing the patent office. In my opinion, the most important of these mistakes are:

1) More patents are not better than fewer patents.

Patents are not Innovation. Patents are not Progress. Patents are simply grounds to file a lawsuit against an industry. More Patents are simply more grounds for more lawsuits. An occasional lawsuit might spur innovation. BUT LAWSUITS DO NOT PRODUCE. Lawsuits are parasitic on innovation and production. Reform must recognize that patents are dangerous monopolies. Reform must place hard limits on the number of patents.

2) Running the US Patent Office as a cost-recovery operation is a mistake.

The US Patent Office is a very small, but critical component of the US economy. It's purpose was "..to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.." (US Constitution Article One, Section 8(8).) But, once the USPTO became completely cost recovery (Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, Title X, Subtitle B), that primary goal became overshadowed by the more pressing goal of securing funding via patent fees. The primary effect of cost recovery has been to promote the collection of patent fees.

Reform is painful, but simple. Admit cost recovery is a failed experiment. Revert the funding model to the model used for the first 200 years. The USPTO must be centrally funded by the US government. Any collected fees should be returned to the US Government.

3) It is a mistake to organize the US Patent Office to create economic incentives to grant poor patents.

Currently most of the revenue of the US Patent Office comes from GRANTING patents. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget page 37: www.uspto.gov/about/stratplan/budget/fy13pbr.pdf "..More than half of all patent fee collections are from issue and maintenance fees, which essentially subsidize examination activities." A recent study by the Richmond School of Law found that the USPTO's actual grant rate is currently running at about 89%. In 2001, it was as high as 99%. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa... page 9. In 2001, it didn't matter if an application was overbroad, obvious, trivial, a duplicate, or unreasonable, they ALL got granted. Things haven't improved much since then.

Reform could come in many forms, but the simplest and most reliable would be to eliminate and unify the Patent office fees into a single filing fee. This fee would provide no guarantee of receiving a patent, only a guarantee that your patent would be considered. This would free the Patent Office to be able to deny poor patents. The filing fee should be high enough to discourage spurious patent applications.

4) Scaling up the Patent Office to produce more poor quality patents is a mistake.

Currently, we expand the number of patent examiners based on demand. See the USPTO FY 2013 President's Budget, page 60, Gap Assessment: "Meeting this commitment assumes efficiency improvements brought about by reengineering many USPTO management and operational processes (e.g., the patent examination process) and systems, and hiring about 3,000 patent examiners in the two-year period FY 2012 and FY 2013 (including examiners for Three-Track Examination)." Again, the assumption is, more patents are better, even if it means decreasing examination, and increasing the number of untrained examiners. Poor quality is an inevitable result of this patent process.

Reform must tightly control and limit the number of patent examiners.

5) It is a mistake to grant all patents that meet minimum standards.

A review of the last couple decades changes in the patent approval criteria will reveal that the minimum standard for granting a patent has consistently shifted downwards. We must abandon the idea that any patent that meets minimum standards is granted. Over time, the standard always degrades. Reform is easy. You rank Patent Applications according to an agreed measure of quality, and only grant the top few percent. Over time, the pressure will be to improve the quality of patent applications, instead of degrade them.

6) Finally, please consider that it is a mistake to allow patent applicants to modify or extend their patents after submission.

This complicates the patent pipeline. It facilitates ‘submarine’ patents. It enables capturing Standards. It also enables gaming the patent system. Reform must simplify and reduce the patent process. Patents should be quickly evaluated. Most should be denied. If an applicant wishes to modify a denied patent, they should alter it, resubmit, and pay a new filing fee.

Real patent reform is possible. The pressures that currently give rise to bad patents are fairly obvious. We can mitigate those pressures and institute processes that tend to increase patent quality. If we can just summon the courage and political will to correct our mistakes.

Don't I wish.

A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.

An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?

A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.

And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)

Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )

At this point, governance of the NSA is a constitutional sham. There is no just rule because there is no consent of the governed.

There appear to be 2 paths forward.

1. 1) The path of trusted representation. If you can trust your representatives, maybe you can trust their oversight. This is the pathway that started with Frank Church and lead to Dianne Feinstein. The problem is, how do you regain trust when it has been so thoroughly abused? We now have lots of evidence that both the process and the people involved in this distribution of trust are not trustworthy. Simply resetting the process will not restore trust.
2. 2) The path of transparency. For the last few years, our dreams of empire have tempted us to discard openness, transparency and rightful rule. But these are the very things that have created and preserved us. There is nothing new about the temptations of tyranny. The dream of power has not changed or evolved in the last few thousand years. The architects of our nation were just as familiar with these temptations are are we. We just need to turn back to open laws, open courts, and open public discourse.