That argument works both ways:

Out of thousands of patents there are destined to be some useful ones.

I don't think we have data on how many IBM patents are stupid, so you're guessing at that 1% figure.

Maybe a better stat would be how many patents are licensed or productized, and how many patents sit on the shelf and are never used.

I can't prove it, but I suspect most IBM patents are never used, other than to lock up Intellectual Property. That's why I called it a land grab.

There is no doubt that IBM has some world-class labs that produce leading research and some amazing technology.

At the same time, IBM makes headlines (and slashdot articles) regularly for stupid patents and stupidly obvious patents. I won't bother linking all of them, but here is one from two months ago: http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/09/15/2235251/IBM-Patents-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Movies

Remember that when you read about how many patents IBM gains and holds. This is a land grab.

There are obviously a lot of problems with these ad services, but maybe there is some value to the Security-for-Ads business model.

The enterprise has an arsenal of security technology that, for the most part, has not made it to the consumer space. This makes consumer-owned computers very easy targets, and that has given rise to botnets.

Either ISPs can give away this kind of security (e.g. IPS, botnet detection) for free, or consumers can pay for it. But, consumers will not pay for it. Maybe supporting network security for consumers with ads isn't such a strange idea.

That said, Kindsight does not seem to have much of a security focus. The most detail I could find on their website are vague references to "advanced threat detection technologies," and none of the positions in their job listings include security expertise.

If this is news, then things are really slowing down in the security industry.

ha, I struck a nerve and some app programmer modded me down.

One quick observation: system-level programmers tend to be talented and have a high degree of skill, while application programmers, in many cases, do not have the same level of education or expertise.

I would guess most of the criticism below towards commercial software is directed towards application software.

An advanced malware author is almost certainly going to fit more into the systems-level programmer category. These are not people who just picked up a C# book three years ago. These are people who eat, sleep, and breathe computer science.

Size of teams and software are probably also a factor. Malware is probably going to be written by a handful of focused programmers, not a 300-person team using five kinds of bloated "platforms."

Maybe the font is intentionally blurry so you can't use your own OCR to scrape the book from Google.

What the Dems did accomplish was to prevent a panic, which may be the best anybody can really expect of government in this kind of crisis. Republicans probably would have focused on lowering taxes, so big business could take that money and use it for overseas jobs.

Maybe we all need to consider that American politicians just are not able to fix this problem.

Microsoft is basically a Windows company (well, Windows + Office), but not for lack of trying.
The company has a long history of trying to break into other markets and Failing. Hell, if it weren't for Microsoft's anti-competitive lock-in, they might not have such high market share for those products, either.

So, we have valuations of facebook and zynga that are:

a) speculative

b) so high that knowledgeable people say, "really?"

c) based on unsustainable annualized growth rates as high as 250% http://www.secondshares.com/2010/04/06/zynga-5-billion-valuation-buy-%E2%80%93-early-leader-in-social-gaming-is-printing-money/

Draw your own conclusions.

Agreed, the real problem here is corporate personhood (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood).

Businesses have something approaching the full rights of a human being, except, as the quote goes "They (corporations) have no soul to save and they have no body to incarcerate."

Combine this with the ideas of limited liability, proprietary knowledge, and the common practice of boards of directors being friends with the executives they appoint, and what you have is a class of corporate management run amok with little or no accountability to shareholders. Management has access to billions of dollars to spend towards their own interests, which in many cases are not the interests of the shareholders.

That said, I believe the government does have the authority to dissolve corporations, so a repeat felon corporation could be dissolved or fined into non-existance, although I don't know of any time this has happened before. The US guidelines to sentencing organizations (http://www.ussc.gov/2009guid/CHAP8.htm) mention fining an exclusively criminal organization of all its assets, but I see no mention of dissolving repeat offenders. Maybe someone else can chime in here.