Doesn't matter if the suing party is a bona fide patent troll or a frivolous suit from a "legitimate" company.

Then why did you ask about defending themselves against patent trolls?

How likely is it that a legitimate company suing them is going to be in their same field and practicing their patents? It's extremely unlikely, that's for sure.

Acquiring a few BS patents is not a defense against patent trolls OR legitimate companies, instead you need MANY generic patents, like IBM or Microsoft has, if you expect to use patents as a defense, AND....

Khan Academy doesn't have that much money to defend itself against patent lawsuits, no matter who they come from.

Non-sequitur. The process of applying and going through the process and obtaining a full-blown patent is expensive, and you say they have little money for defense... that's just inconsistent with them getting a bunch of patents. This is a method of defense against would-be infringement lawsuits that is quite expensive, which could come from any source patent troll or legitimate company in ANY industry, not just your same industry.

Just having a patent provides no defense, if you cannot use it as a basis for suing your litigator.

If you want to make sure someone else doesn't patent your invention, then you just need to create a provisional patent or defensive publication, which doesn't involve many thousands of $$$ in application, research, and legal fees.

The only reason to obtain just a few patents concerning what you are doing is for generating revenue....

It appears that, for whatever reason, the murder charges have been dropped.

If the court is not completely impartial, they may choose to impose penalties for acts which they "know" to be true, but lack sufficient evidence. Or for some quality of character of the defendant that they don't approve of. The propriety of this behavior can be argued endlessly. People are imperfect and the court system is made up of people*.

*Remember this if you ever go to court: Your life is in the hands of twelve people who were not smart enough to get out of jury duty.

I don't know. But for sure, filing for your own patents does not protect against patent trolls.

It's not as if you can countersue a patent troll, as by definition: a troll is not an engineering business but a business centered around acquiring patents and generating revenue from them.

The only patent that would really defend against trolls would be a patent on patent trolling and methods thereof.

I thought KA benign, until they started getting patents.... it does not matter how benign they seem to be now, however, as the patents are not inherently tied to their current behavior which can change over time, And, moreover.... the possibility exists that the patents could change ownership in the future.

Khan Academy is a non-profit.

So what? You haven't contradicted any of my propositions.

There are many non-profit Educational organizations.

Just because they are non-profit does not mean that every activity they conduct or pursue is ultimately beneficial to the public.

The people who operate and govern a non-profit still get paid, And many non-profit educational organizations sell products or services; e.g. Just about every private and public college.

Non-profits also don't want competition, at least not direct competition within their specific niche. They still need revenue and recognition to fund their enterprise.

Also, schools do compete with one another for students and for donations.

At an organizational level; there are many schools whose administrations would favor kick out / make themselves the only university in a region, if they could get away with it / legally succeed at doing so.

I would encourage you to drop the "Non-Profit = Always good", "Profit = Evil" ideas.

... medium.com. Because we just got sucked in again.

It's most likely for a defensive purpose

In other words.... to help prevent competition / defend and prevent against someone else creating a competing service similar to Khan Academy that might take away some of Khan Academy's users, market share, or grant money and threaten KA staffs' ability to get paid.

...picture of Bill Gates across the street from the ATM.

In related news, Bill Gates no longer richest man in the world.

Seeing as Tron: Legacy grossed $400 million and was considered a success, as 11th highest grossing film in 2010, then I would say more than "four people" watched Tron 2.

The emacs psychotherapist doesn't even like me using the word 'hell'. I'm afraid feeding an AI with even a small subset of YouTube would drive it into a blind rage.

... in systemd logrotate?

Be careful what you wish for.

And as someone else mentioned, if nothing shows up quickly enough, another "false flag" operation.

It's not necessary, and I think 9/11 was a real incident, not a false-flag.

However, 9/11 could have prevented, and laziness/incompetence plus a poor job done by intelligence agency staff and neglect of their reports by those in charge contributed to the unmitigated success of the attack.

That's all that needs to happen after Pat. act expires. Laziness or incompetence by the intelligence agencies resulting in failure to prevent an event that could and should easily be prevented based on available intelligence.

If they want to politicize this.... as Obama's administration has been seen to do in the past on some other issues such as "government shutdowns", when the program expires, the agencies can just start pretending "their hands are tied" and stop providing some vital intelligence; even some intelligence they were able to gather and did gather before Pat. act.

An event can happen from negligence in the form of inaction / failure to gather intelligence they should have gathered, or failing to act on intelligence and prevent occurence.

Then when the event happens, they'll claim the loss of Pat. act privileges to spy on ordinary 'mericans made their jobs unduly harder, and they "need the Pat. act" and more to do effective work.

this was obviously on someone's wet dream wish list (it was not so much written as released from the vaults)

There's probably an even better successor version of the law waiting in the vaults for the next event of a similar magnitude.

The intelligence agencies can just lay low for a few months; there's bound to be an event justifying uber-surveillance powers and a never-expiring new and improved version of patriot act that gives even more powers for surveillance of americans and casting dragnets and datamining + data fishing expeditions.

That depends on whether you have implemented some sort of feedback to engineering from QA. If you start to se some variance in the dimensions (or other parameters) from a manufacturing step, even if these are still within tolerances you can see if there is a correlation to increases in problems in service.