That's because virtually 100% of patent holders use their patents defensively.

You missed the part where they knowingly allowed a patent to become part of a published open standard and ignored it for an entire decade, *then* started going after violations.

Oh, actually, it's worse than that. Dolby acquired these patents from General Electric two years ago. So in this matter, they quite literally ARE patent trolls. They did nothing to create this technology, but rather bought the patents to enrich themselves by becoming a leech on the industry now that companies are abandoning their codecs in favor of codecs whose encoders don't involve royalties.

You obviously don't understand patent law terminology, so let me give you a refresher:

• Defensive use of patents - patents held until someone sues you, then used to retaliate and make the other company's lawsuit more expensive and complex, usually resulting in a cross-licensing agreement.
• Offensive use of patents - suing someone else over the patent without having been previously sued by that someone else.

Suing multiple companies for violating a patent without getting sued first is the very definition of offensive use of a patent.

Those are actually separate lawsuits. (See link above.) The AV1 lawsuit is suing to stop them from using AV1 and force them to use a Dolby-licensed codec. They're also suing a Chinese hardware maker over AV1 at the same time.

The hell you can't. Patent infringement occurs on creating an instance of an invention. The moment they create source code for the software (an instantiation of the patent), they have violated the patent. It doesn't have to be instantiated into hardware or used by a business to be a violation. The patent violations began when AOMedia distributed the first beta versions a decade ago. The original patent holder (GE) did not sue.

To be fair, the reference implementation may not have been directly created or distributed by AOMedia, in which case the same applies, but to whatever company actually created and distributed it. This is largely an unimportant detail.

Businesses using products *also* infringe patents, which IMO, is a bad thing, but that's a separate discussion.

You literally didn't understand what I said.

Patent exhaustion occurs when a product is sold by someone who has the right to sell something that violates a patent, which typically means that either they own the patent or they paid licensing fees. It prevents someone from then suing downstream customers. And there is a six-year statute of limitations on suing over a patent violation. What I'm arguing is that:

• Distribution of open source software effectively occurs exactly once per version, because the redistribution permission inherent in open source software makes it impossible to determine whether a copy of the software was obtained directly from the creator on a particular date or from someone else who previously got it from the creator.
• Open source distribution is effectively a sale for patent purposes, just at zero cost.
• That sale occurred a decade ago when AOMedia distributed the reference implementation.
• Because no objection was made to that sale (against AOMedia) during the statutorily limited 6-year period, that sale should be considered to be an authorized sale, in which case patent exhaustion occurred on the results of that sale.
• All copies of the original reference implementation and their derivatives are therefore untouchable.

This is a legal theory. To my knowledge, it has never been tested in court, largely because companies do not do what Dolby is doing, suing companies for using open source reference implementations or their derivatives nearly a decade after their release. And it should be clear that this theory applies only to patents in the context of software.

Maybe the story is a bad target, but I'm not going to start with the rude jokes about what happened to IBM Research. Too close to the my own heart?

I did spot a few mentions of Xerox PARC and I think the managers deserve some sort of special funny booby prize for missed opportunities.

Mod parent funny but I can't concur because I have no bucket list and my fsck-it list has overflowed its bucket.

Still an interesting place to read about, though this story reminds me of an old article in Scientific American before the Germans bought it. Using large arrays of microphones in Houston they tracked the paths of individual lightning strikes. Pretty sure that was when they learned that most of it is cloud-to-cloud... (Two AI's agree over 75%. Trust no single AI? (Cue the married to an AI joke?))

It's mandatory for them because there is so much AI slop now it's starting to infect their data sets. Facebook doesn't give a shit about the quality of their advertising because no matter how many bots there are people keep buying the ads. But the advertising is only about 1/3 of their revenue 2/3 of it is selling data to brokers and law enforcement.

There is so much AI slop and it is so sophisticated it's becoming difficult to keep it out of their data sets and that's gradually making the data sets useless.

So they are going to force complete tracking under the guise of think of the children so that they and they alone know who is a bot and who isn't. As an added bonus is also means that they can effectively and easily figure out who is a person and use their data to train llms.

AI slop is basically an existential threat to these companies because at the end of the day they do need to know who is and isn't a real user and they need to be able to do that quickly and effectively. So mandatory age verification is the way to go.

Your privacy is completely irrelevant. And frankly I think it's irrelevant to most people here. Everyone will talk about how important privacy and internet and anonymity is but when it comes time to vote a dozen other issues come first often pretty stupid ones.

So Mark Zuckerberg can go around buying up laws and there really isn't anything we can do about it because voters prioritize other things.

Taxes made them successful. We used to have super high taxes for the wealthy and corporations. This created a use it or lose it mentality among businesses because they couldn't just pocket all the money themselves because it would be taxed up the wazoo at a certain point. There were ways around taxes even back then but they weren't nearly as effective as they are now where you have billionaires paying an effective tax rate of 0%

Also stock BuyBacks used to be illegal. Stock BuyBacks mean that companies don't invest anymore they hold on to their cash so that they can do BuyBacks and pump the stock during downturn. This is exactly why stock BuyBacks were illegal for so long.

I don't think folks realize how much of a role public policy plays in their daily lives or the myriad of knock-on effects from those kind of policies. There's an idea of a chesterton's fence, which is a fence that you don't pull down unless you know damn well why it was put up. High taxes and Wall Street regulation were a classic chesterton's fence.

Can you tell me where Linux does that? I've been using Linux constantly since around 2007, and that has not happened once. And not certain where you get the idea that changing a "bistro" changes everything on the computer.

Did you get your Linux knowledge from the local Windows OS club?

My son who is a gamer, and I built a top end gaming system, and I concur. Reminded me of the "good old days", where just getting the damn computer to work was something to celebrate, and never turn the thing off once you do, at least until the next BSOD. It's a pretty thing, but a definite learning experience

Which mini? I picked up a Mini M4 when I traded in my last generation Intel iMac. Pretty nice little computer, and the Adobe Suite flies on it be comparison. I'd probably have a NUC if the use cases I have for my Windows laptop didn't have to be portable.

But back to the topic, Microsoft has been having a lot of boots on the ground problems, no matter what our personal situations have happening.

You don't like Time Machine? I have hourly backups on one drive, and daily backups on a drive I store in a different location.

I'd never use any cloud backup, that's like asking Jerry Sandusky to babysit a 10 year old boy.

What does that even mean? As a Boomer, and the boomers around me seem to be pretty darn adroit, I'm having issues parsing what you wrote.

Or do just mean you adhere to some concept that boomers are stupid?

Another issue is I've met many, many, people who insist on asking me "What do I do?" when any prompt comes up. Anything. From "Overwrite these files?" to "Installation finished. Do you want to launch NewlyInstalledApp now?"

And? You sound like the IT guy from Saturday Night Live who hates the people he is supposed to help. I do some teaching, and get asked questions like that pretty often. I just explain a little to them. They go away a little more knowledgeable.

I tend to disagree. People bashing around in Terminal (now zsh) tend toward the more adroit end of MacOS users. And just might be more skilled than you think.

And since I occasionally copy and paste, I and others are very interested in having a reality check. In most cases it isn't needed. But we can all fall for something in a weak moment

I spend almost as much time in Terminal as I do in the GUI. Sometimes more. So I am very interested in this. BTW, despite the memes, There are more of us Mac users that do that than you think.

And W11 is getting worse. That is disturbing, because Windows versions generally improved over time, not regressed.

I guess the point is that while These emergency patches may or may not point to a wider issue. That however does not mean there is no wider issue. I'm not involved with anything Oracle, so can't comment knowledgeably on that, but Microsoft and Windows? Oh hell yeah.

Imagine though, if you have a system where you have no idea what is in the software, and the number of actual thinking people is dropping to a negligible number.

There may be a tipping point where the proverbial shit hits the fan, and there is no competent person to look at it, analyze it, or fix it. What now, Saint Peter?

Sounds like Windows 11.

I think you're describing the models from a year ago. Most of the improvements in capability since then (and the improvements have been really large) are directly due to changes that have the AI model talk to itself to better reason out its response before providing it, and one of the results of that is that most of the time they absolutely can explain why they did what they did. There are exceptions, but they are the exception, not the rule.

It's interesting to compare this with humans. Humans generally can give you an explanation for why they did what they did, but research has demonstrated pretty conclusively that a large majority of the time those explanations are made up after the fact, they're actually post-hoc justifications for decisions that were made in some subconscious process. Researchers have demonstrated that people are just as good at coming up with explanations for decisions they didn't make as for decisions they did! The bottom line is that people can't really provide useful insights on why they did what they did, they're just really good at inventing post-hoc rationales.

If you're asserting that Greg Kroah-Hartman can't code worth a damn, you might want to find out who he is and think again.