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No matter how idiot-proof you make technology, God will always create a better idiot. That's why the right way to solve this problem is:

• Make it as hard as possible for users to accidentally do something that is irreversible, and as easy as possible to roll back even serious mistakes. This means, among other things, keeping more than just a single backup. (Apple, I'm talking about your borderline useless iCloud backups here when I say that.)
• Make SSNs easily changeable and less easily guessable.
• Make it technologically as hard as possible to send out messages in a way where the sender's identity can be forged to look like it comes from someone else.
• Aggressively prosecute phone companies who allow calls and text messages onto their network from fake phone numbers.
• Aggressively track down, prosecute, and very publicly make an example of every person who tries to pull one of these scams, along with the people who employ them, so that anybody considering pulling such a scam is aware of previous scammers who have ended up behind bars for thirty to life within six months of starting their scam.

But IMO, the most important one is that last one. We would be a lot better off if the right to a speedy trial were taken seriously. If a year or more passes between committing a crime and being prosecuted, the threat of prosecution ceases to be a meaningful deterrent to crime.

If I were in charge, there would be two nationwide statutes of limitations added that apply to all crimes:

• Charges must be filed within six months* of law enforcement having solid evidence showing who committed a crime. Just cause must be shown for any exceptions to this. If the law enforcement fails to show that they received significant supporting evidence that made it possible to bring their case during the six month period prior to filing charges, the charges are automatically dropped.
• Cases must begin within thirty days* of bringing charges. If the case cannot begin within 30 days, the charges are dropped.

* I'm willing to consider arguments that these numbers should be slightly higher, but not dramatically so.

If legitimate extenuating circumstances outside the control of prosecution warrant a delay (e.g. the defendant being impossible to locate or in another country), a judge could order the statute of limitations tolled. But otherwise, the only exceptions should be in situations where a mistrial or similar forces a new trial (which obviously starts more than 30 days after the initial charges are filed). And even for a retrial, there should be a hard limit of maybe 90 days from the end of the previous trial or thereabouts.

This would result in a very large number of cases not getting prosecuted, but by forcing the prosecution to triage cases and bring important cases quickly, it would ensure that fear of being brought to justice would be a real deterrent to committing crimes. Right now, it is not. Good people don't (intentionally) commit crimes, because they have morality and ethics. Bad people do, because they have neither. Almost nobody avoids doing crime merely out of fear of punishment, and that's a bad thing.

I would still consider them patent trolls at this point. Legitimate patent holders use patents immediately or hold them to use defensively. They do not sit on patents for an entire decade, waiting for the patented technology to be ingrained in the industry, and then use them to earn income. The patent having been created in-house rather than acquired doesn't change the fact that the behavior is fundamentally similar.

Dolby Atmos was 2012. Dolby Vision was 2014. How are they not basically a non-practicing entity at this point?

Yes, but using them offensively after sitting on them violates the doctrine of Laches. In effect, they sat on the patents so that people would end up depending on AV1, because if they sued too early, AOMedia would have designed around the patent, and they would get nothing. So they deliberately delayed action to cause prejudice to the defendant.

At this point, it would be entirely reasonable for a judge to declare that because they failed to act against AOMedia within the 6-year window prescribed by patent law, they lost their right to sue AOMedia for damages in creating the patented technology, and that patent exhaustion applies to all downstream users. And if that happens, I will laugh so hard.

Dolby is not a startup. It was founded in 1965.

Also, the doctrine of Laches says you cannot unreasonably delay filing a lawsuit. Waiting ten years from the first release of the specification is clearly unreasonable. Waiting eight years from the first finished implementation is clearly unreasonable.

The bigger problem for Dolby is that patent law won't let you recover damages at all for damages more than six years ago, and the standard has been available for eight. So unless somehow this is some wacky patent where Dolby claims that some use of an otherwise non-patent-protected codec is patented (which should almost certainly result in that patent getting overturned for obviousness), Dolby should be laughed out of court.

But I'm sure they're hoping that Snapchat caves and agrees to go back to a Dolby codec or pay them royalties rather than fight them in court. This is patent troll behavior. Dolby has effectively become a patent troll, IMO.

From a patent law point of view, it is illegal to create something that violates a patent, not just to use it. Patent law kicks in when you create, offer for sale, sell, import, or otherwise distribute a patented invention.

IMO, one of the biggest flaws in patent law is that it covers the use of inventions in all cases except for patent exhaustion (sale of an already-licensed product). With the exception of pure process patents, IMO, that should not be a violation, as a user has no realistic way of knowing that something they bought violates someone else's patent, and should not even need to worry about such nonsense.

This "feature" of patent law exists solely to give the patent holder more leverage to screw the company accused of violating the patent by holding their innocently infringing customers liable, causing irreparable reputational damage to both companies, irreparable harm to countless others, etc., and it should have been eliminated decades ago.

That said, having seen this behavior by Dolby, I hereby vow to never knowingly buy any product that they manufacture, nor support their products or technology, nor use it except in situations where the content creator or distributor leaves me no alternative. They've gone from being a legitimate technology company to a glorified patent troll. Instead of innovating and making the world better to enrich themselves, they are suing anybody and everybody and making the world worse to enrich themselves.

Moreover, absent gross incompetence by Dolby's legal counsel, it seems clear that Dolby flagrantly and willfully violated the doctrine of Laches to allow damages to accumulate for eight full years from the final release (and ten years from the first specification release), thus allowing AV1 to become the dominant codec so that they could then predatorily use their patents to squeeze money out of the industry. Their behavior is nothing short of unconscionable, and whether due to incompetence or malice, their legal counsel should be formally sanctioned for it.

Finally, if Dolby wins, it is paramount that the entire technology industry agree to never license *any* future Dolby technologies going forwards, because doing so will only encourage them to use the patent system to prevent free and open standards. The only way to prevent patent abuse is to stop feeding the companies that abuse patents.

It is my fundamental believe that data formats should not be allowed to be protected by copyright or patents under any circumstances, because doing so fundamentally violates the rights of the owners and creators of that content. It makes it so that users can potentially lose access to data that they created. And this is wholly unacceptable for the same reason that renting software is unacceptable.

In short, Dolby and its lawyers can go f**k themselves with a shovel.

Best of the Funny, though the story had many more opportunities.

However if you were trying to persuade a buffoon you didn't get there. That's why buffoons love the YOB so much. They worship their YUGE Orange Buffoon/Baby/Bollocks.

Loyalty over competence.

But I was hoping to see more Funny for the target-rich story.

Okay for the FP branch, but... I wonder if the rude Subject limited the scope of the discussion.

My take is that "love of money" is basically evil and always destroys any philosophic principles that get in the way. Love of money is a fake problem because there is no solution. There is no amount of money that can cure the sick "need" for infinite money. But only people with that sick love can wind up with the kind of sick money the richest people (claim to) have these years.

I do think "pandering" is a better kernel of the analysis, however. That's what destroyed the "Don't be evil" google, though they were initially just trying to pander to the users by providing the "most useful" search results. It took the "profitable" business model of advertising to drive that approach into the cesspool it has reached today. The advertisers CAN handle the truth, by destroying the truth, and the "brand new branded" truth shall make you an addict of whatever snake oil they are pushing. Or dependent on widgets like smartphones if you don't like the drug analogy, though I think chemical addiction is the closest comparison.

Me? Fortunately I seem to be immune to the effects. Like Spock and the purring of the tribbles? My contacts with generative AIs just make me more and more angry--even though I acknowledge they can produce "useful" artifacts. Maybe "time" is more important than "pandering" as the root of the analysis? The real threat might be that whatever they do, the genAIs and LLMs do it so much faster than humans can?

Philosophic tangent time? Naw. Slashdot don't feel worth it no more. I've been turned into a newt and I ain't expecting to get no better. So just give me Funny? But not much Funny to be found these years, even in the depths of Slashdot.

Tried and tested slippery slope argument? On slashdot?

It is psychologically engineered to engage a human's attention. Modern web marketing is shady as hell and there really is no reason to try and defend the practices.

So how about we prohibit shady business practices. There is limited time and space in this world, so let's shutdown the garbage businesses that do us no good and leave more time and space and capital for those offering a legitimate goods and services.

There are 5 Linux laptop at home. None crash. Except the one my wife uses, when she touches the screen. It just goes dark with a few bright pixels on the top line. Nothing in the logs. Last week I changed the inside screen cable... and the problem disappeared. Must have been some kind of short because the cable is twisted in weird ways in the hinges. So I don't think it was an OS problem !!!

The first mistake the user did was open their wallet. They bought a PC with shitty unstable Windows drivers. Microsoft will still sign buggy drivers. And they don't hold vendors accountable for fixing and maintaining drivers, so if all your bugs aren't squashed in a couple of years you will have a computer that is never really going to be stable.

The story on Linux is different. You have to work really hard to hunt down a machine where the hardware is supported. Ideally because the vendor open sourced and upstreamed the support. But frequently because someone reverse engineered it and got the drivers into the official kernel image your chosen distro uses. This at least has some chance of being maintained and fixed for the more egregious crashes over the next several years. Not a 100% guarantee, but given that you paid $0 for Linux, that's still quite a bargain.

Google moving the deadline up and saying "because our own quantum tech is progressing faster than we thought"* sounds like using one of their branches to spin another.

* Paraphrased

I was getting lots of crashes in Linux. I check the logs and it had some machine checks. so I ran memtest86+ (already in my GRUB config) and found a stick with uncorrectable ECC faults. replaced it, and it's running great now.

Mostly it's just an arbitrary game. Like one side wants to attack rich white people (capitalists, industrialists, old money, new money, etc) and the other side wants to scapegoat immigrants or LGBTQ+. Lots of populist appeal with both tactics. And it's all pretty standard practice for politicians to point fingers in any direction except at themselves. For some reason we trucked along like this for the 20th century, most of us openly pointing out that it's a big scam. And then at some point, people decided to start believing politicians. And that's when things really started turning to shit.

I'm pretty old school, regardless of my left/right politics. Hold your representative's feet to the fire. Remember every day that government's moral right comes exclusively through the consent of the governed. That the tax payers and voters can hold the power whenever they are prepared to agree to take it. Peacefully at the ballot box as long as there is a right to vote. Less desirable ways if thing go really astray (if history is any guide)

Shortly after this country realizes the We the People are barely more than government property is when history repeats itself and things really turn bad. Fascism cannot endure, but the human cost of its removal is tremendous. Best to plan ahead and side-step unstable political and social systems that tend to end in terrible violence.

MAGAts is a loser movement. The people on the very bottom of MAGA, the ones who consume the radio and TV and Internet propaganda, were losers before they got political. And I suppose their hope is if their side wins, that they will finally get the respect they feel they deserve. But the problem with conmen is they are not good to their word. MAGA is going to find themselves abandoned, like a rally attendee left behind by the campaign bus at the end of the evening.

Really? That's the only Funny on this rich target? And doesn't even strike me as especially funny. Maybe later?

But now I can't even remember if the real FBI director's passing got a mention on today's Slashdot.