Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Interesting backhand by the court... (Score 3, Informative) 11

IANAL, but it seems like it shows that the plaintiff won... so they can say they found the other party culpable... but for $1. I'm guessing if the case was tossed out of court, even with prejudice, it likely would have been appealed or re-filed, so this helps ensure it has no real grounds for appeal?

At least WD is thinking about encryption. FDE is a critical thing these days, although I trust software FDE (LUKS, ZFS) more than I do hardware.

I doubt this can't be appealed. It's more do to with the fact that they couldn't show they suffered any damages (harm) from the infringement:

He cited [PDF] precedents where an award of damages was deemed unnecessary if the plaintiff could not "adequately tie a dollar amount" to the infringing acts.

"Accordingly, the Court enters nominal damages in the amount of $1," he stated.

For this reason, the portion of WD's Rule 59 Motion regarding damages was declared moot, while the request for a new trial was denied.

Despite the judge denying almost all of the storage firm's post-trial motions, its legal representatives Gibson Dunn claimed the reduction of damages "a significant win."
[...]
He cited [PDF] precedents where an award of damages was deemed unnecessary if the plaintiff could not "adequately tie a dollar amount" to the infringing acts.

"Accordingly, the Court enters nominal damages in the amount of $1," he stated.

For this reason, the portion of WD's Rule 59 Motion regarding damages was declared moot, while the request for a new trial was denied.

Despite the judge denying almost all of the storage firm's post-trial motions, its legal representatives Gibson Dunn claimed the reduction of damages "a significant win."

"Prior to trial, Western Digital made a successful motion to exclude SPEX's damages expert. SPEX then tried the case and attempted to put on a damages case without a damages expert. Based on damages theories that were never disclosed, and legally improper, the jury awarded SPEX over $250 million in damages," Gibson Dunn claimed in a statement sent to The Register.

So WD did infringe, but I guess because they were just a patent troll with no actual business they couldn't actually show they suffered any damages.

Not sure why they couldn't claim lost licensing revenue, maybe the rule was really made to combat patent trolls and it worked as intended?

Comment Optics (Score 1) 110

Nothing illustrates how seriously Tesla takes safety as paying someone to be a full-time safety driver, but sticking them in the passenger seat so it looks like the car is more self-driving.

Could one ask for a clearer illustration of sacrificing safety (of the passengers and wider public) for publicity purposes?

Comment Re:What does that even mean? (Score 1) 40

Indeed. Popularity is a shitty metric.

By Stack Overflow's "Logic" then McDonalds must be #1 because BILLIONS are served.

Popularity != Quality. i.e. Javascript, Python, and PHP are clusterfucks of bad design.

Customers don't care what language you implemented the solution in -- they just want shit to work.

---

Path of Exile 2 is an incomplete, boring, tedious, Ruth Souls-lite grindfest.

Comment Re:Semicolons are between a comma and a period (Score 1) 86

Semicolons create a harder stop than a comma, to encapsulate a thought; but not as hard a stop as a period, which is a more complete encapsulation of a thought.

Implication? People are expressing less compound thoughts in sentences, they stylistically seek faster flow and harder stops perhaps? Does social media consumption impact how people write and express thoughts? Article doesn't say, but interesting result regardless.

I could see a couple of causes.
One, communication is a bit more democratized. So people who read and write have less formal training around grammar than they used to.

Second, language evolves. The gap between a comma and period was always a bit tenuous. The semicolon simply lost it's niche.

Comment Re:Foreign College Enrollments Way Down (Score 1) 173

Colleges make a lot of money off foreign students, and enrollments are way, way off, especially from China (the most lucrative group). This is not going to help, but is not nearly as important to prospective students as the brain drain of foreign-born professors who are top in their fields going back to their native countries. Why go to CalTech (or wherever) and pay through the nose for tuition, room and board, transport, etc. when the top researchers that you want to study under are leaving and going back to China and India?

At this point what student in their right mind is going to enrol in a US college.

Go through all the hassle of applying to a place, getting accepted, then you're denied for some random reason and have to go back to square one.

Might as well just apply to Canada or Europe in the first place.

No worries for the US, I'm sure they'll still get a few of the students who can't get accepted by their preferred country.

Submission + - JD Vance joined Bluesky - was banned 11 minutes later. (x.com) 7

RoccamOccam writes: U.S. Vice President JD Vance joined Bluesky with the post "Hello, Bluesky, I've been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis. So I'm thrilled to be here to engage with all of you." His post included a screenshot from the United States Supreme Court Decision that upheld Tennessee's law barring "gender-affirming" treatments on minors.

He then wrote "To that end, I found Justice Thomas's concurrence on medical care for transgender youth quite illuminating. He argues that many of our so-called 'experts' have used bad arguments and substandard science to push experimental therapies on our youth. I might add that many of those scientists are receiving substantial resources from big pharma to push these medicines on kids. What do you think?".

He was banned 11 minutes later.

Comment Re:Retirement (Score 1) 32

The $100M bonus, if not an exaggeration, is probably restricted stock/options which will require you to be there four years to get all the money.

The $100M number seems too high to be realistic to me. For reference, Tim Cook's total compensation last year was $60M. Since his compensation is probably heavily tilted toward equity, we can assume that what he was actually paid in grants (the value of the stock/options when they were given, but not yet vested) was probably more like $15-30M. If Altman had said $1M, I would have easily believed him. Had he said, $10M I would've had doubts. But he said $100M and that's clearly absurd.

I wonder if it's the case that the people being targeted having $100m+ in OpenAI stock options, and those options go away if they jump ship to Meta. That would explain why they might be sticking with OpenAI because they believe it can succeed.

Meta pulled in $160B last year, so a couple billion trying to buy the industry's top AI team isn't a terrible idea, though I'm not sure it will succeed. I think OpenAI has the lead, but the quality of LLMs are starting to converge and OpenAI's lead at this point is mostly mind share.

Comment Re:Penny-wise (Score 1) 72

I was the OP!

I can certainly imagine a company getting a patent for a drug then later on realizing the drug was worthless as it didn't work, wasn't marketable, or there were simply much better options on the market

Canada isn't much, but across the world the fees could add up to tens, maybe hundreds of thousands per yer per drug? Maybe if the drug really is a bust you just let it expire.

It still seems bizarre considering that it must cost many millions to develop a drug to the point of being able to patent something. But I feel there must be a logical path to this screw up other than a manager out of nowhere trying to save a few hundred bucks (Canadian!).

Comment Re:Penny-wise (Score 1) 72

It's very unlikely that any pharma company is holding on to worthless patents. If nothing else, getting a patent granted takes both time and money, and there's no point in patenting something unless you have a use for it. And, when you apply for a patent, you have to make one or more claims, each one of them describing a use for whatever you're patenting that you want protected. No use, no claims, no patent.

Sure, but they requested a refund of the 2017 fee. I doubt this was some middle manager going completely insane. There had to be some kind of official process at work, even if that process went haywire.

Comment Re:Penny-wise (Score 1) 72

I imagine an overflowing mail inbox that is not getting processed because the team now works from home 100%...

They let it lapse in 2019, before COVID sent folks working from home.

This sounds more like a bureaucratic screw-up, unless at that time they didn't know the true market/application and legit thought the drug was so useless that it wasn't worth $450. That sounds bizarre, but among many drugs and countries those fees probably add up, maybe they do just let a bunch of the worthless ones expire.

Comment Re:Adaptation (Score 1) 69

But the adaptations may also make them better at adapting to increasing temperatures as well. Even the adaptations should not be seen in a static way.

It doesn't because the temperatures don't increase much over the scope of a single generation.

Remember how evolution works. The offspring who are best adapted to the current conditions have more offspring themselves.

So if the typical range the species operates at is 18-22C (made up numbers), but the current range is 19-23, then only the ones with mutations that let them operate at the higher temp will survive. The rest of the population will crash and the new population will be less robust because they've lost some genetic diversity and the genes that allow them to withstand that extra 1C might have secondary deleterious effects that would take many more generations to breed out.

Now you shift the range to 20-24C. Now you're going through that whole process again. You'll lose even more genetic diversity and be more dependent on whatever mutations allow them to live at that new temperature. Or new ecosystem that they can exist in.

Sure things will stabilize eventually as long as we don't turn into Venus or something. But in the meanwhile we're going to endure a mass extinction event.

Comment Re:Adaptation (Score 1) 69

Insect populations will adapt and recover. To think that these changes are permanent is ludicrous and reveals a complete lack of understanding of nature. Life will adapt and fill openings/niches that are available over time. Cool it with the chicken-little stuff. Life will adapt to higher temperatures or wider temperature swings.

That's not how evolution works.

Yes, life can adapt to higher temperatures, but as the article shows it's not instantaneous as the populations are crashing.

But the problem is the whole point of climate change is the climate won't stop changing. Even if they adapt to the current increase it will take time to do that, and for the populations to recover. But before that happens we'll be looking at another degree and the populations will crash again.

The longer the temperatures keep increasing the more the populations will decline and closer we get to the point of whole ecosystems collapsing.

Comment Re:The windshield test (Score 1) 69

For at least the last 20 years, I've noticed I no longer have to pull over to clean my windshield because it was covered by bug corpses. Not even in the Spring. I do not miss them, but at the same time I know they *should* be there, and their almost total absence is an ominous portent of the future.

I always figured a big part of that was expanded use of agricultural pesticides. The thing that gets me with this story is it's inside the nature preserves, so the answer isn't local pesticide use, it's something much larger.

Which does feel weirdly foreboding. I don't think most bugs have a particularly large range. Give them enough local plant life and they should thrive.

And the nature preserves should be pretty free of pesticides, meaning something else, like climate change, is causing the issues.

Slashdot Top Deals

Many people are unenthusiastic about their work.

Working...