The first Unix machine that I used had 1MB of RAM and it supported about 10 simultaneous users. OK: this was the 1980s and it was a PDP-11 (16 bit machine), but how times have changed!

BTW: Mb means megabit, MB means megabyte.

but the market capitalisation ie the total value of all publicly traded shares, but even then AMD beats Intel at £268.77 B vs £191.72 B but by not so great a margin.

Beware it shows me the market cap in British pounds, but that is where I live.

U.S. Patent No. 10,855,990
This is old technology, but was used extensively in JPEG and JPEG2000. All these patents are and have been long expired. There is no novel approach in U.S. Patent No. 10,855,990. More specifically, all the claims they're making in terms of the specific violations of this patent were covered in ITU-13818-2. Though ITU-https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.263-200501-I/en hammers the last nails in the coffin. I have read and reviewed the claim and the patent and the technologies presented in 10,855,990 are just reiterations of earlier work with scrambled wording to try and give a new name for variable sized macroblocks. They novel approach implemented in H.264, H.265 and H.266 was the method of selecting which specific pattern of "coding units" to apply. I have not checked for reuse of this, but this is neither in 10,855,990 or the claim. So, I believe they checked and found out that there was no violation. Oh and to be clear, they're completely fixated on the sharing coding parameters between blocks. Their approach is almost, barely, kinda novel, but the fact is, I'd make a strong argument that this is obvious, it's basically just macroblock grouping which has been part of standard video coding as far back as MPEG-1 and ASF. And the method applied could easily be argued to be an almost direct copy of LZW compression.

U.S. Patent No. 9,924,193
I couldn't find a copy of the original text (not wearing my glasses) and frankly their description was so TL;DR that they just started making things up. Ok... here's the argument against this. This has been a core features of all DWT based compression methods since the start. It was even the reason we used DWT. JPEG2000 is almost entirely based on what they're claiming here. If I spent an hour on this one, I could tear it to pieces without even trying. And skip mode... what in the world do you think something like Google Earth is?

U.S. Patent No. 9,596,469
Encoding data in a way that would allow independent parallel decoding of different portions, bands, blocks whatever of the image ... blah blah. Back to JPEG-2000 and Google Earth and stuff like that. The first time I saw this personally was at Disney Epcot Center when there was a Cray Supercomputer on display showing off a google earth like experience. The computer was streaming data at different spatial representations in parallel to hundreds of CPU cores who were all decoding and texturizing. The number of patents filed and expired on this one tech is immense. I haven't dug up specifics, but I can guarantee that the JPEG2000 patent pool clearly invalidates this

I just doom scrolled through the rest of this. I highly doubt I'm the only signal processing and video/image compression historian out there. I'm guessing that the LLMs could easily tear this crap apart too. But I'd be willing to make a few bucks as an advisor on this. I've either worked with, against, for, on, etc... on every technology being claimed here and I did this 15-20 years ago... and the tech was already old.

Much better expressed as 5 Kelvin -- who understands Fahrenheit when you are describing temperature close to absolute zero ?

And this cartoon.

If you visit a web site then you expect to pay for the bandwidth to download the HTML, videos, etc.

If you have a PC you expect to pay for the bandwidth to download system updates; you do not expect/want it to download adverts to be pushed onto your screen thus stopping you doing what you bought the PC for -- this is what Microsoft does.

that have been introduced in California and elsewhere ?

The prompts provided to the LLM should be copyrightable as code and the code generated should be protected the same way compiled or intermediate code is protected.

The issue at hand is how the model was trained. And the users of the LLM should be made clearly aware by the model trainer whether the user or the model trainer is responsible for the liability related to using other peoples code for training the model.

That said, we should soon be seeing models that are trained using training courses rather than massive amounts of code. Once that happens, the models will make use of agents to search the web and learn from stackexchange or other sources how to solve problems the same way a human would. Of course, when a human learns how to do something from searching the web, simply copy/pasting other peoples code can be an issue and we have to read license restrictions. But learning how someone did something and doing it ourselves is generally safe. If a model reads an articles while searching and then learns how to do something, it should also be protected if it's not copies verbatim.

We have a lot of legalities to deal with.

1) Massive models are going to die. I don't know whether it's with wasting time with nonsense like OpenAI and Anthropic. They won't even be in business by the time the lawsuits come through.

2) Agentic models will be the focus of the future because they work more like humans. We give them the base information needed to learn and find the answers themselves. Using cloud based solutions where companies hosting the solutions keep massive amounts of data locally cached so the model can research faster could be an issue. But these will cost money and really just won't do more than local-AI will. They'll just be faster. For legality sake you'd want to avoid the cloud models since caching can be seen as theft. But, local-AI is much different. With agentic solutions, I think most legal issues are back to the same issues with copyright we always have. We just have to make sure our models which we use are following the copyright rules. If it's allowed, copy/paste. If it's not, then learn how it's done and make your own solution. In a perfect world, we'd then have a stackexchange or alternate github for AI generated code and post that different LLMs could use to learn from each other. The problem then becomes whether that would be seen as training a large model and whether they are in violation of copyright again.

So, the rest of the world can continue as usual and the US will be isolated.

Now, will the US owned TikTok or the Chinese owned TikTok win the competition.

I hope US tiktok gets banned here since I think the US just has too much influence on youth outside of the US

There will also be bad effects on birds & bugs and other wildlife. This will just add to the ways that we are screwing up our planet.

they are trying to keep the power of information to themselves. If the farmers were to get together they would prolly get a better deal -- assuming that they want to sell up in the first place.

I expected it to take 6 more months. But, if they're playing the victim already, either it's time for them to cash in on patents or to sell off their shares while they can.

That's kind of hitting on the point but not quite.

IBM mainframes are online transaction processing systems. The language hasn't been and issue for a long time and it really doesn't take more than a few days for a programmer to learn to use COBOL. The problem is that JCL, RPG, CICS. DB2 and all the surrounding infrastructure is very confusing.

The uptime you're talking about is that a mainframe is basically a special purpose computer built specifically to make it so you can suffer loss upon loss upon loss and it will still keep processing transactions. This is because they have a specific workflow which is designed specifically to support this. I have implemented the exact same topologies and workflows using more modern tools on small computers ... because frankly you don't need big computers for this. And it works. I can scale almost infinitely and lose all but 2 nodes and it will keep chugging. But I'm not going to provide support on it and I'm not going to back my project with insurance company support.

IBM is offering a lot more than computing in the price they charge. That's the real issue. And no other company has built that up.