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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.

We would have to re-arrange society to ease many of the stressors in life. I predict we'll be needing those drugs for a while.

Based on the cost of products from China vs the price of products made in China but sold by non-Chinese companies, I'd say the price well more than covers the cost of everything for practically any product where they also choose to display ads.

They just want more, more, always more.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

It's also possible that Dolby is twisting logic into a pretzel in order to make this claim. It wouldn't be the first far-fetched theory of infringement to go through court.

Users should never be able to do things that cause crashes in the same way that drivers should not ever be able to press any button or press any pedal that causes the engine to spontaneously burst into flames.

I'm also a Mac user, but let's not boast here, shall we?

My personal guess would have been at least 10x. Did Microsoft bribe the study authors?

Dude, are you living under a rock?

These bands are creating new music. But the money that allows them to do so comes from their old music. I have bands in my collection that have been making music for 30 years.

No they don't. They don't even make ok money. Tours are expensive and a lot of people, from road crew to venue security, take their cut before the musicians. The big guys, they make a killing on tours. But the small ones sometimes don't even break even.

In fact, a common wisdom in the industry is that touring is worth it not because the tour itself makes profits, but because it builds a fanbase and drives what is called "catalog discovery" - both old and new fans looking buying the albums with the songs they liked (and for the old fans, didn't know).

This study: https://www.giarts.org/article... says that 28% of income across all the musicians surveyed comes from tours. The share is larger for the rock/pop sector where it nears 40% but even that isn't easy money. And if you consider that only 20% of the rock/pop musicians make more than $50,000 a year, then it becomes a hollow statement.

Plus, it goes directly against your first statement - while on tour the band is not creating new music. So if you want to drive musicians more towards constantly creating (which most of them already do), then you can't make live performances the main income source.

The first thing I do on installing Linux is nuke NetworkManager and it's ilk.

"Apple has never offered a product that justified a large chassis. It used to be lots of slots, hard drives and other storage that justified it. Macs have never been about that"

I see you don't remember the 68k Macs OR the PPC Macs. Apple offered machines with lots of slots ever since the Macintosh II line. HTH.

Too much latency for RAM.

You mean running them on an external GPU? That doesn't take much bandwidth unless you're constantly loading new models.