It's a growing niche, with every indication of eventually turning what it is displacing into a niche. If we want to go by your last post about cars, 1 in 5 new cars sold last year worldwide was electric and it's a growing market. For the electric shipping question, you first talked about electric shipping like it couldn't be done. When I pointed it that it can, you acted like ships stopping at ports to fuel wasn't a thing and that, anyway, that would mean spending money on infrastructure and having to spend money on infrastructure somehow precludes a thing from happening, the entirety of our modern civilization somehow notwithstanding. From my perspective, it seems like you're on the losing side of a lost cause. You just seem to really, really want electrification to fail in the face of the fact that internal combustion engines appear to be at their peak, but EV systems are still developing and improving (I mean, the motors are at maximum efficiency, but the battery technology is definitely still improving). For the life of me, I can't really understand why you're so insistent on fossil fuel tech over more modern and sustainable technology.

How much does the robot cost? If can can speed things up to "up to" twice as fast per person over traditional methods, is it cheaper than twice as many people equipped with twice as much traditional equipment? What proportion of the time does it get "up to" double the speed? Does it use more or less energy than traditional equipment? Does it break down more or less often than traditional equipment? How much does getting it serviced cost, compared to traditional equipment?

Ah. I know this one. XKCD reference here. So that you don't have to follow the link if you don't want to, it shows one of the stock characters showing a bride a graph indicating that, since she had 0 husbands yesterday, and 1 today, she'll have over four dozen husbands by late next month. In other words, it's cute that you can only make linear extrapolations.

As for ships and trucks not having worked yet. They, in fact, have, but they're still a niche. Sensible extrapolation of the technology shows them becoming more and more mainstream.

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.

So now we're talking about consumer BEVs? Quite aside from the fact that you're intentionally downplaying the capabilities of BEVs, you're also exaggerating the sales situation. Despite the dip in sales when the Trump administration eliminated the tax credit, 2025 was still the second best year for US EV sales on record. Then, of course, we come full circle to the actual point of the article after all your goalpost shifting. The large rise in gas prices due to Trump's war is renewing interest in EVs. While it is too soon to have sales numbers, other indicators like web searches, etc. indicate increased interest. Of course, if we want to reverse the goalpost shifting altogether, we can go back to your first post and point out, as throughout this discussion, that electric ships and trucks are indeed making their way into shipping from producers.

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.

uh, no. You didn't win.

Places like Bell Labs were more like university research centers than corporate dressing on mandatory-overtime grind. They were not expected to directly turn a profit as business units of the company, because what they did was to lay the groundwork for technology that the other business units could then adapt into products. The return on the investment paid into running them took years or even decades to realize. Without the pressures of needing to turn quarterly or even annual profits they weren't working their researchers to the bone and they were fostering a culture of internship for college students into joining their ranks as researchers to perpetuate the institutional knowledge.

Simplify. The best part is no part. The parts omitted never fail. They don't require maintenance, supply chains, continuous improvement.

I'll bet. His case has less than no chance in court.

Reply "yes", then close and reopen this message to activate the link.

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.

They are two distinctively different technologies.

Facial Recognition applied to pets is not AI.

Could the AI be using Facial recognition? Yes, but that's like saying a car did the surgery because your surgeon drove one to the hospital.

*ow!*

uh, found it...