I can only guess: It is likely judges do not know what they are adjudicating. Another bad case is a patent on driving I2C-enabled RGB LEDs via I2C. It's a patent on using a product as intended. It's like patenting the act of using a brake with a hydraulic line to stop a car.

The guy goes around trolling makers with it and forcing people to pay huge royalties.

Judges don't grant patents, patent examiners do. AFAICT it doesn't seem this patent has been litigated in court.

I went to law school[1] with several patent examiners. Some of them not only share the belief that these patents are B.S., they're often programmers and Free Software advocates. Nonetheless, they've approved patents like these because their job is to adhere to the interpretive guidelines written by Patent Office lawyers, and to be as fair and consistent as possible.

Judges can sometimes be equally knowledgable, though it's worth pointing out that Federal judges of general jurisdiction tend to have a more restrictive view of both patentability and copyrightability. Whereas judges that spend more time adjudicating these disputes tend to hold a more expansive view. Sometimes subject matter experience is a bad thing.

There's a widespread strain of legal and economic thought that believes using property rights as a vehicle for the exchange of inventions and creative works is almost always the most economically efficient method of facilitating innovation and creativity. If you hold this belief, you'll tend to take a very expansive view of patentability and copyrightability, have a very strict interpretation of obviousness (patents) and originality (copyrights), and will significantly discount the apparent costs these legal regimes impose; you're convinced that you're actually lowering costs and expanding markets, but that this benefit isn't readily discernible. So if you've ever wondered why an examiner or judge might permit patenting a swing, it may be because they actually believed the world would be better off for it. It sounds crazy, I know, but this type of thinking exists, these people are sincere believers, and they have mountains of "research" to back up their views.

Hackers just aren't usually exposed to such views because for better or worse, and particularly in the context of patents and copyrights, we live and work in an echo chamber. Unfortunately, the views of lawyers and legal scholars in our community aren't representative of even mainline legal opinion, let alone the opinions of the people I just described. Ever wonder why Lawrence Lessig has an abysmal record at winning and predicting cases, especially for big Supreme Court cases?

[1] I've never practiced law, though.

My wife is an attorney at an appellate court and tells me she doesn't think a high majority of judges even know what a PDF is.

I'm guessing this patent is put there to give a big company like Facebook some basic legal framework to flex their muscles if ever needed; but I can't see this being enforced very easily. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part though.

Probably not, but general jurisdiction judges do know what excessive litigation looks like, and if you told them that PDFs are a pervasive and, presently, largely royalty-free mechanism for exchanging documents, they'll be able to predict fairly well the consequences an expansive or restrictive interpretive view might have regarding future litigation. General jurisdiction judges are so overloaded with cases that they tend to be biased against legal interpretations that might increase litigation, unless they have a strong opinion on a particular issue. And because their cases are of relatively diverse subject matter, they don't tend to become invested in the same legal nuances as IP lawyers and scholars do; they'll prefer simpler, more easily applied rules.

On the other hand, the legal and economic strain of thought I described has been growing for quite some time, especially wrt to copyright (e.g. copyrightability of the bat mobile, which seemed inevitable to me, but was clearly a break with precedent). Liberal patentability hasn't gone mainstream in the same way, if only because the specter of patent trolls is so obvious, whereas we've all become inured to the reality of perpetual copyrights and a nearly non-existent public domain.

They do subsidize through rates. The UPU is set up so that the last mile of a receiving country is charged to the sender as if it were in the sender's country. This is made up from other revenue the carrier in the receiving country makes.

I mean I don't think they increase other rates to cover those costs, because they don't actually cover their costs at all. They spend more than they take in and their rates are still, for lighter packages anyway, significantly better than either FedEx or UPS.

What do you mean spend more than they take in? The USPS is in the black, save for some strange law that they must prefund pensions 50 years in advance (any company would be running a loss if they had to do this).

The USPS can't increase their domestic prices but there is good indication that they are charging more to offset this. There are complaints in this thread even about the cost of shipping abroad, as international shipping is not regulated like domestic postage rates if I remember right. So the USPS uses outbound international shipments as a cost center to make up for the subsidy to China.

The article states there is a ~$500M subsidy to China through UPU rates.

That's orthogonal to what the article is talking about, which is a lot more like not advertising yourself as a victim without even realizing it to the world, and not advertising to yourself that you are a permanent victim and you can't change anything about that, again often without really realizing how you're doing it.

If you do want to seek justice, you'll be better off doing it from a position of not mentally assuming the role of a victim; indeed, in some sense, I'm not sure how you would progress to truly seeking justice without taking that step, as otherwise, you'll likely to assume there's no hope of any justice. (True, final, or total justice may not be on the table in this world, but partial justice often is.)

Or, to put it another way, the article is about internal factors, and you're talking about external factors. The collected store of human wisdom over the millenia has a lot to say about the efficaciousness of setting your inner factors right first, and how that will almost magically lead to better external results. It isn't magic, really, if you could analyze the interactions from a dispassionate third party view and compare, the reasons why the person with correctly-set internal factors does better will be fairly obvious, but it'll feel like magic from the inside.

Well, let's put it this way. Being a Polish-Jew in a rural, and very southern high school in Florida, one where I was considered a minority because there were no other minorities, wasn't all roses. Then when it came to being a white male applying for scholarships. More than half of those scholarship books pretty much told me that I need not apply. My post high school education is quite lacking because of it.

It took me a while in my 20s to realize how much of a benefit all of that was. And to quit being angry. Compared to all my peers from high school, I have a pretty damn good amount of resiliency. There's already a few known suicides in my graduating class, post-graduating. Plenty of drug addiction. Only a few folks really escaped like I did. But even them, when I touched based with them, it's all doom and gloom. In my early 20s, I faced an eviction, plenty of debt, debt collectors and lots of other problems that, well, never crushed me. Honestly, a lot of problems I shrugged off and found solutions. I think the worst thing that's ever affected me was my cats dying a few months ago. That, honestly, was the worst thing that happened to me, even though I was homeless for a while, couldn't find work, scrapped to pay for food. I could do all that again if I have to. Losing a pet... that hurts.

But that brings me to the next, and I think biggest benefit from all those problems from school. I have a "sixth sense" on people's intentions. Just a gut reaction that's been correct every time. You have no idea how beneficial this has been since I went into business for myself.

It also means, I have zero tolerance for assholes and incompetence. The time I save from wasting time on assholes, I spend on my real friends. I value my real friends and have tight relationships with them. Something my generation really doesn't have. Now, I am abrasive to people the moment I realize someone is underhanded, a user, asshole, etc. Even if they're mostly strangers and it's only been 5 minutes since I met them. But my friends are fully aware that I'm loyal, without end, to them. And thus far, every time I ignored that gut feeling on someone being bad, it always bit me in the ass. If I listened, I would find out from someone else a few months later on what bullet I just dodged.

At the end, the world truly owes you nothing. Having a rough life is actually a blessing. It builds resilience and teaches you to greater appreciate the good and not focus on the toxic. Without experiencing hate, you can't truly love.

Plus, you can't blame the entire world population over what a group of teenagers did. The older you get, the more you realize all teens, all over the world, are an equal amount of stupid.

A lot of your early paragraphs point to an Abundance mindset, rather than one of Scarcity. It really changes your world-view (and the actions one takes) to realize there's plenty of resources, and one doesn't need to hoard and blame others for personal perceived lack.

If I don't have what I want and can't get it then how could I possibly have an abundance mindset? That abundance mindset stuff is like telling depressed people to stop being depressed.

Whether being angry is right or wrong is largely irrelevant. It's great to advocate for educational reforms, but society won't agree to your demands soon enough to make any practical difference for you personally. Focus on what you can practically achieve within the current system, while continuing to work for changes that will benefit future generations.

The original statement by a justice implying restriction on freedom of expression was later recanted (note it was not directly a precedent setting ruling either). There are people in the US that see any restriction, even for hate speech or incitement of violence, as against the first amendment.

You might think they are extreme in their views but rulings restricting speech are very, very rare.

I don’t believe that is accurate. Courts routinely issue gag orders.

> You might think they are extreme in their views but rulings restricting speech are very, very rare.

And that has severe consequences as you see.

Popper said it many years ago.

You assume a device can not be tracked from creation to dsitribution. Why?

supply chain tracking is extremely difficult even for entire ecosystems that make it their near maximum priority (such as say, military procurement).

There isn't a hope in hell you can reliably keep track of who has which Intel CPU.

Think of all the stages involved, and how each one has to cooperate and how many times Intel's CPU is sitting on "undifferentiated palette of X units".

Of course one device can be tracked. But not every CPU can be tracked, I consider that quite infeasible indeed. If you already know the target, and know that target is looking to buy a new PC/laptop, you can feed it a specific CPU, sure. But you could just as well feed it some sort of modified BIOS that doesn't require any special hardware, and would be pretty much just as hard to detect for someone that isn't specifically looking for that kind of modification.

But that's usually not the interesting case. The interesting case is that you find a new target, and that target already has a PC/laptop, and you want to gain access to it without having to physically infiltrate. Now, you might be able to manipulate their network in some way, or send them an E-Mail, or get them to visit a website that contains an activation code. But having to backtrack which CPU that laptop contains seems impossible to me in the vast majority of cases. Even if you can somehow figure out where he bought it, most stores aren't even going to be able to tell you the serial number of the product they sold, and even if they can, now you have to match that serial number to a CPU, which is... impossible? How would you get that information? Retailers buy hundreds of thousands of CPUs, and they probably don't tell Intel which CPU they put into which device, or even who buys which individual CPU. If you send a CPU back on Amazon, they don't even check if it's the same goddamn model! (Hence the surprise of some people who bought a $550 CPU and got a $550 CPU box with a $50 CPU in it.) And if the CPU or laptop was bought used, now you're really out of luck. I really don't see how this is very useful, when instead of doing that you can just force Intel to give up plausible deniability and hack everything in sight. If you get caught (which is incredibly unlikely in the first place), you just say "we did it for America!" and that's it, nobody would care. I mean Intel would be kinda fucked, but the NSA wouldn't be.

You restated your position instead of addressing my question and then added irrelevant speculation in a different direction.

The issue with supply chain tracking is the sharing of information. If every part of the supply chain is hacked then you have all of the info. You also need to look at it backwards: instead of "who has X" ask "where did X go" which is easier to answer. It starts at the source, the factory, which can know which serial was in which lot. Then you know where that got shipped, etc.

Maybe occasionally units get "lost" but you do have error bounds on their location.

I have to agree with sangnoir. I don't want to provide free engineering services. I want a working product. If you are explicit about component compatibility and provide a troubleshooting checklist (all ways it must be plugged in and turned on) then you should assume there is an issue. You should also treat the boards as interchangeable; if a board comes back, you test it and it's good, ship it out again.

A family friend will help me troubleshoot my electronics. So, I have seen the other side of this: I get something which is completely nonfunctional and send it back to the manufacturer who claims it is functional, and tries to bill me for the shipping both ways. That's why if I can not get a working replacement in 2wk or so I just send it back for refund.

For a real example: Are you using very well made power supplies? Maybe your board's power filtering could be better, and customers notice because they buy the cheapest supply that meets their power requirements.

All of the Raptor products use very high quality regulators and power filtering. The only cases of PSU-related damage or malfunction that I am aware of were as a result of a PSU operating way outside of specification (think 12V+ on a 5V rail) or a poorly made PSU exploding and catching on fire, with predictable consequences for the attached devices. Thankfully such incidents are rare, and have never happened with our prebuilt systems that use high quality PSUs.

In general we can diagnose and repair or replace the systems rapidly. This one case was an extreme outlier, and in the future we will just be authorizing RMA and replacement / repair.

Ok, that sounds good. The example was more just to be illustrative. But there is the (slight) possibility of harmonics on the power lines, etc. There are EDA suites that can do such signal analysis on your board but they are quite expensive. If you picked just the wrong values there could be a filter system which amplifies noise from a power supply.

The trick is to get your board manufacturer to eat the return cost. If you can buy testing, do so; usually it comes with some assurance that the boards work, and they either make new stock or remanufacture what you send back. If you can point to a comprehensive testing instructions that the customer would have performed it should not matter if you receive the board and it works for you, for some reason it did not work for the customer.

It may be legal to apply for asylum but it is still a misdemeanor to enter the US without proper authorization. How these two things may interact is up for debate, but there is plenty of legal precedent that these "gotchas" are intentional.

Arguably if the migrants are not stopping to apply at a port of entry then they broke the law.

> he's not out to screw any customers or provide an inferior product.

Can he actually manage returns? His suppliers should be eating the cost of faulty boards, and the article makes me think they aren't. Continued problems customer side should result in a replacement.

In the US you have full rights to a return to the person who took your money for 30-90 days (depends on state). Requests that you use the warranty or contact the manufacturer are unenforceable. Considering this, it is unwise to wait for longer than that period before requesting your money back. The federal statute of limitations for being sold a defective product is 4 years, but that is a lot harder to enforce.

Remember the AMD Ryzen returns? Why wait 2-3 months for a replacement? Demand your money back from Newegg and buy another, they have to process the refund. Also -- most FFLs either state gun returns are outright illegal (a lie) or only accepted for 3 days (against state law) with a steep restocking fee (also against state law). This is the worst case I know of.

Instead of attacking the content of the leaks or his claimed motives you are mainly attacking his character.

It should be obvious that he planned to take the data. Taking it without a plan would be a good way for him to fail to accomplish anything. The main detraction I can see is that he leaked without regard to content, even considering he may not have had time to look over what he had taken (e.g. there is some top level stuff about drones that probably could have been redacted with a quick scan of the documents).

He likely avoided commenting on improvements to remain apolitical; if he had not, it would be more ammunition for character assassination. Other countries may be doing roughly the same but most people's issue is not with the fact spying was occurring but that it was largely turned inward.[1] You do not know he would throw away the whole system. As previously mentioned, he likely had no time to figure out what documents were what and the impact of their release would be.

In any case, he was acting as if he expected his own government to completely ignore the protections it had built in to defend its citizens. That some of the domestic programs he exposed were since cancelled due to public outrage is telling.

---

[1]: Besides the unconstitutionality of inwards-facing spying it is also a red herring. We repeatedly see little in the way of domestic terrorism but because inward spying is so much easier to do it seems to make up a disproportionate amount of the information generated; information that is likely not representative of real threats.

> Well, he defected.

No he didn’t. He was passing through Russia when the U.S. cancelled his passport and they pressured other countries to deny him asylum.

That's not what I'm saying, the leaking to a journalist is the defection.

The leaker is on the best behavior to impress their new handler. They're suckers and getting played.

An analogy to what Snowden did: How would you feel if you had a significant other that promised themselves to you, but behind your back, connected with someone else, some jester/stranger/charlatan. Hurtfully, you find they were eager to move mountains for them, and all the while criticizing your mere existence as a person. It'd be safe to say they've broke their vow, even though they haven't officially acknowledged yet.

People stood up to the warrant-less searches but were disposed of one way or another. A good example is the Qwest CEO: he wasn't killed, but he was jailed after acting in his own self interest after his company was ruined.

There are occurrences that are less clear cut but still suspicious and that involve long prison terms or death.

>Put is this way: Why should I get my safety as a US person put at risk so someone can publicize their story that someone leaked something again? In that video at 1:00. He's trying to make it so classification basically no longer has meaning, if they defect to a journalist.

You're wanting to trade freedom for security. I disagree that that is a good idea. You also do not know that he is trying to do that; certainly he has not stated as such.

He exposed high crimes. That is why people think he should not suffer punishment.

>For the sake of encouraging understanding: I think constitution is used as a way to imply subjectivity of what feels right.

That is true in the sense that all laws are only what "feels" right. There is a long history of the US federal government twisting laws to give the federal government more power.

It really feels like you're trolling, the last statement does not seem to follow any way I try to read it.

I can acknowledge that yes, there are people out there who want to kill you and take your stuff. Defunding the defense apparatus of the US is not a valid solution. But neither is the status quo.

The other side of this is that in the European system many otherwise qualified individuals will never see higher education because there is so much competition for the limited spaces available. I would hazard to guess that most people arguing that US education should be more European would not be able to achieve degrees in such a system anyway due to early test scores precluding them from attending.

> The other side of this is that in the European system many otherwise qualified individuals will never see higher education because there is so much competition for the limited spaces available.

I tend to prefer a system where you fail because you are not good enough, to a system where you fail because the pockets of your parents are not deep enough.

"Not good enough" is compared to how many slots are available, many of the people forced out could be good enough.

The stories I have been told of difficult classes in the EU are mind-bending. They seem to be incentivizing ~80% of the class to drop out. There is no way the majority of people are not suited for, say, IT. They may not want to do it, but that doesn't mean they are not capable of doing it.