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Patent trolls have sued or threatened to sue tens of thousands of end-users. For example, Innovatio attacked cafes, bakeries, and even a funeral parlor for using off-the-shelf Wi-Fi routers. And the notorious scanner troll, MPHJ, targeted small businesses and nonprofits around the country for using ordinary office equipment. As a recent paper explained: “Mass suits against technology customers have become too common, involving building block technologies like wi-fi, scanning, email and website technologies.” The growth in patent suits against customers reveals the importance of the Limelight case. A ruling that made it even easier to sue customers (by allowing suits against someone who performs just some steps of a patent) would encourage patent trolls to launch more abusive litigation campaigns. We hope the Supreme Court will restore the sensible rule that only a single entity (or its agents) can infringe a patent.
(tags: patents uspto swpats eff consumer law legal patent-infringement scanners wifi printers)
Hanging on the telephone – has anyone got it right on the new ban on text driving?
Some good legal commentary on this new Irish law.
There has been much hand-wringing and concern about whether or not the 2014 Regulations prohibit the use of Google Maps or Hailo, for example. They don’t, but this does not mean that drivers should feel free to use non-texting functions of their phones while driving – holding a mobile phone (which could include a tablet) while driving remains prohibited, whatever the use it is being put to. Moreover, offences of dangerous and careless driving and driving without due care and attention could cover a wide range of bad driving, and could include, for example, driving while zooming in and out of maps on your phone or sending stickers on WhatsApp.
(tags: ireland law driving safety mobile-phones texting google-maps satnav)
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‘better dates and times for Python’, to fix the absurd proliferation of slightly-incompatible Python date/time types and APIs. unfortunately, http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png applies….
(tags: python libraries time dates timestamps timezones apis proliferation iso-8601)
Holdings: Guinness’s Brewery Dublin
‘Guinness’s Brewery Dublin. Malt House, malt on floor; sign’ – One of the photos taken by my great-grandfather, Thomas H. Mason, around the turn of the century from the NLI collection
(tags: nli ireland photos t-h-mason history dublin guinness maltings beer)
Published image: ‘An Irish Village’.
‘Cart, man/woman; 2 men and boy serving beer outside, + sign ‘Rich King Spirits’. Ragged attire’ – One of the photos taken by my great-grandfather, Thomas H. Mason, around the turn of the century from the NLI collection
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One of the photos taken by my great-grandfather, Thomas H. Mason, around the turn of the century from the NLI collection
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One of the photos taken by my great-grandfather, Thomas H. Mason, around the turn of the century from the NLI collection
(tags: ireland history science chemistry crystals t-h-mason photos)
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One of the SmartStack developers at AirBNB responds to Consul.io’s comments. FWIW, we use SmartStack in Swrve and it works pretty well…
(tags: smartstack airbnb ops consul serf load-balancing availability resiliency network-partitions outages)
A Closer Look At OC’s Anti-Vaccination Cluster
In communities such as San Clemente, Laguna Beach, Laguna Niguel, Aliso Viejo, Mission Viejo and Capistrano Beach, where Dr. Bob Sears practices, there are clusters of unvaccinated children. Last year, at 15 of the 40 elementary schools in the Capistrano Unified School District, more than 10 percent of kindergartners had [Personal Belief exemptions], according to data from the California Department of Public Health. At one public charter school, Journey, 56 percent of kindergartners were unvaccinated, at least partially, due to their parents’ beliefs.
This is going to end horribly. Typical OC(tags: orange-county health vaccination laguna-beach oc dr-bob-sears kindergarten measles mumps rubella pertussis epidemiology)
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Today we’re open sourcing Secor, a zero data loss log persistence service whose initial use case was to save logs produced by our monetization pipeline. Secor persists Kafka logs to long-term storage such as Amazon S3. It’s not affected by S3’s weak eventual consistency model, incurs no data loss, scales horizontally, and optionally partitions data based on date.
(tags: pinterest hadoop secor storm kafka architecture s3 logs archival)
Coping with the TCP TIME-WAIT state on busy Linux servers
extensive blog post
(tags: networking linux tcp performance time-wait sysctls tuning)