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Rackspace sued for hosting GitHubRackspace sued for hosting GitHubPosted Sep 18, 2012 21:49 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559)Parent article: Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub
i am nearly ready to say that working within the system is no longer viable
maybe it is time for hacker culture to pack its bags and move somewhere else, and the USA can figure out how to create jobs on assembly lines instead
saving that, maybe it really is time to create a data haven. a place with so much of everyone else's data in it that the rest of the world is afraid to touch it.
sensible measures aren't working any more
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Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 19, 2012 3:54 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
The other, saner, cheaper option is for hackers to just stop thinking that email and Twitter matter and to actually _march_ on Congress to make a point about how completely fed up we are with this crap.
The current median age of a US congressman is ~63 years. They are not technical whizzes for the most part. Heck, you're hard pressed to find a UNIX hacker that age, given that UNIX itself is only ~40 years old, so only the very original UNIX developers were around when our politicians were taking their first steps into the world of professional law making.
Point being, Internet petitions don't freaking matter to Congress. In-your-face people matter. So long as people sit at home whining on the Internet, nothing is likely to change in D.C.
Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 19, 2012 9:11 UTC (Wed) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]
Yeah, they do need to be pushed more on this.
What gets me is why they don't consider this an *emergency*. Consider all the bullcrap Congress rammed down our throats immediately after 9/11 because it was "needed for homeland security."
Major reform here is needed to protect business in America and we really do need it NOW.
They need to get their priorities right and understand that.
Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 19, 2012 12:22 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
> Major reform here is needed to protect business in America and we really do need it NOW.
Patent trolls are businesses, too. Congresspersons will not see much difference between a patent troll making 500 million USD a year by suing successful companies and a company making 500 million USD a year by making a useful product. To the politician these things are equal (unless one of the two contributes to a campaign).
Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 19, 2012 21:51 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Almost all elected politicians are lawyers. So are almost all patent trolls.
There is such a thing called 'professional courtesy'.
Unfortunately for the rest of us when it's lawyers in charge of everything things don't tend to work out very well for non-lawyers.
Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 19, 2012 22:38 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> Almost all elected politicians are bad people. So are almost all patent trolls.
> There is such a thing called 'professional courtesy'. > Unfortunately for the rest of us when it's bad people in charge of everything things don't tend to work out very well for non-bad people.
There, FTFY 8-) Being educated doesn't make one a bad person.
Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 20, 2012 7:13 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (subscriber, #26138) [Link]
> The current median age of a US congressman is ~63 years.
Sounds like Politburo in the pre-collapse USSR.
Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 21, 2012 10:14 UTC (Fri) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]
Yes, and the US will collapse as well.
Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 21, 2012 15:27 UTC (Fri) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-CON...
Annoyingly they don't have a total average, but it looks like under 58.
(Could we check and cite numbers before repeating them, please?)
Rackspace sued for hosting GitHub Posted Sep 19, 2012 8:02 UTC (Wed) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
> i am nearly ready to say that working within the system is no longer
> viable
I don't know. I largely ignore software patents, because they're all illegally granted anyway. Which brings me to the second point:
Why hasn't anyone sued for a software-patent infringement gone for the heart? Which is, that EVERY patent law on earth forbids patents a) software and b) mathematics (which software also is).
I know there are completely bogus rulings on this, for a) namely in re Appalat http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=4571960268239... and in re Prater http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2299319819326... but this doesn't mean it's impossible to get another court to realize that they have no basis in reality. The same with the completely hare-brained interpretation of "algorithm", where courts also maintain a view which has no basis in reality (something like ruling that the value of Pi is exactly 3).
But nobody has yet gone for that and argued that these patents ALL must be invalid because a) putting software on a computer does not make that computer a new device and b) software is math.
I mean, it's not like that would be your only defence (usually it's: you're suing in the wrong place, you made procedural errors, we do not infringe, the patent is invalid anyway -- everything you can heap on it). So you could easily add this.
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