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Apple's Billion Dollar Patent & Other Stories From Patentland
DECS writes "It has been widely reported that Apple secured a patent worth a "billion dollars." According to a patent attorney involved in the issue, Apple will be "after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties." The good news is that all the news reports were based on misleading hyperbole. " Don't let the title fool you; the essay is a good background on patents, the horror stories of some of them but also why companies feel compelled to seek patents as a business "safety" precaution.
In case you don't know, this article was submited by Daniel Eran who was caught spamming Digg with his useless articles...
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Check out how he was caught:
http://ba01162.googlepages.com/RoughlyDraftedBUST
A lot of digg users bury Roughly Drafted stories on site. There's no algorithym change involved in his claims of being censored. Digg users just think he stories are very biased pro-Apple, and also are annoyed because he has dozens of digging sockpuppets.
Wow, you're a bright one aren't you? Take a look at Mac hardware... it's practically IDENTICAL to PC hardware, including that of graphics processors. The problem isn't hardware, it's software companies not willing to port games on mac. And from what I've seen since I bought my MacBook, any games that are on here run so damn well that it's not funny.
I agree. There are some real ModTards floating around. And I have a feeling the meta-mods are just as bad, fueling a bad situation.
Disagreeing with a statement and modding it troll = ModTard
I never said they did, I said they /threatened too/, this was a couple of years ago, when the bytecode interperater wasn't turned off. Now they ship it with that functionality turned off to prevent such litigations.
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Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
So we have an press release about a supposed Apple patent. The article doesn't identify the patent or give the patent number. Then we have a blog entry about the press release about the supposed patent. That doesn't identify the patent. Then we have the Slashdot article about the blog entry about the press release. Which doesn't identify the patent either. The end result is a clueless Slashdot article.
The actual patent is US# 5,864,868 (Contois, January 26, 1999), "Computer control system and user interface for media playing devices". The main claim is:
1. A computer user interface menu selection process for allowing the user to select music to be played on a music device controlled by a computer, comprising the steps of:
a) simultaneously displaying on a display device, at least two individual data fields selected from music categories, composers, artists, and songs;
b) selecting at least one item from at least one of the data fields;
c) in response to step b), redisplaying all data fields not having an item selected therefrom with data related only to the at least one item selected in step b), and simultaneously maintaining all items originally displayed in the data fields with at lest one item selected therefrom;
d) selecting an item in the songs data field in response to step c), and
e) playing the selected song item from step d) on the computer responsive music device.
So it's an interface for a specific format of playlist interaction. Some players might have to change their interfaces a bit. Big deal.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Science Friday had a good episode last week covering some of the more absurd patents and the culture at the USPTO.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
That's probably his stories are very biased pro-Apple. It took me one look at the Roughly Drafted Magazine page a few weeks ago when his site hosted the Leopard vs. Vista article (linked to here on
I'd think that would be against the Digg rules, but since I've never liked Digg (because its "Digg this" links promote karma-whoring), I wouldn't know.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
RD content was buried consistently due to inaccurate claims made by the author, suspicious activity related to his storys and a refusal to ever correct his mistakes.
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Rather than use the critiques to become a better writer he instead lashed out and cried censorship envisioning some massive conspiracy to squelch his glorified blog.
This is the kind of garbage he was submitting over and over again:
http://digg.com/apple/Windows_5x_More_Expensive_t
And here we see that Daniel agrees with his own article! "Exactly right" in fact. Tell me that does not have the hallmarks of someone using secondary accounts to spam their articles. I guess he forgot which account he was on at the time.
http://digg.com/apple/How_Apple_Got_Its_Groove_Ba