Slashdot Mirror
Folding Screen For Mobile Phones Unveiled
sumj sends in word out of a Taiwanese research institute of a folding display on a smartphone that allows its screen to double in size to 5 inches (slideshow here). It's a prototype at this point. Don't bother clicking for the article's second page — it's one sentence with an interstitial before.
Seems to me that patents on rapidly evolving hardware only slows those who are forced to follow those laws... those that aren't forced to follow them are free to develop and innovate freely and as quickly as they like.
I'm sort of on the fence as to which side I would like to root for in cases like these, but it seems to me that the source for creative and innovative things will no longer be the U.S. The world is too big and too busy changing to slow down and patiently await the next evolution in the gradual release of "better ideas" that were conceived of 10 years prior by companies trying to milk the most out of 12 year old ideas.
It is truly time to give up the legal battling and manipulation and get back to spending money on R back to the kind of marketing that REALLY impresses and pleases people. Intellectual property should never have become more valuable than physical property. The collapse of intellectual property, which I now think is inevitable, will not be nearly as dramatic as the collapse of the financial system that made itself to rely on human emotion and perception to determine value and wealth... but it will have some interesting results and I hope sanity is one of them.