I don't because it doesn't matter. The initial impression is that he's describing a computer with a TV-tuner that does X, Y, and Z that are common functions already present in common software packages and/or as built-in OS features. That impression is accurate, as you'll note:
Keyboard -> controller.
Any video editing software -> allows editing of sections of video files.
I'm pretty sure a computer with commonly available video editing software pre-installed does not constitute an invention. The design of the remote might. The design of the physical hardware might. The design of the system concept overall describing a computer with software capabilities doesn't, because it's very clearly covered by prior art. That's what it describes, at any level, so that's all I needed to read.
So drivers who have driving licenses should not be on the jury of a hit run case?
I don't see how you made that leap. Jurors with licenses don't have any bias based on someone hitting a pedestrian. Jurors who stand to benefit from a conviction of the hit/run case would clearly have a conflict of interest, but I don't see any reasonable situation where that's the case. Owning a patent or profiting from copyright should preclude you from being on the jury of infringement cases, because you're no longer impartial, as required by the 6th amendment. Even if they pass selection, a lack of impartiality can be demonstrated, so the verdict should be nullified.
By your own description the foreman has a very similar view of patents as the two corporations, ergo - they were judged by their peers, end of story on the bias of the foreman. The time to attack a juror's worldview is during selection, attacking the juror after deliberations is no better than attacking the messenger. The fundamental injustice in all this is that the patent office is enabling (some would say encouraging) these kinds of "Gulliver's travels" court cases to tie up the courts and bankrupt business with this utter nonsense, in the end the consumers and taxpayers (ie society) are the mugs paying for all this.
It's not a peer basis. A is claiming B infringed on A's patents. B is trying to prove A's patents are invalid by prior art. The foreman would benefit from a very narrow description of "prior art" which he has clearly demonstrated he believes in, and his use of prior knowledge rather than facts and information presented in the case indicates partiality. The other jurors deferred to his judgement because of this, and his knowledge (flawed) is not admissible court evidence, so the entire thing is wrong. But yes, in the end we pay for it. If a company goes bankrupt, we suffer. If a company gets a huge fine, their product prices increase. They never really have any liability, even with patents and copyrights. It's a totally broken system, used more these days to troll than to protect and foster innovation.
The components those patents are made of do not by their construction/nature imply their usage in said patent. This is obviousness. Say someone patents a bucket. You aren't going to get a patent on a bucket with some sand in it. The bucket's design implies holding things, so putting something in the bucket isn't a new invention. A PC supporting USB-based storage being connected to USB-based storage does not constitute an invention. It's obvious use of what that thing was designed to do in the first place.
I'd like to point out you're injecting logical fallacy here: if all ideas are based on other ideas, where does it end? Is it ideas all the way down?
And as for the strawman, feel free to read up and enlighten yourself. He refuted a claim that all patents aren't made of existing inventions/components, a claim which I did not make, but which is superficially similar to the claim I did make, and persuaded me to make a counter-claim. Have a nice day.
1. You can be relatively certain from the summary. And there's a huge problem if it takes a team of lawyers a week to determine presumed patent validity.
2. This is incorrect. Since you wish to straw-man, allow me to refer you to a list of cool patents that aren't trivially represented by the existing functionality of their constituent components (ie: not obvious).
3. That's actually not how jury selection works. Potential jurors are afforded a lot of privacy. They certainly didn't (can't?) do background checks on every person. They simply ask a few questions. So this guy could have a clear conflict of interest but because of privacy concerns, it may not be discovered during voir dire. That said, if it's later determined that a juror had a conflict of interest, the jury should be re-selected, a mistrial should occur, or any convictions nullified. If this man was indeed asked if there were any conflicts of interest or any circumstance that would impact his impartiality (I don't have the text of the voir dire, so I can't really determine what he was asked) and denied that claim, he should be tried for perjury. The 6th amendment clearly requires the impartiality of the jury.
When it is a clear conflict of interest, it should. I'm not saying that any person with a patent should be disallowed to serve on a jury in any case involving a patent, instead I'm claiming that a person who owns a patent that is obviously invalid by prior art (it's just a TiVo with removable storage, filed years AFTER TiVo was invented and after others already had the capability) should not be permitted to make a decision in a case in a patent infringement case where the key issue of defense is patent invalidity due to prior art. He has something to gain (ideologically, perhaps not realistically) from a verdict siding with Apple here.
He owns a patent and thus claims some knowledge of patents and patent law. The other jurors do not, and they defer to his judgement. His judgement is factually incorrect, ignores large parts of both the written law and case law, and is pretty clearly skewed in a manner that is rather self-serving (if what he believes were true: his patent is valid and may be profitable, he's clearly a patent troll). So effectively, what I see in this case is that a single guy who has a massive conflict of interest was allowed to decide a case like this all by himself. No problems there, right?
However, he owns a patent. This is an obvious conflict of interest. This would be something like a person who owns and profits from copyright sitting on the jury in a case where someone was being sued for copyright infringement.
If you watch his interview, it's apparent he's factually mistaken horribly in regards to most things patent related. He's also under this Apple-fanboi-esque assumption that a patent must be an identical match in every minute detail to an existing thing for that thing to be considered "prior art." So he's completely ignoring obviousness and likeness, which are key in prior art claims. Making this observation failure is key to the validity of many Apple patents. If something is original and unique just because it has rounded corners, something's really broken. Worse, probably, is that he uses likeness and obviousness to determine the infringement of another thing. So you have a guy who's perfectly willing to take a patent and make a deduction which I can only expect is similar to: "look, these icons are spaced/oriented in this manner, and that's similar to what the Samsung device here has, and there's a button here which is really obvious by the design, even though it's not identical to the Apple patent, so obviously this is infringing." While at the same time making the deduction when presented with evidence of prior art: "well... it wouldn't run on an Apple processor, so it can't be prior art, even if the software is functionally identical and looks identical." Complete absurdity.
Also, he clearly states he was trying to expedite the whole process to avoid being hung up on actually looking at evidence. Sounds like solid grounds for an appeal to me. It appears very clear he had his decision made on day 1 and was influencing the other jurors to ignore evidence and vote the same as him. This makes me curious if being a negligent juror is actually a federal crime. If it's not, it should be.
And we would argue that any site worth visiting is capable of being supported by its visitors alone. Then you have things like YouTube. There's no YouTube+ where I can be guaranteed I'll never see ads (unless I use ABP or watch on anything but a PC). They are built from the ground up to be funded by advertisements and advertisements alone. The customers of YouTube are advertisers. Then you have things like Hulu which accept premium payments but STILL make you watch ads, because you're just the "extra icing on the cake."
And I agree with you. The standard (nay, required) model should be: free to use - ads, pay to use - no ads, unless there is no option to pay, in which case there should be no ads. This forces advertisements to subsidize the cost of serving content to non-paying-customers, but your paying customers are probably a much larger portion of your income (at least it has the possibility, and it at least gives paying customers some kind of voice-power). Models like Hulu and YouTube should be shunned and rejected wholly, much like cable/satellite TV should be as well ($120/month just to watch 40% ads? No thanks).
This is why I want ABP to succeed. The better we get at blocking ads, the less revenue that industry earns, and the less capable of sustaining anything it becomes. Hopefully eventually advertising will be so incapable of generating revenue that it won't be the option people consider as their primary source of income when planning new projects.
The problem is that getting revenue from advertisements changes who your customer is. No longer is it your viewers and website visitors, rather the people paying you the big bucks to violate the privacy and potentially security of your visitors. It also gives advertisers the power to control your business since they pay for it.
There's an astonishingly high false-positive rate on claimed rapes versus actual rapes, and most actual rapes aren't ever reported. Women who claim they've been "raped" for various reasons (the ability to sue, revenge, bitches be crazy, political pressure and financial motives to bring in a wanted person, like Assange and on and on) should be excluded from a study that is looking into a correlation between women who have actually been raped and their pregnancy rates from said rape. It's perfectly reasonable from a statistics point of view, and that's surely where "legitimate" comes from. But it's impossible in reality to determine legitimate from illegitimate, and no, a conviction on the part of the guy is not a reasonable metric for determining this. Which leads me to question: what's the point of these studies if we're not looking at well-defined groups?
CS: GO, utter shit (even worse than CS:S, if that's even possible). HL3: myth. DOTA? Shit. Steam? Complete forfeit of all consumer rights to "buy" games. I don't think GabeN is the messiah you believe he is.
That's not technically a MITM attack. You've changed an endpoint, so it's a little more involved. But it's a good thing to point out: things like SSL won't protect your data from malware.
I've found Google Play significantly better in every regard. For applications, it's painless. It's seamless. I never have to deal with pop-ups and constantly re-agree to the changed iTunes TOS (which seemed to happen once a week for the longest time). I don't have to constantly enter my iTunes password on my phone (pain in the ass, it really is, and being required to type in your password in a public place on a little phone that everyone can see where each character of your password is shown in plaintext until you press the next one is.. yeah that's secure, Apple). If an app is free, I get ZERO hassle from Google Play. Amazing.
As for music, movies, etc. It's still incredibly easy, and it doesn't require me have this big bulky poorly written iTunes application on my desktop to manage my phone, to sync my purchased data, etc. I just re-download my purchased content. I can even buy music/movies from Google Play by just going to a website, and watch the movies and listen to the music on my computer.
I can't find a single thing that iTunes does better than Google Play. Nothing. Read the TOS of both sometimes. It's even better at that. Shocking.
Except that you're wrong. On an iPhone, you have constraints that force you to deal with crap that you never need to deal with on an Android device. Only ever use 4 apps, ever? You can't uninstall those vendor apps, they're permanent unless you jailbreak your phone. So how do you clean up your pages? You make folders and dump everything into them, then move it to another page. You just did customization that I, as an Android user, have never had to do. What do I do? The apps I install that I use are put on my front page by default (I can turn that off, if I want, too). It's more likely that I will use apps that I install than that I will use every app provided on the phone by default (there are a good 15 I don't think I've ever used). I'm doing nothing but getting the same benefit as the hack you have to do on an iPhone. Further, I can drop a few widgets on an info panel and see the current weather and how long it'll take me to get home instead of opening apps and waiting for data to load, like on the iPhone. You're spending all that extra time opening a weather app every time you want to check the weather. And on and on and on.
Managing running apps and multitasking on an iPhone? Talk about a chore, if it even works, most of the time it's just a "recently used" list because most (all?) apps just re-launch instead of resume. A single notification in the middle of the lock screen? So you have to unlock your phone and open the appropriate app.. that's not inconvenient at all? I'm talking about stock functionality and stock configuration in Jellybean, here. Not something you spend hours configuring. iOS is just terrible. This is as an ex-iOS user reborn into the light that is Android.
Let me relate the iOS hot screens to the desktop of your mother. Check it sometime. Hundreds of icons, 90% unused. She might make a new folder every once in a while and dump most of the icons in it to "clean up," but then you'll be damned if you need to actually access one of those files. Now you have to go searching for it. All I do is open up my application list, which is in alphabetical order, and pick the uncommonly-used-app I want.
The Galaxy Nexus was released a month after the iPhone 4S. Additionally, IIRC, you couldn't purchase an iPhone 4S originally unlocked. So the cost of a 2 year contract on top of a $299 purchase was actually significantly more than $699. (24 months @ $20/month = $779, this is based on the fact that I went from paying $65 a month with my iPhone to AT&T to $45 a month with my Galaxy Nexus).
The point remains: an iPhone 4S is still $650 while a GNexus, while being a better phone overall, is only $350. I don't see a victory for the iPhone anywhere.
Galaxy Nexus 16GB - $350 unlocked from Google Play
iPhone 4S 16GB - $650 unlocked from Apple
Technical specs favor the Nexus. Most reviews favor the Nexus. I've actually seen subsidized offers for a Galaxy Nexus for free. I don't see a competition here at all.
I care because right now, iOS does not compete at all with Jellybean. iPhone hardware competes on no level but pixel density with other devices. iTunes as an app store is horrendous by comparison to Google Play and others, and it's quickly being matched in content (I can use Spotify for Music, and various other sources for all the same video, etc). In essence, what was the great iPhone victory of smart phones is completely gone. The iPhone has nothing going for it anymore except that it's made by Apple and costs nearly twice as much as similar smart phones. That means that the connector fail here is a huge deciding factor in terms of objective feature sets. If Apple screws this up, Apple eats a massive loss on next-gen iPhone sales, and arguably might be dropped out of the smart phone industry altogether (one can hope). So I care because a small mistake here can mean the end of iPhones, and good riddance.
An example of adapter win: I just bought a Galaxy Nexus from Google. Awesome phone. My old GPS in my car used a mini-usb connector to charge. Therefore, I already have a car charger for my phone (which also happens to be my new GPS, because Google Navigation is incredibly hawt). That's the pure win of standards. After using an iPhone for almost 3 years, I was astonished at how terrible iOS is by comparison to Jellybean. My god I will never use an iPhail again.
What I find interesting is that if colored slightly differently and used jagged edges instead of curves, it would resemble the BP logo. BP paid $210,000,000 for their logo. Heh.
I'd argue if that's the case, you're doing it wrong. Java was designed to be ubiquitous and to provide that write-once-run-everywhere capability that we needed, but hasn't succeeded arguably one of the worst languages ever created (weak typing, too!). Surely there's something bigger here than you or others are willing to admit.
You mention tool-chains, but it appears implicit that you haven't noticed that same trend web development. It's moving away from manually using HTML5 APIs, DOM manipulation (because the DOM API can fuck itself, for all we care), etc, and more towards the development of widely used, open, stable, and mature libraries and frameworks that provide incredible speed and agility in authoring. Look at AngularJS. It has the potential to replace GWT at Google as a platform*. Wow. It was designed to make development of web interfaces faster than GWT, and in fact, that's the very story of its birth.
No offense meant towards you or anyone else who finds themselves in a similar boat, but in my experience, the case is in general that it's a simple case of doin'-it-wrong. I typically hear this from people who WANT the web as a platform to fail or to be bad, and so they create this huge barrier akin to noticing that C lets you use inline ASM and then taking that as "C is basically just writing ASM, how can anyone get anything done with this?". The web has within it a beautiful and rapid basis for application development. Try to get in touch with it, your life will be simpler.
And towards the future: we have potential prospects like Dart that could succeed Javascript in a few years, we can hope. It's substantially better as a language fundamentally than JS but remains quite simple to use, especially for JS veterans, and for anyone familiar with C or Java. Right now, it has terrible performance, so when V8-level JIT-fu is applied, I suspect Dart will be the fastest web-borne language in existence (strong typing means the JITC can do a much better job without needing to rely on deoptimizations due to type inference failures, which are essentially the cache-misses of JS). The future is full of possibilities for web development. Embrace it, and encourage sanity. It's easy to belittle something, it's harder to improve it.
* I tried to find this reference, I believe it's in one of the I/O 2012 videos, if you care to find it.
I don't think this logic applies at all. We're talking about Skype, right? I think Skype is small fish in light of this technology, but let's go with that assumption.
Skype is already installed on millions of PCs, phones, and tablets as a native application. Nobody goes to "www.skype.com" and hopes they can make phone calls from the website, they just open their Skype application. If Microsoft does anything to make Skype run on IE10, it will almost certainly not see a wide adoption, because of the aforementioned fact. It's already installed -- we don't need another way of running it, and we have native apps on our iDevices and Droids, too. On the other hand, the reason something like Meebo became popular in spite of being completely contradictory to what I just said (it's messaging services but web-based), is because it allowed ubiquitous multi-protocol support and muddled everything together for you and did so VERY well. Sure you have Pidgin, Trillian, Adium, etc that will do this, but it managed to do it much more successfully, and it bypassed the sweeping firewall abuses that happened in the last decade to stop "abuse" of internet access at work, school, etc, which wasn't a small part of its success.
On the other hand, what will you get as a result? You'll have Skype, this software that we already all have native implementations for, running in a web-capable manner but ONLY for IE10. That means the vast majority of web browsers in the world cannot run the software. So you have a web service that has not made an attempt at proliferation. That is a complete fail from the start. What you have is a useless bit of engineering, and it won't make a splash AT ALL as far as these standards go, because there's no compelling story to drive it here. Moreover, proposing a web application intended to be used by everyone and not supporting the major browsers is a losing battle. When was the last time GMail didn't work in IE for you? They could just as well say "screw everything but Chrome," but they get it: it needs to work for everyone, and Microsoft doesn't make that easy, but it's still the truth. Look at Microsoft's own web services. Their MSDN application, their KB systems, their support forums, their registration sites for VS and other applications all now support Chrome and Firefox. They used to work well (sometimes at all) ONLY in IE. Look at OWA and Office365. They work in other browsers, albeit OWA disables features (for no reason) in them, which I'd argue is a good basis for a lawsuit, but then again IANAL, so I'm probably completely wrong. It's still stupid, though.
Now contrast that with technologies that would see HUGE benefits from this technology: web conferencing. Surely no replacement for Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Mumble (unless we get the Meebo of voice chats, which.. hold on, filing a patent really quick), etc, but there is already a large web presence for conferencing software. This will mean huge improvements in the quality of these systems and one less thing we need to rely on plugins to do. Awesome. I can even see some interesting hacking with this technology that might just end-of-life Skype, too. But it needs massive, sweeping adoption, not one browser in one tiny corner of the Web. This is not what Microsoft's proposed business plan would do. So I don't see that as a valid argument for why their proposal would succeed over one that's already been accepted by the two by-in-large leaders in HTML5 technology.
I don't recall this being an issue when I was in highschool (a mere 6-10 years ago). There weren't too many resources to encourage learning and advancement in computer science outside of your really basic CS courses and AP programs that taught Java (3 or 4?), and how uninspired they were. I think that was the main issue. Lack of resources. I ended up buying K&R, Stroustrup, Irvine, and some other college-level texts and reading myself to learn. If I had much more resources available to me, I would've been years ahead of that even. By the time I was in my first year of college, I already knew more than the 4 years at university would have taught me (sans a few algorithms, but that was later corrected with Intro to Algorithms, which was far better than anything on our curriculum). This prompted me to change my major because outside of a top-5 CS school, there wasn't the available resources and people to really push me. Math, however, was suitable, and far more difficult, I found. I had to spend a lot of my own free time finding resources to fuel my desire to learn. I think this was the main problem, between 5-10 years ago in terms of educating young hackers. Finding the odd RCE paper, agner's papers, some defcon/blackhat stuff, leading to more research papers from people at MIT/Stanford/etc was the real source of insight for me, outside of some classic CS texts. To this day, those fields still have a very high barrier to entry, and not for any good reason I can tell.
As far as "hacking is bad", in 8th grade I pointed out that I could access my teacher's drive containing grade books from our lab, circumventing the group policy that prevented me from opening a 'Run' box or 'My Computer' or navigating there in explorer. I just opened up anything with a Save As, knowing that dialog wasn't at the time tied to policies and navigated over to network places and could see everything, and everything was on public shares (WTF upon WTF). I got kicked out of the lab for a day for pointing that out, and I don't know if they ever fixed it, but that was the extent of punishment there for "hacking." I also nearly got fired from my first job in college for attempting to implement a roaming trojan on our CS lab's computers (they had this annoying habit of restarting after 15 minutes of inactivity when logged off with DeepFreeze). Since we had administrative access via our logins, the idea was to write a simple tool that would bounce from computer to computer like a fire, keeping it alive even though DeepFreeze was installed on the lab (the only way to extinguish it would be to reboot the entire lab at once). The reason? Our files for projects were stored on network drives in a heavily firewalled lab-accessible only location. And that's also where we were to submit homework. So instead of being able to submit homework from another lab on campus (there were quite a few more), or from wireless, we had to go over to the CS lab during lab hours, log-in (took 15 minutes sometimes), and somehow manage to move our files to the lab machine (USB or e-mail, fun times) and then finally copy them into the homework directory. My goal was to have that trojan running in the lab and have it connect out on port 80 to a server of mine so I could submit my homework at any time from anywhere (hallelujah!). Nevertheless, while trying to break some things, I inadvertently e-mailed myself some toolage to my university e-mail address instead of gmail, which got flagged by the antivirus, and which got my boss asking "why are you sending yourself this tool" which then led to them noticing I sent it from one of the CS lab computers, which meant I had the actual files on a lab computer.. ouch. Simple mistakes, yeah?
It's never been about the malice. It's always because a roadblock is in the way: how do I get around it, or an incredibly difficult question being posed: how do I make this do what I want? And that way of thinking about everything is why I have the skills I have today, and why I was interested in CS. I think
What scares me the most, I think, is that several of the banks I've used have required ridiculously short passwords and relied heavily on these "security questions" as a second tier of authentication (as if that's more important than 64+ more bits of strength in the password). So you have to pick a password that's between 4 and 8 characters or some nonsense and answer some questions like "mother's maiden name" and "name of first employer" etc.
What we need is some kind of authenticator or something. If you can't trust me to use a 24+ character password or provide me with a more secure means to log-in, I can't trust you to hold my money. It's that simple. Keyloggers still win against complex passwords. Blizzard solved the problem by using symmetric cryptographic protocols so a device that's highly unlikely to be compromised is the source of part of the key (a keychain or a smartphone app). Why can't banks do the same? What a damn shame.
One has to wonder if, given the difficulty to obtain guns in that area, if he's found himself on some kind of "potential domestic terrorists" list from all of our intelligence agencies, and is now wiretapped and being watched very closely. :)
The statement isn't unrealistic or unbelievable and seems quite objective, indicating it's most likely not puffery. If they knew it was false, it may be defamatory, and I hope they get pwned so hard.
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I don't because it doesn't matter. The initial impression is that he's describing a computer with a TV-tuner that does X, Y, and Z that are common functions already present in common software packages and/or as built-in OS features. That impression is accurate, as you'll note:
Keyboard -> controller.
Any video editing software -> allows editing of sections of video files.
I'm pretty sure a computer with commonly available video editing software pre-installed does not constitute an invention. The design of the remote might. The design of the physical hardware might. The design of the system concept overall describing a computer with software capabilities doesn't, because it's very clearly covered by prior art. That's what it describes, at any level, so that's all I needed to read.
So drivers who have driving licenses should not be on the jury of a hit run case?
I don't see how you made that leap. Jurors with licenses don't have any bias based on someone hitting a pedestrian. Jurors who stand to benefit from a conviction of the hit/run case would clearly have a conflict of interest, but I don't see any reasonable situation where that's the case. Owning a patent or profiting from copyright should preclude you from being on the jury of infringement cases, because you're no longer impartial, as required by the 6th amendment. Even if they pass selection, a lack of impartiality can be demonstrated, so the verdict should be nullified.
By your own description the foreman has a very similar view of patents as the two corporations, ergo - they were judged by their peers, end of story on the bias of the foreman. The time to attack a juror's worldview is during selection, attacking the juror after deliberations is no better than attacking the messenger. The fundamental injustice in all this is that the patent office is enabling (some would say encouraging) these kinds of "Gulliver's travels" court cases to tie up the courts and bankrupt business with this utter nonsense, in the end the consumers and taxpayers (ie society) are the mugs paying for all this.
It's not a peer basis. A is claiming B infringed on A's patents. B is trying to prove A's patents are invalid by prior art. The foreman would benefit from a very narrow description of "prior art" which he has clearly demonstrated he believes in, and his use of prior knowledge rather than facts and information presented in the case indicates partiality. The other jurors deferred to his judgement because of this, and his knowledge (flawed) is not admissible court evidence, so the entire thing is wrong. But yes, in the end we pay for it. If a company goes bankrupt, we suffer. If a company gets a huge fine, their product prices increase. They never really have any liability, even with patents and copyrights. It's a totally broken system, used more these days to troll than to protect and foster innovation.
The components those patents are made of do not by their construction/nature imply their usage in said patent. This is obviousness. Say someone patents a bucket. You aren't going to get a patent on a bucket with some sand in it. The bucket's design implies holding things, so putting something in the bucket isn't a new invention. A PC supporting USB-based storage being connected to USB-based storage does not constitute an invention. It's obvious use of what that thing was designed to do in the first place.
I'd like to point out you're injecting logical fallacy here: if all ideas are based on other ideas, where does it end? Is it ideas all the way down?
And as for the strawman, feel free to read up and enlighten yourself. He refuted a claim that all patents aren't made of existing inventions/components, a claim which I did not make, but which is superficially similar to the claim I did make, and persuaded me to make a counter-claim. Have a nice day.
1. You can be relatively certain from the summary. And there's a huge problem if it takes a team of lawyers a week to determine presumed patent validity.
2. This is incorrect. Since you wish to straw-man, allow me to refer you to a list of cool patents that aren't trivially represented by the existing functionality of their constituent components (ie: not obvious).
3. That's actually not how jury selection works. Potential jurors are afforded a lot of privacy. They certainly didn't (can't?) do background checks on every person. They simply ask a few questions. So this guy could have a clear conflict of interest but because of privacy concerns, it may not be discovered during voir dire. That said, if it's later determined that a juror had a conflict of interest, the jury should be re-selected, a mistrial should occur, or any convictions nullified. If this man was indeed asked if there were any conflicts of interest or any circumstance that would impact his impartiality (I don't have the text of the voir dire, so I can't really determine what he was asked) and denied that claim, he should be tried for perjury. The 6th amendment clearly requires the impartiality of the jury.
When it is a clear conflict of interest, it should. I'm not saying that any person with a patent should be disallowed to serve on a jury in any case involving a patent, instead I'm claiming that a person who owns a patent that is obviously invalid by prior art (it's just a TiVo with removable storage, filed years AFTER TiVo was invented and after others already had the capability) should not be permitted to make a decision in a case in a patent infringement case where the key issue of defense is patent invalidity due to prior art. He has something to gain (ideologically, perhaps not realistically) from a verdict siding with Apple here.
He owns a patent and thus claims some knowledge of patents and patent law. The other jurors do not, and they defer to his judgement. His judgement is factually incorrect, ignores large parts of both the written law and case law, and is pretty clearly skewed in a manner that is rather self-serving (if what he believes were true: his patent is valid and may be profitable, he's clearly a patent troll). So effectively, what I see in this case is that a single guy who has a massive conflict of interest was allowed to decide a case like this all by himself. No problems there, right?
However, he owns a patent. This is an obvious conflict of interest. This would be something like a person who owns and profits from copyright sitting on the jury in a case where someone was being sued for copyright infringement.
If you watch his interview, it's apparent he's factually mistaken horribly in regards to most things patent related. He's also under this Apple-fanboi-esque assumption that a patent must be an identical match in every minute detail to an existing thing for that thing to be considered "prior art." So he's completely ignoring obviousness and likeness, which are key in prior art claims. Making this observation failure is key to the validity of many Apple patents. If something is original and unique just because it has rounded corners, something's really broken. Worse, probably, is that he uses likeness and obviousness to determine the infringement of another thing. So you have a guy who's perfectly willing to take a patent and make a deduction which I can only expect is similar to: "look, these icons are spaced/oriented in this manner, and that's similar to what the Samsung device here has, and there's a button here which is really obvious by the design, even though it's not identical to the Apple patent, so obviously this is infringing." While at the same time making the deduction when presented with evidence of prior art: "well... it wouldn't run on an Apple processor, so it can't be prior art, even if the software is functionally identical and looks identical." Complete absurdity.
Also, he clearly states he was trying to expedite the whole process to avoid being hung up on actually looking at evidence. Sounds like solid grounds for an appeal to me. It appears very clear he had his decision made on day 1 and was influencing the other jurors to ignore evidence and vote the same as him. This makes me curious if being a negligent juror is actually a federal crime. If it's not, it should be.
And we would argue that any site worth visiting is capable of being supported by its visitors alone. Then you have things like YouTube. There's no YouTube+ where I can be guaranteed I'll never see ads (unless I use ABP or watch on anything but a PC). They are built from the ground up to be funded by advertisements and advertisements alone. The customers of YouTube are advertisers. Then you have things like Hulu which accept premium payments but STILL make you watch ads, because you're just the "extra icing on the cake."
And I agree with you. The standard (nay, required) model should be: free to use - ads, pay to use - no ads, unless there is no option to pay, in which case there should be no ads. This forces advertisements to subsidize the cost of serving content to non-paying-customers, but your paying customers are probably a much larger portion of your income (at least it has the possibility, and it at least gives paying customers some kind of voice-power). Models like Hulu and YouTube should be shunned and rejected wholly, much like cable/satellite TV should be as well ($120/month just to watch 40% ads? No thanks).
This is why I want ABP to succeed. The better we get at blocking ads, the less revenue that industry earns, and the less capable of sustaining anything it becomes. Hopefully eventually advertising will be so incapable of generating revenue that it won't be the option people consider as their primary source of income when planning new projects.
The problem is that getting revenue from advertisements changes who your customer is. No longer is it your viewers and website visitors, rather the people paying you the big bucks to violate the privacy and potentially security of your visitors. It also gives advertisers the power to control your business since they pay for it.
There's an astonishingly high false-positive rate on claimed rapes versus actual rapes, and most actual rapes aren't ever reported. Women who claim they've been "raped" for various reasons (the ability to sue, revenge, bitches be crazy, political pressure and financial motives to bring in a wanted person, like Assange and on and on) should be excluded from a study that is looking into a correlation between women who have actually been raped and their pregnancy rates from said rape. It's perfectly reasonable from a statistics point of view, and that's surely where "legitimate" comes from. But it's impossible in reality to determine legitimate from illegitimate, and no, a conviction on the part of the guy is not a reasonable metric for determining this. Which leads me to question: what's the point of these studies if we're not looking at well-defined groups?
CS: GO, utter shit (even worse than CS:S, if that's even possible). HL3: myth. DOTA? Shit. Steam? Complete forfeit of all consumer rights to "buy" games. I don't think GabeN is the messiah you believe he is.
The important question then becomes what kind of pie?
That's not technically a MITM attack. You've changed an endpoint, so it's a little more involved. But it's a good thing to point out: things like SSL won't protect your data from malware.
I've found Google Play significantly better in every regard. For applications, it's painless. It's seamless. I never have to deal with pop-ups and constantly re-agree to the changed iTunes TOS (which seemed to happen once a week for the longest time). I don't have to constantly enter my iTunes password on my phone (pain in the ass, it really is, and being required to type in your password in a public place on a little phone that everyone can see where each character of your password is shown in plaintext until you press the next one is .. yeah that's secure, Apple). If an app is free, I get ZERO hassle from Google Play. Amazing.
As for music, movies, etc. It's still incredibly easy, and it doesn't require me have this big bulky poorly written iTunes application on my desktop to manage my phone, to sync my purchased data, etc. I just re-download my purchased content. I can even buy music/movies from Google Play by just going to a website, and watch the movies and listen to the music on my computer.
I can't find a single thing that iTunes does better than Google Play. Nothing. Read the TOS of both sometimes. It's even better at that. Shocking.
Except that you're wrong. On an iPhone, you have constraints that force you to deal with crap that you never need to deal with on an Android device. Only ever use 4 apps, ever? You can't uninstall those vendor apps, they're permanent unless you jailbreak your phone. So how do you clean up your pages? You make folders and dump everything into them, then move it to another page. You just did customization that I, as an Android user, have never had to do. What do I do? The apps I install that I use are put on my front page by default (I can turn that off, if I want, too). It's more likely that I will use apps that I install than that I will use every app provided on the phone by default (there are a good 15 I don't think I've ever used). I'm doing nothing but getting the same benefit as the hack you have to do on an iPhone. Further, I can drop a few widgets on an info panel and see the current weather and how long it'll take me to get home instead of opening apps and waiting for data to load, like on the iPhone. You're spending all that extra time opening a weather app every time you want to check the weather. And on and on and on.
Managing running apps and multitasking on an iPhone? Talk about a chore, if it even works, most of the time it's just a "recently used" list because most (all?) apps just re-launch instead of resume. A single notification in the middle of the lock screen? So you have to unlock your phone and open the appropriate app.. that's not inconvenient at all? I'm talking about stock functionality and stock configuration in Jellybean, here. Not something you spend hours configuring. iOS is just terrible. This is as an ex-iOS user reborn into the light that is Android.
Let me relate the iOS hot screens to the desktop of your mother. Check it sometime. Hundreds of icons, 90% unused. She might make a new folder every once in a while and dump most of the icons in it to "clean up," but then you'll be damned if you need to actually access one of those files. Now you have to go searching for it. All I do is open up my application list, which is in alphabetical order, and pick the uncommonly-used-app I want.
The Galaxy Nexus was released a month after the iPhone 4S. Additionally, IIRC, you couldn't purchase an iPhone 4S originally unlocked. So the cost of a 2 year contract on top of a $299 purchase was actually significantly more than $699. (24 months @ $20/month = $779, this is based on the fact that I went from paying $65 a month with my iPhone to AT&T to $45 a month with my Galaxy Nexus).
The point remains: an iPhone 4S is still $650 while a GNexus, while being a better phone overall, is only $350. I don't see a victory for the iPhone anywhere.
Galaxy Nexus 16GB - $350 unlocked from Google Play
iPhone 4S 16GB - $650 unlocked from Apple
Technical specs favor the Nexus. Most reviews favor the Nexus. I've actually seen subsidized offers for a Galaxy Nexus for free. I don't see a competition here at all.
I care because right now, iOS does not compete at all with Jellybean. iPhone hardware competes on no level but pixel density with other devices. iTunes as an app store is horrendous by comparison to Google Play and others, and it's quickly being matched in content (I can use Spotify for Music, and various other sources for all the same video, etc). In essence, what was the great iPhone victory of smart phones is completely gone. The iPhone has nothing going for it anymore except that it's made by Apple and costs nearly twice as much as similar smart phones. That means that the connector fail here is a huge deciding factor in terms of objective feature sets. If Apple screws this up, Apple eats a massive loss on next-gen iPhone sales, and arguably might be dropped out of the smart phone industry altogether (one can hope). So I care because a small mistake here can mean the end of iPhones, and good riddance.
An example of adapter win: I just bought a Galaxy Nexus from Google. Awesome phone. My old GPS in my car used a mini-usb connector to charge. Therefore, I already have a car charger for my phone (which also happens to be my new GPS, because Google Navigation is incredibly hawt). That's the pure win of standards. After using an iPhone for almost 3 years, I was astonished at how terrible iOS is by comparison to Jellybean. My god I will never use an iPhail again.
Also: bootstrap.
What I find interesting is that if colored slightly differently and used jagged edges instead of curves, it would resemble the BP logo. BP paid $210,000,000 for their logo. Heh.
I'd argue if that's the case, you're doing it wrong. Java was designed to be ubiquitous and to provide that write-once-run-everywhere capability that we needed, but hasn't succeeded arguably one of the worst languages ever created (weak typing, too!). Surely there's something bigger here than you or others are willing to admit.
You mention tool-chains, but it appears implicit that you haven't noticed that same trend web development. It's moving away from manually using HTML5 APIs, DOM manipulation (because the DOM API can fuck itself, for all we care), etc, and more towards the development of widely used, open, stable, and mature libraries and frameworks that provide incredible speed and agility in authoring. Look at AngularJS. It has the potential to replace GWT at Google as a platform*. Wow. It was designed to make development of web interfaces faster than GWT, and in fact, that's the very story of its birth.
No offense meant towards you or anyone else who finds themselves in a similar boat, but in my experience, the case is in general that it's a simple case of doin'-it-wrong. I typically hear this from people who WANT the web as a platform to fail or to be bad, and so they create this huge barrier akin to noticing that C lets you use inline ASM and then taking that as "C is basically just writing ASM, how can anyone get anything done with this?". The web has within it a beautiful and rapid basis for application development. Try to get in touch with it, your life will be simpler.
And towards the future: we have potential prospects like Dart that could succeed Javascript in a few years, we can hope. It's substantially better as a language fundamentally than JS but remains quite simple to use, especially for JS veterans, and for anyone familiar with C or Java. Right now, it has terrible performance, so when V8-level JIT-fu is applied, I suspect Dart will be the fastest web-borne language in existence (strong typing means the JITC can do a much better job without needing to rely on deoptimizations due to type inference failures, which are essentially the cache-misses of JS). The future is full of possibilities for web development. Embrace it, and encourage sanity. It's easy to belittle something, it's harder to improve it.
* I tried to find this reference, I believe it's in one of the I/O 2012 videos, if you care to find it.
I don't think this logic applies at all. We're talking about Skype, right? I think Skype is small fish in light of this technology, but let's go with that assumption.
.. hold on, filing a patent really quick), etc, but there is already a large web presence for conferencing software. This will mean huge improvements in the quality of these systems and one less thing we need to rely on plugins to do. Awesome. I can even see some interesting hacking with this technology that might just end-of-life Skype, too. But it needs massive, sweeping adoption, not one browser in one tiny corner of the Web. This is not what Microsoft's proposed business plan would do. So I don't see that as a valid argument for why their proposal would succeed over one that's already been accepted by the two by-in-large leaders in HTML5 technology.
Skype is already installed on millions of PCs, phones, and tablets as a native application. Nobody goes to "www.skype.com" and hopes they can make phone calls from the website, they just open their Skype application. If Microsoft does anything to make Skype run on IE10, it will almost certainly not see a wide adoption, because of the aforementioned fact. It's already installed -- we don't need another way of running it, and we have native apps on our iDevices and Droids, too. On the other hand, the reason something like Meebo became popular in spite of being completely contradictory to what I just said (it's messaging services but web-based), is because it allowed ubiquitous multi-protocol support and muddled everything together for you and did so VERY well. Sure you have Pidgin, Trillian, Adium, etc that will do this, but it managed to do it much more successfully, and it bypassed the sweeping firewall abuses that happened in the last decade to stop "abuse" of internet access at work, school, etc, which wasn't a small part of its success.
On the other hand, what will you get as a result? You'll have Skype, this software that we already all have native implementations for, running in a web-capable manner but ONLY for IE10. That means the vast majority of web browsers in the world cannot run the software. So you have a web service that has not made an attempt at proliferation. That is a complete fail from the start. What you have is a useless bit of engineering, and it won't make a splash AT ALL as far as these standards go, because there's no compelling story to drive it here. Moreover, proposing a web application intended to be used by everyone and not supporting the major browsers is a losing battle. When was the last time GMail didn't work in IE for you? They could just as well say "screw everything but Chrome," but they get it: it needs to work for everyone, and Microsoft doesn't make that easy, but it's still the truth. Look at Microsoft's own web services. Their MSDN application, their KB systems, their support forums, their registration sites for VS and other applications all now support Chrome and Firefox. They used to work well (sometimes at all) ONLY in IE. Look at OWA and Office365. They work in other browsers, albeit OWA disables features (for no reason) in them, which I'd argue is a good basis for a lawsuit, but then again IANAL, so I'm probably completely wrong. It's still stupid, though.
Now contrast that with technologies that would see HUGE benefits from this technology: web conferencing. Surely no replacement for Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Mumble (unless we get the Meebo of voice chats, which
I don't recall this being an issue when I was in highschool (a mere 6-10 years ago). There weren't too many resources to encourage learning and advancement in computer science outside of your really basic CS courses and AP programs that taught Java (3 or 4?), and how uninspired they were. I think that was the main issue. Lack of resources. I ended up buying K&R, Stroustrup, Irvine, and some other college-level texts and reading myself to learn. If I had much more resources available to me, I would've been years ahead of that even. By the time I was in my first year of college, I already knew more than the 4 years at university would have taught me (sans a few algorithms, but that was later corrected with Intro to Algorithms, which was far better than anything on our curriculum). This prompted me to change my major because outside of a top-5 CS school, there wasn't the available resources and people to really push me. Math, however, was suitable, and far more difficult, I found. I had to spend a lot of my own free time finding resources to fuel my desire to learn. I think this was the main problem, between 5-10 years ago in terms of educating young hackers. Finding the odd RCE paper, agner's papers, some defcon/blackhat stuff, leading to more research papers from people at MIT/Stanford/etc was the real source of insight for me, outside of some classic CS texts. To this day, those fields still have a very high barrier to entry, and not for any good reason I can tell.
As far as "hacking is bad", in 8th grade I pointed out that I could access my teacher's drive containing grade books from our lab, circumventing the group policy that prevented me from opening a 'Run' box or 'My Computer' or navigating there in explorer. I just opened up anything with a Save As, knowing that dialog wasn't at the time tied to policies and navigated over to network places and could see everything, and everything was on public shares (WTF upon WTF). I got kicked out of the lab for a day for pointing that out, and I don't know if they ever fixed it, but that was the extent of punishment there for "hacking." I also nearly got fired from my first job in college for attempting to implement a roaming trojan on our CS lab's computers (they had this annoying habit of restarting after 15 minutes of inactivity when logged off with DeepFreeze). Since we had administrative access via our logins, the idea was to write a simple tool that would bounce from computer to computer like a fire, keeping it alive even though DeepFreeze was installed on the lab (the only way to extinguish it would be to reboot the entire lab at once). The reason? Our files for projects were stored on network drives in a heavily firewalled lab-accessible only location. And that's also where we were to submit homework. So instead of being able to submit homework from another lab on campus (there were quite a few more), or from wireless, we had to go over to the CS lab during lab hours, log-in (took 15 minutes sometimes), and somehow manage to move our files to the lab machine (USB or e-mail, fun times) and then finally copy them into the homework directory. My goal was to have that trojan running in the lab and have it connect out on port 80 to a server of mine so I could submit my homework at any time from anywhere (hallelujah!). Nevertheless, while trying to break some things, I inadvertently e-mailed myself some toolage to my university e-mail address instead of gmail, which got flagged by the antivirus, and which got my boss asking "why are you sending yourself this tool" which then led to them noticing I sent it from one of the CS lab computers, which meant I had the actual files on a lab computer.. ouch. Simple mistakes, yeah?
It's never been about the malice. It's always because a roadblock is in the way: how do I get around it, or an incredibly difficult question being posed: how do I make this do what I want? And that way of thinking about everything is why I have the skills I have today, and why I was interested in CS. I think
What scares me the most, I think, is that several of the banks I've used have required ridiculously short passwords and relied heavily on these "security questions" as a second tier of authentication (as if that's more important than 64+ more bits of strength in the password). So you have to pick a password that's between 4 and 8 characters or some nonsense and answer some questions like "mother's maiden name" and "name of first employer" etc.
What we need is some kind of authenticator or something. If you can't trust me to use a 24+ character password or provide me with a more secure means to log-in, I can't trust you to hold my money. It's that simple. Keyloggers still win against complex passwords. Blizzard solved the problem by using symmetric cryptographic protocols so a device that's highly unlikely to be compromised is the source of part of the key (a keychain or a smartphone app). Why can't banks do the same? What a damn shame.
One has to wonder if, given the difficulty to obtain guns in that area, if he's found himself on some kind of "potential domestic terrorists" list from all of our intelligence agencies, and is now wiretapped and being watched very closely. :)
The statement isn't unrealistic or unbelievable and seems quite objective, indicating it's most likely not puffery. If they knew it was false, it may be defamatory, and I hope they get pwned so hard.