I think we need to cover what makes patents bad. One of the things that make software patents bad (only one of them) is the fact you can't be certain whether you infringe them, even when you have the patent right in front of you. This is due to ambiguities in the patent. You simply cannot know which way claim construction is going to go.
If you aim is not to infringe a patent, you must avoid the most broad interpretation the patent has, since you never know how that is going to be interpreted.
Back to our design patent. The bezel is clearly marked with a dotted line. To the best of my understanding, that means it is not a part of the patent. The same goes for the earphones jack location and the charging socket. Moving any of those around not will cause you to not infringe the patent. Probably. I think. To the best of my limited understanding.
Basilbrush is trying to claim that the aspect ratio, clearly part of the solid lines, is part of the patent. Just as clearly, however, Apple did not think so. That means that whether he (she?) is right or wrong is irrelevant. When you are trying to avoid infringement, you had !@$#%!@# better assume a different aspect ratio will not save you.
Which brings us back to the bezel. At trial, Apple has a clear interest to show the patent as being as narrow as possible, while still including whatever it is Samsung has done. Make the patent seem too broad, and the jury might think it is invalid. So it is entirely possible that Apple bringing up the bezel was a strategic move.
Of course, they are safe to bring it up as, at the point, they already knew what Samsung did and did not do. It is entirely possible^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlikely that, given other circumstances, Apple would have claimed that the bezel means nothing at all, but the color has to be different, or that the bezel and the color are both irrelevant, but having a logo would have changed everything. Apple's strategy during the trial is dictated by Samsung already past actions.
Discussing what a patent covers, however, pertains to future actions and future litigation. Combining all the different, often conflicting, ways to read this patent yields just one strategy to avoid infringement: don't use rounded corners.
So whether Basilbrush is right or not, the patent covers "hand held device with rounded corners" (the hand is marked with solid lines, so I think it is safe to say it is mandatory). Anything else is a risk.
Then why did Apple think they had a chance to win? Why did the German judge, when confronted with Apple changing Samsung's tablet aspect ratio, not think they were falsifying evidence? Why didn't Samsung defense center around the aspect ratio?
It seems to me that a lot of people who know a lot more about the field than me (you haven't stated what your qualifications are, if any) do not agree with you.
I ask again, in what way do the design patent drawings not cover a specific aspect ratio?
In the most practical way. If you issue a device that has a different aspect ratio, you might still get sued (as Samsung has).
More generally, you need to be a patent lawyer in order to answer, in general, whether things like aspect ratio are part of the specific claims of a design patent. I am not a lawyer. Obviously, Apple's lawyers thought it is not.
If you know differently (maybe you are a patent lawyer), please do speak up. If not, please avoid re-asking the same question merely because you do not like the answer.
In what way do the design patent drawings not cover the aspect ratio?
In the practical way. Samsung were sued for violating this patent despite having a different aspect ratio. Obviously, Apple doesn't think the aspect ratio in any way limits the applicability of this patent.
The aspect ratio was so different that Apple felt the need to photoshop evidence to make the devices look more alike.
GP linked to the patent. The patent covers everything shown in the diagram that isn't excluded by means of being drawn in a dotted line. If you check the diagram, the only thing not dotted are the rounded corners and the curve on the back (which just means the "rounded corners" are 3D).
So, no. This design patent is solely about rounded corners.
Windows, including the most up to date one, still have a 16 bit personality able to run DOS programs. This means there is something there that is able to catch int 21 and process it, as well as allow programs to direct interrupts.
While it is true that cmd.exe (as well as the black screen dumb terminal that it usually runs in) are not DOS, DOS is certainly still in there, somewhere.
Which is not to say that I think the "vulnerability" angle has any merit. Just that your statement isn't entirely true.
In a study, patents were given placebo, and told what it was. They got specific instructions that these are just sugar pills, and that it doesn't really matter whether they take it or not. The pills were still as effective as placebo.
I am wondering why that research did not make more waves than it did, as it clearly solves placebo's greatest problem as treatment.
As long as the research is valid and the conclusions correctly presented (which, in this case, they do not seem to have been), I don't care for the motive.
There is really a bite to it, there is quite some flavour with the browning. I know there is no fat in it so I didn't really know how juicy it would be, but there is quite some intense taste; it's close to meat, it's not that juicy, but the consistency is perfect. This is meat to me... It's really something to bite on and I think the look is quite similar.
While I agree that Android != Linux, I think your statements are somewhat over-broad.
There is a full Posix userspace on Android. It is done via different libraries than the usual ones, so don't expect any GNU extensions to glibc and such, but posix is there completely. You will need to use a toolchain adapted to that environment, but the same holds true if you decide to go with uclibc.
I'm not sure what you mean by the kernel being locked/limited. This is, when all is said and done, a Linux kernel, exposing all of the usual Linux user space APIs. There are some non-standard APIs as well, true, but I don't see how that is any problem. I have statically compiled a fairly comprehensive version of busybox, and everything worked. The only reason I did this statically was to avoid the toolchain problem mentioned above.
I think you are thinking about the wrong question. The question is not whether the publication is going to cause trouble. Of course it is. The question is whether it is legitimate for the spying to have taken place in the first place.
If it is, then Snowden releasing this information is betrayal, and the shit storm that will (likely) happen now is just one good reason to keep this a secret.
My point was that countries are forming spy organizations. I know very few people who claim those organizations are completely unnecessary. And yet, assuming you don't live in a country with clear enemies (which, living in Israel, I actually do), you have to wonder, who are those organizations spying on? If it's not okay to spy on your own citizens (and it's not), and not okay to spy on your close allies (which it's probably not), and not okay to spy on other countries (which, implied by this piece of news, is also not), then who's left?
Seriously. These are spy organizations. And here they are - spying. On foreign countries, no less. What were they thinking?
The Snowden leaks started out with things the public actually needed to know. The NSA spying on Americans is a gross overstep of the organization's charter. Spying on friendly nation's leaders is an embarrassment. This, however, seems to me like them doing their job.
At first, I thought that labeling Snowden as a spy was an overreaction. The US government trying to silence a whistle blower. However, were I a juror in a trial in which he released just this document, I'd convict.
Anyone who disagrees is kindly requested to answer two simple questions: 1. What should the NSA do? 2. Assuming this is not this, how can a country maintain military intelligence without doing this?
For long term space voyages, all you have to do is accelerate at 9.8m/s^2 for half the voyage, and then turn off the rockets, rotate the ship, and use the same rockets to decellerate at the same rate. Except for the time the ship rotates, the astronautes would feel a normal earth gravity. Bonus, the trip takes less time.
Of course, it's not that simple. Not only are the energy needs of such a trip much higher, there is another potential problem. After about 35 days of accelerating at 9.8m/s^2, your speed will be about a tenth of the speed of light. At those speeds, time flows visibly different inside the ship and on earth. Accelerate much further, and this becomes a one way trip, by definition.
That to me just shows the kind of mindset that the GPLers have and its really sad, because it went from a way to share to St. iGNUcious and the church of GPL.
Huh?
I did not pour religious !$%!@# into discussion. You did. I just chose a license for my own software, which I have written and decided to share. If you don't like that license, don't use the software. I am not limiting your choice in any way. If you wish to share your software under a non-copyleft free license, feel free to do so with no word of reproach from me.
I do not understand why you defend software released under a proprietary license, which gives the user a very limited set of freedoms, and yet condemn my choices, which give the users a much much greater set of freedoms (though not a great as you'd like, obviously). You seem to think you have a moral right to my code if I choose a free license, but not if I choose to go proprietary.
I simply do not understand this position. It seems hypocritical to me.
You complain about RMS going around telling people what licenses to use. I get that. I think he's pushing it. Then again, you do the exact same thing, only with a different license. Not only this, but RMS's position is, at least, self consistent. He claims that all software should be free. I agree with neither basic claim nor the method he advances that world view, but I understand the world he's aiming for. You, on the other hand, claim that all free software should be non-copyleft, but that proprietary software can be whatever it likes. Maybe I'm missing something, but that does not seem self-consistent to me.
Which is why I'm glad to see so many pointing out their doublespeak when it comes to freedom, because for too damned many the only "freedom" you should have is the freedom to do as they say and be like them, no freedom at all.
Not a day goes by, and you say:
because for the pro-GPL crowd it isn't enough that they choose to run only free, its quite obvious from the posts above and below you that they don't want you to have the ability to run anything else.
So, what you're saying is that I should be free to write proprietary software all I want, under whatever restrictions my lawyer can come up with, but should I choose to release the software, that I should not go with a copyleft license.
As my list of projects clearly show, I belong to neither the "Anti-GPL" nor the "GPL-only" camps. As a rule, I try to choose the most restrictive license that does not impose anything on the user of the program (hence - GPL for command line utilities, but LGPL for PgOleDb, which is a driver).
When I have a special interest in people using the software, however, I go with more lenient licenses. BiDiEdit was meant to be a proof of concept reference implementation to a standard, so the higher cause here is the standard, not the actual editor. safewrite represents a relatively modest investment on my part, and a major boon to any program that maintains a configuration file automatically. Since it is a common plague on Linux, my outmost interest here is that people will do safe writes, and my library is a simple convenient way to do it.
The bottom line here is that the licenses on all of those programs represent what I believe is best for my own interests. This is fine and proper, as I am the one who invested the time to write those programs to begin with. You do not gain the moral right to tell me what I should and shouldn't do with programs I write unless you also go around telling Microsoft and Apple what they should with theirs.
To be fair, there is some confusion between people like yourself, who advocate the user's freedom to choose whether to use free only software, and the anti-GPL crowd, who advocate a developer's right to choose whether their addition are free or not.
While I am all for the user's freedom to not use free software (and, in fact, the non-free repository is enabled on my machines, and like I said, I do have some proprietary software installed), whenever I choose a license for freesoftwarethat I writefromscratch, I (usually, there areexceptions) choose a copyleft license.
I think the heat from the later argument is warming up the former argument, despite the fact there are few good arguments to limit a user's freedom of choice for the sake of giving her more freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we need to cover what makes patents bad. One of the things that make software patents bad (only one of them) is the fact you can't be certain whether you infringe them, even when you have the patent right in front of you. This is due to ambiguities in the patent. You simply cannot know which way claim construction is going to go.
If you aim is not to infringe a patent, you must avoid the most broad interpretation the patent has, since you never know how that is going to be interpreted.
Back to our design patent. The bezel is clearly marked with a dotted line. To the best of my understanding, that means it is not a part of the patent. The same goes for the earphones jack location and the charging socket. Moving any of those around not will cause you to not infringe the patent. Probably. I think. To the best of my limited understanding.
Basilbrush is trying to claim that the aspect ratio, clearly part of the solid lines, is part of the patent. Just as clearly, however, Apple did not think so. That means that whether he (she?) is right or wrong is irrelevant. When you are trying to avoid infringement, you had !@$#%!@# better assume a different aspect ratio will not save you.
Which brings us back to the bezel. At trial, Apple has a clear interest to show the patent as being as narrow as possible, while still including whatever it is Samsung has done. Make the patent seem too broad, and the jury might think it is invalid. So it is entirely possible that Apple bringing up the bezel was a strategic move.
Of course, they are safe to bring it up as, at the point, they already knew what Samsung did and did not do. It is entirely possible^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlikely that, given other circumstances, Apple would have claimed that the bezel means nothing at all, but the color has to be different, or that the bezel and the color are both irrelevant, but having a logo would have changed everything. Apple's strategy during the trial is dictated by Samsung already past actions.
Discussing what a patent covers, however, pertains to future actions and future litigation. Combining all the different, often conflicting, ways to read this patent yields just one strategy to avoid infringement: don't use rounded corners.
So whether Basilbrush is right or not, the patent covers "hand held device with rounded corners" (the hand is marked with solid lines, so I think it is safe to say it is mandatory). Anything else is a risk.
Shachar
Then why did Apple think they had a chance to win? Why did the German judge, when confronted with Apple changing Samsung's tablet aspect ratio, not think they were falsifying evidence? Why didn't Samsung defense center around the aspect ratio?
It seems to me that a lot of people who know a lot more about the field than me (you haven't stated what your qualifications are, if any) do not agree with you.
Shachar
And I answer again:
I ask again, in what way do the design patent drawings not cover a specific aspect ratio?
In the most practical way. If you issue a device that has a different aspect ratio, you might still get sued (as Samsung has).
More generally, you need to be a patent lawyer in order to answer, in general, whether things like aspect ratio are part of the specific claims of a design patent. I am not a lawyer. Obviously, Apple's lawyers thought it is not.
If you know differently (maybe you are a patent lawyer), please do speak up. If not, please avoid re-asking the same question merely because you do not like the answer.
Shachar
In what way do the design patent drawings not cover the aspect ratio?
In the practical way. Samsung were sued for violating this patent despite having a different aspect ratio. Obviously, Apple doesn't think the aspect ratio in any way limits the applicability of this patent.
The aspect ratio was so different that Apple felt the need to photoshop evidence to make the devices look more alike.
Shachar
Let me see.....
GP linked to the patent. The patent covers everything shown in the diagram that isn't excluded by means of being drawn in a dotted line. If you check the diagram, the only thing not dotted are the rounded corners and the curve on the back (which just means the "rounded corners" are 3D).
So, no. This design patent is solely about rounded corners.
Shachar
Windows, including the most up to date one, still have a 16 bit personality able to run DOS programs. This means there is something there that is able to catch int 21 and process it, as well as allow programs to direct interrupts.
While it is true that cmd.exe (as well as the black screen dumb terminal that it usually runs in) are not DOS, DOS is certainly still in there, somewhere.
Which is not to say that I think the "vulnerability" angle has any merit. Just that your statement isn't entirely true.
Shachar
Not necessarily.
In a study, patents were given placebo, and told what it was. They got specific instructions that these are just sugar pills, and that it doesn't really matter whether they take it or not. The pills were still as effective as placebo.
I am wondering why that research did not make more waves than it did, as it clearly solves placebo's greatest problem as treatment.
Shachar
As long as the research is valid and the conclusions correctly presented (which, in this case, they do not seem to have been), I don't care for the motive.
Shachar
How will stop voting improve the situation?
Shachar
Even if it's legal to install the CA, it is almost certainly not legal to intercept the traffic (wiretapping laws etc).
So, probably illegal, but IANAL.
Shachar
No, that is not what everyone on slashdot are saying.
What we are saying is:
So, to falsify the common slashdot knowledge, you'd have to show all of the following:
and..
Assuming 1 is true and the rest is false, pre-9/11 airport security was all it was supposed to take to prevent this plane from going down.
Shachar
Not Sherlock, but Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The one who originally said "fire in a crowded theater".
Shachar
We all know that shouting fire when there is none can get you in a raft of trouble.
I don't think "we all" quite covers it.
TL;DR:
Holmes is often misquoted (more specifically, truncated). Holmes himself recanted that position later.
Shachar
Do you have any citation for the taste claim? From what I heard, taste was actually pretty good.
Here's what I have (from wikipedia):
There is really a bite to it, there is quite some flavour with the browning. I know there is no fat in it so I didn't really know how juicy it would be, but there is quite some intense taste; it's close to meat, it's not that juicy, but the consistency is perfect. This is meat to me... It's really something to bite on and I think the look is quite similar.
Shachar
While I agree that Android != Linux, I think your statements are somewhat over-broad.
There is a full Posix userspace on Android. It is done via different libraries than the usual ones, so don't expect any GNU extensions to glibc and such, but posix is there completely. You will need to use a toolchain adapted to that environment, but the same holds true if you decide to go with uclibc.
I'm not sure what you mean by the kernel being locked/limited. This is, when all is said and done, a Linux kernel, exposing all of the usual Linux user space APIs. There are some non-standard APIs as well, true, but I don't see how that is any problem. I have statically compiled a fairly comprehensive version of busybox, and everything worked. The only reason I did this statically was to avoid the toolchain problem mentioned above.
Shachar
Completely undermining.
Shachar
I think you are thinking about the wrong question. The question is not whether the publication is going to cause trouble. Of course it is. The question is whether it is legitimate for the spying to have taken place in the first place.
If it is, then Snowden releasing this information is betrayal, and the shit storm that will (likely) happen now is just one good reason to keep this a secret.
My point was that countries are forming spy organizations. I know very few people who claim those organizations are completely unnecessary. And yet, assuming you don't live in a country with clear enemies (which, living in Israel, I actually do), you have to wonder, who are those organizations spying on? If it's not okay to spy on your own citizens (and it's not), and not okay to spy on your close allies (which it's probably not), and not okay to spy on other countries (which, implied by this piece of news, is also not), then who's left?
Shachar
Seriously. These are spy organizations. And here they are - spying. On foreign countries, no less. What were they thinking?
The Snowden leaks started out with things the public actually needed to know. The NSA spying on Americans is a gross overstep of the organization's charter. Spying on friendly nation's leaders is an embarrassment. This, however, seems to me like them doing their job.
At first, I thought that labeling Snowden as a spy was an overreaction. The US government trying to silence a whistle blower. However, were I a juror in a trial in which he released just this document, I'd convict.
Anyone who disagrees is kindly requested to answer two simple questions:
1. What should the NSA do?
2. Assuming this is not this, how can a country maintain military intelligence without doing this?
Shachar
I am very interested in hearing what you believe in. In particular, why do you think the evolutionary model is wrong?
Also, I'd like to know whether you consider your belief of how the species got to be the way they are to be scientific.
Thanks,
Shachar
Care to share what you do believe in, then? Particularly, why you believe the evolutionary model is wrong?
Also, I'm interested to hear whether you think your ideas are scientific, and what that term means to you.
Thanks,
Shachar
The repeated turns would add to the overall cost but the same amount of fuel would be spent on the same two overall vectors of acceleration.
When stating that, you forgot to factor in the fact that your way the trip will take much longer.
Shachar
For long term space voyages, all you have to do is accelerate at 9.8m/s^2 for half the voyage, and then turn off the rockets, rotate the ship, and use the same rockets to decellerate at the same rate. Except for the time the ship rotates, the astronautes would feel a normal earth gravity. Bonus, the trip takes less time.
Of course, it's not that simple. Not only are the energy needs of such a trip much higher, there is another potential problem. After about 35 days of accelerating at 9.8m/s^2, your speed will be about a tenth of the speed of light. At those speeds, time flows visibly different inside the ship and on earth. Accelerate much further, and this becomes a one way trip, by definition.
Shachar
That to me just shows the kind of mindset that the GPLers have and its really sad, because it went from a way to share to St. iGNUcious and the church of GPL.
Huh?
I did not pour religious !$%!@# into discussion. You did. I just chose a license for my own software, which I have written and decided to share. If you don't like that license, don't use the software. I am not limiting your choice in any way. If you wish to share your software under a non-copyleft free license, feel free to do so with no word of reproach from me.
I do not understand why you defend software released under a proprietary license, which gives the user a very limited set of freedoms, and yet condemn my choices, which give the users a much much greater set of freedoms (though not a great as you'd like, obviously). You seem to think you have a moral right to my code if I choose a free license, but not if I choose to go proprietary.
I simply do not understand this position. It seems hypocritical to me.
You complain about RMS going around telling people what licenses to use. I get that. I think he's pushing it. Then again, you do the exact same thing, only with a different license. Not only this, but RMS's position is, at least, self consistent. He claims that all software should be free. I agree with neither basic claim nor the method he advances that world view, but I understand the world he's aiming for. You, on the other hand, claim that all free software should be non-copyleft, but that proprietary software can be whatever it likes. Maybe I'm missing something, but that does not seem self-consistent to me.
Shachar
You said:
Which is why I'm glad to see so many pointing out their doublespeak when it comes to freedom, because for too damned many the only "freedom" you should have is the freedom to do as they say and be like them, no freedom at all.
Not a day goes by, and you say:
because for the pro-GPL crowd it isn't enough that they choose to run only free, its quite obvious from the posts above and below you that they don't want you to have the ability to run anything else.
So, what you're saying is that I should be free to write proprietary software all I want, under whatever restrictions my lawyer can come up with, but should I choose to release the software, that I should not go with a copyleft license.
As my list of projects clearly show, I belong to neither the "Anti-GPL" nor the "GPL-only" camps. As a rule, I try to choose the most restrictive license that does not impose anything on the user of the program (hence - GPL for command line utilities, but LGPL for PgOleDb, which is a driver).
When I have a special interest in people using the software, however, I go with more lenient licenses. BiDiEdit was meant to be a proof of concept reference implementation to a standard, so the higher cause here is the standard, not the actual editor. safewrite represents a relatively modest investment on my part, and a major boon to any program that maintains a configuration file automatically. Since it is a common plague on Linux, my outmost interest here is that people will do safe writes, and my library is a simple convenient way to do it.
The bottom line here is that the licenses on all of those programs represent what I believe is best for my own interests. This is fine and proper, as I am the one who invested the time to write those programs to begin with. You do not gain the moral right to tell me what I should and shouldn't do with programs I write unless you also go around telling Microsoft and Apple what they should with theirs.
Shachar
To be fair, there is some confusion between people like yourself, who advocate the user's freedom to choose whether to use free only software, and the anti-GPL crowd, who advocate a developer's right to choose whether their addition are free or not.
While I am all for the user's freedom to not use free software (and, in fact, the non-free repository is enabled on my machines, and like I said, I do have some proprietary software installed), whenever I choose a license for free software that I write from scratch, I (usually, there are exceptions) choose a copyleft license.
I think the heat from the later argument is warming up the former argument, despite the fact there are few good arguments to limit a user's freedom of choice for the sake of giving her more freedom.
Shachar