People have been saying that since 1920... well... they said it would run out in 1920... and then they said it would run out in 1950... and then they said it would run out in 1980... and then they said it would run out in 2000...
I get it. I was running a little short on breakfast cereal this week. I thought that my remaining breakfast reserves would run out on Thursday, but I managed to reduce consumption a little by only eating three quarters of a bowl. And then on Friday I added some fruit to eke it out a bit further. On Saturday I discovered some leftover bread and ate that. So here I am, on Sunday, and I still have some bread left. THEREFORE I CONCLUDE THAT I WILL NEVER HAVE TO GO SHOPPING AGAIN AS I WILL NEVER, EVER RUN OUT OF BREAKFAST RESERVES. WHEN MY RESERVES ARE LOW, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE NEW FOOD TO DISCOVER IN MY KITCHEN.
When we pass the peak, half the available oil is still in the ground.
No, the peak is about production (as you correctly stated earlier): as in, the number of barrels being produced per annum begins to level off and will eventually decline. Production does not have to peak at 50% of cumulative extraction, and in fact is very unlikely to do so. Suppose that 90% of global oil reserves were not recoverable at all in an economically viable way - we would still hit "peak oil", even though only 10% of available oil could ever have been viably extracted.
Of course they do, and it has a name: Lawful interception. Support for lawful interception is built in to telephone exchanges, network switches etc. When it's used to eavesdrop on terrorists and drug dealers, then people like it. When it's used to eavesdrop on everyone, then people dislike it. Somewhere inbetween there is a vast land where some approve, some disapprove, and many don't care.
[NB: The German constitutional court ruled that there is a sphere of privacy that is afforded total protection and can never be breached, no matter for what reason, for example keeping a diary or husband and wife talking in the bedroom.
That is very interesting: even during a criminal terrorism investigation, a suspect's personal notes and diary are legally protected. I doubt very many other nations have such strong privacy laws. CCC is arguing that because these notes are often held on a personal computer, then the personal computer comes within the "sphere of privacy". Obviously you can see why the police would disagree, as this would outlaw the monitoring of personal PCs for evidence.
India is a poor choice for comparison - they had to start a hi-tech industry from scratch in a nation with the largest illiterate population in the world. The European Union would be a more valid comparison - where software patents are specifically excluded by the European Patent Convention. The lack of software patents doesn't seem to have hurt E.U. companies: the UK is one of the leading manufacturers of financial services software and videogames, and Germany has one of the most productive export economies in the world. See the Truffle100 list of top 100 EU software companies. The E.U. software industry is worth billions of Euros, despite (or, some would say because of) the lack of software patents.
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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· Score: 1
What exactly is linking "malware scanners" to a Google search for "android malware" (6.01 million results) meant to prove? If your point is that the number of Google hits is some kind of evidence of malware problems, then note that a search for "iPhone malware" produces 102 million results - the very first result being a malware scanner for the iPhone - exactly the product that you are complaining about.
Well, in hindsight it would have been nice if Sun had adopted SWT and its native widgets instead of pushing Swing on the desktop for years and getting nowhere. Yes, I get it, writing a cross-platform native GUI layer that acts the same on every platform is hard, but they had numerous options. They could have bought or licensed QT. They could have adopted SWT. Or wxJava. Or even GTK (like most Mono LInux desktop apps).
It would have been nice if they had open sourced the JDK a decade earlier instead of waiting until they felt the heat from gcj. Java could have been the dominant platform for writing cross-platform desktop apps, instead Sun was pushing applets, and it took until SWT before I saw the first Java desktop app that didn't suck (Eclipse). Imagine my surprise when I found that the second Java desktop app that didn't suck (Azureus) was also based on SWT.
Applications like Eclipse, Azureus, and Banshee show that Java/Mono style languages can do desktop apps, but for whatever reasons the Sun AWT/Swing combination went nowhere. If it were a true open source project I'm sure they would've adopted another GUI widget layer, but they didn't, probably because Sun wanted exclusive ownership rights.
The analogy makes sense. The C and Java JIT compilers produce some kind of executable binary which then gets run. There is only one process when the binary is executed, regardless of platform. With non-JIT Java you might have a point about there being an interpreter layer (what you refer to as a "process"). But with JIT, the code is compiled before execution just like C++. In terms of security there is no real difference between gcj and gcc. Both require a supporting runtime environment, both have potential security problems in the runtime environment, and in compiled code. Perhaps you meant to point out that the JVM can be used to run applets on the web, but that is not something that is intrinsic to Java - DirectX code can be written in C++ and can also be insecure.
Oh, and Nokia did in fact get a patent cross-licensing agreement with Nokia. The terms haven't been disclosed, so who knows if they "got what they wanted".
If Apple wants to pay in cash, Samsung are required to take it
Yes, but how do you assign a dollar value to a patent pool?
Apple already has a licence - it has paid for the use of the 3G patents. Samsung is trying to claim that one of the "essential" patents has not been covered.
The patent system is not as simple as you think. Purchasers and licensers of technology can be sued for patents that are infringed by components that they use in their product (see, for example, Sco suing Red Hat customers rather than Red Hat). If the 3g chipset infringes, then Samsung has the lawful right to sue any customer using that chipset. They do not have to sue the manufacturer or designer of the chipset.
So if they win, they have successfully Trojaned the 3G standard
Again, the patent system is not as simple as you think. I recommend reading this 2009 writeup by a patent lawyer. Because of patent cross-licensing, and the fact that there is no independent examination of potential FRAND patents during the standardisation process, the result is that a) nobody really knows which patents are (or should be) considered FRAND, and b) there is no "fixed price" for licensing FRAND patents. "In reality FRAND is nebulous and undefined, with almost no specific rules for determining what a 'fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory' license actually is."
and everyone who uses 3G in their product will owe them whatever Apple ends up paying
Everybody already does. That's how the patent system works. There is no "dollar value" assigned to Samsung's patents, and determining what other corporations have "paid" is hard because everybody cross-licenses patent pools. If the courts assign a dollar value to the patents, then yes, everybody will have to trade either cash or patents of a similar value. That is exactly what is supposed to happen. But if the court decides that the dollar value is, say, $1 trillion, then obviously that will be too much for Apple, and they will have to trade their own patent pool instead of paying cash. How much are essential wireless patents actually worth? If the patents really are essential, it could be several billion dollars.
In actual fact, Nokia was the one that petitioned the court for a cash settlement: "since all Nokia's asked the court to do is set a price, it's clearly willing to simply accept cash and move on." - Engadget.
And they _MUST_ do so at a rate that is Fair and Reasonable. Anything else is a breach of their F/RAND obligations.
Indeed, and Samsung is willing to license their FRAND patents in terms that they believe to be Fair and Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory: a cross-license of all Apple patents in order to protect their (Samsung) products. Whether that is, in fact, "Fair and Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" is an issue for the courts to decide.
Many of the communication patents are related to the GSM/CDMA standards, and thus do require FRAND licensing, but not all of the hardware patents.
Even with the FRAND patents, it is not so clear cut. What one person believes to be "fair and reasonable" may differ from another person's interpretation. Because of patent cross-licensing, and the fact that there is no independent examination of potential RAND patents during the standardisation process, the result is that a) nobody really knows which patents are (or should be) considered RAND, and b) there is no "fixed price" for licensing RAND patents. "In reality FRAND is nebulous and undefined, with almost no specific rules for determining what a 'fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory' license actually is." - Engadget.
Per capita, Arab countries have the highest rates of sex slaves, prostitutes, and underground drinking.
Citation needed, because there's a lot of prostitution going on in the rest of the world. Hell, we even have web sites where prostitutes are listed and rated like any other product would be on Amazon or Ebay. As for underground drinking: half of British 11 to 15 year olds regularly drink alcohol. 75% of Russian teenagers regularly drink vodka. What are the figures for Arab countries?
drugs are readily available but far less popular than drinking. In most of these countries, you can pick up the phone and have just about any preference in prostitute delivered to your door in minutes to hours
So, just like non-Arab countries, then?
In Arab countries there is what they say and then there is what they do. It is a cultural imperative and deeply rooted in all aspects of their society.
Still not seeing how this is different to non-Arab countries? Politicians and the religious right tell us not to do drugs, and not to hire prostitutes, and yet both are easily available.
Hypocrisy is best spell, 'A', 'r', 'a', 'b'.
Because non-Arab populations have no hypocrites? No men of religion or politics who fail to live up to their own standards?
According to the Mozilla bug report, this problem actually is Java - specifically, the Java implementation of TLS. NSS, the TLS library used by Firefox and Chrome, has already been patched by Google engineers. The question is whether Firefox should block Java applets to protect users, or continue allowing Java applets, in which case Firefox users can still be exploited until Oracle comes out with a fix for Java.
The question is, under what terms? If Google had joined, would it have been able to use the patent pool to protect its Android partners from lawsuits? It seems very unlikely that Apple would've agreed to a situation where it has to back down on all of its anti-Android lawsuits, or that Microsoft would agree to a situation where it could no longer sue Android manufacturers. And if the patent pool wouldn't protect Android, then what motivation would Google have to join?
The explicit idea was to get them out of the way so no one could use them to sue anyone else.
Since the contractual terms between the Rockstar group members haven't been disclosed, it is impossible to know what the patents will be used for. It's a nice idea that they will only be used defensively, but history has shown that patents are often used otherwise.
It's not just you. The fundamental problem is that there is a conflict between global capitalism and the patent regime. The patent regime is hundreds of years old, and developed from the rule of Kings, who could use their power to bestow monopoly rights on their allies in certain areas of production. Think about that - the whole system was based around an exclusive right to manufacture within the boundaries and legal jurisdiction of a single nation. This kind of worked, because the existence of a single legal jurisdiction resolved any conflicts (for better or worse). But with the explosion of globalisation in the 1990s, the whole concept fell apart.
Why would a foreign court recognise your patent? Patent resolution is far too arbitrary. Why should Chinese companies, who only recently discovered capitalism, accept that they have to give a share of their profits to Western companies for patents that predate the concept of capitalism in their nation? Why would an American court side with a foreign company over an American company? Why would Korean courts side with a Western company against one of their own?
Global capitalism encourages rabid competition; the patent regime is the complete opposite, and is more akin to the communist states which granted production monopolies to favoured suppliers. Monopolies, in essence, are anti-capitalist, and in this globalised world, lacking a single governmental regime for patent jurisdiction and resolution, it is inevitable that there are going to be huge differences in the way that nations treat different companies and different patents. And these differences are going to become more visible and exposed as more and more companies file for increasing numbers of patents, and courts around the world are filled with the growing industry of global patent lawyering.
No, Apple licenses the CPU core from ARM, but Apple then integrates this core into its own SoC platform, has the physical chips manufactured by its foundry partner (Samsung!), and - most importantly - sells the product into the marketplace. It's the same reason that SCO targeted Red Hat customers instead of Red Hat, and the same reason Apple targeted Samsung and HTC instead of Google...
Wen Chi Chen founded VIA Technologies in 1983, and has run the company for almost 30 years, building it from nothing into a billion dollar company that is now the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. He is the Taiwanese equivalent of Steve Jobs. Under his stewardship VIA successfully defended a patent attack from Intel that led to 11 different court cases in 5 different countries (sound familiar?). The investors don't care about the family connection - they care about profit. And if VIA's patent portfolio was strong enough to convince Intel to settle, then what makes you think Apple will be any different? Intel holds many, many patents on fundamental CPU technologies; how many do you think Apple holds?
I had thought the same, but with modern digital phones and firmware, who knows? If the design of the phone allows the firmware to control the circuit, rather than having it mechanically linked to the handset being picked up, then it must be possible. Certainly, for systems that combine phone function with answerphone, it must be possible for the firmware to order the phone "off-hook".
A spokeswoman with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in Minnesota says officers don't need to seek search warrants in that state to use a mobile tracking device because it "does not intercept communication, so no wiretap laws would apply."
The big question is: if the device works as advertised by faking a basestation, pinging the phone and measuring the returned signal level, but does not intercept voice or data traffic, is that a wiretap?
Slashdot Mirror
People have been saying that since 1920... well... they said it would run out in 1920... and then they said it would run out in 1950... and then they said it would run out in 1980... and then they said it would run out in 2000...
I get it. I was running a little short on breakfast cereal this week. I thought that my remaining breakfast reserves would run out on Thursday, but I managed to reduce consumption a little by only eating three quarters of a bowl. And then on Friday I added some fruit to eke it out a bit further. On Saturday I discovered some leftover bread and ate that. So here I am, on Sunday, and I still have some bread left. THEREFORE I CONCLUDE THAT I WILL NEVER HAVE TO GO SHOPPING AGAIN AS I WILL NEVER, EVER RUN OUT OF BREAKFAST RESERVES. WHEN MY RESERVES ARE LOW, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE NEW FOOD TO DISCOVER IN MY KITCHEN.
See any problem here?
When we pass the peak, half the available oil is still in the ground.
No, the peak is about production (as you correctly stated earlier): as in, the number of barrels being produced per annum begins to level off and will eventually decline. Production does not have to peak at 50% of cumulative extraction, and in fact is very unlikely to do so. Suppose that 90% of global oil reserves were not recoverable at all in an economically viable way - we would still hit "peak oil", even though only 10% of available oil could ever have been viably extracted.
[NB: The German constitutional court ruled that there is a sphere of privacy that is afforded total protection and can never be breached, no matter for what reason, for example keeping a diary or husband and wife talking in the bedroom.
That is very interesting: even during a criminal terrorism investigation, a suspect's personal notes and diary are legally protected. I doubt very many other nations have such strong privacy laws. CCC is arguing that because these notes are often held on a personal computer, then the personal computer comes within the "sphere of privacy". Obviously you can see why the police would disagree, as this would outlaw the monitoring of personal PCs for evidence.
India is a poor choice for comparison - they had to start a hi-tech industry from scratch in a nation with the largest illiterate population in the world. The European Union would be a more valid comparison - where software patents are specifically excluded by the European Patent Convention. The lack of software patents doesn't seem to have hurt E.U. companies: the UK is one of the leading manufacturers of financial services software and videogames, and Germany has one of the most productive export economies in the world. See the Truffle100 list of top 100 EU software companies. The E.U. software industry is worth billions of Euros, despite (or, some would say because of) the lack of software patents.
What exactly is linking "malware scanners" to a Google search for "android malware" (6.01 million results) meant to prove? If your point is that the number of Google hits is some kind of evidence of malware problems, then note that a search for "iPhone malware" produces 102 million results - the very first result being a malware scanner for the iPhone - exactly the product that you are complaining about.
Invest time and effort in a pipe-dream that, should it actually succeed, will in-fact incur legal actions from Microsoft.
Pipe-dream? It already exists: Mono for Android, Mono for iPad and iPhone
Well, in hindsight it would have been nice if Sun had adopted SWT and its native widgets instead of pushing Swing on the desktop for years and getting nowhere. Yes, I get it, writing a cross-platform native GUI layer that acts the same on every platform is hard, but they had numerous options. They could have bought or licensed QT. They could have adopted SWT. Or wxJava. Or even GTK (like most Mono LInux desktop apps).
It would have been nice if they had open sourced the JDK a decade earlier instead of waiting until they felt the heat from gcj. Java could have been the dominant platform for writing cross-platform desktop apps, instead Sun was pushing applets, and it took until SWT before I saw the first Java desktop app that didn't suck (Eclipse). Imagine my surprise when I found that the second Java desktop app that didn't suck (Azureus) was also based on SWT.
Applications like Eclipse, Azureus, and Banshee show that Java/Mono style languages can do desktop apps, but for whatever reasons the Sun AWT/Swing combination went nowhere. If it were a true open source project I'm sure they would've adopted another GUI widget layer, but they didn't, probably because Sun wanted exclusive ownership rights.
The analogy makes sense. The C and Java JIT compilers produce some kind of executable binary which then gets run. There is only one process when the binary is executed, regardless of platform. With non-JIT Java you might have a point about there being an interpreter layer (what you refer to as a "process"). But with JIT, the code is compiled before execution just like C++. In terms of security there is no real difference between gcj and gcc. Both require a supporting runtime environment, both have potential security problems in the runtime environment, and in compiled code. Perhaps you meant to point out that the JVM can be used to run applets on the web, but that is not something that is intrinsic to Java - DirectX code can be written in C++ and can also be insecure.
Oh, and Nokia did in fact get a patent cross-licensing agreement with Nokia. The terms haven't been disclosed, so who knows if they "got what they wanted".
If Apple wants to pay in cash, Samsung are required to take it
Yes, but how do you assign a dollar value to a patent pool?
Apple already has a licence - it has paid for the use of the 3G patents. Samsung is trying to claim that one of the "essential" patents has not been covered.
The patent system is not as simple as you think. Purchasers and licensers of technology can be sued for patents that are infringed by components that they use in their product (see, for example, Sco suing Red Hat customers rather than Red Hat). If the 3g chipset infringes, then Samsung has the lawful right to sue any customer using that chipset. They do not have to sue the manufacturer or designer of the chipset.
So if they win, they have successfully Trojaned the 3G standard
Again, the patent system is not as simple as you think. I recommend reading this 2009 writeup by a patent lawyer. Because of patent cross-licensing, and the fact that there is no independent examination of potential FRAND patents during the standardisation process, the result is that a) nobody really knows which patents are (or should be) considered FRAND, and b) there is no "fixed price" for licensing FRAND patents. "In reality FRAND is nebulous and undefined, with almost no specific rules for determining what a 'fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory' license actually is."
and everyone who uses 3G in their product will owe them whatever Apple ends up paying
Everybody already does. That's how the patent system works. There is no "dollar value" assigned to Samsung's patents, and determining what other corporations have "paid" is hard because everybody cross-licenses patent pools. If the courts assign a dollar value to the patents, then yes, everybody will have to trade either cash or patents of a similar value. That is exactly what is supposed to happen. But if the court decides that the dollar value is, say, $1 trillion, then obviously that will be too much for Apple, and they will have to trade their own patent pool instead of paying cash. How much are essential wireless patents actually worth? If the patents really are essential, it could be several billion dollars.
In actual fact, Nokia was the one that petitioned the court for a cash settlement: "since all Nokia's asked the court to do is set a price, it's clearly willing to simply accept cash and move on." - Engadget.
And they _MUST_ do so at a rate that is Fair and Reasonable. Anything else is a breach of their F/RAND obligations.
Indeed, and Samsung is willing to license their FRAND patents in terms that they believe to be Fair and Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory: a cross-license of all Apple patents in order to protect their (Samsung) products. Whether that is, in fact, "Fair and Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" is an issue for the courts to decide.
Many of the communication patents are related to the GSM/CDMA standards, and thus do require FRAND licensing, but not all of the hardware patents.
Even with the FRAND patents, it is not so clear cut. What one person believes to be "fair and reasonable" may differ from another person's interpretation. Because of patent cross-licensing, and the fact that there is no independent examination of potential RAND patents during the standardisation process, the result is that a) nobody really knows which patents are (or should be) considered RAND, and b) there is no "fixed price" for licensing RAND patents. "In reality FRAND is nebulous and undefined, with almost no specific rules for determining what a 'fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory' license actually is." - Engadget.
Arab men don't look at/for porn. It is forbidden by the dominant religion over there.
It is also forbidden by the dominant religion in the U.S.
Religious people are often hypocrites...
Per capita, Arab countries have the highest rates of sex slaves, prostitutes, and underground drinking.
Citation needed, because there's a lot of prostitution going on in the rest of the world. Hell, we even have web sites where prostitutes are listed and rated like any other product would be on Amazon or Ebay. As for underground drinking: half of British 11 to 15 year olds regularly drink alcohol. 75% of Russian teenagers regularly drink vodka. What are the figures for Arab countries?
drugs are readily available but far less popular than drinking. In most of these countries, you can pick up the phone and have just about any preference in prostitute delivered to your door in minutes to hours
So, just like non-Arab countries, then?
In Arab countries there is what they say and then there is what they do. It is a cultural imperative and deeply rooted in all aspects of their society.
Still not seeing how this is different to non-Arab countries? Politicians and the religious right tell us not to do drugs, and not to hire prostitutes, and yet both are easily available.
Hypocrisy is best spell, 'A', 'r', 'a', 'b'.
Because non-Arab populations have no hypocrites? No men of religion or politics who fail to live up to their own standards?
IT doesn't hurt that the Fire probably has too small a processor and too little memory to run a real browser
1.2GHz dual core ARM with 512MB of memory. That's plenty enough for a web browser. Plus, there are already multiple web browsers available on Amazon app store.
According to the Mozilla bug report, this problem actually is Java - specifically, the Java implementation of TLS. NSS, the TLS library used by Firefox and Chrome, has already been patched by Google engineers. The question is whether Firefox should block Java applets to protect users, or continue allowing Java applets, in which case Firefox users can still be exploited until Oracle comes out with a fix for Java.
The resolution of a reconstituted neural image is higher if you directly wire electrodes to the brain; see Looking through cats' eyes and the PDF Reconstruction of natural scenes from ensemble responses in the lateral geniculate nucleus.
Google was invited to join the same group.
The question is, under what terms? If Google had joined, would it have been able to use the patent pool to protect its Android partners from lawsuits? It seems very unlikely that Apple would've agreed to a situation where it has to back down on all of its anti-Android lawsuits, or that Microsoft would agree to a situation where it could no longer sue Android manufacturers. And if the patent pool wouldn't protect Android, then what motivation would Google have to join?
The explicit idea was to get them out of the way so no one could use them to sue anyone else.
Since the contractual terms between the Rockstar group members haven't been disclosed, it is impossible to know what the patents will be used for. It's a nice idea that they will only be used defensively, but history has shown that patents are often used otherwise.
It was a claim made by Google's David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer. Basically, Apple and Microsoft banded together with some others to acquire the Nortel patent warchest to use against Android. See TechCrunch: "How Apple Led The High-Stakes Patent Poker Win Against Google, Sealing Ballmer's Promise". Apple and MS also banded together to acquire the CPTN patent pool. Why? Over half a million Android devices are activated every day. Half a million! How many winPhones and iPhones have been sold in total their entire history? Android is a huge threat to both Apple and MS, some would say the biggest threat, so it makes sense for them to work together.
It's not just you. The fundamental problem is that there is a conflict between global capitalism and the patent regime. The patent regime is hundreds of years old, and developed from the rule of Kings, who could use their power to bestow monopoly rights on their allies in certain areas of production. Think about that - the whole system was based around an exclusive right to manufacture within the boundaries and legal jurisdiction of a single nation. This kind of worked, because the existence of a single legal jurisdiction resolved any conflicts (for better or worse). But with the explosion of globalisation in the 1990s, the whole concept fell apart.
Why would a foreign court recognise your patent? Patent resolution is far too arbitrary. Why should Chinese companies, who only recently discovered capitalism, accept that they have to give a share of their profits to Western companies for patents that predate the concept of capitalism in their nation? Why would an American court side with a foreign company over an American company? Why would Korean courts side with a Western company against one of their own?
Global capitalism encourages rabid competition; the patent regime is the complete opposite, and is more akin to the communist states which granted production monopolies to favoured suppliers. Monopolies, in essence, are anti-capitalist, and in this globalised world, lacking a single governmental regime for patent jurisdiction and resolution, it is inevitable that there are going to be huge differences in the way that nations treat different companies and different patents. And these differences are going to become more visible and exposed as more and more companies file for increasing numbers of patents, and courts around the world are filled with the growing industry of global patent lawyering.
No, Apple licenses the CPU core from ARM, but Apple then integrates this core into its own SoC platform, has the physical chips manufactured by its foundry partner (Samsung!), and - most importantly - sells the product into the marketplace. It's the same reason that SCO targeted Red Hat customers instead of Red Hat, and the same reason Apple targeted Samsung and HTC instead of Google...
Wen Chi Chen founded VIA Technologies in 1983, and has run the company for almost 30 years, building it from nothing into a billion dollar company that is now the world's largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets. He is the Taiwanese equivalent of Steve Jobs. Under his stewardship VIA successfully defended a patent attack from Intel that led to 11 different court cases in 5 different countries (sound familiar?). The investors don't care about the family connection - they care about profit. And if VIA's patent portfolio was strong enough to convince Intel to settle, then what makes you think Apple will be any different? Intel holds many, many patents on fundamental CPU technologies; how many do you think Apple holds?
I had thought the same, but with modern digital phones and firmware, who knows? If the design of the phone allows the firmware to control the circuit, rather than having it mechanically linked to the handset being picked up, then it must be possible. Certainly, for systems that combine phone function with answerphone, it must be possible for the firmware to order the phone "off-hook".
Well the FBI say not. From TFA:
A spokeswoman with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in Minnesota says officers don't need to seek search warrants in that state to use a mobile tracking device because it "does not intercept communication, so no wiretap laws would apply."
The big question is: if the device works as advertised by faking a basestation, pinging the phone and measuring the returned signal level, but does not intercept voice or data traffic, is that a wiretap?