The other guy was right. They don't have the watch that was searched, but they do have other watches that are similar. The displayed the similar choices. The 'other stuff' (ice chests, etc) has nothing to do with the case, I don't know why the author even bothered mentioning it.
Yes, but that only applies to devices in unlicensed spectrum. You could also be interfering with other licensed useds (ie other carriers), which is not allowed.
No, that's not what accept means at all. Accept means that the USER of a device gets no legal protection from interference. If your unregulated device is interfered with, too bad, you have no recourse.
Uh-huh. So, in your brilliant analysis, there was nothing illegal about the events in Newtown, CT, or the assasination of Kennedy, or the attempted assasination of Reagan, because nobody was ever or will ever be convicted? All of the unsolved burglaries, etc were all legal acts? People should not be able to make insurance claims for crimes where nobody is ever convicted because the removal of stuff from their house was not illegal?
That is a ridiculous position. Laws prohibit certain acts. Doing that act is therefore illegal. HOWEVER, just because an illegal act was performed does not mean anyone will be convicted of it. There may not be enough evidence, or the act may be excused because of some extenuating circumstance, or the perpetrator may never be found, but none of those things magically turn the act 'legal'.
If would be highly illogical to say that never being captured for a murder you committed means that what you did was legal. It wasn't, it was illegal. You just weren't convicted for it.
Why is this modded down? It is entirely correct. There are various 'Telecommunications Acts' that have been passed over the years to regulate the telecomm industry. If you are in that industry you are subject to those regulations. Some of those regulations determine when a provided gets 'common carrier' status. It is only when they have that status that they are required to accept all customers.
There are no such regulations for web site operators.
Except that there is no such law. Quoting from the treasury's website.
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.
In other words, it is always legal to offer cash, but no requirement that any private entity accepts your cash.
Not so. When you use your credit card you are requesting credit from Visa, under an agreement you have with Visa. That agreement has conditions under which they will not approve the credit (over limit, too much credit in one day, illegal activity, etc).
So, when you perform a transaction with a credit card, YOU are in fact 'doing business' with two entities: the merchant who you are buying the goods from, and the credit card company you are requesting credit from.
If you lie to the credit card company to cause them to give you the credit where they otherwise would not, that is fraud.
If you were talking about checks, or EFT, or maybe debit cards (not sure about that one), then you could say that they are doing business on your behalf and are not involved. With a credit card, no way.
Vigilante justice almost always involves the vigilantes performing illegal acts (killing, imprisonment, destruction of property, intimidation, etc). This does not. This just involves someone deciding who they will do business with, a decision billions of people make every day.
However, even that statement is ONLY true as it refers to punishment by the state. There is no such statement as far as the general public is concerned. If such statements did apply to the general public then all calls for boycotts, etc should be illegal.
Actually, to further clarify, the exact phrasing in the law is "... would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to one having ordinary skill in the art..." (emphasis mine). So the fact that the answer was obvious to some genius has no bearing, it must be obvious to an ordinary practitioner of whatever field the subject is in.
The real world (and in particular, the law) does not exist in some literal, binary, geek universe. Ask a thousand ordinary sighted people how much work it would be to determine if the person facing them has a nose, and they all would say 'none'. Ask them how much work it would be to determine the other person's blood type, and the answer would be 'quite a bit'.
Evidence, please? Here you have two people who clearly were motivated by patents (or else they wouldn't be racing to the patent office), who, after a period toiling, came up with a solution to a problem. And from that, you somehow make the enormous leap that 'it would have happened anyway'. Where is the proof of that? And by the way, the purpose of patents is to encourage progress, not 'let it happen in due time anyway'.
Patents should be reserved...
According to who? That may be what YOU happen to wish patents are, but it was clearly not what the US patent system was ever intended be be. If it were, Thomas Jefferson would not have made the criteria for something being patentable
"Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title."
Not a word in there about in there about being expensive or trade secrets or any of the other nonsense you wrote. Any new or useful process...
Was the telephone new? Undoubtedly. Was it useful? Certainly. No reason it wasn't patentable at all.
How the hell can you say it was obvious? Do you even know what the word means? Do you think these two guys just woke up one morning, having never thought about the idea of a telephone before, and instantly knew exactly how to make a working telephone? Or do you think it is more likely that they, independently, spent many hours, days, months, or years thinking and experimenting before they found a solution that worked? Finding the answer at approximately the same time in no way indicates obviousness, it just demostrates that it is a good solution to the problem.
If you have to think about a solution to a problem at all then the solution is not obvious.
It is obvious that you don't know what obvious means. It does not mean that someone working independently could possibly come up with the same solution. It means that no work is required to come up with the solution at all.
You can do whatever you want with the device, nobody will stop you. However, there is also no reason for anybody to make it easy to do whatever you want.
Roomba did what they did because they think it will help them sell more devices. The addition of a programming jack costs virtually nothing, and people who don't care about programming are not going to avoid the device just because the jack is there. The addition of the programming jack is a net win for Roomba.
On the other hand, tablet manufacturers, etc also do who they do because they think it will help them sell more devices. Making a device repairable involves tradeoffs in terms of weight, size, etc. If gluing the back on, or squashing more and more components together in single unit (even if if means you can't get to the individual components anymore) will let them make the device a fraction of an inch thinner, that is what they are going to do. Why? Because people want thin devices. Every review you see of a device is going to include weight and size, and comparisons to other manufacturers devices. If manufacturers thought for one second that a screwed-on back or more accessible components would let them sell more devices than a glued-on back they would make it in a heartbeat.
There are devices where the manufacturer specifically tries to destroy the device if you attempt to open or modify it. These are usually security devices like crypto processors, and again that self-destruction is a feature that most of their customers want. The manufacturers of tablets, etc don't do that. They are not intentionally making it difficult for you to do something else with the device, they are just not making it easy. In short, they don't care (and there is no reason they should).
What you meant was '28 screws to hold two very thin pieces of metal against plastic, in an area which receives almost no stress'.
They didn't use screws there to make it repairable, they used them because they were the best fit for the job. It is difficult to glue metal and plastic together. And even at that, they had to use 28 screws even in a low-stress area. If there was a better alternative, they would have used it.
The case, however, is subject to a lot of stress, as well as aesthetic considerations. Screws to hold the case together would have to be much beefier and have similarly beefy mounting points (on both parts). That means more weight and thickness. It also means holes all over the back of the device.
How are those points 'asinine'? If you claim to be going 54 MPH, but are actually going faster, you are going to use more energy - in any car. If you claim to have to heat at 72F but have it higher, you are going to use more energy. If should be completely obvious to anyone that if you use more energy, you are going to run out of it sooner.
The problem is not that he was going faster than 54MPH or had the temperature at 75F, it was that he LIED about it. If he would have said 'at 65MPH, with a temperature of 75F, and only a 27% charge I got this far' there would be no problem. What he said however, was 'at 54MPH with the temperature at 72F or lower, and a full charge, I only got this far'. Surely you can understand the important difference there.
So you're telling me that over the last couple of decades of laptops, phones, and tablets, thin and light haven't won out every time? What planet are you on?
Slashdot Mirror
How is it anti-competitive? Do you even know what that means?
Maybe you could show us the 'sign' that Amazon has that says 'MTM Products'.
The other guy was right. They don't have the watch that was searched, but they do have other watches that are similar. The displayed the similar choices. The 'other stuff' (ice chests, etc) has nothing to do with the case, I don't know why the author even bothered mentioning it.
Yes, but that only applies to devices in unlicensed spectrum. You could also be interfering with other licensed useds (ie other carriers), which is not allowed.
No, that's not what accept means at all. Accept means that the USER of a device gets no legal protection from interference. If your unregulated device is interfered with, too bad, you have no recourse.
Uh-huh. So, in your brilliant analysis, there was nothing illegal about the events in Newtown, CT, or the assasination of Kennedy, or the attempted assasination of Reagan, because nobody was ever or will ever be convicted? All of the unsolved burglaries, etc were all legal acts? People should not be able to make insurance claims for crimes where nobody is ever convicted because the removal of stuff from their house was not illegal?
That is a ridiculous position. Laws prohibit certain acts. Doing that act is therefore illegal. HOWEVER, just because an illegal act was performed does not mean anyone will be convicted of it. There may not be enough evidence, or the act may be excused because of some extenuating circumstance, or the perpetrator may never be found, but none of those things magically turn the act 'legal'.
If would be highly illogical to say that never being captured for a murder you committed means that what you did was legal. It wasn't, it was illegal. You just weren't convicted for it.
Why is this modded down? It is entirely correct. There are various 'Telecommunications Acts' that have been passed over the years to regulate the telecomm industry. If you are in that industry you are subject to those regulations. Some of those regulations determine when a provided gets 'common carrier' status. It is only when they have that status that they are required to accept all customers.
There are no such regulations for web site operators.
You're playing games with sematics, which do not change the situation at all.
Except that there is no such law. Quoting from the treasury's website.
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.
In other words, it is always legal to offer cash, but no requirement that any private entity accepts your cash.
Not so. When you use your credit card you are requesting credit from Visa, under an agreement you have with Visa. That agreement has conditions under which they will not approve the credit (over limit, too much credit in one day, illegal activity, etc).
So, when you perform a transaction with a credit card, YOU are in fact 'doing business' with two entities: the merchant who you are buying the goods from, and the credit card company you are requesting credit from.
If you lie to the credit card company to cause them to give you the credit where they otherwise would not, that is fraud.
If you were talking about checks, or EFT, or maybe debit cards (not sure about that one), then you could say that they are doing business on your behalf and are not involved. With a credit card, no way.
Vigilante justice almost always involves the vigilantes performing illegal acts (killing, imprisonment, destruction of property, intimidation, etc). This does not. This just involves someone deciding who they will do business with, a decision billions of people make every day.
However, even that statement is ONLY true as it refers to punishment by the state. There is no such statement as far as the general public is concerned. If such statements did apply to the general public then all calls for boycotts, etc should be illegal.
Simple - telecommunications is a regulated industry, web sites are not.
Actually, to further clarify, the exact phrasing in the law is "... would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to one having ordinary skill in the art..." (emphasis mine). So the fact that the answer was obvious to some genius has no bearing, it must be obvious to an ordinary practitioner of whatever field the subject is in.
Yes, you are correct. Thanks for the clarification.
The real world (and in particular, the law) does not exist in some literal, binary, geek universe. Ask a thousand ordinary sighted people how much work it would be to determine if the person facing them has a nose, and they all would say 'none'. Ask them how much work it would be to determine the other person's blood type, and the answer would be 'quite a bit'.
Anytime the issue is decided by a foot race...
Evidence, please? Here you have two people who clearly were motivated by patents (or else they wouldn't be racing to the patent office), who, after a period toiling, came up with a solution to a problem. And from that, you somehow make the enormous leap that 'it would have happened anyway'. Where is the proof of that? And by the way, the purpose of patents is to encourage progress, not 'let it happen in due time anyway'.
Patents should be reserved...
According to who? That may be what YOU happen to wish patents are, but it was clearly not what the US patent system was ever intended be be. If it were, Thomas Jefferson would not have made the criteria for something being patentable
"Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title."
Not a word in there about in there about being expensive or trade secrets or any of the other nonsense you wrote. Any new or useful process...
Was the telephone new? Undoubtedly. Was it useful? Certainly. No reason it wasn't patentable at all.
How the hell can you say it was obvious? Do you even know what the word means? Do you think these two guys just woke up one morning, having never thought about the idea of a telephone before, and instantly knew exactly how to make a working telephone? Or do you think it is more likely that they, independently, spent many hours, days, months, or years thinking and experimenting before they found a solution that worked? Finding the answer at approximately the same time in no way indicates obviousness, it just demostrates that it is a good solution to the problem.
If you have to think about a solution to a problem at all then the solution is not obvious.
It is obvious that you don't know what obvious means. It does not mean that someone working independently could possibly come up with the same solution. It means that no work is required to come up with the solution at all.
Except that (in spite of what the summary implies) he is no longer with the company.
You can do whatever you want with the device, nobody will stop you. However, there is also no reason for anybody to make it easy to do whatever you want.
Roomba did what they did because they think it will help them sell more devices. The addition of a programming jack costs virtually nothing, and people who don't care about programming are not going to avoid the device just because the jack is there. The addition of the programming jack is a net win for Roomba.
On the other hand, tablet manufacturers, etc also do who they do because they think it will help them sell more devices. Making a device repairable involves tradeoffs in terms of weight, size, etc. If gluing the back on, or squashing more and more components together in single unit (even if if means you can't get to the individual components anymore) will let them make the device a fraction of an inch thinner, that is what they are going to do. Why? Because people want thin devices. Every review you see of a device is going to include weight and size, and comparisons to other manufacturers devices. If manufacturers thought for one second that a screwed-on back or more accessible components would let them sell more devices than a glued-on back they would make it in a heartbeat.
There are devices where the manufacturer specifically tries to destroy the device if you attempt to open or modify it. These are usually security devices like crypto processors, and again that self-destruction is a feature that most of their customers want. The manufacturers of tablets, etc don't do that. They are not intentionally making it difficult for you to do something else with the device, they are just not making it easy. In short, they don't care (and there is no reason they should).
What you meant was '28 screws to hold two very thin pieces of metal against plastic, in an area which receives almost no stress'.
They didn't use screws there to make it repairable, they used them because they were the best fit for the job. It is difficult to glue metal and plastic together. And even at that, they had to use 28 screws even in a low-stress area. If there was a better alternative, they would have used it.
The case, however, is subject to a lot of stress, as well as aesthetic considerations. Screws to hold the case together would have to be much beefier and have similarly beefy mounting points (on both parts). That means more weight and thickness. It also means holes all over the back of the device.
How are those points 'asinine'? If you claim to be going 54 MPH, but are actually going faster, you are going to use more energy - in any car. If you claim to have to heat at 72F but have it higher, you are going to use more energy. If should be completely obvious to anyone that if you use more energy, you are going to run out of it sooner.
The problem is not that he was going faster than 54MPH or had the temperature at 75F, it was that he LIED about it. If he would have said 'at 65MPH, with a temperature of 75F, and only a 27% charge I got this far' there would be no problem. What he said however, was 'at 54MPH with the temperature at 72F or lower, and a full charge, I only got this far'. Surely you can understand the important difference there.
So you're telling me that over the last couple of decades of laptops, phones, and tablets, thin and light haven't won out every time? What planet are you on?