Most consumers won't care that a judge has said their product is cool. It's not exactly going to make the front page of the tabloids- outside of the Slashdot crowd, most people don't follow technology patent lawsuits ever so closely. They will notice that Samsungs are still stocked in all good gadget shops.
However, if Apple were to seriously develop a long and protracted court case on the premise of persuading a judge and jury that the Galaxy is cool in the following scientifically provable ways...well, that's surreal and amusing enough that quite a few news outlets will report it in their "you couldn't make this up" pages. That would be some serious good press for Samsung.
It's difficult to see how the negatives for Samsung outweigh the positives.
That some secular governments have managed to supersede and subdue the religious clique and its superstitious regulations is a completely different matter. The fact stands: what secular law recognizes is a legal union, sometimes limited to pairs of people of opposite sexes, which tradition stems from religious superstition.
On these grounds I refuse to recognize every legal union as "marriage," especially those exclusively secular.
Good for you- but that makes you on the fringes of society, not the mainstream.
I'm not religious, and I'm due to be married next month. It'll be a religion-free civil ceremony. I'll then be married, my wife will be a "Mrs", and we're be known as married to anyone who meets us, and the law will treat us as married. You might decide that, if you knew the details, that you know better- but who cares? I care about as much as you'd care if some Zoroastrian told you he thought your Christian marriage was invalid.
There's no evidence that marriage was invented by religion, as opposed to being a pre-existing tradition that has been incorporated into marriage. As a 21st century man in a modern democracy, it is of little interest to me what the majority of people 1000 years ago would have thought. It is what the majority of people now want that matters.
There are sect of Christianity that have no issue with gays, even some of the larger ones.... angelician... come to mind.
Anglicans aren't "OK" with gay marriage. The UK is having the debate at the moment, and the CofE is firmly on the "Don't do it" side of the argument, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18405318
- They're at 16%. I know that's "almost 15%", but why not just type 16%? It's not like you saved any time! - Stiff competition from Apple? Safari is at the same 4% market share it's been at for several years. - Implications for the Future of Microsoft? I'm sure dropping to third place in the browser market is really going to be the straw that broke Ballmer's back...
Make sure you have screensavers with password locking on by default, problem solved. If someone leaves the computer logged in, all the next user will find is a box asking them for their password or to switch users.
Incidentally, this is the set up we use at my office too.
This isn't going to happen on Windows. Could finally be the year of Linux on the desktop, though. Windows EULA specifically prohibits one shared computer with multiple users without a license for each user.
Citation on that please.
Windows has the capability to have multiple users, with multiple passwords, built right in. I can't remember the last home PC I've had that hasn't had a separate user profile for every person in the house (plus guest). And they've never tried to extract more money out of me. Why would they put that option in there if it were illegal?
Back when I lived with my parents, there was one desktop computer shared by four people. Maybe this is a "youth of today" attitude- where it is now practically unthinkable that people might not have at least one computer each...
Editing settings in the BIOS may be exciting to new people, but it is not something you gain any fundamental knowledge from. In 5 or 10 years, BIOS will be replaced by something else, and will be long forgotten. Better use your brain for more interesting, fundamental stuff.
With that attitude you'll find yourself with thousands of lines of perfectly optimised assembly code and no working computers to run it on.
It'd be like learning how to strip and rebuild a petrol engine by hand while standing at the side of the road in the rain, but neglecting to actually learn to drive.
"Coming to market too late" is, in my opinion, a red herring. People could have (and I seem to remember did) said that the iPhone would struggle against the mighty incumbents like RIM and Nokia- and it went on to nearly kill them off entirely. And people definitely criticised whether Android (accused of being nothing but a cheap imitator) stood a chance of competing with the (by now genre-defining) iPhone- and it now leads by market share.
I'm not necessarily trying to argue that Firefox OS is going to be the next big thing; but every market leader (especially in the consumer computing industry) starts off as a minnow.
Personally, I like Mozilla- despite some stupid moves with Firefox, it's still my browser of choice and I still have a lot of respect for them as a FOSS developer. Android isn't bad, but I'm excited that Mozilla are having a crack at their own mobile Linux OS. Best of luck to them, I say.
Eh. We have been known to (temporarily) come in peace when we don't have the power to back up the alternative(Apropos of the 4th of July, see the English colonial activities in the new world).
Are you using The American War of Independence as an example of coming in peace?
If anything, it's a fantastic example of the opposite- how we use war as a first resort to solving our problems. Someone increases tax on tea imports? War!
I'm not going to check, but I think I've already replied to you elsewhere.
No, I'm afraid gravity propagates at C, which is the same as the maximum speed of light. If the Sun randomly vanished, no effect from that would reach us for 8 minutes- Earth would continue to orbit around the spot where the Sun had been for 8 minutes before the change in the gravitational field reached us. In Relativity, there are no cheats to get around C- it is the maximum speed for any form of matter, energy or information to travel, full stop.
Citation please- gravity is limited by C the same as light is, as far as I'm aware. C is the universal speed limit for all types of matter and information, not just light. Yes, the Earth is attracted to the Sun by gravity as it was 8 minutes ago. This does not cause Earth to fly off into space- for Earth's purposes, there has always been a Sun 8 minutes ago around which to orbit.
Faster than light communication is as firmly in the realm of sci-fi/fantasy as is faster than light travel, I'm afraid. Until someone comes up with a sensible theory for another method of communication, we might as well pin our hopes on the EM spectrum.
In Windows, Win+D minimizes all windows, pressing it again restores them all exactly as they were. In Unity I think it's Ctrl-Alt-D. I'm sure all windows managers have something similar.
Scotland and England are separate in the same way as Texas and Oklahoma- different police force, legal systems that differ in some ways (but are shared in others), separate legislatures (except for the bits that aren't).
Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland are separate in the same way as Mexico and New Mexico- they're next to each other, they were the same country at some point in their history, and they've got a similar name- but are otherwise nothing much to do with each other.
The patent in question is allegedly to do with WiFi, so more to the point- Asus have been making computers for years, full stop. Every single one of their laptops has WiFi that would presumably infringe in some way.
But then I'm not even going to pretend that I even slightly understand patent law...
Mozilla obviously hope that one day it'll be more than a blip.
iOS was a blip on RIM's radar once. Android was a blip on Apple's radar after that.
If Mozilla's business model is more appealing to carriers or device makers than Android or iOS, they might do well. The fact that they've got some big names like Alcatel, Deutsche Telecom and Sprint interested is vaguely promising for them, so we'll see how it pans out.
Why on earth does the government need to be running not one, but two luxury car companies, for instance? (And one of those isn't just any luxury car company, it's probably one of the two most outrageously expensive makes on earth.)
Rolls Royce were a company that made both luxury cars and military-grade aircraft parts. They were nationalised as a whole when they went bust in the 70s due to the need to keep the military gear flowing; the car brand was immediately separated off and sold. The aircraft-part manufacturer stayed on the public books for a couple of decades before being sold off again. The two are still separate to this day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_plc
My view on nationalisation versus privatisation has always been: if it's too big or important to fail, it has to be state owned. Otherwise the state is only underwriting the company anyway. The current Tory government is looking to sell off the Royal Mail; this would mean that in any year where they make a profit, some shareholders will get to keep that money as a dividend. But if the Royal Mail makes huge losses and heads towards bankruptcy, you can be damned sure the government will bail them out; the country without a postal system is unimaginable. So all they'll have done is privatise the profits, nationalised the losses. Ridiculous.
That's why there are newer design patents (and more to the point in the US) for the newer iPads. Doesn't change the fact tat the basic iPad design predates all the "prior art" given.
That was about 20 seconds of Googling (I'm presuming that it's a fairly "well debated" topic on the internet these days).
Bearing in mind we're only talking about the physical hardware design if we're talking about your linked sketches- although seeing it in action it seems surprisingly up-to-date.
We still generate most of the power domestically (and still extract a fair amount of oil, gas and coal). It's just under the neo-conservative ravages of the Tory Party in the 80s and 90s, most of that infrastructure was sold to the highest bidder. Mostly, the highest bidders were nationalised foreign companies, such as the French EDF or German RWE.
For some reason, it was decided that the best thing for our economy would be to keep exactly the same infrastructure as before, but allow any profits to go to neighbouring foreign governments instead of our own Treasury. I'll be honest, I'm not sure I understand the logic.
I think you're a little confused. Or making a very deadpan joke.
Labour weren't in power for most of the 90s- the Tories were. British Coal and the CEGB (later to be Powergen & NPower) were privatised in 1990, with the process finishing up in 1995- entirely under John Major's Tory government (which came immediately after Thatcher's Tory government). I believe British Rail was privatised under Major too. Under Thatcher in the 80s, the following were privatised: British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways, Jaguar, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, British Aerospace, Britoil, British Gas and the water utilities.
By the time Labour entered power under Tony Blair in 1997, there was nothing much left to privatise- it had all already been done. The only major thing they privatised was the Air Traffic Control.
It also has a small sketched circle on one edge that could easily be a 3.5mm jack (or a power connector, or a button of some sort, or an LED light), and a jagged rectangle on another edge that is quite clearly a proprietary Apple brand iDock connector (unless it's USB; or HDMI; or a Kensington lock slot; or a latch for the removable battery cover).
Interestingly (sarcasm mode off now), the sketch lacks the "single button on the front" which formed part of one of Apple's lawsuits, has a far flatter back panel than the attractively curved iPad, and the two lone connectors drawn on that sketch don't match the connectors that are actually on an iPad. So it isn't even an accurate sketch of an iPad- it's just a sketch of a rounded rectangle.
Also noteworthy- the "Design Status" on the page you linked is "Invalidity procedure pending". I'm not familiar with how that system works- but that doesn't sound like the design is cut-and-dried accepted.
If you're still running Windows XP and you want to upgrade to Windows 8, you'd have to buy upgrade packages for both Windows 7 and Windows 8 (or a full copy of Windows 8, and accept that you have to wipe and reinstall from scratch). That's a copy of Windows 7 that you'll only see as you whiz right past it.
If you're running an ancient version of Ubuntu, and you need to daisy chain the upgrades as you plough towards the latest version- at least all those intermediary copies are free.
Slashdot Mirror
Most consumers won't care that a judge has said their product is cool. It's not exactly going to make the front page of the tabloids- outside of the Slashdot crowd, most people don't follow technology patent lawsuits ever so closely. They will notice that Samsungs are still stocked in all good gadget shops.
However, if Apple were to seriously develop a long and protracted court case on the premise of persuading a judge and jury that the Galaxy is cool in the following scientifically provable ways...well, that's surreal and amusing enough that quite a few news outlets will report it in their "you couldn't make this up" pages. That would be some serious good press for Samsung.
It's difficult to see how the negatives for Samsung outweigh the positives.
*sigh* Non sequitur.
The concept of marriage is religious.
That some secular governments have managed to supersede and subdue the religious clique and its superstitious regulations is a completely different matter. The fact stands: what secular law recognizes is a legal union, sometimes limited to pairs of people of opposite sexes, which tradition stems from religious superstition.
On these grounds I refuse to recognize every legal union as "marriage," especially those exclusively secular.
Good for you- but that makes you on the fringes of society, not the mainstream.
I'm not religious, and I'm due to be married next month. It'll be a religion-free civil ceremony. I'll then be married, my wife will be a "Mrs", and we're be known as married to anyone who meets us, and the law will treat us as married. You might decide that, if you knew the details, that you know better- but who cares? I care about as much as you'd care if some Zoroastrian told you he thought your Christian marriage was invalid.
There's no evidence that marriage was invented by religion, as opposed to being a pre-existing tradition that has been incorporated into marriage. As a 21st century man in a modern democracy, it is of little interest to me what the majority of people 1000 years ago would have thought. It is what the majority of people now want that matters.
There are sect of Christianity that have no issue with gays, even some of the larger ones. ... angelician ... come to mind.
Anglicans aren't "OK" with gay marriage. The UK is having the debate at the moment, and the CofE is firmly on the "Don't do it" side of the argument,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18405318
And don't get me started on the Catholics...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17329902
Oh, that summary hurts me in so many ways.
- They're at 16%. I know that's "almost 15%", but why not just type 16%? It's not like you saved any time!
- Stiff competition from Apple? Safari is at the same 4% market share it's been at for several years.
- Implications for the Future of Microsoft? I'm sure dropping to third place in the browser market is really going to be the straw that broke Ballmer's back...
Make sure you have screensavers with password locking on by default, problem solved. If someone leaves the computer logged in, all the next user will find is a box asking them for their password or to switch users.
Incidentally, this is the set up we use at my office too.
This isn't going to happen on Windows. Could finally be the year of Linux on the desktop, though. Windows EULA specifically prohibits one shared computer with multiple users without a license for each user.
Citation on that please.
Windows has the capability to have multiple users, with multiple passwords, built right in. I can't remember the last home PC I've had that hasn't had a separate user profile for every person in the house (plus guest). And they've never tried to extract more money out of me. Why would they put that option in there if it were illegal?
Back when I lived with my parents, there was one desktop computer shared by four people. Maybe this is a "youth of today" attitude- where it is now practically unthinkable that people might not have at least one computer each...
Editing settings in the BIOS may be exciting to new people, but it is not something you gain any fundamental knowledge from. In 5 or 10 years, BIOS will be replaced by something else, and will be long forgotten. Better use your brain for more interesting, fundamental stuff.
With that attitude you'll find yourself with thousands of lines of perfectly optimised assembly code and no working computers to run it on.
It'd be like learning how to strip and rebuild a petrol engine by hand while standing at the side of the road in the rain, but neglecting to actually learn to drive.
"Coming to market too late" is, in my opinion, a red herring. People could have (and I seem to remember did) said that the iPhone would struggle against the mighty incumbents like RIM and Nokia- and it went on to nearly kill them off entirely. And people definitely criticised whether Android (accused of being nothing but a cheap imitator) stood a chance of competing with the (by now genre-defining) iPhone- and it now leads by market share.
I'm not necessarily trying to argue that Firefox OS is going to be the next big thing; but every market leader (especially in the consumer computing industry) starts off as a minnow.
Personally, I like Mozilla- despite some stupid moves with Firefox, it's still my browser of choice and I still have a lot of respect for them as a FOSS developer. Android isn't bad, but I'm excited that Mozilla are having a crack at their own mobile Linux OS. Best of luck to them, I say.
Eh. We have been known to (temporarily) come in peace when we don't have the power to back up the alternative(Apropos of the 4th of July, see the English colonial activities in the new world).
Are you using The American War of Independence as an example of coming in peace?
If anything, it's a fantastic example of the opposite- how we use war as a first resort to solving our problems. Someone increases tax on tea imports? War!
I'm not going to check, but I think I've already replied to you elsewhere.
No, I'm afraid gravity propagates at C, which is the same as the maximum speed of light. If the Sun randomly vanished, no effect from that would reach us for 8 minutes- Earth would continue to orbit around the spot where the Sun had been for 8 minutes before the change in the gravitational field reached us. In Relativity, there are no cheats to get around C- it is the maximum speed for any form of matter, energy or information to travel, full stop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity
Citation please- gravity is limited by C the same as light is, as far as I'm aware. C is the universal speed limit for all types of matter and information, not just light. Yes, the Earth is attracted to the Sun by gravity as it was 8 minutes ago. This does not cause Earth to fly off into space- for Earth's purposes, there has always been a Sun 8 minutes ago around which to orbit.
Faster than light communication is as firmly in the realm of sci-fi/fantasy as is faster than light travel, I'm afraid. Until someone comes up with a sensible theory for another method of communication, we might as well pin our hopes on the EM spectrum.
In Windows, Win+D minimizes all windows, pressing it again restores them all exactly as they were. In Unity I think it's Ctrl-Alt-D. I'm sure all windows managers have something similar.
I dare you to go to Yorkshire and call someone a Londoner.
That is not a legal definition of separate countries.
(Although you are right- I'm just being pedantic).
That's so very much not true.
Scotland and England are separate in the same way as Texas and Oklahoma- different police force, legal systems that differ in some ways (but are shared in others), separate legislatures (except for the bits that aren't).
Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland are separate in the same way as Mexico and New Mexico- they're next to each other, they were the same country at some point in their history, and they've got a similar name- but are otherwise nothing much to do with each other.
The patent in question is allegedly to do with WiFi, so more to the point- Asus have been making computers for years, full stop. Every single one of their laptops has WiFi that would presumably infringe in some way.
But then I'm not even going to pretend that I even slightly understand patent law...
Does a Time Cube come with MyCleanPC?
Mozilla obviously hope that one day it'll be more than a blip.
iOS was a blip on RIM's radar once. Android was a blip on Apple's radar after that.
If Mozilla's business model is more appealing to carriers or device makers than Android or iOS, they might do well. The fact that they've got some big names like Alcatel, Deutsche Telecom and Sprint interested is vaguely promising for them, so we'll see how it pans out.
Why on earth does the government need to be running not one, but two luxury car companies, for instance? (And one of those isn't just any luxury car company, it's probably one of the two most outrageously expensive makes on earth.)
Rolls Royce were a company that made both luxury cars and military-grade aircraft parts. They were nationalised as a whole when they went bust in the 70s due to the need to keep the military gear flowing; the car brand was immediately separated off and sold. The aircraft-part manufacturer stayed on the public books for a couple of decades before being sold off again. The two are still separate to this day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_plc
My view on nationalisation versus privatisation has always been: if it's too big or important to fail, it has to be state owned. Otherwise the state is only underwriting the company anyway. The current Tory government is looking to sell off the Royal Mail; this would mean that in any year where they make a profit, some shareholders will get to keep that money as a dividend. But if the Royal Mail makes huge losses and heads towards bankruptcy, you can be damned sure the government will bail them out; the country without a postal system is unimaginable. So all they'll have done is privatise the profits, nationalised the losses. Ridiculous.
That's why there are newer design patents (and more to the point in the US) for the newer iPads. Doesn't change the fact tat the basic iPad design predates all the "prior art" given.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1381528/Knight-Ridder-tablet-looks-just-like-iPad-17-YEARS-OLD.html
That was about 20 seconds of Googling (I'm presuming that it's a fairly "well debated" topic on the internet these days).
Bearing in mind we're only talking about the physical hardware design if we're talking about your linked sketches- although seeing it in action it seems surprisingly up-to-date.
We still generate most of the power domestically (and still extract a fair amount of oil, gas and coal). It's just under the neo-conservative ravages of the Tory Party in the 80s and 90s, most of that infrastructure was sold to the highest bidder. Mostly, the highest bidders were nationalised foreign companies, such as the French EDF or German RWE.
For some reason, it was decided that the best thing for our economy would be to keep exactly the same infrastructure as before, but allow any profits to go to neighbouring foreign governments instead of our own Treasury. I'll be honest, I'm not sure I understand the logic.
Short answer- they didn't; the GP is just confused.
See my reply in the sibling post.
I think you're a little confused. Or making a very deadpan joke.
Labour weren't in power for most of the 90s- the Tories were. British Coal and the CEGB (later to be Powergen & NPower) were privatised in 1990, with the process finishing up in 1995- entirely under John Major's Tory government (which came immediately after Thatcher's Tory government). I believe British Rail was privatised under Major too. Under Thatcher in the 80s, the following were privatised: British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways, Jaguar, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, British Aerospace, Britoil, British Gas and the water utilities.
By the time Labour entered power under Tony Blair in 1997, there was nothing much left to privatise- it had all already been done. The only major thing they privatised was the Air Traffic Control.
You're right, by golly, I'm not being fair.
It also has a small sketched circle on one edge that could easily be a 3.5mm jack (or a power connector, or a button of some sort, or an LED light), and a jagged rectangle on another edge that is quite clearly a proprietary Apple brand iDock connector (unless it's USB; or HDMI; or a Kensington lock slot; or a latch for the removable battery cover).
Interestingly (sarcasm mode off now), the sketch lacks the "single button on the front" which formed part of one of Apple's lawsuits, has a far flatter back panel than the attractively curved iPad, and the two lone connectors drawn on that sketch don't match the connectors that are actually on an iPad. So it isn't even an accurate sketch of an iPad- it's just a sketch of a rounded rectangle.
Also noteworthy- the "Design Status" on the page you linked is "Invalidity procedure pending". I'm not familiar with how that system works- but that doesn't sound like the design is cut-and-dried accepted.
If you're still running Windows XP and you want to upgrade to Windows 8, you'd have to buy upgrade packages for both Windows 7 and Windows 8 (or a full copy of Windows 8, and accept that you have to wipe and reinstall from scratch). That's a copy of Windows 7 that you'll only see as you whiz right past it.
If you're running an ancient version of Ubuntu, and you need to daisy chain the upgrades as you plough towards the latest version- at least all those intermediary copies are free.
Taking a leaf out of Apples playbook then. I wonder if Apple patented it?
One can only hope they haven't taken a leaf from anything resembling a Playbook...