If your invention includes all the elements of any given claim, you infringe in the US.
You may be confused with regards to dependent claims. (E.g. Claims that begin with something like "The invention in claim 1, where..." )
In the case of dependent claims, you'd have to include all the elements of that claim, and its parent claims up to the initial independent claim, to infringe.
Early adopters and gadget freaks are the target market of version 1 products. The kinda people who are already carrying a $500-$600 phone, or a combination of $250 pda, $250 ipod and $250 phone.
The original iPod launched at $400/$500 for "just an mp3 player" and people made the same cracks and quips. But not so much anymore. They 'get' that the interface really did make all the difference. They 'got' that the early pricing was for early adopters. Even early adopters know they're getting raked over the coals. Everyone's aware-of and ok-with how this works.
Apple will have something priced to joe-six-pack in a year, and they'll have carrier choice in two.
I doubt the 'core' system is going away. Having a SKU without a HD lets them advertise a unit price that Sony will never be able to match*. It also lets them remain price-competitive with Nintendo.
*Sure, Sony could match the price by taking horrible losses on hardware for the life of their console, as Microsoft did last go-round trying to keep up with the PS2. But I don't see Sony being in a position to do that.
Just buy a $30 wireless bridge and plug it into the ethernet port. I've got a wireless bridge feeding my xbox, tivo and 360 - it works like a champ. And when I upgrade to 802.11n or powerline, or god-knows-what-else - everything shares the benefit.
the official add-on is definitely a shameless cash-grab, but it ain't required. and thankfully it's not built-in cost. I have no idea why anyone would want a device-specific wireless adapter at this stage of the game.
Levelling is the core problem of quite a few of massmog ills. mudflation. grinding. powerlevelling. twinking. etc. the solutions themselves make problems and make the whole thing even less approachable. Take powerlevelling. You stop it by penalizing or restricting level disparities in groups. Which basically means you cut people off from playing the game together, and stratify the playerbase. It creates a barrier for entry. A roadblock that makes it hard for friends to hook one another or keep in touch when some play more than others. It's Not Good(tm).
Levels even waste precious designer/developer/artist time, forcing the creation of redundant content that is necessarily consumed and then abandoned entirely. (e.g. if a WoW player levels up in loch modan/the wetlands, they probably won't bother with westfall. and they'll likely never really go back to either zone. abandoned cities. dead zones. Not to mention the designed-to-be-disposable itemization for loot, tradeskills, mobs, spells, special attacks, etc )
The worst part about the entire system is that level caps ultimately present the game designer with the hard problem eventually anyway: How do you occupy a player base when they can no longer level? The grind just delays facing the inevitable, and chases off customers in the meantime.
I've been advocating No-Levels (and even strict No-Numbers) game systems for years to alleviate the business, balance and social problems levels create in persistent multiplayer worlds. And you know what the biggest roadblock i've run into is?
people like levelling. They like the discrete 'accomplishment' and the 'power gain'. Even if it's all a sham. Even though they know it's all a sham.
I think the alternatives are the future. They're inevitable. But the current playerbase is going to resist. It's going to take a bold developer to create a game that faces very real rejection by the only proven playerbase out there. Just as WoW vindicated the assertion that casual massmog players did exist, were willing to play and to pay - I think such a bold design would be vindicated.
People buy music and games on their cellphones all the time.
They'll connect their CC# to an iTunes account, to the iPod, and not think twice about it. Losing their pod is a potential issue, but so is losing your phone. People just don't seem too concerned. They should probably be a bit more concerned, but they're not.
Apple could even toss a 5 or 6 digit pin on there and an X retry lockout if they wanted, passing the 'security' on your ATM or CC itself, without a serious UI hassle.
And the click wheel is good enough to sort through thousands and thousands of songs as it is. Adding a store with some category breakdowns isn't going to cause UI chaos.
No, the ESRB should not be changed due to Election year pandering legislation.
Maybe the ESRB should form a playtest group to make it's own vids for rating purposes. But they should absolutely not bow -in any form- to political whim in an even-numbered year.
Why stop there? They could toss kiosks into stores/coffee shops to pass out preview copies of music singles (like they already do on XBL Marketplace) and videos (music videos, movies trailers, game trailers, tv shows shorts), allow purchase of content through hotspots or content-caching kiosks, allow users to sync contacts/calendars with any PC they authenticate to, or sync with your bluetooth phone/pda/blackberry, allow swapping of electronic business cards, miscellaneous data, XBox 360 integration, etc
They could create a fully functional personal data platform - and they could do 80% of it with only software changes to the Zune. (i don't think zune does bluetooth)
Anyone can think of something better to do than play WoW at a given time -- but they can't think of something better to do *all* the time. WoW's damn fun in small chunks. No-one challenges that. They complain about the social aspect being weaker than other massmogs (it is), the end-game being all raiding (it is) and an interminable grind (it definitely can be). But they admit that for a couple hours a week, it's just good clean DIKU fun, turned up to 11.
The _vast_ majority of Blizzard's playerbase are not playing WoW _all_ the time. They log on a couple times a week or less.
The end consumer doesn't care about spending $200 for 'potential' they can't access without spending $2000 -more-?
I think you woefully underestimate the masses. They certainly can be dumb and impressionable, but they're more canny than you estimate, for major entertainment purchases.
Spending more than a few hundred bucks for a TV is not something the casual market has -ever- gone for.
...there was no current-gen competitor for the PS2 or the 360 when they launched. They were the only game in town, which allowed them to survive an otherwise precarious launch.
This year, the PS3 is launching itself into the market alongside the dramatically cheaper, more numerous Nintendo console, and a 360 with a very respectable foothold. These are hardly comparable situations.
Furthermore, the PS3 is not notably more powerful than the 360, and it's advantages are a moot point for all but a tiny segment of the -hardcore- gaming audience.
It would take twenty minutes to explain to Joe Consumer why the PS3 is better on paper.
-Then- you'd have to spend another ten explaining the theoretical advantage is moot unless he's spending several thousand dollars on a TV, and planning on spending another thousand on an HD video player in the very near future.
If he doesn't have an HDTV, the marginal theoretical performance advantage and 1080p capability don't matter. If he isn't planning on buying a blu-ray player in the next year, then the 'cheap' BR player capability doesn't matter either.
All that 'potential' for $200-$300 more than last generation's price hike, and all ignoring one very large elephant in a very small room: by the time either of those advantages -truly- matter, the PS4, 720, and Wii Too will be in the hype machine.
Frankly, while humans have come to value human life more, I don't think we can necessarily apply that to how extra-terrestrials would value human life.
Consider that we know several species of primates are capable of simple communication and tool use. Yet we brush their environments aside, routinely use them as medical/technological guinea pigs, cage them up for entertainment, and put them down when they become troublesome with little moral guilt.
I can't imagine a more advanced civilization would have an issue treating primates as we do currently. And without our having warp drives, replicators or mind powers - who's to say whether they respect the distinction between us and our evolutionary cousins?
What is the difference between taping a song off the radio and creating an Mp3 from radio?
In short: quality levels. According to the rulings.
I would like someone from the RIAA to address why they need to go this route.
Read up on how they basically killed internet radio stations. It's the same argument.
You can buy a CD, copy it, rip it and give it away...is this a violation too?
You can legally make backup copies, and convert its format for personal use. Ripping it to mp3 counts as such a copy. Making mp3s from discs you own is legal.
Or can you only give it to someone who already owns it? (doesn't make sense)
You can 'loan' it to other people. You can't gift it to them. Gifting is distribution and thereby civil copyright infringment. (if you charge for it, you're on the way to criminal infringement.)
Well, these would be insane preorder bundles - so it's safe to assume they're aimed at the insane preorder crowd.
Clearly, this is not for mere mortals who actually need to justify the purchase of new consoles and shiny gadgets.
Meatspace retailers will sell the two core bundles and rest assured, normal people will be able to put a 360 and perfect dark 0 under the tree for $350.
XBox1 games had to function perfectly when the harddrive was full, so it couldn't be absolutely depended upon to be useful for streaming or storing. Hence, it's relative underutilization for a stock part in the XB1.
As far as the devs are concerned, this isn't much of a change.
It is, however, why there's this big push with the 360 to market it primarily for its usefulness outside of off-the-shelf games.
They're trying to take a part that was a loss (financially) the last go-round and make it into a premium upgrade that only depends on a couple major content providers for decent support (Microsoft, Movie studios, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
no, he's right.
..." )
If your invention includes all the elements of any given claim, you infringe in the US.
You may be confused with regards to dependent claims.
(E.g. Claims that begin with something like "The invention in claim 1, where
In the case of dependent claims, you'd have to include all the elements of that claim, and its parent claims up to the initial independent claim, to infringe.
Early adopters and gadget freaks are the target market of version 1 products.
The kinda people who are already carrying a $500-$600 phone, or a combination of $250 pda, $250 ipod and $250 phone.
The original iPod launched at $400/$500 for "just an mp3 player" and people made the same cracks and quips.
But not so much anymore. They 'get' that the interface really did make all the difference. They 'got' that the early pricing was for early adopters. Even early adopters know they're getting raked over the coals. Everyone's aware-of and ok-with how this works.
Apple will have something priced to joe-six-pack in a year, and they'll have carrier choice in two.
wouldn't you use your bluetooth headset, or in-car bluetooth interface?
I barely take my phone out of my pocket anymore.
I doubt the 'core' system is going away.
Having a SKU without a HD lets them advertise a unit price that Sony will never be able to match*.
It also lets them remain price-competitive with Nintendo.
*Sure, Sony could match the price by taking horrible losses on hardware for the life of their console, as Microsoft did last go-round trying to keep up with the PS2. But I don't see Sony being in a position to do that.
Just buy a $30 wireless bridge and plug it into the ethernet port.
I've got a wireless bridge feeding my xbox, tivo and 360 - it works like a champ.
And when I upgrade to 802.11n or powerline, or god-knows-what-else - everything shares the benefit.
the official add-on is definitely a shameless cash-grab, but it ain't required. and thankfully it's not built-in cost.
I have no idea why anyone would want a device-specific wireless adapter at this stage of the game.
Exactly.
Levelling is the core problem of quite a few of massmog ills.
mudflation. grinding. powerlevelling. twinking. etc.
the solutions themselves make problems and make the whole thing even less approachable.
Take powerlevelling. You stop it by penalizing or restricting level disparities in groups. Which basically means you cut people off from playing the game together, and stratify the playerbase. It creates a barrier for entry. A roadblock that makes it hard for friends to hook one another or keep in touch when some play more than others.
It's Not Good(tm).
Levels even waste precious designer/developer/artist time, forcing the creation of redundant content that is necessarily consumed and then abandoned entirely. (e.g. if a WoW player levels up in loch modan/the wetlands, they probably won't bother with westfall. and they'll likely never really go back to either zone. abandoned cities. dead zones. Not to mention the designed-to-be-disposable itemization for loot, tradeskills, mobs, spells, special attacks, etc )
The worst part about the entire system is that level caps ultimately present the game designer with the hard problem eventually anyway: How do you occupy a player base when they can no longer level? The grind just delays facing the inevitable, and chases off customers in the meantime.
I've been advocating No-Levels (and even strict No-Numbers) game systems for years to alleviate the business, balance and social problems levels create in persistent multiplayer worlds. And you know what the biggest roadblock i've run into is?
people like levelling.
They like the discrete 'accomplishment' and the 'power gain'.
Even if it's all a sham. Even though they know it's all a sham.
I think the alternatives are the future. They're inevitable.
But the current playerbase is going to resist.
It's going to take a bold developer to create a game that faces very real rejection by the only proven playerbase out there. Just as WoW vindicated the assertion that casual massmog players did exist, were willing to play and to pay - I think such a bold design would be vindicated.
But that's an awfully hard sell.
People buy music and games on their cellphones all the time.
They'll connect their CC# to an iTunes account, to the iPod, and not think twice about it.
Losing their pod is a potential issue, but so is losing your phone.
People just don't seem too concerned. They should probably be a bit more concerned, but they're not.
Apple could even toss a 5 or 6 digit pin on there and an X retry lockout if they wanted, passing the 'security' on your ATM or CC itself, without a serious UI hassle.
And the click wheel is good enough to sort through thousands and thousands of songs as it is.
Adding a store with some category breakdowns isn't going to cause UI chaos.
Seriously - these are solved problems.
Having a specialized GPU made sense when processors were single-core.
Now that processors have multiple cores, many of which are left looking for a job to do - it makes sense to bring the GPU back to the main die.
The result will produce an immediate performance boost for Joe Sixpack, at lower manufacturer cost.
No, the ESRB should not be changed due to Election year pandering legislation.
Maybe the ESRB should form a playtest group to make it's own vids for rating purposes.
But they should absolutely not bow -in any form- to political whim in an even-numbered year.
Why stop there?
They could toss kiosks into stores/coffee shops to pass out preview copies of music singles (like they already do on XBL Marketplace) and videos (music videos, movies trailers, game trailers, tv shows shorts), allow purchase of content through hotspots or content-caching kiosks, allow users to sync contacts/calendars with any PC they authenticate to, or sync with your bluetooth phone/pda/blackberry, allow swapping of electronic business cards, miscellaneous data, XBox 360 integration, etc
They could create a fully functional personal data platform - and they could do 80% of it with only software changes to the Zune. (i don't think zune does bluetooth)
Short-sighted muppets, the lot of them.
That's kinda the point of patents.
Game Publishers aim at the 17-34 hardcore gamer because they -purchase- most of the games.
The NPD study is weighted heavily by -use-.
Is anyone surprised that K-12 kids have more spare time and fewer entertainment alternatives than college students and young professionals?
You answered your own question.
Anyone can think of something better to do than play WoW at a given time -- but they can't think of something better to do *all* the time. WoW's damn fun in small chunks. No-one challenges that. They complain about the social aspect being weaker than other massmogs (it is), the end-game being all raiding (it is) and an interminable grind (it definitely can be). But they admit that for a couple hours a week, it's just good clean DIKU fun, turned up to 11.
The _vast_ majority of Blizzard's playerbase are not playing WoW _all_ the time.
They log on a couple times a week or less.
The end consumer doesn't care about spending $200 for 'potential' they can't access without spending $2000 -more-?
I think you woefully underestimate the masses.
They certainly can be dumb and impressionable, but they're more canny than you estimate, for major entertainment purchases.
Spending more than a few hundred bucks for a TV is not something the casual market has -ever- gone for.
...there was no current-gen competitor for the PS2 or the 360 when they launched.
They were the only game in town, which allowed them to survive an otherwise precarious launch.
This year, the PS3 is launching itself into the market alongside the dramatically cheaper, more numerous Nintendo console, and a 360 with a very respectable foothold.
These are hardly comparable situations.
Furthermore, the PS3 is not notably more powerful than the 360, and it's advantages are a moot point for all but a tiny segment of the -hardcore- gaming audience.
It would take twenty minutes to explain to Joe Consumer why the PS3 is better on paper.
-Then- you'd have to spend another ten explaining the theoretical advantage is moot unless he's spending several thousand dollars on a TV, and planning on spending another thousand on an HD video player in the very near future.
If he doesn't have an HDTV, the marginal theoretical performance advantage and 1080p capability don't matter.
If he isn't planning on buying a blu-ray player in the next year, then the 'cheap' BR player capability doesn't matter either.
All that 'potential' for $200-$300 more than last generation's price hike, and all ignoring one very large elephant in a very small room: by the time either of those advantages -truly- matter, the PS4, 720, and Wii Too will be in the hype machine.
Frankly, while humans have come to value human life more, I don't think we can necessarily apply that to how extra-terrestrials would value human life.
Consider that we know several species of primates are capable of simple communication and tool use. Yet we brush their environments aside, routinely use them as medical/technological guinea pigs, cage them up for entertainment, and put them down when they become troublesome with little moral guilt.
I can't imagine a more advanced civilization would have an issue treating primates as we do currently. And without our having warp drives, replicators or mind powers - who's to say whether they respect the distinction between us and our evolutionary cousins?
S-VHS technically beat ED-Beta too.
Lot of good it did em.
I think he's also overselling the idea that it's scientific method.
Half the kids I know that picked up the controller and started mashing buttons wind up looking like Skinner's Superstitious Pigeons.
This isn't VHS vs Beta.
It's S-VHS vs ED-Beta.
You could randomly pluck a Bullfrog game out of a hat and it'd be more in need of a sequel than half those titles.
In short: quality levels. According to the rulings.
Read up on how they basically killed internet radio stations. It's the same argument.
You can legally make backup copies, and convert its format for personal use.
Ripping it to mp3 counts as such a copy. Making mp3s from discs you own is legal.
You can 'loan' it to other people. You can't gift it to them. Gifting is distribution and thereby civil copyright infringment. (if you charge for it, you're on the way to criminal infringement.)
It's what everyone paid at launch last go-round.
Well, these would be insane preorder bundles - so it's safe to assume they're aimed at the insane preorder crowd.
Clearly, this is not for mere mortals who actually need to justify the purchase of new consoles and shiny gadgets.
Meatspace retailers will sell the two core bundles and rest assured, normal people will be able to put a 360 and perfect dark 0 under the tree for $350.
XBox1 games had to function perfectly when the harddrive was full, so it couldn't be absolutely depended upon to be useful for streaming or storing. Hence, it's relative underutilization for a stock part in the XB1.
As far as the devs are concerned, this isn't much of a change.
It is, however, why there's this big push with the 360 to market it primarily for its usefulness outside of off-the-shelf games.
They're trying to take a part that was a loss (financially) the last go-round and make it into a premium upgrade that only depends on a couple major content providers for decent support (Microsoft, Movie studios, etc).
Their target market ain't us. Not anymore.
fscking ubb...
get out of my brain!