There wouldn't have been a vote without his advocacy. He got it to the voting stage.
As for government involvement crowding out private investment. That's an easily testable hypothesis. There are societies that spend a lot of government directed research and societies that spend little. The two tend to positively correlate not negatively correlate.
Even if the bill never existed, there is a real business incentive to invest research in science that can be used to increase worker productivity.
It was pretty unclear at the time that the internet was going to be a worker productivity tool, other than in marketing and advertising. Further there are lots of science ideas which might increase labor productivity not getting funding. So I think its fair to say the private market isn't funding all, most or even a substantial fraction of potential areas.
How? The anti-trust violation was about using a monopoly in one area to create a monopoly in another. Its not about pushing standards in their area of monopoly (operating systems). Especially if that is in the public interest.
We both agree it is not "just as good" on legacy hardware. It can't be. A system designed to work only with mouse and keyboard is going to be better than a flexible system when used with just mouse and keyboard.
That sort of messaging will kill Windows 8, the same way chickening out on the higher hardware requirements for Longhorn killed WinFS, killed document security and made everyone think Vista was terrible. Microsoft is going to have to decide on where they want to take this.
I agree with the plan on Windows 8, assuming they do not for one second underestimate the degree of change they are trying to push. 1/2 measures will fail.
Why would you be sitting in an office? If people are mobile why pay for that incredibly expensive real estate? But even lets assume the office is being used. Most likely in a sit down office setting they would want to use a high end trackpad or touch tablet, not touching a 24-32" screen. If they are talking regularly and they are in an office, they are going to want to use a good quality microphone so they would be speaking softly, and that means headsets as well.
As far as voice recognition. Good voice recognition can be trained. See Dragon for example.
As tablets and phones start to become primary computing devices their limitations become more obvious.The most obvious limitations are connections with business productivity software. Microsoft is dominant in business productivity. If they can carry their business productivity advantages to tablets and phones they maintain their hold on the consumer space. If they fail, consumer becomes a software eco-system entirely different than enterprise by say 2020. That fast changing rapidly evolving eco-system will naturally develop business productivity applications for the small business market, while at the same time having volumes from consumer which will allow to it pull ahead in other ways.
Microsoft then spends 2020-2030 having done to it, what it did to IBM, DEC and Unisys.
I understand what you are saying. What I'm saying is that bright sunlight is an unusual working condition. But if the goal is to function well in bright sunlight you want entirely different type of screen. This isn't a quality difference you are actually in a situation where you preferring lower quality to higher. As an aside iPhone 4 does rather well in indirect sun but no emitting LCD is more than terrible above 40,000 LUX, and a bright southern condition you are likely at about 120,000 LUX or more.
In critic world they get the cake and they eat it.
Yes I'll agree. The real test is how they get treated when something is a genuine negative. Like for example when the iPhone wasn't available except on AT&T and AT&T was having data problems. But you do have a point, critics do also go with winners. I remember when I was a big fan of Apple during 2004 years their stuff got panned even when in areas where it was way better.
Macs for example has the best OS right now for 3D gaming (native), but you never hear about that because in practice no one brings out high end gaming for Mac using low level Apple only features.
I own the rMBP. I think we should subdivide the issue of price:
1) On the computer side, Apple is now dominant owning 90% of the $!000+ laptop market. There median PC laptop is $515, the median Apple $1400. Which means there really are two entirely different comparisons. a) How does Apple compare to similar general purpose laptops. And there by virtue of the different target markets Apple shines. I think its fair to say if you are planning on spending $2k+ on a laptop, and don't need to be in Windows, you'll have a better experience on Apple. b) How does Apple compare to similar specialized laptops, which are often at those price points. And since Apple doesn't make specialized laptops the PC laptops win easily. c) Should you buy a high priced Apple or a low priced PC laptop? Which is the point you are getting at. That's an impossible comparison. A fair comparison might be used Apple laptops to new PC laptops. And there I think the PC is likely to come out ahead.
2) On the tablet side there are Android tablets at the same price points as the iPads, though generally they are more money for a less. Apple wins here on both price and experience, generally. As you go down market, with the tablets in the $40-300 range you start to run into the same problem you didn't with PC laptops vs. Apple. As you go up market you hit the Windows tablets with stylus and OneNote and those are vastly better devices for more money.
3) On the phone side, the price difference is somewhat obscured for most consumers by the higher subsidy. If a consumer is a getting a $14/mo subsidy on an Android vs. a $17/mo subsidy on a iPhone that blows away $72 in price difference for the raw device. Once you subtract off that difference, since it doesn't matter for consumers generally the iPhone is about the same money and a feature to feature comparison works out. When people have to buy phones unsubsidized they frequently consider cheap and look at the low end or used.
Why? There are thousands of potential technologies that never get the funding they need to get off the ground. Those that get substantial financial backing frequently do get off the ground. The government is one of the primary means by which technologies can get the seed money they need. Politicians run the government. Ergo...
That may not be the case. Microsoft controls the OEMs. It depends how committed Microsoft is to the shift in the laptop market. They can, if they so choose, force the market to switch.
The problem is the UI. Not only is it ugly, which maybe shouldn't matter to people but does, but it is not well designed for mouse+keyboard. They are trying to whack a tablet UI on to a desktop and for some reason they think that won't piss people off. So it isn't as pleasing to look at, and is less efficient to use than Windows 7.
They aren't trying to sell it for mouse+keyboard. They whole goal is keyboard: onscreen or external touch screen and stylus mouse: replaced by stylus or trackpad
For example retina performs poorly in direct sunlight
Just about any backlit LCD performs poorly in direct sunlight. In direct sunlight you want a reflected light monitor not an emitted light monitor. Pixel Qi screens, for example, are used in laptops that need to perform well in direct sunlight. So what's your point that Apple's screens suffer from the same defect as 98% of the other laptop screens on the market? The retina also doesn't do well with heavy exposure to water, people who need to get their laptops wet have to go elsewhere.
The reason iDevices get good reviews is that the balance of all the various parts of the hardware and the software. That's a compelling package. Part by part they can obviously be beat, and for specialized used cases they can be beat. But what's missing is a broad based disadvantages for the iDevices relative to the competition.
Laptops 20-25 years ago didn't have nice enough screen for serious work and needed a slew of peripherals....
Desktops 25-30 years ago didn't have enough RAM or CPU for serious work and had permanent design problems which would prevent them from every multitasking well enough....
Thanks you good information. I have no idea whether my telco had supporting equipment or not. I had University provided ISPs after about 1990 or so, so I doubt they had special equipment for student speed. I don't remember when I switched to DSL / Cable modem I'm thinking about '97 certainly by '99.
The law is quite clear: patents only cover novel and unobvious contributions. Merely putting together a bunch of known parts using engineering skills into something that's working isn't patentable, no matter how much of an effort it may have been.
I quoted you the section from the very start of the statue, "useful improvement".
The rest of this is mostly you are trying to shift the patent system to be narrower than it is.
Oh I agree computers are more popular today. The question is whether that's going to slow the rate of change as far as digital formats. It certainly should. But taking USB for example I've noticed the number of totally incompatible mini usb's I've had to go through in the last 5 years.
Well for one thing we know that mice and keyboards have been migrating towards a Bluetooth interface. Some are good, some are bad but I see no reason to believe there will be a physical connection in 10 years much less 25 years at all.
If we go a but further out, there are two major changes:
1) Mouses may cease to the the dominant form of pointer input at all, and even keyboards may disappear. We are clearly moving towards touch screen devices replacing mice. Apple's primary OS (by volume and profits) already works mostly exclusively this way, and Google's as well. Microsoft has already announced they intend to make this input format ubiquitous. For keyboards, screen keyboards, voice and light keyboards seem to be growing more prominent as input formats. I suspect physical keyboards will still exist, but if they are rare direct keyboard connectors won't be common and that makes something like BlueTooth being the only type available much more likely.
2) Going out a bit more, I can think of an obvious improvement to the current system. Right now there is a general input buffer that goes to the kernel. From there mouse / keyboard input gets moved to the window manger which then either directly addresses the input or creates an application event and passes it off to applications. As PCs move beyond single CPU architectures, there is no reason that everything should go through a unified kernel that worked well for one CPU, one execution thread with interrupts. The more that systems can operate in parallel the faster they can go. So a far better architecture would be to have the window manager receiving the inputs from mice and keyboards directly and being able to send messages to the kernel or the applications. This way passive applications can run far away from access to input hardware, and you can start to have variable memory subsystems with faster RAM access times; like you see in mainframes.
Review is never going to work any better; what person with half a brain would want to work for the patent office reading this crap?
Why? Patent review understanding how invention work, discussing it with their inventors and deciding on what parts should or shouldn't be covered could be a quite interesting job for people with degrees in the sciences who themselves weren't particularly talented. Good jobs for people who want to go to grad school but weren't capable of writing a first class thesis for example. Or people who didn't get tenure. Or people who had research positions and then lost them.
When patents get struck down, patent holders and licensees should be liable to the tune of a significant percentage of their annual revenue, for the same length of time that the patent was in effect. And this money should be given as an incentive to lawyers in order to sue companies.
That's just a large tax applied arbitrarily.
No, it is not; that's just engineering.
Engineering is covered. The law is pretty clear,
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.
Pre-existing work invalidates a patent. That gets into the issue that patent review in the US is weak, not that patent law needs to be restructured. Though I should mention, getting all the parts to work together is grounds for a patent.
Well for one thing we know that mice and keyboards have been migrating towards a Bluetooth interface. Some are good, some are bad but I see no reason to believe there will be a physical connection in 10 years much less 25 years at all.
If we go a but further out, there are two major changes:
1) Mouses may cease to the the dominant form of pointer input at all, and even keyboards may disappear. We are clearly moving towards touch screen devices replacing mice. Apple's primary OS (by volume and profits) already works mostly exclusively this way, and Google's as well. Microsoft has already announced they intend to make this input format ubiquitous. For keyboards, screen keyboards, voice and light keyboards seem to be growing more prominent as input formats. I suspect physical keyboards will still exist, but if they are rare direct keyboard connectors won't be common and that makes something like BlueTooth being the only type available much more likely.
2) Going out a bit more, I can think of an obvious improvement to the current system. Right now there is a general input buffer that goes to the kernel. From there mouse / keyboard input gets moved to the window manger which then either directly addresses the input or creates an application event and passes it off to applications. As PCs move beyond single CPU architectures, there is no reason that everything should go through a unified kernel that worked well for one CPU, one execution thread with interrupts. The more that systems can operate in parallel the faster they can go. So a far better architecture would be to have the window manager receiving the inputs from mice and keyboards directly and being able to send messages to the kernel or the applications. This way passive applications can run far away from access to input hardware, and you can start to have variable memory subsystems with faster RAM access times; like you see in mainframes.
The people of Iraq were worse off prior to the invasion in terms of living standards. Most of the damage done to Iraq was either done before by the sanctions regime or after by the rebellion.
In terms of Libya, that uprising was rather broad. There is no strip-mining being done by foreign powers. Nor is there an occupation.
We already have a bid system for most products. Someone invents X.
a) The patent for X gets sold. That's a real bid. b) An X gets made.and sells. If X is making margin the R&D costs are being recouped.
if you can make the same product without ever looking at the product, ie by just thinking "how would would implement a wipe-to unlock mechanism to unlock a phone using a multitouch phone", you should be ok. companies would have no use for good ideas that are trivial to resolve
That's fine. And that is the law today. The question is why shouldn't the very idea of wipe-to-unlock be a patentable component of an interface? The idea of use wipe-to-unlock in the first place is what the argument is about. No one is arguing it is hard to implement. Parts of things that work well together are easy to implement almost all the time. Its figuring out how to put those parts together that's tricky. So the parts that never got used before get patented not so much to stop someone from using those parts but to stop them from using the whole.
The reason wipe-to-unlock was patented was to require people to either:
a) Come up with an entirely different style of interacting with a touch screen phone than the iPhone b) Pay a license fee to Apple.
Many things are trivial once you know they are possible and how. Again drugs are a good example. Once you know which approach works to cure disease X out of thousands of possibilities its easy. The steps in manufacturing a drug if you know the formula and know the chemical composition of a drug are always trivial.
I'm not saying that the current patent situation isn't harmful, particularly in technology but its important to understand what the problem is. It might be that the tech system decides that patents aren't worth it, for tech and there is blanket exclusion. But I don't think its a good idea to say that patents shouldn't exist in areas where they are providing benefit.
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There wouldn't have been a vote without his advocacy. He got it to the voting stage.
As for government involvement crowding out private investment. That's an easily testable hypothesis. There are societies that spend a lot of government directed research and societies that spend little. The two tend to positively correlate not negatively correlate.
Even if the bill never existed, there is a real business incentive to invest research in science that can be used to increase worker productivity.
It was pretty unclear at the time that the internet was going to be a worker productivity tool, other than in marketing and advertising. Further there are lots of science ideas which might increase labor productivity not getting funding. So I think its fair to say the private market isn't funding all, most or even a substantial fraction of potential areas.
How? The anti-trust violation was about using a monopoly in one area to create a monopoly in another. Its not about pushing standards in their area of monopoly (operating systems). Especially if that is in the public interest.
We both agree it is not "just as good" on legacy hardware. It can't be. A system designed to work only with mouse and keyboard is going to be better than a flexible system when used with just mouse and keyboard.
That sort of messaging will kill Windows 8, the same way chickening out on the higher hardware requirements for Longhorn killed WinFS, killed document security and made everyone think Vista was terrible. Microsoft is going to have to decide on where they want to take this.
I agree with the plan on Windows 8, assuming they do not for one second underestimate the degree of change they are trying to push. 1/2 measures will fail.
Why would you be sitting in an office? If people are mobile why pay for that incredibly expensive real estate? But even lets assume the office is being used. Most likely in a sit down office setting they would want to use a high end trackpad or touch tablet, not touching a 24-32" screen. If they are talking regularly and they are in an office, they are going to want to use a good quality microphone so they would be speaking softly, and that means headsets as well.
As far as voice recognition. Good voice recognition can be trained. See Dragon for example.
No its more sensible than that.
As tablets and phones start to become primary computing devices their limitations become more obvious.The most obvious limitations are connections with business productivity software. Microsoft is dominant in business productivity. If they can carry their business productivity advantages to tablets and phones they maintain their hold on the consumer space. If they fail, consumer becomes a software eco-system entirely different than enterprise by say 2020. That fast changing rapidly evolving eco-system will naturally develop business productivity applications for the small business market, while at the same time having volumes from consumer which will allow to it pull ahead in other ways.
Microsoft then spends 2020-2030 having done to it, what it did to IBM, DEC and Unisys.
I understand what you are saying. What I'm saying is that bright sunlight is an unusual working condition. But if the goal is to function well in bright sunlight you want entirely different type of screen. This isn't a quality difference you are actually in a situation where you preferring lower quality to higher. As an aside iPhone 4 does rather well in indirect sun but no emitting LCD is more than terrible above 40,000 LUX, and a bright southern condition you are likely at about 120,000 LUX or more.
In critic world they get the cake and they eat it.
Yes I'll agree. The real test is how they get treated when something is a genuine negative. Like for example when the iPhone wasn't available except on AT&T and AT&T was having data problems. But you do have a point, critics do also go with winners. I remember when I was a big fan of Apple during 2004 years their stuff got panned even when in areas where it was way better.
Macs for example has the best OS right now for 3D gaming (native), but you never hear about that because in practice no one brings out high end gaming for Mac using low level Apple only features.
I own the rMBP. I think we should subdivide the issue of price:
1) On the computer side, Apple is now dominant owning 90% of the $!000+ laptop market. There median PC laptop is $515, the median Apple $1400. Which means there really are two entirely different comparisons.
a) How does Apple compare to similar general purpose laptops. And there by virtue of the different target markets Apple shines. I think its fair to say if you are planning on spending $2k+ on a laptop, and don't need to be in Windows, you'll have a better experience on Apple.
b) How does Apple compare to similar specialized laptops, which are often at those price points. And since Apple doesn't make specialized laptops the PC laptops win easily.
c) Should you buy a high priced Apple or a low priced PC laptop? Which is the point you are getting at. That's an impossible comparison. A fair comparison might be used Apple laptops to new PC laptops. And there I think the PC is likely to come out ahead.
2) On the tablet side there are Android tablets at the same price points as the iPads, though generally they are more money for a less. Apple wins here on both price and experience, generally. As you go down market, with the tablets in the $40-300 range you start to run into the same problem you didn't with PC laptops vs. Apple. As you go up market you hit the Windows tablets with stylus and OneNote and those are vastly better devices for more money.
3) On the phone side, the price difference is somewhat obscured for most consumers by the higher subsidy. If a consumer is a getting a $14/mo subsidy on an Android vs. a $17/mo subsidy on a iPhone that blows away $72 in price difference for the raw device. Once you subtract off that difference, since it doesn't matter for consumers generally the iPhone is about the same money and a feature to feature comparison works out. When people have to buy phones unsubsidized they frequently consider cheap and look at the low end or used.
Why? There are thousands of potential technologies that never get the funding they need to get off the ground. Those that get substantial financial backing frequently do get off the ground. The government is one of the primary means by which technologies can get the seed money they need. Politicians run the government. Ergo...
small correction:
I should have added voice under keyboard.
So it should read
keyboard replaced by: onscreen, voice and rarely external
mouse replaced by: touch screen, stylus highly sensitive trackpad
That may not be the case. Microsoft controls the OEMs. It depends how committed Microsoft is to the shift in the laptop market. They can, if they so choose, force the market to switch.
The problem is the UI. Not only is it ugly, which maybe shouldn't matter to people but does, but it is not well designed for mouse+keyboard. They are trying to whack a tablet UI on to a desktop and for some reason they think that won't piss people off. So it isn't as pleasing to look at, and is less efficient to use than Windows 7.
They aren't trying to sell it for mouse+keyboard. They whole goal is
keyboard: onscreen or external
touch screen and stylus
mouse: replaced by stylus or trackpad
That's the devices this is aimed at.
There are two markets for desktops:
enterprise: Microsoft has Windows 7. Enterprises are mostly not done even their Windows 7 conversion and won't be moving again for a while.
consumer: Desktops aren't a high profit area. Its a thin margin rapidly declining market. Why would Microsoft want to target this group?
For example retina performs poorly in direct sunlight
Just about any backlit LCD performs poorly in direct sunlight. In direct sunlight you want a reflected light monitor not an emitted light monitor. Pixel Qi screens, for example, are used in laptops that need to perform well in direct sunlight. So what's your point that Apple's screens suffer from the same defect as 98% of the other laptop screens on the market? The retina also doesn't do well with heavy exposure to water, people who need to get their laptops wet have to go elsewhere.
The reason iDevices get good reviews is that the balance of all the various parts of the hardware and the software. That's a compelling package. Part by part they can obviously be beat, and for specialized used cases they can be beat. But what's missing is a broad based disadvantages for the iDevices relative to the competition.
8 years ago the 12" was 1.4ghz g4.
When was a 400 MHZ mac current? I think we are talking late OS8.
Laptops 20-25 years ago didn't have nice enough screen for serious work and needed a slew of peripherals....
Desktops 25-30 years ago didn't have enough RAM or CPU for serious work and had permanent design problems which would prevent them from every multitasking well enough....
Thanks you good information. I have no idea whether my telco had supporting equipment or not. I had University provided ISPs after about 1990 or so, so I doubt they had special equipment for student speed. I don't remember when I switched to DSL / Cable modem I'm thinking about '97 certainly by '99.
The law is quite clear: patents only cover novel and unobvious contributions. Merely putting together a bunch of known parts using engineering skills into something that's working isn't patentable, no matter how much of an effort it may have been.
I quoted you the section from the very start of the statue, "useful improvement".
The rest of this is mostly you are trying to shift the patent system to be narrower than it is.
Oh I agree computers are more popular today. The question is whether that's going to slow the rate of change as far as digital formats. It certainly should. But taking USB for example I've noticed the number of totally incompatible mini usb's I've had to go through in the last 5 years.
I think I self replied yesterday :
Well for one thing we know that mice and keyboards have been migrating towards a Bluetooth interface. Some are good, some are bad but I see no reason to believe there will be a physical connection in 10 years much less 25 years at all.
If we go a but further out, there are two major changes:
1) Mouses may cease to the the dominant form of pointer input at all, and even keyboards may disappear. We are clearly moving towards touch screen devices replacing mice. Apple's primary OS (by volume and profits) already works mostly exclusively this way, and Google's as well. Microsoft has already announced they intend to make this input format ubiquitous. For keyboards, screen keyboards, voice and light keyboards seem to be growing more prominent as input formats. I suspect physical keyboards will still exist, but if they are rare direct keyboard connectors won't be common and that makes something like BlueTooth being the only type available much more likely.
2) Going out a bit more, I can think of an obvious improvement to the current system. Right now there is a general input buffer that goes to the kernel. From there mouse / keyboard input gets moved to the window manger which then either directly addresses the input or creates an application event and passes it off to applications. As PCs move beyond single CPU architectures, there is no reason that everything should go through a unified kernel that worked well for one CPU, one execution thread with interrupts. The more that systems can operate in parallel the faster they can go. So a far better architecture would be to have the window manager receiving the inputs from mice and keyboards directly and being able to send messages to the kernel or the applications. This way passive applications can run far away from access to input hardware, and you can start to have variable memory subsystems with faster RAM access times; like you see in mainframes.
Review is never going to work any better; what person with half a brain would want to work for the patent office reading this crap?
Why? Patent review understanding how invention work, discussing it with their inventors and deciding on what parts should or shouldn't be covered could be a quite interesting job for people with degrees in the sciences who themselves weren't particularly talented. Good jobs for people who want to go to grad school but weren't capable of writing a first class thesis for example. Or people who didn't get tenure. Or people who had research positions and then lost them.
When patents get struck down, patent holders and licensees should be liable to the tune of a significant percentage of their annual revenue, for the same length of time that the patent was in effect. And this money should be given as an incentive to lawyers in order to sue companies.
That's just a large tax applied arbitrarily.
No, it is not; that's just engineering.
Engineering is covered. The law is pretty clear,
Pre-existing work invalidates a patent. That gets into the issue that patent review in the US is weak, not that patent law needs to be restructured. Though I should mention, getting all the parts to work together is grounds for a patent.
Well for one thing we know that mice and keyboards have been migrating towards a Bluetooth interface. Some are good, some are bad but I see no reason to believe there will be a physical connection in 10 years much less 25 years at all.
If we go a but further out, there are two major changes:
1) Mouses may cease to the the dominant form of pointer input at all, and even keyboards may disappear. We are clearly moving towards touch screen devices replacing mice. Apple's primary OS (by volume and profits) already works mostly exclusively this way, and Google's as well. Microsoft has already announced they intend to make this input format ubiquitous. For keyboards, screen keyboards, voice and light keyboards seem to be growing more prominent as input formats. I suspect physical keyboards will still exist, but if they are rare direct keyboard connectors won't be common and that makes something like BlueTooth being the only type available much more likely.
2) Going out a bit more, I can think of an obvious improvement to the current system. Right now there is a general input buffer that goes to the kernel. From there mouse / keyboard input gets moved to the window manger which then either directly addresses the input or creates an application event and passes it off to applications. As PCs move beyond single CPU architectures, there is no reason that everything should go through a unified kernel that worked well for one CPU, one execution thread with interrupts. The more that systems can operate in parallel the faster they can go. So a far better architecture would be to have the window manager receiving the inputs from mice and keyboards directly and being able to send messages to the kernel or the applications. This way passive applications can run far away from access to input hardware, and you can start to have variable memory subsystems with faster RAM access times; like you see in mainframes.
The people of Iraq were worse off prior to the invasion in terms of living standards. Most of the damage done to Iraq was either done before by the sanctions regime or after by the rebellion.
In terms of Libya, that uprising was rather broad. There is no strip-mining being done by foreign powers. Nor is there an occupation.
We already have a bid system for most products. Someone invents X.
a) The patent for X gets sold. That's a real bid.
b) An X gets made.and sells. If X is making margin the R&D costs are being recouped.
if you can make the same product without ever looking at the product, ie by just thinking "how would would implement a wipe-to unlock mechanism to unlock a phone using a multitouch phone", you should be ok. companies would have no use for good ideas that are trivial to resolve
That's fine. And that is the law today. The question is why shouldn't the very idea of wipe-to-unlock be a patentable component of an interface? The idea of use wipe-to-unlock in the first place is what the argument is about. No one is arguing it is hard to implement. Parts of things that work well together are easy to implement almost all the time. Its figuring out how to put those parts together that's tricky. So the parts that never got used before get patented not so much to stop someone from using those parts but to stop them from using the whole.
The reason wipe-to-unlock was patented was to require people to either:
a) Come up with an entirely different style of interacting with a touch screen phone than the iPhone
b) Pay a license fee to Apple.
Many things are trivial once you know they are possible and how. Again drugs are a good example. Once you know which approach works to cure disease X out of thousands of possibilities its easy. The steps in manufacturing a drug if you know the formula and know the chemical composition of a drug are always trivial.
I'm not saying that the current patent situation isn't harmful, particularly in technology but its important to understand what the problem is. It might be that the tech system decides that patents aren't worth it, for tech and there is blanket exclusion. But I don't think its a good idea to say that patents shouldn't exist in areas where they are providing benefit.