However, the cost of settling a case like this for $15 or $20 000 is less than the cost of a coupla' good IP lawyers.
Unfortunately, it'd probably be even a lot more than that, especially in Chocolatier's case. My question is: if all of these legal types and law professors are in a tizzy about it, why are none of them willing to offer their support for pro bono work, or even nominal compensation. This effects *everyone*, and this is a precedent that should not be allowed to continue. If a couple of prominent IP lawyers were willing to donate some time for what would appear to be an open-and-shut case, they would pave the way for others. PanIP would probably stop hounding all of these small businesses for cash. IANAL, but if they didn't, they could just bring them to court with a local lawyer, and pretty much only have prove that they're under the same umbrella as SoandSo vs. PanIP, not? I hear so much speculation by prominent lawyers about how awful these new laws are, but no one is willing to give up their time to do anything. Hell, we're decently paid professionals too, and a lot of us give away our professional works for the greater good.
I agree, but to me it appears complex on the part of the buying public than that. Will John Q. Buyincds decide that he doesn't want to buy the new Avril Lavigne CD because it won't work in his existing CD player? Or will they buy another brand just to have the ability to get that new CD later on if they want it, just because some rogue music publisher asserts that their existing player is faulty (I say rogue meaning against the grain, they are certainly not an upstart)? In a perfect world, people would see the social responsibility involved, and would keep their existing, non-BMG-compliant readers or buy new ones, and just not buy BMG crippled CDs. Unfortunately, people nowadays tend to shrug off social responsibility in favor of convenience, so they might keep their Phillips player for now, but all external forces aside, probably buy a Sony or Kenwood CD player next time (assuming that those companies adhere to BMG standards).
"THIRD WORLD -- the economically underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, considered as an entity with common characteristics, such as poverty, high birthrates, and economic dependence on the advanced countries. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the expression ("tiers monde" in French) in 1952 by analogy with the "third estate," the commoners of France before and during the French Revolution-as opposed to priests and nobles, comprising the first and second estates respectively. Like the third estate, wrote Sauvy, the third world is nothing, and it "wants to be something." The term therefore implies that the third world is exploited, much as the third estate was exploited, and that, like the third estate its destiny is a revolutionary one. It conveys as well a second idea, also discussed by Sauvy, that of non-alignment, for the third world belongs neither to the industrialized capitalist world nor to the industrialized Communist bloc. The expression third world was used at the 1955 conference of Afro-Asian countries held in Bandung, Indonesia. In 1956 a group of social scientists associated with Sauvy's National Institute of Demographic Studies, in Paris, published a book called Le Tiers-Monde. Three years later, the French economist Francois Perroux launched a new journal, on problems of underdevelopment, with the same title. By the end of the 1950's the term was frequently employed in the French media to refer to the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America."
I don't necessarily agree. I'll accept that a document comprised of the main points of the EULA would be deleterious to both the user and manufacturer, as key points that aren't deemed major slip through the cracks. However, you'll be hard pressed to find a legal term that can't be translated into layman speak. An exact translation would be too verbose, but if there were a line-for-line translation into plain English, perhaps that would prove to suit the needs of all parties involved.
But if the appeals circuit courts say that you did not, in fact, infringe on patents, then there is no reason why the inventor should receive that US$42 million. Thankfully, it has already been pointed out that such is not the case here, Intel and Intergraph agreed outside of court that Intel would pay $150 million if they lost the case.
The thing that still puzzles me is that it was settled out of court in an agreement that if Intel lost the case, they would pay $150 million to Intergraph to license their patent. Yet, if the appeal shows that Intel did nothing wrong, I don't see why they can't just renege on the contract, as they didn't really lose the case then. This whole deal to me seems like legal gambling.
From the article: "The companies further agreed that Intel would pay Intergraph an additional $100 million if it filed and lost an appeal."
If they're already out $150 million, according to that they would have only been out $150 if they *didn't* appeal at all, and just sought to license the patent from Intergraph. It seems rather silly to bring about more litigation to me.
Read that one again, chief. This thread is chock full of people who just don't get jokes. I've read before that the only benefit Solaris has is Sun hardware, and that's pretty true. Porting another UNIX to x86 just isn't going to sell very many copies. Hence the joke, UNIX has been on x86 for some time now, in one form or another.
Agreed, I tried not to sound bitter in that post, but it was hard not to recall such things. Certainly, I would agree with you if they were blocking sites just for containing contrary viewpoints. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the sites (or even a listing of the sites, really..I'd be interested to see them, as they're not banned here), so I can't say who's right then, they may be blocking simply pro-life sites. The limited scope of the actual block list would lead me to *hope* that they're only blocking sites of organizations that conspire to commit murder.
Well, often times anti-abortion groups are quite hateful and mob-ruled.
When's the last time a doctor who performed a birth after the mother decided against abortion was sniped? Many US doctors have been shot, or their offices been burned and/or pillaged for performing abortions after the mother decided against childbirth. A year or so ago, I took a good friend of mine to get an abortion, and we had to identify ourselves through an armored door thicker than some banks to get in, and they literally have to do that to protect themselves. If that's not hate, McCart42, what is?
Again, I don't condone silencing free speech, but where do you draw the line? I don't see how the blind hatred of people for their skin color is different than blind hatred for those that make decisions that do not concern yourself.
Of course there is the smart Joe cheater that will eventually release a program that will change the mac address for you, but thats niether here nor there nor central to the argument.
If there is a program that allows you to do it, then Joe Cheater *does* know how to do it, regardless of his knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes.
..and I go to a pretty large school that uses MAC addresses to authenticate client computers..but only when requesting an IP from the DHCP server. We all have static IP addresses, but they're assigned by a DHCP server that hands them out based on MAC addresses, if you statically assign one not in use to your computer, you'll get on fine and no one will probably notice for a good while, so long as you don't keep it on 24x7. I wouldn't be surprised of other colleges did something similar.
A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.
Side to side? Let them have their fun, I like swinging forward and backward best, anyway.
Well jeez, according to that site...the National Association of Broadcasters only gave $3,000 to his campaign fund. Is that seriously all? I'd give $3,000 myself to any politician who would strikedown pro-RIAA legislation.
But it's a fairly obscure point that most people seem to just ignore.
I do agree with your logic, however saying "twenty times larger" is a form mathematical slang to begin with. Are we multiplying 20 by the integerial value of the string "larger"? Well, no. The multiplication by fractions to describe a smaller quantity is quite lucid, but we're not really talking about strict mathematics anymore, so it really becomes a matter of whether or not you want to adhere to the conventions of the notation from whence your phrase descended. Keeping that in mind, it becomes more of a question of which is proper in English grammar.
I'm pretty sure reading the rest of his post that the "A" there was part of the battery name (BP1-A, BP-71A, both in the post), not an article describing the battery ("A battery"). Thus he was not describing his own BP1 as being half empty, he was describing the BP1-A as being shoddy by calling it half empty. Admittedly, I can't find any mention of this battery type via google, but I surmise from his mention of the BP-71A type that perhaps it was just mistyped.
..and the problem is that my PowerBook gets between 3.5 and 4 hours of battery time. Another battery from apple.com is $129, $70 less than a Vaio battery on eBay, and would give me 7-8 hours total uptime.
My roommate has a laptop about this size not *quite* as thin, that is from circa 1993-4. There's nothing especially new here, it's just that in recent years the push has been for powerful machines that can push as many pixels as a gaming desktop can. Now that we can squeeze all those transistors into a tiny space, the trend is back to form, not function, and everyone wants a thin, trendy laptop.
There are reasons why you're wrong, mainly because it's already been ported to a lot of other architectures (I knew about Alpha, though I heard from a professor that support was dropped after NT 4), but here:
1) It's mostly written in c/c++ I don't quite follow you here. Are you saying that it would be easier to port XP/NT the way it is as opposed to if the entire thing were written with x86 ASM? Then yes, I agree. Although, even so, while a simple recompile may work with a simple program in C/C++ (and not-so-simple programs), there are still thousands of libraries that need to be checked and possibly ported. Running gcc on the beast just isn't going to cut it. C/C++ is versatile, but it is not the end-all be-all of portability.
2) The HAL (Harware Abstraction Layer) contains most of the platform specific code. As I understand it the kernel does not actually handle the hardware directly While I can't say for sure, I'd venture a guess that that layer is part of the XP design...which is STILL going to have to be ported. Even if you move *all* of your platform-specific code to one layer, you've still got to rewrite that layer before you can do anything.
As it's been said though, NT (almost assuredly not XP, possibly 2000, and certainly NT4) has already been ported to other architectures, as well as 64 bit machines. Also, I highly doubt Apple is going to ask Microsoft to port XP to their processors. Apparently XP is already ported to PPC (Motorola's PPC arch that Apple uses? not sure). But Apple doesn't even make processors, they already are 90% certainly going ahead with IBM's new Altivec-compatible PPC chip, and they JUST came out with a new version of their already accoladed OS, which a lot of critics now describe as being ready for "primetime" in both Apple and UNIX environments.
They also vary the theme between aqua and brushed metal seemingly at random in their apps collection. This goes flat against their own HIG.
I recall reading somewhere that with the advent of the Developer Toolkit release that came out around the Jaguar release (which added the ability to create applications with brushed metal look-and-feel), Apple was advocating that general applications continue to use the normal Aqua style, and applications created to be an interface to hardware (iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, et c.) should use the brushed metal theme. They may not strictly adhere to this (and it seems kinda hokey to me), but there is some rhyme and reason behind this.
2) they have no rights under our system as they are housed on forgin soil and have never toutched our shores...there is a few court rulings on that one
Without getting further into an offtopic war, I'll say this: That is why the US government is taking them to Cuba, so they don't have rights according to American laws. That was the ENTIRE point of the comment about taking them to Cuba. Somehow that one got by you.
Don't forget, a lot of AOL users (and dialup users in general) have a second phone line already just for internet access. Dropping the second phone line in favor of getting cable would on average decrease their phone bill by $15-20 per month. For most folks , this actually pushes the cost of AOL just a tiny bit above cable.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the cost of settling a case like this for $15 or $20 000 is less than the cost of a coupla' good IP lawyers.
Unfortunately, it'd probably be even a lot more than that, especially in Chocolatier's case. My question is: if all of these legal types and law professors are in a tizzy about it, why are none of them willing to offer their support for pro bono work, or even nominal compensation. This effects *everyone*, and this is a precedent that should not be allowed to continue. If a couple of prominent IP lawyers were willing to donate some time for what would appear to be an open-and-shut case, they would pave the way for others. PanIP would probably stop hounding all of these small businesses for cash. IANAL, but if they didn't, they could just bring them to court with a local lawyer, and pretty much only have prove that they're under the same umbrella as SoandSo vs. PanIP, not? I hear so much speculation by prominent lawyers about how awful these new laws are, but no one is willing to give up their time to do anything. Hell, we're decently paid professionals too, and a lot of us give away our professional works for the greater good.
I agree, but to me it appears complex on the part of the buying public than that. Will John Q. Buyincds decide that he doesn't want to buy the new Avril Lavigne CD because it won't work in his existing CD player? Or will they buy another brand just to have the ability to get that new CD later on if they want it, just because some rogue music publisher asserts that their existing player is faulty (I say rogue meaning against the grain, they are certainly not an upstart)? In a perfect world, people would see the social responsibility involved, and would keep their existing, non-BMG-compliant readers or buy new ones, and just not buy BMG crippled CDs. Unfortunately, people nowadays tend to shrug off social responsibility in favor of convenience, so they might keep their Phillips player for now, but all external forces aside, probably buy a Sony or Kenwood CD player next time (assuming that those companies adhere to BMG standards).
"THIRD WORLD -- the economically underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, considered as an entity with common characteristics, such as poverty, high birthrates, and economic dependence on the advanced countries. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the expression ("tiers monde" in French) in 1952 by analogy with the "third estate," the commoners of France before and during the French Revolution-as opposed to priests and nobles, comprising the first and second estates respectively. Like the third estate, wrote Sauvy, the third world is nothing, and it "wants to be something." The term therefore implies that the third world is exploited, much as the third estate was exploited, and that, like the third estate its destiny is a revolutionary one. It conveys as well a second idea, also discussed by Sauvy, that of non-alignment, for the third world belongs neither to the industrialized capitalist world nor to the industrialized Communist bloc. The expression third world was used at the 1955 conference of Afro-Asian countries held in Bandung, Indonesia. In 1956 a group of social scientists associated with Sauvy's National Institute of Demographic Studies, in Paris, published a book called Le Tiers-Monde. Three years later, the French economist Francois Perroux launched a new journal, on problems of underdevelopment, with the same title. By the end of the 1950's the term was frequently employed in the French media to refer to the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America."
r ld_def.html
t ml
Source: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/General/ThirdWo
See also:
http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/11-27-01askeds.h
http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/oncwg.htm (slightly different take on the term)
I don't necessarily agree. I'll accept that a document comprised of the main points of the EULA would be deleterious to both the user and manufacturer, as key points that aren't deemed major slip through the cracks. However, you'll be hard pressed to find a legal term that can't be translated into layman speak. An exact translation would be too verbose, but if there were a line-for-line translation into plain English, perhaps that would prove to suit the needs of all parties involved.
But if the appeals circuit courts say that you did not, in fact, infringe on patents, then there is no reason why the inventor should receive that US$42 million. Thankfully, it has already been pointed out that such is not the case here, Intel and Intergraph agreed outside of court that Intel would pay $150 million if they lost the case.
The thing that still puzzles me is that it was settled out of court in an agreement that if Intel lost the case, they would pay $150 million to Intergraph to license their patent. Yet, if the appeal shows that Intel did nothing wrong, I don't see why they can't just renege on the contract, as they didn't really lose the case then. This whole deal to me seems like legal gambling.
From the article: "The companies further agreed that Intel would pay Intergraph an additional $100 million if it filed and lost an appeal."
If they're already out $150 million, according to that they would have only been out $150 if they *didn't* appeal at all, and just sought to license the patent from Intergraph. It seems rather silly to bring about more litigation to me.
"Finally UNIX comes to x86!"
Read that one again, chief. This thread is chock full of people who just don't get jokes. I've read before that the only benefit Solaris has is Sun hardware, and that's pretty true. Porting another UNIX to x86 just isn't going to sell very many copies. Hence the joke, UNIX has been on x86 for some time now, in one form or another.
Ah, but abortion is legal for the first two trimesters. Murder by the legal definition is never lawful. Morality has nothing to do with this.
Agreed, I tried not to sound bitter in that post, but it was hard not to recall such things. Certainly, I would agree with you if they were blocking sites just for containing contrary viewpoints. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the sites (or even a listing of the sites, really..I'd be interested to see them, as they're not banned here), so I can't say who's right then, they may be blocking simply pro-life sites. The limited scope of the actual block list would lead me to *hope* that they're only blocking sites of organizations that conspire to commit murder.
Well, often times anti-abortion groups are quite hateful and mob-ruled.
When's the last time a doctor who performed a birth after the mother decided against abortion was sniped? Many US doctors have been shot, or their offices been burned and/or pillaged for performing abortions after the mother decided against childbirth. A year or so ago, I took a good friend of mine to get an abortion, and we had to identify ourselves through an armored door thicker than some banks to get in, and they literally have to do that to protect themselves. If that's not hate, McCart42, what is?
Again, I don't condone silencing free speech, but where do you draw the line? I don't see how the blind hatred of people for their skin color is different than blind hatred for those that make decisions that do not concern yourself.
A subterranean bunker is designed to withstand nuclear wars, but what do you think would happen if the nuke was inside the bunker?
There would be a lot of cooked pork and beans everywhere that *SOMEONE* would have to explain.
Of course there is the smart Joe cheater that will eventually release a program that will change the mac address for you, but thats niether here nor there nor central to the argument.
..and I go to a pretty large school that uses MAC addresses to authenticate client computers..but only when requesting an IP from the DHCP server. We all have static IP addresses, but they're assigned by a DHCP server that hands them out based on MAC addresses, if you statically assign one not in use to your computer, you'll get on fine and no one will probably notice for a good while, so long as you don't keep it on 24x7. I wouldn't be surprised of other colleges did something similar.
If there is a program that allows you to do it, then Joe Cheater *does* know how to do it, regardless of his knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes.
A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.
Side to side? Let them have their fun, I like swinging forward and backward best, anyway.
Well jeez, according to that site...the National Association of Broadcasters only gave $3,000 to his campaign fund. Is that seriously all? I'd give $3,000 myself to any politician who would strikedown pro-RIAA legislation.
They also hold patents on prostate cancer-causing genes.
Further proof that men just don't complain as much as women.
QED.
But it's a fairly obscure point that most people seem to just ignore.
I do agree with your logic, however saying "twenty times larger" is a form mathematical slang to begin with. Are we multiplying 20 by the integerial value of the string "larger"? Well, no. The multiplication by fractions to describe a smaller quantity is quite lucid, but we're not really talking about strict mathematics anymore, so it really becomes a matter of whether or not you want to adhere to the conventions of the notation from whence your phrase descended. Keeping that in mind, it becomes more of a question of which is proper in English grammar.
I'm pretty sure reading the rest of his post that the "A" there was part of the battery name (BP1-A, BP-71A, both in the post), not an article describing the battery ("A battery"). Thus he was not describing his own BP1 as being half empty, he was describing the BP1-A as being shoddy by calling it half empty. Admittedly, I can't find any mention of this battery type via google, but I surmise from his mention of the BP-71A type that perhaps it was just mistyped.
..and the problem is that my PowerBook gets between 3.5 and 4 hours of battery time. Another battery from apple.com is $129, $70 less than a Vaio battery on eBay, and would give me 7-8 hours total uptime.
My roommate has a laptop about this size not *quite* as thin, that is from circa 1993-4. There's nothing especially new here, it's just that in recent years the push has been for powerful machines that can push as many pixels as a gaming desktop can. Now that we can squeeze all those transistors into a tiny space, the trend is back to form, not function, and everyone wants a thin, trendy laptop.
So buy an iBook and install any distribution of Linux for PPC :)
There are reasons why you're wrong, mainly because it's already been ported to a lot of other architectures (I knew about Alpha, though I heard from a professor that support was dropped after NT 4), but here:
1) It's mostly written in c/c++
I don't quite follow you here. Are you saying that it would be easier to port XP/NT the way it is as opposed to if the entire thing were written with x86 ASM? Then yes, I agree. Although, even so, while a simple recompile may work with a simple program in C/C++ (and not-so-simple programs), there are still thousands of libraries that need to be checked and possibly ported. Running gcc on the beast just isn't going to cut it. C/C++ is versatile, but it is not the end-all be-all of portability.
2) The HAL (Harware Abstraction Layer) contains most of the platform specific code. As I understand it the kernel does not actually handle the hardware directly
While I can't say for sure, I'd venture a guess that that layer is part of the XP design...which is STILL going to have to be ported. Even if you move *all* of your platform-specific code to one layer, you've still got to rewrite that layer before you can do anything.
As it's been said though, NT (almost assuredly not XP, possibly 2000, and certainly NT4) has already been ported to other architectures, as well as 64 bit machines. Also, I highly doubt Apple is going to ask Microsoft to port XP to their processors. Apparently XP is already ported to PPC (Motorola's PPC arch that Apple uses? not sure). But Apple doesn't even make processors, they already are 90% certainly going ahead with IBM's new Altivec-compatible PPC chip, and they JUST came out with a new version of their already accoladed OS, which a lot of critics now describe as being ready for "primetime" in both Apple and UNIX environments.
It's amazing how you can get all of that detail out of his original 7 words.
They also vary the theme between aqua and brushed metal seemingly at random in their apps collection. This goes flat against their own HIG.
I recall reading somewhere that with the advent of the Developer Toolkit release that came out around the Jaguar release (which added the ability to create applications with brushed metal look-and-feel), Apple was advocating that general applications continue to use the normal Aqua style, and applications created to be an interface to hardware (iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, et c.) should use the brushed metal theme. They may not strictly adhere to this (and it seems kinda hokey to me), but there is some rhyme and reason behind this.
2) they have no rights under our system as they are housed on forgin soil and have never toutched our shores...there is a few court rulings on that one
Without getting further into an offtopic war, I'll say this: That is why the US government is taking them to Cuba, so they don't have rights according to American laws. That was the ENTIRE point of the comment about taking them to Cuba. Somehow that one got by you.
..but what about Windows XP Home edition?
Don't forget, a lot of AOL users (and dialup users in general) have a second phone line already just for internet access. Dropping the second phone line in favor of getting cable would on average decrease their phone bill by $15-20 per month. For most folks , this actually pushes the cost of AOL just a tiny bit above cable.