As of right now, the average Chinese person emits as much carbon as the average European [todayonline.com] -- and there are many more Chinese people.
Most of the Chinese emissions are for the creation of products shipped to Europe and the US. These are basically emissions that are exported to China.
At some point, we will have used up enough land so that pollution, species loss and loss of renewable resources makes us get a Darwin award as a species.
Species grow until they reach the carrying capacity of the environment. They don't die out when they do, they stabilize and/or evolve. Humans have done this many times before.
You think it's a bad idea to seed the oceans with iron, because our interfering with the natural ecosystem might have unintended consequences. So instead, you're suggesting that we should do nothing to stop our interfering with the natural ecosystem by pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the air.
Of course, we should reduce our burning of fossil fuels, and we will, as new technologies become available, because fossil fuels are expensive. Governments should stop subsidizing oil, gas, and coal and they should invest more in research on renewable energy and energy efficiency, as well as loosen regulations for the deployment of nuclear and renewable generators.
What we should not do is compound the problem by engaging in additional environmental tinkering, subsidizing both fossil fuel and renewable energies, or give governments even more command over the economy, because all of those will make the problem worse.
Every operating system (including iOS) has some technical problems in its initial release,
WebOS didn't have "some technical problems", it used entirely the wrong paradigm. And by the time it came out, Palm was already dead.
It was only after the deluge of low-cost Android i-clones that the bottom dropped out for Palm, so I think that it is pretty clear that Apple's inability to protect its design killed Palm.
Stop saying that it was "Apple's design"; Apple ripped off most of that design from others, much of it Palm. In fact, since Android's release, Apple keep ripping off features from Android.
Apple's declared m.o. is to look at other people's products and steal the best features:
What Jobs didn't say was that Apple then turns around, patents like hell, and tries to sue others.
And if WebOS had been a success, Apple would have sued Palm into oblivion.
And, yes, Android phones are cheap. Easy to use $100 smart phones are a good thing, as opposed to Apple's overpriced, heavily restricted toys for whiny teenagers.
You're arguing about the rounding error on his poverty line value?
A more than 50% increase is hardly a "rounding error".
People who cannot afford to live without government assistance seems like a pretty good definition of "poor" to me.
Well, then Obama wants us all to be poor and keep us poor, given that he keeps telling us that without government assistance, we can do nothing. Just look at his "Julia".
My parents saved for a decade before they bought their house, in the suburbs, and waited with kids until they bought a house. I saved for a decade before I bought mine. And you expect to be able to just plunk down money, move into a house in the city, and have kids right away? What kind of fantasy world do you live in? Furthermore, home ownership rates have actually increased significantly since the 60's.
It does not matter if USA poverty rates were higher than the typical wage of another nation. The relative cost of living differs greatly
Which part of "purchasing power parity" do you not understand?
Relative poverty levels are all that matters;
Relative levels (i.e., relative to other earners) are irrelevant. What matters is how you live: how big your house is, how much food you have, what transportation and education options you have, and those depend on purchasing power parity (PPP).
I can't imagine that piracy makes more than a few percent of potential Android purchases; most people just don't have the time, and the prices are too low to make it worth it. I suspect this is a marketing gimmick. As I recall from the reviews, this game already used to be free, but was constantly bugging people about in-app purchases.
In 1960 a college graduate could own a home and support a family on one full time salary. In 2012, positions like that are vanishingly rare.
You can easily buy an home that's the size and style of the 1960's and furnish it with 1960's-level furniture and technology: a phone, a TV receiving three channels, and not much else.
If you want two cars, modern health care, iphones, cable, Internet, large screen TVs, video game consoles, two garages, 2500 sq ft, all close to the highway, coast, and a major urban center, however, then it's going to cost you more.
I think that what ultimately killed Palm (and Blackberry) was all of the iPhone knock-offs running Android.
No, take it from a long-time Palm user: Palm failed because it was an obsolete and buggy p.o.s. That's why the Android founders left Palm and... founded Android.
Palm could have competed with Apple's limited, and somewhat pricey, product line
No, they couldn't. Palm had been resting on their laurels, Apple had ripped off all the best features of Palm, and Palm had no way of competing with that. Since Android has been released, Apple has been ripping off feature after feature from Android, that is, when Apple isn't ripping off features from small software developers.
Apple and Steve Jobs were evil rip-off artist, but that's OK; that's business competition and it caused Palm and RIM to disappear from the market, which they well deserved.
Where I draw the line is if Apple tries to claim ownership of other people's inventions.
That kind of "poverty" is relative poverty; it's just another way of saying that the income distribution is skewed in the US and is really just a bad version of the Gini index. It has nothing to do with actual, absolute poverty. You can be absolutely rich and relatively poor, or absolutely poor but relatively rich.
Look at it in international comparisons. In 2007, US poverty level for a family of three was $17000/year, and median household income was about $31000. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), in the same year, median family income in Germany was about $21000, Japan was about $19000, in Italy $17000, in Israel about $14000. EU median is about $15000.
So if you apply US poverty measures, more than half of EU citizens, and a large part of even rich countries like Germany and Japan, live "in poverty", and it gets worse if you consider all of continental Europe and if you consider that PPP doesn't account for a lot of taxes and expenses.
But if you really think that Europeans are doing so much better economically, it's easy to get a work permit for Europe and move there.
I quoted you the section from the very start of the statue, "useful improvement".
The statute says "NEW AND useful method etc." and "NEW AND useful improvement thereof". It needs to be both "useful" and "NEW".
Besides, Apple isn't claiming a patent on the iPhone, so whether you think the combination is "new" and patent-worthy doesn't matter. Apple is claiming trademarks and "design patents", and those criteria are different.
Most of the stuff Apple actually tried to patent (e.g. sliding unlock) fails the novelty test.
Apple is abusing intellectual property and trying to claim as theirs what isn't theirs.
And yet none of the companies that had experimented with touch screen phones had had particularly great success with them. Seems like Apple must have added something to produce the iPhone's runaway success, much faster than the growth of the market.
Palm OS had been very successful with its touch screen PDAs and phones. They were having problems because they had a 16bit OS and were fumbling the 32bit replacement. Apple's iPhone was a rip-off of Palm and the other platforms, but based on a better 32bit platform. iPhone succeeded was because Palm, Nokia, and Microsoft fumbled on execution and were mired in backwards compatibility issues, and because Android was delayed due to Google's purchase. iPhone's success was temporary (and limited), and within a year, Android came out and started running rings around iOS on technology, including in the all-important touch screen keyboard input (otherwise, many people including me would want RIM-style keyboards; I can't stand Apple's piss-poor keyboard).
No, I infer that nobody else had the courage or vision to make the investment and take the risk to enter the market with a phone of that design.
Oh, cut the myth making. Apple wasn't some lone company with a vision that nobody else had; Apple saw a fast-growing market in smartphones, copied the best features of their competitors, and produced a good product. And now they are trying to keep competitors out by underhanded tricks.
And I believe that it would be a good thing if the patent system rewarded companies with courage and vision to take risks that ultimately advance design and benefit consumers.
The patent system is there to encourage the sharing of technological innovation, nothing else. And as one of the biggest and richest companies, Apple hardly needs any more rewards anyway.
Claiming that people thought there was a small market for these phones is bullshit. There were tons of touch screen phones and PDAs since the mid-90's and they were selling briskly. Apple massively ripped off design elements and features from Sony, Palm, Microsoft, and Nokia, plus some third party apps, in the design of the iPhone. Lots of Apple employees had phones and devices from these manufacturers.
Apple entered the market as it was growing briskly, and they had a well-engineered product, in no small part because all these other companies had already done the hard work. Even Apple's icon designs were hardly original.
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.
Yes, that's the way the system works: the patent office gets the bottom of the barrel for examiners, since there is a shortage of STEM graduates. That's why lousy patents keep getting approved.
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.
There is nothing arbitrary about penalizing companies for filing bad patents. Nor is it a tax. The current system amounts to highway robbery, since companies like Apple (and many others) are gaming the system and obtaining temporary monopolies for inventions they didn't even create themselves; and the rest of us are paying the price.
Engineering is covered. The law is pretty clear,
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 guess I see the UI work that Apple did on the iPhone as original and innovative and not at all standard
Apple didn't patent "the UI work", they patented specific aspects of it: sliders, elastic bounce-back, etc. Those elements were not novel.
I'd never seen anything like it at the time, and probably the ATM was the only touch interface I commonly used.
Well, that was perhaps the problem. There were tons of touch apps for Palm and Window Mobile for many years before the iPhone.
What Apple refers to in its own documentation since the Mac 128 day are Human Interface Guidelines which describe guidelines and principles, not standards.
You're confusing "standards" in the formal standards with "standards" in the "what people generally do and expect" kind of sense. Apple picked a bunch of elements innovated by others and pulled them together into a UI. They did a good job, achieved commercial success, so that particular became a "standard", in the sense that that's how everybody expects touch screens to work. There is no reason in the world to give Apple a monopoly on that.
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.
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? "We need better review" is just a lame excuse by people who like the status quo, a status quot that gives companies like Apple a government-granted near-monopoly.
We need to change patent law so that patent laws are self-enforcing; in particular, there need to be tough consequences when companies file or obtain invalid patents, and even tougher consequences when they try to assert 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.
Though I should mention, getting all the parts to work together is grounds for a patent.
Pretty much everything that iPhone did years later was already available on Palm, Nokia and Windows Mobile, sometimes as part of the OS, more often from third party vendors.
The reason the iPhone took off because all that wonderful functionality was too hard to use on those other platforms: things were hard to install, the OS couldn't deal with large apps, the touch screen hardware was worse, syncing was unreliable, etc.
Apple did a better job at engineering the hardware and operating system than those other companies, but almost all the functionality of the iPhone, Apple copied from others.
I'm not "singling out Apple"; Apple is suing people left and right with weak patents, and that means that those cases present the possibility for changing legal standards through precedent. If Google or Microsoft were suing people left and right like that, then we'd talk about them instead, but they aren't.
One can talk about Motorola's and Nokia's shenanigans with RAND patents, but that's a different issue: by and large, unlike Apple's patents, those are reasonable from a technical point of view but those companies are violating their commitments. Of course, they are doing so only because of Apple's actions.
Furthermore, Apple isn't like any other company. Apple has been abusing intellectual property laws and has been copying other people's inventions for a quarter century. They tried the same tactic with user interfaces, where they first copied windowing interfaces from Xerox, MIT, and others, and then tried to prevent everybody else from using them. If they had prevailed back then and managed to set a precedent, there'd likely be no Gnome, KDE, X11, or Windows today.
I don't see how that invalidates my argument, namely that the Google/Apple dispute is not about innovation but standardization of common UI elements. Apple attempts to patent arbitrary interface standards to create incompatibilities; Apple isn't patenting actual innovation. And Apple can do that because they are first.
Saying that doesn't mean that there are never any innovations in interfaces. The analogy was only intended to show the benefit of standardization. But the fact that there may have been actual innovation or valid patents in the case of cars doesn't mean that what Apple did for touch screens was actual innovation or should have been patented (it wasn't and it shouldn't).
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Most of the Chinese emissions are for the creation of products shipped to Europe and the US. These are basically emissions that are exported to China.
Species grow until they reach the carrying capacity of the environment. They don't die out when they do, they stabilize and/or evolve. Humans have done this many times before.
Of course, we should reduce our burning of fossil fuels, and we will, as new technologies become available, because fossil fuels are expensive. Governments should stop subsidizing oil, gas, and coal and they should invest more in research on renewable energy and energy efficiency, as well as loosen regulations for the deployment of nuclear and renewable generators.
What we should not do is compound the problem by engaging in additional environmental tinkering, subsidizing both fossil fuel and renewable energies, or give governments even more command over the economy, because all of those will make the problem worse.
WebOS didn't have "some technical problems", it used entirely the wrong paradigm. And by the time it came out, Palm was already dead.
Stop saying that it was "Apple's design"; Apple ripped off most of that design from others, much of it Palm. In fact, since Android's release, Apple keep ripping off features from Android.
Apple's declared m.o. is to look at other people's products and steal the best features:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
What Jobs didn't say was that Apple then turns around, patents like hell, and tries to sue others.
And if WebOS had been a success, Apple would have sued Palm into oblivion.
And, yes, Android phones are cheap. Easy to use $100 smart phones are a good thing, as opposed to Apple's overpriced, heavily restricted toys for whiny teenagers.
Your post proves again that sufficiently advanced sarcasm is indistinguishable from genuine stupidity.
A more than 50% increase is hardly a "rounding error".
Well, then Obama wants us all to be poor and keep us poor, given that he keeps telling us that without government assistance, we can do nothing. Just look at his "Julia".
WebOS was dead before it even reached the market and beset with technical problems.
My parents saved for a decade before they bought their house, in the suburbs, and waited with kids until they bought a house. I saved for a decade before I bought mine. And you expect to be able to just plunk down money, move into a house in the city, and have kids right away? What kind of fantasy world do you live in? Furthermore, home ownership rates have actually increased significantly since the 60's.
You don't pay taxes if you're near the poverty line.
How is the difference between $23000 (4 persons) and $11139 (one person) only $600?
Which part of "purchasing power parity" do you not understand?
Relative levels (i.e., relative to other earners) are irrelevant. What matters is how you live: how big your house is, how much food you have, what transportation and education options you have, and those depend on purchasing power parity (PPP).
I can't imagine that piracy makes more than a few percent of potential Android purchases; most people just don't have the time, and the prices are too low to make it worth it. I suspect this is a marketing gimmick. As I recall from the reviews, this game already used to be free, but was constantly bugging people about in-app purchases.
That calculation is bogus, starting with the fact that the poverty level for a family of 4 is $23000.
In addition, people with that kind of income level qualify for food stamps, housing assistance, and numerous other programs.
You can easily buy an home that's the size and style of the 1960's and furnish it with 1960's-level furniture and technology: a phone, a TV receiving three channels, and not much else.
If you want two cars, modern health care, iphones, cable, Internet, large screen TVs, video game consoles, two garages, 2500 sq ft, all close to the highway, coast, and a major urban center, however, then it's going to cost you more.
Your choice.
No, take it from a long-time Palm user: Palm failed because it was an obsolete and buggy p.o.s. That's why the Android founders left Palm and... founded Android.
No, they couldn't. Palm had been resting on their laurels, Apple had ripped off all the best features of Palm, and Palm had no way of competing with that. Since Android has been released, Apple has been ripping off feature after feature from Android, that is, when Apple isn't ripping off features from small software developers.
Apple and Steve Jobs were evil rip-off artist, but that's OK; that's business competition and it caused Palm and RIM to disappear from the market, which they well deserved.
Where I draw the line is if Apple tries to claim ownership of other people's inventions.
That kind of "poverty" is relative poverty; it's just another way of saying that the income distribution is skewed in the US and is really just a bad version of the Gini index. It has nothing to do with actual, absolute poverty. You can be absolutely rich and relatively poor, or absolutely poor but relatively rich.
Look at it in international comparisons. In 2007, US poverty level for a family of three was $17000/year, and median household income was about $31000. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), in the same year, median family income in Germany was about $21000, Japan was about $19000, in Italy $17000, in Israel about $14000. EU median is about $15000.
So if you apply US poverty measures, more than half of EU citizens, and a large part of even rich countries like Germany and Japan, live "in poverty", and it gets worse if you consider all of continental Europe and if you consider that PPP doesn't account for a lot of taxes and expenses.
But if you really think that Europeans are doing so much better economically, it's easy to get a work permit for Europe and move there.
The statute says "NEW AND useful method etc." and "NEW AND useful improvement thereof". It needs to be both "useful" and "NEW".
Besides, Apple isn't claiming a patent on the iPhone, so whether you think the combination is "new" and patent-worthy doesn't matter. Apple is claiming trademarks and "design patents", and those criteria are different.
Most of the stuff Apple actually tried to patent (e.g. sliding unlock) fails the novelty test.
Apple is abusing intellectual property and trying to claim as theirs what isn't theirs.
Palm OS had been very successful with its touch screen PDAs and phones. They were having problems because they had a 16bit OS and were fumbling the 32bit replacement. Apple's iPhone was a rip-off of Palm and the other platforms, but based on a better 32bit platform. iPhone succeeded was because Palm, Nokia, and Microsoft fumbled on execution and were mired in backwards compatibility issues, and because Android was delayed due to Google's purchase. iPhone's success was temporary (and limited), and within a year, Android came out and started running rings around iOS on technology, including in the all-important touch screen keyboard input (otherwise, many people including me would want RIM-style keyboards; I can't stand Apple's piss-poor keyboard).
Oh, cut the myth making. Apple wasn't some lone company with a vision that nobody else had; Apple saw a fast-growing market in smartphones, copied the best features of their competitors, and produced a good product. And now they are trying to keep competitors out by underhanded tricks.
The patent system is there to encourage the sharing of technological innovation, nothing else. And as one of the biggest and richest companies, Apple hardly needs any more rewards anyway.
Claiming that people thought there was a small market for these phones is bullshit. There were tons of touch screen phones and PDAs since the mid-90's and they were selling briskly. Apple massively ripped off design elements and features from Sony, Palm, Microsoft, and Nokia, plus some third party apps, in the design of the iPhone. Lots of Apple employees had phones and devices from these manufacturers.
Apple entered the market as it was growing briskly, and they had a well-engineered product, in no small part because all these other companies had already done the hard work. Even Apple's icon designs were hardly original.
Yes, that's the way the system works: the patent office gets the bottom of the barrel for examiners, since there is a shortage of STEM graduates. That's why lousy patents keep getting approved.
There is nothing arbitrary about penalizing companies for filing bad patents. Nor is it a tax. The current system amounts to highway robbery, since companies like Apple (and many others) are gaming the system and obtaining temporary monopolies for inventions they didn't even create themselves; and the rest of us are paying the price.
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.
Apple didn't patent "the UI work", they patented specific aspects of it: sliders, elastic bounce-back, etc. Those elements were not novel.
Well, that was perhaps the problem. There were tons of touch apps for Palm and Window Mobile for many years before the iPhone.
You're confusing "standards" in the formal standards with "standards" in the "what people generally do and expect" kind of sense. Apple picked a bunch of elements innovated by others and pulled them together into a UI. They did a good job, achieved commercial success, so that particular became a "standard", in the sense that that's how everybody expects touch screens to work. There is no reason in the world to give Apple a monopoly on that.
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? "We need better review" is just a lame excuse by people who like the status quo, a status quot that gives companies like Apple a government-granted near-monopoly.
We need to change patent law so that patent laws are self-enforcing; in particular, there need to be tough consequences when companies file or obtain invalid patents, and even tougher consequences when they try to assert 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.
No, it is not; that's just engineering.
Pretty much everything that iPhone did years later was already available on Palm, Nokia and Windows Mobile, sometimes as part of the OS, more often from third party vendors.
The reason the iPhone took off because all that wonderful functionality was too hard to use on those other platforms: things were hard to install, the OS couldn't deal with large apps, the touch screen hardware was worse, syncing was unreliable, etc.
Apple did a better job at engineering the hardware and operating system than those other companies, but almost all the functionality of the iPhone, Apple copied from others.
I'm not "singling out Apple"; Apple is suing people left and right with weak patents, and that means that those cases present the possibility for changing legal standards through precedent. If Google or Microsoft were suing people left and right like that, then we'd talk about them instead, but they aren't.
One can talk about Motorola's and Nokia's shenanigans with RAND patents, but that's a different issue: by and large, unlike Apple's patents, those are reasonable from a technical point of view but those companies are violating their commitments. Of course, they are doing so only because of Apple's actions.
Furthermore, Apple isn't like any other company. Apple has been abusing intellectual property laws and has been copying other people's inventions for a quarter century. They tried the same tactic with user interfaces, where they first copied windowing interfaces from Xerox, MIT, and others, and then tried to prevent everybody else from using them. If they had prevailed back then and managed to set a precedent, there'd likely be no Gnome, KDE, X11, or Windows today.
I don't see how that invalidates my argument, namely that the Google/Apple dispute is not about innovation but standardization of common UI elements. Apple attempts to patent arbitrary interface standards to create incompatibilities; Apple isn't patenting actual innovation. And Apple can do that because they are first.
Saying that doesn't mean that there are never any innovations in interfaces. The analogy was only intended to show the benefit of standardization. But the fact that there may have been actual innovation or valid patents in the case of cars doesn't mean that what Apple did for touch screens was actual innovation or should have been patented (it wasn't and it shouldn't).