Web pages are already available for free, to anyone, on-line, with immediate access, from their original sources. That's five factors right there that distinguish the Web search engine case from what Google Books does.... The law in every first world jurisdiction I know requires that someone making a copy have permission from the copyright holder unless they have a specific exception/exemption, not that the copyright holder opt-out of forfeit their rights.
You're wildly contradicting yourself, saying on the one hand that it doesn't matter because it's free, and on the other hand that you need explicit permission for everything.
Fact is: you don't need explicit permission to make copies under many circumstances: you can make copies under fair use, you can make copies if you already have paid fees through some other mechanism, you can make copies for indexing purposes, etc.
In any case, even a few snippets could easily undermine the value of a book if it happens to be all the highlights.
Tough cookies. It is not the purpose of copyright law to "protect the value of the book" against all possible threats to your revenue.
There seem to be plenty of books on there where a lot more than a few short snippets are shown. I suppose it's possible
Which means that you are groundlessly accusing Google. What's really going on is that you don't like Google and are now looking for shit to throw at them.
Throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and liberty has been not terrorism but the power of the state.
Your signature is ironic, given that you are arguing for limiting liberty through the power of the state.
I think that's one of the reasons Google is asking for the case to be dismissed. But these are big and powerful organizations, and they aren't easy to dismiss even if they don't have much of a case.
So you keep saying, and of course you're right. What you seem to keep conveniently missing out is how mass-copying works as Google are doing is actually legal under fair use or any similar provision. Perhaps you could make a start by explaining how Google are entitled to copy all of these works into their own database without at the very least paying for a legal copy of each and every one of them.
Google does exactly the same for building their web index: copy all the content, then digest and index it. Indexing just entails effectively having a copy of the content around. Google didn't invent this, a lot of search engines before them did the same thing. There were a whole bunch of lawsuits over it and people lost (which is a good thing). Why should it be legal for electronic content and not legal for books?
Then you can explain how republishing the work on-line qualifies.
Google isn't "republishing" the work; unless you opt in or the book is out of copyright, all that is shown about a book is a few short snippets, just like web search results. And you can even opt out of that.
Why should I, as an author, have to lift a finger just to make Google's life easier?
Because what Google is doing is what copyright is supposed to accomplish: dissemination of information, while still providing some limited incentives for authors. The "opt-in" default you want would lock up a lot of content that would otherwise be accessible, and that is contrary to the Constitutional goals of copyright.
People only have to ask you for permission to the extent that the law says, and the copyright law is supposed to be based on what benefits the public. Unlike property rights, copyright is not a natural right.
In the Bullet Cluster, it is mainly the gas that is affected by the drag effect. Stars, just like hypothetical dark matter, are only affected by gravity during the collision, since they are too massive to be subject to significant drag. And the same is true for MACHOs (in addition, black holes are also MACHOs). People say that "baryonic matter is separated from dark matter" in these collisions because most of the baryonic matter in normal galaxies is actually gas, but that is sloppy language. What you end up with in these collisions is a region of "invisible matter and stars" and the gas is left behind. (And, of course, the separation is far from perfect.)
The primary argument against MACHOs is that there would have to be too many of them if the Bullet Cluster had the same ratio that we observe around us. But this may simply be the second collision, and much of the gas already got stripped out in the first collision.
Google isn't "ignoring the law". The law is somewhat unclear about this situation, but Google has a good argument that it is fair use. And to the degree that there is anything to be settled, I'm saying it should "opt-out" rather than "opt-in".
Besides, the big publishers are big corporations themselves, and unlike Google, publishers are obsolete and have a long history of being totally evil.
They put a big honking COPYRIGHT NOTICE at the front of their books, it says "Do NOT Copy without written permission in ADVANCE". Anyone (including google) who makes a copy of the entire book is brazenly violating the posted copyright notice!
What you can and cannot do with a book is determined by copyright, not by those notices. Publishers have a habit of lying about what rights they do and do not have to the content they publish. I think anybody who claims more rights to their works than they actually have under the law should automatically lose all rights.
And, if, for some reason, your book slipped through the cracks, you can have it removed.
But what you and the publishers really want is to force Google to promote your books and then pay for the privilege. And you want to make it so cumbersome for small authors and publishers to get onto services like Google that you retain a monopoly. I don't think so.
What we have to admit here is that Google is a massively wealthy company, and that authors are, in general, poor as shit.
The reason authors are "poor as shit" is simple supply and demand: there is a glut of authors and books. The world doesn't owe you a living as an author. If you can't make it as an author under the existing copyright law, which is already very strict, choose a different profession or get a day job to pay the bills.
Authors own their property, just like you own your toothbrush or your socks.
Copyright is a temporary, limited grant by the government. It is nothing like physical property. Read the Constitution.
Google comes in and makes money off of this property, without asking, in violation of the rule of law and the custom of law.
There is nothing in copyright law that generally prohibits others from profiting from your writings; such a notion is contrary to the very idea of copyright laws. Your rights in your copyrighted materials are limited.
There are countless scandals and corruption episodes going on right now that we will never know about because there are no journalists being payed to report on them.
Same thing applies to journalists as to authors: either there is a demand for their services or there is not, either they can make a living at it or they can't. Because of the Internet, it turns out that we need far fewer journalists than we used to, so a lot of them lose their jobs. I don't see a problem.
The publishers are often horrible, but Google is just another publisher - the funny thing is that it doesnt really pay anyone to write anything, and there is only one of it (i.e. its a monopoly).
Google has spent billions on creating free software. That alone more than makes up for any moral quibbles you may have with them.
The LG Prada was announced and described about a month before the first iPhone. It has all the design elements that Apple is claiming. In fact, LG K850 still looks like a very nice and elegant phone next to the iPhone 4S.
Given that there are very few people like you and very few services like Google Books, opt-out is a reasonable default. Making opt-in the default because of a bunch of malcontent potty-mouths like you is unreasonable.
The people behind the lawsuits are publishers and "authors guilds", organizations made obsolete by Google and electronic publishing. And they aren't suing over their own books (they could just have them removed), they are suing over the vast quantity of orphan works that they don't own but that would provide unwelcome free competition to their content.
What Google is doing is exactly the sort of thing copyright law is supposed to prevent. They are copying massive amounts of copyrighted works and using them for their own profit without permission from the copyright holders.
Copyright law isn't intended to prevent people from profiting from copyrighted works. If you publish a cookbook, I can use it to prepare meals and charge for them, for example. Copyright law gives copyright holders specific, limited rights in order to encourage them to publish and produce, nothing more. What Google is doing is no different from establishing a privately run reference service with a large staff that can look things up for you. They don't redistribute the works (unless the copyright holder gives them explicit permission).
With something this clear cut,
With something this clearcut, the court really should have kicked out authors and publishers as having no standing and no damages: any author or publisher who doesn't want to be on Google can just ask to be removed. What authors and publishers really want is to force Google to pay them no matter what. It's the usual rip-off of these groups of trying to get paid no matter what crap they produce.
So because you choose to have Google profit from your work, you declare everyone else must have the choice taken away from them?
Nobody is taking your choice away; if you don't want your books on Google, just tell them. Furthermore, just because you own a copyright doesn't mean other people can't profit from your content without paying you. Copyright doesn't give you exclusive rights to any possible use of your works, it only gives you a specific, limited monopoly.
I shan't speak in defence of copyright or "intellectual property" but I shall speak in defence of rule of law.
Yes, so shall I: the rule of law in the US includes fair use and the public domain. "Authors guilds" and publishers have been trying to subvert the rule of law for decades by trying to carve out ever increasing special privileges. By default, Google makes books searchable and publishes snippets that is fair use.
You and the publishers want to steal from the public and from companies like Google, by deriving profit from fair use activities and content you don't even own. It is high time that the rule of law puts a stop to people like you.
It's the publishers and "guilds" that see their monopoly profits fade away as they are being cut out of the business. In fact, any publisher and author who doesn't want to be on Google Books can simply notify Google and they'll remove their content. Their claims that they are protecting the authors are bullshit. What they really want is to stay in control of the publishing business. They also don't want free content and orphan works to appear because that would be unwelcome competition.
Publishers and "guilds" have conned some authors into supporting them; but any author with half a brain quickly figures out that Amazon, Google Books, and the e-book revolution are good for them.
This is exactly what we would see if the majority of the cluster mass is nonbaryonic
It is also what you would see if the majority of the dark matter is MACHOs, and you can't exclude MACHOs for the Bullet Cluster by observation because it's too far away. The reason we don't use MACHOs to explain all dark matter is because we would expect more microlensing events in our neighborhood and because that would be more baryonic matter than we'd expect to have been produced in the big bang. Other than that, MACHOs are perfectly good explanations for "dark matter" observations, and neither of those objections apply if we just need MACHOs to explain the occasional faraway oddity like the Bullet Cluster.
So, we have two hypotheses. (1) Both galactic rotation and the Bullet Cluster are explained by non-baryonic dark matter (but we have no idea what that might be). (2) The paper is right and galactic rotation is explained by standard gravity, while the Bullet Cluster is explained by some kind of MACHOs. If the math in the paper is right, I personally find (2) a lot more attractive than (1) because it doesn't involve inventing new physics.
The MACHO-based argument is that there can't be enough of those objects around in order to explain galactic rotation. But this paper, in effect, says that you don't need them. So that observation seems consistent with this paper.
* Existence of unexpected gravitational lensing in Bullet Cluster.
The Bullet Cluster result shows that some form of unobservable matter exists. But we already know that: brown dwarfs, rogue planets, etc.: that kind of "dark matter" has been observed, just not in the amounts to explain galactic rotation.
It is not surprising that somewhere in the universe, you might get very large clusters of such objects. The bullet cluster might just be composed of such objects. And at those distances, you couldn't observe baryonic dark matter. In fact, if you rip out most of the hydrogen from a cluster, it is perhaps not surprising that you end up with a lot of cold, dark lumps of baryonic matter.
* CMBR measurements * and more.
You have to separate explaining observations from testing hypotheses. CMBR measurements can be explained within the framework of non-baryonic dark matter. But that does not necessarily imply that they provide evidence for non-baryonic dark matter, since there are many other possible explanations.
I'm not saying that this paper is true or not. But if you want to argue against it, you need to sharpen your arguments.
Science is not made by consensus, it is made by logic, mathematics, experiment, and observable facts. If you cannot provide clear, correct, and reproducible experiments and math, you aren't doing science.
There is no "consensus on dark matter", since nobody knows what causes galactic rotation to be the way it is. Any ideas of what dark matter might be at this point is just guesswork. You are entitled to your preferences, but just because a lot of people have certain preferences doesn't make those preferences "science".
This wrong-headed notion of a "consensus" in science has increasingly polluted science. I think it started with soft sciences like sociology and climatology, both of which lack simple, reproducible experiments, well-defined theories, and mathematical theories. Instead of providing those, "scientists" with political agendas then just ended up saying to politicians "we can't really prove it, but we are the experts; believe us". From there, this has spread to other sciences, including, sadly, physics.
The threshold for damages in these kinds of lawsuits is pretty high. For patents, if it has been issued, it is presumed to be valid and you have reasonable cause to sue others for infringement. Therefore, a court would not consider it "frivolous" if you sue over that. I assume it's similar for design patents (even though the patent office does even less checking on them).
A fix for the patent mess would be, however, to put this responsibility on the patent holder. That is, patents would not be automatically presumed valid. People affected by a patent could sue and you would have to prove in court that it is valid. Furthermore, licensees of patents found invalid should be able to recover their licensing costs plus damages. Again, that's how it should be, not how it is.
Anger doesn't help; there's nobody to blame for this.
Instead, try to figure out how you can create something that appeals to the masses and yet still makes hacking and innovation possible.
(Also, in the short term, stop buying from companies that produce locked down hardware or software and try to control the distribution channels. This means all iOS products and some Android products.)
If you want to fix it, you need a complete overhaul of the framework and quite likely rewrite chunks of it in C or C++.
Rewriting it in C/C++ will do nothing to improve this, and often makes things worse. It's easy to achieve great peak performance and CPU utilization in C/C++, but lack of peak performance is not the problem that causes UIs to occasionally lag. What causes UIs to lag is if there is some uninterruptible operation that preempts UI tasks. And it is just those uninterruptible operations (inner loops, manual storage management, etc.) that make C/C++ code so efficient. If you want good, steady responsiveness, you need to make as much of the code preemptable by the UI, and that's much easier if your language enables it for you.
In different words, when the Android UI lags, it is probably already inside highly optimized C/C++ code that is causing the lag.
There is nothing to solve, it's a deliberate tradeoff. You can get guaranteed maximum latencies on all operations, but you get worse average case performance. So what people do in practice is that they optimize for the average case and try to detect and limit the worst case so that it isn't too bad.
The kind of operations that cause these glitches are usually related to resource allocation: garbage collection, reference counting cascades, disk reorganization. Error recovery and recalibration on storage media can also cause it. Uninterruptible tasks are another source of lag, and again, these are usually made uninterruptible because it allows to code to run faster (otherwise you'd need more locks and logic). Some of these are beyond the reaches of the operating system (e.g., in the Flash controller).
The law doesn't and can't define where the line is between patentable and unpatentable designs; that is for the courts to sort out, and they are trying to sort it out.
The reasons this is coming up now and is such a problem are twofold. First, product cycles and market opportunities are very short lived. Samsung had a few months to turn a profit on the 10.1 and Apple killed that. Now, the Transformer Prime is coming out and the lawsuit doesn't matter anymore. Second, most companies focus on making good products and don't, as a habit, go around suing each other over trivialities--it wastes everybody's time.
The last point may also be the solution to this problem: Samsung and everybody else being sued by Apple should tie up Apple's designers and executives in court, for years. Given how marginal Apple's claims are, the court should grant wide latitude to the defense to depose and question these people. When Apple's employees spend more time in court than doing work, maybe they'll figure out that these kinds of lawsuits are not productive for anybody.
Is there any indication that the GP is a "freetard" (in your terminology)?
With iPhone and iPad, Apple did what they have always done: they have ripped off other people's ideas, patented them, and then tried to sue over them. The legal system should put a stop to Apple's abuse of the patent system because it costs consumers a huge amount of money, and because it stifles innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
You're wildly contradicting yourself, saying on the one hand that it doesn't matter because it's free, and on the other hand that you need explicit permission for everything.
Fact is: you don't need explicit permission to make copies under many circumstances: you can make copies under fair use, you can make copies if you already have paid fees through some other mechanism, you can make copies for indexing purposes, etc.
Tough cookies. It is not the purpose of copyright law to "protect the value of the book" against all possible threats to your revenue.
Which means that you are groundlessly accusing Google. What's really going on is that you don't like Google and are now looking for shit to throw at them.
Your signature is ironic, given that you are arguing for limiting liberty through the power of the state.
Fair use isn't violating copyright, hence they don't need to ask permission.
I think that's one of the reasons Google is asking for the case to be dismissed. But these are big and powerful organizations, and they aren't easy to dismiss even if they don't have much of a case.
Google does exactly the same for building their web index: copy all the content, then digest and index it. Indexing just entails effectively having a copy of the content around. Google didn't invent this, a lot of search engines before them did the same thing. There were a whole bunch of lawsuits over it and people lost (which is a good thing). Why should it be legal for electronic content and not legal for books?
Google isn't "republishing" the work; unless you opt in or the book is out of copyright, all that is shown about a book is a few short snippets, just like web search results. And you can even opt out of that.
Because what Google is doing is what copyright is supposed to accomplish: dissemination of information, while still providing some limited incentives for authors. The "opt-in" default you want would lock up a lot of content that would otherwise be accessible, and that is contrary to the Constitutional goals of copyright.
People only have to ask you for permission to the extent that the law says, and the copyright law is supposed to be based on what benefits the public. Unlike property rights, copyright is not a natural right.
In the Bullet Cluster, it is mainly the gas that is affected by the drag effect. Stars, just like hypothetical dark matter, are only affected by gravity during the collision, since they are too massive to be subject to significant drag. And the same is true for MACHOs (in addition, black holes are also MACHOs). People say that "baryonic matter is separated from dark matter" in these collisions because most of the baryonic matter in normal galaxies is actually gas, but that is sloppy language. What you end up with in these collisions is a region of "invisible matter and stars" and the gas is left behind. (And, of course, the separation is far from perfect.)
The primary argument against MACHOs is that there would have to be too many of them if the Bullet Cluster had the same ratio that we observe around us. But this may simply be the second collision, and much of the gas already got stripped out in the first collision.
Google isn't "ignoring the law". The law is somewhat unclear about this situation, but Google has a good argument that it is fair use. And to the degree that there is anything to be settled, I'm saying it should "opt-out" rather than "opt-in".
Besides, the big publishers are big corporations themselves, and unlike Google, publishers are obsolete and have a long history of being totally evil.
What you can and cannot do with a book is determined by copyright, not by those notices. Publishers have a habit of lying about what rights they do and do not have to the content they publish. I think anybody who claims more rights to their works than they actually have under the law should automatically lose all rights.
Stop lying. Google shows "dozens of pages" only for publishers and authors who opt into their partner program.
http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=43729&topic=9259&hl=en
And, if, for some reason, your book slipped through the cracks, you can have it removed.
But what you and the publishers really want is to force Google to promote your books and then pay for the privilege. And you want to make it so cumbersome for small authors and publishers to get onto services like Google that you retain a monopoly. I don't think so.
The reason authors are "poor as shit" is simple supply and demand: there is a glut of authors and books. The world doesn't owe you a living as an author. If you can't make it as an author under the existing copyright law, which is already very strict, choose a different profession or get a day job to pay the bills.
Copyright is a temporary, limited grant by the government. It is nothing like physical property. Read the Constitution.
There is nothing in copyright law that generally prohibits others from profiting from your writings; such a notion is contrary to the very idea of copyright laws. Your rights in your copyrighted materials are limited.
Same thing applies to journalists as to authors: either there is a demand for their services or there is not, either they can make a living at it or they can't. Because of the Internet, it turns out that we need far fewer journalists than we used to, so a lot of them lose their jobs. I don't see a problem.
Google has spent billions on creating free software. That alone more than makes up for any moral quibbles you may have with them.
The LG Prada was announced and described about a month before the first iPhone. It has all the design elements that Apple is claiming. In fact, LG K850 still looks like a very nice and elegant phone next to the iPhone 4S.
Dilbert said it best:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-10-18/
Are you an author or publisher and don't want your books on Google? Remove them:
http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=175010
Given that there are very few people like you and very few services like Google Books, opt-out is a reasonable default. Making opt-in the default because of a bunch of malcontent potty-mouths like you is unreasonable.
The people behind the lawsuits are publishers and "authors guilds", organizations made obsolete by Google and electronic publishing. And they aren't suing over their own books (they could just have them removed), they are suing over the vast quantity of orphan works that they don't own but that would provide unwelcome free competition to their content.
Copyright law isn't intended to prevent people from profiting from copyrighted works. If you publish a cookbook, I can use it to prepare meals and charge for them, for example. Copyright law gives copyright holders specific, limited rights in order to encourage them to publish and produce, nothing more. What Google is doing is no different from establishing a privately run reference service with a large staff that can look things up for you. They don't redistribute the works (unless the copyright holder gives them explicit permission).
With something this clearcut, the court really should have kicked out authors and publishers as having no standing and no damages: any author or publisher who doesn't want to be on Google can just ask to be removed. What authors and publishers really want is to force Google to pay them no matter what. It's the usual rip-off of these groups of trying to get paid no matter what crap they produce.
Nobody is taking your choice away; if you don't want your books on Google, just tell them. Furthermore, just because you own a copyright doesn't mean other people can't profit from your content without paying you. Copyright doesn't give you exclusive rights to any possible use of your works, it only gives you a specific, limited monopoly.
Yes, so shall I: the rule of law in the US includes fair use and the public domain. "Authors guilds" and publishers have been trying to subvert the rule of law for decades by trying to carve out ever increasing special privileges. By default, Google makes books searchable and publishes snippets that is fair use.
You and the publishers want to steal from the public and from companies like Google, by deriving profit from fair use activities and content you don't even own. It is high time that the rule of law puts a stop to people like you.
It's the publishers and "guilds" that see their monopoly profits fade away as they are being cut out of the business. In fact, any publisher and author who doesn't want to be on Google Books can simply notify Google and they'll remove their content. Their claims that they are protecting the authors are bullshit. What they really want is to stay in control of the publishing business. They also don't want free content and orphan works to appear because that would be unwelcome competition.
Publishers and "guilds" have conned some authors into supporting them; but any author with half a brain quickly figures out that Amazon, Google Books, and the e-book revolution are good for them.
It is also what you would see if the majority of the dark matter is MACHOs, and you can't exclude MACHOs for the Bullet Cluster by observation because it's too far away. The reason we don't use MACHOs to explain all dark matter is because we would expect more microlensing events in our neighborhood and because that would be more baryonic matter than we'd expect to have been produced in the big bang. Other than that, MACHOs are perfectly good explanations for "dark matter" observations, and neither of those objections apply if we just need MACHOs to explain the occasional faraway oddity like the Bullet Cluster.
So, we have two hypotheses. (1) Both galactic rotation and the Bullet Cluster are explained by non-baryonic dark matter (but we have no idea what that might be). (2) The paper is right and galactic rotation is explained by standard gravity, while the Bullet Cluster is explained by some kind of MACHOs. If the math in the paper is right, I personally find (2) a lot more attractive than (1) because it doesn't involve inventing new physics.
The MACHO-based argument is that there can't be enough of those objects around in order to explain galactic rotation. But this paper, in effect, says that you don't need them. So that observation seems consistent with this paper.
The Bullet Cluster result shows that some form of unobservable matter exists. But we already know that: brown dwarfs, rogue planets, etc.: that kind of "dark matter" has been observed, just not in the amounts to explain galactic rotation.
It is not surprising that somewhere in the universe, you might get very large clusters of such objects. The bullet cluster might just be composed of such objects. And at those distances, you couldn't observe baryonic dark matter. In fact, if you rip out most of the hydrogen from a cluster, it is perhaps not surprising that you end up with a lot of cold, dark lumps of baryonic matter.
You have to separate explaining observations from testing hypotheses. CMBR measurements can be explained within the framework of non-baryonic dark matter. But that does not necessarily imply that they provide evidence for non-baryonic dark matter, since there are many other possible explanations.
I'm not saying that this paper is true or not. But if you want to argue against it, you need to sharpen your arguments.
Science is not made by consensus, it is made by logic, mathematics, experiment, and observable facts. If you cannot provide clear, correct, and reproducible experiments and math, you aren't doing science.
There is no "consensus on dark matter", since nobody knows what causes galactic rotation to be the way it is. Any ideas of what dark matter might be at this point is just guesswork. You are entitled to your preferences, but just because a lot of people have certain preferences doesn't make those preferences "science".
This wrong-headed notion of a "consensus" in science has increasingly polluted science. I think it started with soft sciences like sociology and climatology, both of which lack simple, reproducible experiments, well-defined theories, and mathematical theories. Instead of providing those, "scientists" with political agendas then just ended up saying to politicians "we can't really prove it, but we are the experts; believe us". From there, this has spread to other sciences, including, sadly, physics.
The threshold for damages in these kinds of lawsuits is pretty high. For patents, if it has been issued, it is presumed to be valid and you have reasonable cause to sue others for infringement. Therefore, a court would not consider it "frivolous" if you sue over that. I assume it's similar for design patents (even though the patent office does even less checking on them).
A fix for the patent mess would be, however, to put this responsibility on the patent holder. That is, patents would not be automatically presumed valid. People affected by a patent could sue and you would have to prove in court that it is valid. Furthermore, licensees of patents found invalid should be able to recover their licensing costs plus damages. Again, that's how it should be, not how it is.
Anger doesn't help; there's nobody to blame for this.
Instead, try to figure out how you can create something that appeals to the masses and yet still makes hacking and innovation possible.
(Also, in the short term, stop buying from companies that produce locked down hardware or software and try to control the distribution channels. This means all iOS products and some Android products.)
Rewriting it in C/C++ will do nothing to improve this, and often makes things worse. It's easy to achieve great peak performance and CPU utilization in C/C++, but lack of peak performance is not the problem that causes UIs to occasionally lag. What causes UIs to lag is if there is some uninterruptible operation that preempts UI tasks. And it is just those uninterruptible operations (inner loops, manual storage management, etc.) that make C/C++ code so efficient. If you want good, steady responsiveness, you need to make as much of the code preemptable by the UI, and that's much easier if your language enables it for you.
In different words, when the Android UI lags, it is probably already inside highly optimized C/C++ code that is causing the lag.
There is nothing to solve, it's a deliberate tradeoff. You can get guaranteed maximum latencies on all operations, but you get worse average case performance. So what people do in practice is that they optimize for the average case and try to detect and limit the worst case so that it isn't too bad.
The kind of operations that cause these glitches are usually related to resource allocation: garbage collection, reference counting cascades, disk reorganization. Error recovery and recalibration on storage media can also cause it. Uninterruptible tasks are another source of lag, and again, these are usually made uninterruptible because it allows to code to run faster (otherwise you'd need more locks and logic). Some of these are beyond the reaches of the operating system (e.g., in the Flash controller).
The law doesn't and can't define where the line is between patentable and unpatentable designs; that is for the courts to sort out, and they are trying to sort it out.
The reasons this is coming up now and is such a problem are twofold. First, product cycles and market opportunities are very short lived. Samsung had a few months to turn a profit on the 10.1 and Apple killed that. Now, the Transformer Prime is coming out and the lawsuit doesn't matter anymore. Second, most companies focus on making good products and don't, as a habit, go around suing each other over trivialities--it wastes everybody's time.
The last point may also be the solution to this problem: Samsung and everybody else being sued by Apple should tie up Apple's designers and executives in court, for years. Given how marginal Apple's claims are, the court should grant wide latitude to the defense to depose and question these people. When Apple's employees spend more time in court than doing work, maybe they'll figure out that these kinds of lawsuits are not productive for anybody.
Is there any indication that the GP is a "freetard" (in your terminology)?
With iPhone and iPad, Apple did what they have always done: they have ripped off other people's ideas, patented them, and then tried to sue over them. The legal system should put a stop to Apple's abuse of the patent system because it costs consumers a huge amount of money, and because it stifles innovation.