One common way to prove that an assertion is false is to prove that assuming it would lead to a contradiction.
You're assuming two parties who fully buy into logic and reality.
Creation literalists will deny scientific evidence that doesn't confirm with their beliefs.
This won't come down to a debate based on logic and science, this will devolve into "but see, it says right here". This will essentially be a side show, and achieve nothing.
"of late". They have been that way for at least 20+ years.
Ever known someone with bipolar disorder? Same kind of thing... you know they always have it, but sometimes they're just a little more 'out there' than usual.
Last little while, Kim Jong Un has been blustering quite a bit more.
Canada is a wonderful place, but one thing that Canadians do not know about is bacon. Hint: it's not ham.
Canadian bacon isn't ham, it's the same pork belly and loin as American bacon. Ham is the leg, it's an entirely different part of the animal.
We have multiple kinds of bacon in Canada -- back bacon (which is the same as the British bacon you mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_bacon), Peameal bacon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peameal_Bacon which is brined and rolled in pea meal), and plain old bacon.
Well, I guess we also have that mysterious bacon which doesn't need to be refrigerated, which I assume is an invention of the US food industry.
We know bacon, we just know more kinds than you do.
That should make China and India some pretty extreme countries, no?
And you'd be right. Both countries have extreme poverty, and extreme wealth.
And certainly I doubt that the majority of Indians will accept that a woman out after dark deserves to be gang-raped, yet some of their politicians made the suggestion that 'nice women' wouldn't be out alone in the first place.
it's telling that a company is still running on the vapours of their original core business unit when that business unit no longer exists in their organization
Because once we had web pages, everybody wanted a search engine. And then everybody wanted.com anything. Long about then AOL bought Time Warner, and Compaq bought DEC. Then there was punch the monkey. Somewhere in there portals became awesome to augment your webmail. Then it went all Intranets, web 2.0, and then social media, and now the cloud. Soon it will be something else.
Yahoo as a search company is so 1998, and is passe. Yahoo has been several incantations of the new hotness since. I think mostly webmail and being a news portal, but I'm not sure. But they've had billions, so it doesn't really matter.;-)
And the problem with companies who were on the forefront of software in the 90's is now they're largely media companies who are trying to still look young and hip -- like an old guy at a punk concert desperately looking around to understand what the young hepcats are doing and if anybody remembers the Lindy Hop.;-)
If this is the case, Merck can send a cease and desist letter to that woman who copied my genome without permission and is now seeking child support payments.
Well, since it's actually a derivative work of both your genomes, this is classed as a collaborative effort.
Unless you were engaged in a limited liability partnership, you can be sued for liability issues arising from the partnership.
I'd suggest consulting a lawyer if you didn't have any contracts drawn up in advance... you may have unwittingly entered into a partnership which doesn't shield you from liability, and it sounds like it's too late to withdraw without consequences.;-)
Of course, this doesn't appear to apply to the patent discussed in this article, but as a general principle, doing something more cheaply can be patentable.
Sure, and I don't disagree with that as long as you're actually coming up with something new and not just combining technology in ways that have already been done.
If I take a device, and that device has notionally input, display, networking, and power systems... if someone invents a better version of any of those systems, and you replace an older technology with it, have they invented something which is patentable? Or have they basically made an incremental and obvious enhancement?
I'd argue this is incremental extensions by applying existing technology to refine something which already exists. So, taking something which has wired internet, making it have wireless internet you haven't invented something new. If someone comes out with a better CPU, putting that into an existing device is pretty much the same thing.
Since none of dumb terminal, wireless networking, and wireless power were invented by Bezos... what exactly is the invention here?
I think what we're seeing is a bunch of tech companies who got rich in the.com era struggling to stay relevant.
I assume Yahoo still has a search engine, but I've not been inclined to use it or look for it in a *long* time -- like since Google came into existence.
Now with Facebook and all of these other companies which are relatively recent, the old guard is trying to make sure they keep market share and features people want.
And, really, the tech industry has been going through fairly steady acquisitions for quite a while... it's become normal operating procedure. Buy a company with a product you like so you can get their features and customers, and hopefully integrate the features into your platform.
We may or may not be in a tech bubble, but tech companies have been buying smaller companies for years... that's just how companies grow these days.
two minutes googling would tell you that the available RAM is only 2GB, what is this newbie crucifiction week?
Or "ramifications of bad marketing week" -- because I wouldn't be surprised if those companies are advertising it as having 16GB of memory and not differentiating between 'storage' and 'RAM'.
A phone with 16GB of RAM would be kinda crazy just yet.
Most of them, especially the cheap P&S or cell phone cameras that people would actually be likely to have on them, have a hard time picking up the stars too, even though they're plainly visible to anybody who bothers to look.
Depends entirely on where you are.
Most urban locations have so much light pollution that the amount of stars you can see if hugely reduced. On a clear summer night out my back yard, most of the stars are washed out in the background light, and only the really bright stuff is visible.
I should think in a city like London, the amount of visible stars wouldn't be all that much.
If you're using an app on a, more capable, tablet then you aren't doing what this patent describes. You paid full price for the tablet, with the touchscreen, and battery, and decent processor etc. This is for a much lower cost device that won't be able to do anything but act as a display.
Since when is cost a factor in the validity of a patent? Does it do the same tasks?
We've had dumb-terminals for decades, so nothing at all new on that front.
To me, moving from wired networking to wireless networking is pretty obvious since we've been moving in that direction pretty steadily. The specifics of the networking is irrelevant I'd think.
Other than the wireless power, which I'm never clear actually exists... this is taking several existing things, and putting them together in what seems more like an evolution than an invention. At which point it becomes the usual "system and methodology for combining several well understood technologies in a fairly obvious way".
What I'd really like to know is what claim 1 was in the patent which is now cancelled. I'm sure it was something ridiculous they couldn't support.
Takeoff and landing, you're supposed to concentrate on safety instructions
Do you have any idea of how many times some of us have heard those? Half of the people on any given plane could probably give them.
Seats and tray tables upright and locked, no headphones unless they're hooked up to the in-flight stuff, seatbelts work thusly, floor lighting here and here, cabin baggage stowed, put on my mask first (it might not inflate but that's normal), emergency exits front and rear and maybe at the wings -- look around you, non-smoking flight with smoke detectors in the lav, crash debris location indicators under your seat, you may need to inflate your life vest with these tubes (but only once you're out the door), look at the pretty card in the seat pocket. STFU and hold on.
So the company I won't do business with because I don't trust them is being sued by the companies I'm stuck with because the ones I won't do business with won't share enough of our data with them?
So, we're fucked then -- the megacorps have utterly won the privacy and financial data battle, the advertisers know everything you do because of it, Google and everybody else reads your email, and the government can collate the whole damned thing if they declare they Need To.
Bzzzt, wrong answer. From the link you provided I can see at least 4 jobs posted in Paris, which oddly enough is in France.
Which means Twitter "does business in France", and logically if France wants to sue them for the identities of French citizens who broke French law... Twitter has no choice but to comply.
Exactly. This is an issue for France vs. Internet. Not France vs. Twitter.
Not necessarily. If Twitter is doing business in France, they're bound by their laws -- hell, if they've registered the trademark in France they're probably bound by them.
Imagine if a Chinese company set up shop in the US, and then said "We're a Chinese company, we're ignoring your laws". It wouldn't fly.
So it's going to come down to the extent to which Twitter has any business presence in France -- and if they have any, they're going to be stuck. And, since twitter.fr redirects to twitter.com the claim of not doing business in France might be nullified. Because the act of buying the domain likely means you agree to their rules. (And don't say that isn't true, because the US has seized.com domains for companies with no presence in the US because they claim ownership over the entire.com TLD)
Twitter have purchased twitter.fr, but it only redirects to their US site. They probably have done the same to every country code, to make sure squatters or scammers don't get them.
Then, arguably, for every country they're purchased that domain, promoted their software, taken any advertising revenue, employed staff, or otherwise "done business" -- then they might have to obey the local laws only as it pertains to their citizens and what they make available in that country.
If you staunchly set up US only, don't promote into other countries, and any international usage isn't something you sought out, then you can probably tell them to PFO.
I'm not convinced that Twitter hasn't promoted themselves, or "done business" in those jurisdictions. If they've ever done anything in France, they can't then say they're only bound by US laws.
Not knowing what Twitter's presence looks like in France, the first questions are: Do they have any offices/personnel there? Do they have any equipment? Is there a twitter.fr? Do they promote and regionalize the software to France?
If any of those are true, Twitter is basically screwed in the same way Google was.
If it's all in the US and not anywhere else, then Twitter will likely be safe.
Is an internet company responsible to the country that it operates from, or is it responsible to every country that they can be reached from?
Likely, it will come down to if they have a regional variant of their service or local servers.
If there's only a single twitter.com, and it lives in the US, and everybody hits then likely not.
But if there is a twitter.fr, and they have a presence in France and promote their service there -- well, then you really are going to be compelled to adhere to local laws. You can't have it both ways. One would hope that reasonably, if I do something in the country I live in, and it's legal, no other country should have any jurisdiction. That way you don't get someone being sued in France for something which is legal where they live. Because half of the internet would be getting sued in countries where saying certain things is illegal, even if they've never been there.
Twitter can't promote their products in other countries, install infrastructure there, regionalize their product, but claim everything else is covered under US laws.
Of course, that's great in theory -- who knows what a court would decide in reality.
Well there's your problem. if I had to call up my ISP every time I wanted to patch windows I'd be screwed.
Well, this is because the carriers all want to make sure to inject their own shit to monetize everything.
The carriers want to put on their stuff to sell you ring tones, apps, and generally make sure your bill is as high as they can manage.
They don't care about your security. On my HTC Android phone, I had to go through and disable a lot of the crap my carrier put in because I was never going to use it and it was just junk.
When I was looking at my last phone, I had a choice of HTC with Android 4+, or Samsung with Android 2+. I opted for a newer OS and lower phone specs, and because I don't hold Samsung in high regard.
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming two parties who fully buy into logic and reality.
Creation literalists will deny scientific evidence that doesn't confirm with their beliefs.
This won't come down to a debate based on logic and science, this will devolve into "but see, it says right here". This will essentially be a side show, and achieve nothing.
Ever known someone with bipolar disorder? Same kind of thing ... you know they always have it, but sometimes they're just a little more 'out there' than usual.
Last little while, Kim Jong Un has been blustering quite a bit more.
I don't think we need to look further than the fact that NK has become fairly unhinged as of late, with a lot of bluster and threats.
So either this is really just more penis waggling by the little runt to show he's got some balls, or they're really thinking about doing something.
This could be them showing they can really do this (oooh, I'm impressed), or a prelude to something else.
Solar storms? ;-)
Canadian bacon isn't ham, it's the same pork belly and loin as American bacon. Ham is the leg, it's an entirely different part of the animal.
We have multiple kinds of bacon in Canada -- back bacon (which is the same as the British bacon you mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_bacon), Peameal bacon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peameal_Bacon which is brined and rolled in pea meal), and plain old bacon.
Well, I guess we also have that mysterious bacon which doesn't need to be refrigerated, which I assume is an invention of the US food industry.
We know bacon, we just know more kinds than you do.
And you'd be right. Both countries have extreme poverty, and extreme wealth.
And certainly I doubt that the majority of Indians will accept that a woman out after dark deserves to be gang-raped, yet some of their politicians made the suggestion that 'nice women' wouldn't be out alone in the first place.
Go to a mall, a bus station, or pretty much any place else in public.
Now, ask yourself, do you really need to ask if the world is populated with morons?
Of course they are. But sadly that's independent of the number of morons in the world.
Because once we had web pages, everybody wanted a search engine. And then everybody wanted .com anything. Long about then AOL bought Time Warner, and Compaq bought DEC. Then there was punch the monkey. Somewhere in there portals became awesome to augment your webmail. Then it went all Intranets, web 2.0, and then social media, and now the cloud. Soon it will be something else.
Yahoo as a search company is so 1998, and is passe. Yahoo has been several incantations of the new hotness since. I think mostly webmail and being a news portal, but I'm not sure. But they've had billions, so it doesn't really matter. ;-)
And the problem with companies who were on the forefront of software in the 90's is now they're largely media companies who are trying to still look young and hip -- like an old guy at a punk concert desperately looking around to understand what the young hepcats are doing and if anybody remembers the Lindy Hop. ;-)
Informative? Damn, I was going for funny ... I'm pretty sure an LLP can't shield you from a paternity suit. ;-)
Well, since it's actually a derivative work of both your genomes, this is classed as a collaborative effort.
Unless you were engaged in a limited liability partnership, you can be sued for liability issues arising from the partnership.
I'd suggest consulting a lawyer if you didn't have any contracts drawn up in advance ... you may have unwittingly entered into a partnership which doesn't shield you from liability, and it sounds like it's too late to withdraw without consequences. ;-)
Sure, and I don't disagree with that as long as you're actually coming up with something new and not just combining technology in ways that have already been done.
If I take a device, and that device has notionally input, display, networking, and power systems ... if someone invents a better version of any of those systems, and you replace an older technology with it, have they invented something which is patentable? Or have they basically made an incremental and obvious enhancement?
I'd argue this is incremental extensions by applying existing technology to refine something which already exists. So, taking something which has wired internet, making it have wireless internet you haven't invented something new. If someone comes out with a better CPU, putting that into an existing device is pretty much the same thing.
Since none of dumb terminal, wireless networking, and wireless power were invented by Bezos ... what exactly is the invention here?
I think what we're seeing is a bunch of tech companies who got rich in the .com era struggling to stay relevant.
I assume Yahoo still has a search engine, but I've not been inclined to use it or look for it in a *long* time -- like since Google came into existence.
Now with Facebook and all of these other companies which are relatively recent, the old guard is trying to make sure they keep market share and features people want.
And, really, the tech industry has been going through fairly steady acquisitions for quite a while ... it's become normal operating procedure. Buy a company with a product you like so you can get their features and customers, and hopefully integrate the features into your platform.
We may or may not be in a tech bubble, but tech companies have been buying smaller companies for years ... that's just how companies grow these days.
Well, they really make up their money on the servicing of the vehicle over its lifetime.
I've seen many things which suggest there's much more money to be made by the dealer from the maintenance than the actual sale.
So if they sell the car at a small loss, and then make way more money via the service department .. the car essentially becomes a loss leader.
Or "ramifications of bad marketing week" -- because I wouldn't be surprised if those companies are advertising it as having 16GB of memory and not differentiating between 'storage' and 'RAM'.
A phone with 16GB of RAM would be kinda crazy just yet.
Depends entirely on where you are.
Most urban locations have so much light pollution that the amount of stars you can see if hugely reduced. On a clear summer night out my back yard, most of the stars are washed out in the background light, and only the really bright stuff is visible.
I should think in a city like London, the amount of visible stars wouldn't be all that much.
Since when is cost a factor in the validity of a patent? Does it do the same tasks?
We've had dumb-terminals for decades, so nothing at all new on that front.
To me, moving from wired networking to wireless networking is pretty obvious since we've been moving in that direction pretty steadily. The specifics of the networking is irrelevant I'd think.
Other than the wireless power, which I'm never clear actually exists ... this is taking several existing things, and putting them together in what seems more like an evolution than an invention. At which point it becomes the usual "system and methodology for combining several well understood technologies in a fairly obvious way".
What I'd really like to know is what claim 1 was in the patent which is now cancelled. I'm sure it was something ridiculous they couldn't support.
Do you have any idea of how many times some of us have heard those? Half of the people on any given plane could probably give them.
Seats and tray tables upright and locked, no headphones unless they're hooked up to the in-flight stuff, seatbelts work thusly, floor lighting here and here, cabin baggage stowed, put on my mask first (it might not inflate but that's normal), emergency exits front and rear and maybe at the wings -- look around you, non-smoking flight with smoke detectors in the lav, crash debris location indicators under your seat, you may need to inflate your life vest with these tubes (but only once you're out the door), look at the pretty card in the seat pocket. STFU and hold on.
So the company I won't do business with because I don't trust them is being sued by the companies I'm stuck with because the ones I won't do business with won't share enough of our data with them?
So, we're fucked then -- the megacorps have utterly won the privacy and financial data battle, the advertisers know everything you do because of it, Google and everybody else reads your email, and the government can collate the whole damned thing if they declare they Need To.
Dammit, the tinfoil isn't working any more. :-P
Bzzzt, wrong answer. From the link you provided I can see at least 4 jobs posted in Paris, which oddly enough is in France.
Which means Twitter "does business in France", and logically if France wants to sue them for the identities of French citizens who broke French law ... Twitter has no choice but to comply.
NOBODY expects the inquisitorial system of justice ... ;-)
Not necessarily. If Twitter is doing business in France, they're bound by their laws -- hell, if they've registered the trademark in France they're probably bound by them.
Imagine if a Chinese company set up shop in the US, and then said "We're a Chinese company, we're ignoring your laws". It wouldn't fly.
So it's going to come down to the extent to which Twitter has any business presence in France -- and if they have any, they're going to be stuck. And, since twitter.fr redirects to twitter.com the claim of not doing business in France might be nullified. Because the act of buying the domain likely means you agree to their rules. (And don't say that isn't true, because the US has seized .com domains for companies with no presence in the US because they claim ownership over the entire .com TLD)
Then, arguably, for every country they're purchased that domain, promoted their software, taken any advertising revenue, employed staff, or otherwise "done business" -- then they might have to obey the local laws only as it pertains to their citizens and what they make available in that country.
If you staunchly set up US only, don't promote into other countries, and any international usage isn't something you sought out, then you can probably tell them to PFO.
I'm not convinced that Twitter hasn't promoted themselves, or "done business" in those jurisdictions. If they've ever done anything in France, they can't then say they're only bound by US laws.
Not knowing what Twitter's presence looks like in France, the first questions are: Do they have any offices/personnel there? Do they have any equipment? Is there a twitter.fr? Do they promote and regionalize the software to France?
If any of those are true, Twitter is basically screwed in the same way Google was.
If it's all in the US and not anywhere else, then Twitter will likely be safe.
Likely, it will come down to if they have a regional variant of their service or local servers.
If there's only a single twitter.com, and it lives in the US, and everybody hits then likely not.
But if there is a twitter.fr, and they have a presence in France and promote their service there -- well, then you really are going to be compelled to adhere to local laws. You can't have it both ways. One would hope that reasonably, if I do something in the country I live in, and it's legal, no other country should have any jurisdiction. That way you don't get someone being sued in France for something which is legal where they live. Because half of the internet would be getting sued in countries where saying certain things is illegal, even if they've never been there.
Twitter can't promote their products in other countries, install infrastructure there, regionalize their product, but claim everything else is covered under US laws.
Of course, that's great in theory -- who knows what a court would decide in reality.
Well, this is because the carriers all want to make sure to inject their own shit to monetize everything.
The carriers want to put on their stuff to sell you ring tones, apps, and generally make sure your bill is as high as they can manage.
They don't care about your security. On my HTC Android phone, I had to go through and disable a lot of the crap my carrier put in because I was never going to use it and it was just junk.
When I was looking at my last phone, I had a choice of HTC with Android 4+, or Samsung with Android 2+. I opted for a newer OS and lower phone specs, and because I don't hold Samsung in high regard.