Summary: 'If we litigate, we have a chance to win.'
Win what?
Money.
Specifically, the money they feel they should be getting paid every single time you watch a program, and on every single device.
Content providers would love it if we reached the level where every time I watched a movie I had bought on DVD, they get paid for it. Watch an episode again on your PVR, they get paid for it. Re-read a book, they get paid for it. In their ideal world, a single viewing is licensed as a one-time event, with each person watching being part of the revenue stream.
I've already heard the argument that fast forwarding commercials should be illegal because the advertiser paid for that, and you should be obligated to watch. This, of course, completely ignores the fact that local markets already change the ads to those they've sold, and that in a re-run of an episode, it's likely to be a different set of commercials. But, they'd like their commercials to be an unalterable part of the broadcast.
Although Wiktionary has allowed the use of "foil" to describe transparencies, Webster still hasn't allowed that usage of the word.
Dude, when "OMG" and "LOL" get added to the Oxford Dictionary, it's too late to start worrying about what's "allowed".
Let's face it, if they're just adding "rotoscope" and "suicide door" to the lexicon (both words which have been around for ever), a dictionary isn't always definitive on what words people are using in practice.
You can now be free to make up geek-bonics as you please.;-)
I don't think I'll permit a Chinese company to dictate proper use of the English language, nor a page entitled "Here you obtain information about plastic foils".
*laugh* OK, fair enough... I've never heard the term before, and all of the hits for "plastic foil" seem to be Chinese companies.
The term seems to be in use, but nothing I would call authoritative on the subject. Though, someone filed a patent relating to it.
I am not in control of it. It is an appliance that's mostly locked down.
It's a flat Tivo.
It's not a PC.
Wow, all the irrational zeal and enthusiasm of RMS and a four digit ID. Bravo sir.
I'm afraid I disagree with you... just because it's not idealogically pure enough for you doesn't cause it to cease to be a computer. Some of you guys are just way too rabid in your assertions. You remind me of Stalin and his purges for crying out loud, you come across as bordering on zealotry with the need to shout down anybody who disagrees with you.
Boo hoo, you don't have unlimited freedom to do what you want with it, and you are horribly oppressed... help help, come see the violence inherent in the system. Both an Xbox and a PS3 are locked down too... are they not computers? I know for a fact there are supercomputers made from PS3s... oh, but someone has Linux running on it, so that makes everything OK. Right, gotcha. Same hardware, different OS, that turns it into a computer.
I'm sorry, but you're not the keeper of the definition of a computer... it's got a CPU, memory, storage, input and output, and is capable of running Turing-complete languages. That makes it a computer.
Sometimes you guys get so mired down in whether you have the freedom to port Tux Racer to something that you go around making these big sweeping statements about how it's not good enough because it's a limited platform... and you ignore the freedom of someone to actually buy one of these devices and get usage out of it. Keep your politics out of my consumer choices, and shut up about it.
Drooling, rabid, ideological fanboi-ism doesn't really accomplish anything of actual value. It certainly doesn't allow for any dialog, because you've already decided that You Are Right and that everyone else if a fucking moron.
In conclusion, Have a Nice Day... but remember, it's not all about you.
I'm for ANY law which punishes unfair competition by liars, thieves and cheats overseas.
Except, this is punishing a company for the actions of its suppliers... actions which the company at risk of being sued has no control or influence over (and quite possibly no knowledge).
This is not "if you steal our stuff and sell a product in our country we sue you"... this is "if you buy from someone who steals our stuff, you are liable for it". This is 3rd party liability.
So, if I hire you to paint my house, and you are in arrears on your child support, I can be held liable for your child support. Or, if I hire you to design my web page, and I assume that in good faith you've paid for your development tools but you've pirated them, I can be sued for hiring you and not policing your software licenses.
This is not cracking down on people who pirate software... this is cracking down on people who have business arrangements with people who might have pirated software. This is an incredibly stupid law, and it grossly skews everything in favor of Microsoft.
Everybody else is now on the hook for what 3rd parties do in terms of software licenses and intellectual property. That is just plain old bullshit.
Seriously, read the Groklaw piece. Nothing good comes from a law like this.
I understand that some of you people want to allow piracy for personal use, but this is business.
Except, how is a business supposed to know if its suppliers are running pirated software?
This basically says that Microsoft now demands that anybody buying a widget from anywhere in the world effectively enforces a software audit on its suppliers. You know what happens if you tell your supplier they need to open up their stuff to you for scrutiny just in case they're doing something offensive to a 3rd party? They laugh at you, and cancel the deal.
If I'm buying foam packing peanuts from China, do you really think I have the clout to get them to prove to me they haven't pirated Excel? Because, that's what this bill is asking for. This is a stupid law, and one that tries to make enforcement of Microsoft's products the responsibility of people who might not even be in the computer industry.
Even better is the fact that he counts iPads as PCs. My phone runs Windows Mobile. Is that a PC?
Sure, why not? It's called a tablet computer, and it's, well, personal.
I think once you started having CPUs and could write programs for them, phones definitely became "computers". Heck, I bet your Windows Mobile phone has more resources than many of our first computers did. I know mine had less than 16K, and read everything from a tape cassette.
What about your smart-phone, or an iPad, makes it not a computer? Over the last bunch of years, they've largely converged and now do many of the same things.
Are you joking? Asset-backed securities are traded all the time. Every day. And they make sense. Trading a physical boat full of oil, for example, is a lot harder on the back than trading a contract for the delivery of a boat full of oil.
Right up until they started trading really bad debts as if it had value, and allowing that to begin to underwrite things which actually had value.
At a certain point, nothing was actually backing them, and they weren't really assets.
It was based on speculation and bad debt, and everybody went around saying it was a good idea. At a certain point, the money system became pretty much entangled with ponzi schemes, and everybody believed it would keep working.
It's epistemologically impossible to believe something that doesn't make sense.
Except, people believe in stuff that doesn't make sense all of the time.
People believe in trickle-down economics, though it makes no sense to me and doesn't seem to have ever worked as claimed.
People believe that the "free market" exists, and will always help us to find the optimal solution to all problems. That makes no sense whatsoever as it seems to presume that everybody makes choices based on perfect information, and that people aren't unfairly manipulating the system.
People believed that Asset Backed Paper Commodities made sense or that you could ignore the fundamentals of how money works and still get away with it.
People believe all sorts of crazy shit all the time.
Most people's beliefs aren't epistemologically consistent, because most people don't/can't apply that level of rigor within their own thought processes.
You seem to believe that epistemology actually gets you anything beyond an academic discussion -- like things would disappear into a puff of illogic if proved wrong. You can parrot your formulation of truth all you like too... there's numerous forms of epistemology, that doesn't make any of them into universal laws or anything.
So basically all you have to do to be a Buddhist is say that you are a Buddhist? That certainly fits the self-professed Buddhists I have met.
To be a Buddhist, you have to decide to go for refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And you more or less have to decide that you believe in it and that it's a good idea. I guess if you truly wanted to go through a formal ceremony and call that the threshold, you can do that too.
And, you can be a lousy Buddhist like you can be a lousy Catholic. So, maybe someone might kick me out of the club or something. But, really, it's not for someone else to say if I'm a Buddhist or not.
The Dalai Lama is still held to be a rebirth of the boddhisatva Avalokiteshvara. The notion of the boddhisatva, remaining in the cycle of rebirths while assisting people out of it, is pretty superstitious.
And, truthfully, a lot of people don't get too bogged down in the literal nature of that. I understand what you're saying, but the Dalai Lama is pretty quick to say "unless you're doing something scholarly, you don't need to focus on that too much".
The Mahayana scriptures suggest that the Buddha-nature is the supreme being. And although Buddhism inherited the Vedic pantheon, the Avatamsakasutra does have Buddha ascend to Mt Sumeru to display his superiority over them.
Yes, it did inherit the Vedic pantheon, because that would have been the background of Siddartha. However, he also says that those being are also stuck in Samsara, and mostly talks about how they'll have the same fate as us, just over a longer period of time. They don't mean "supreme being" in the sense that he is in control of everything, but that it's a "better" state.
The teachings of the Mahayana sutras (and at least a few Theravada texts) assume the existence of supernatural forces. They simply consider these entities to be inferior to the Buddha-nature. This persists even into schools of Buddhism that appeal to the West. The Mahayana sutras continue to be chanted in Zen monasteries.
Oh, I'm not saying that the sutras aren't used any more, or even that the imagery isn't there. But, a lot of it is aspirational/instructional, and there is room for interpretation if this is literal, or merely intended to not just come out and say "your religion is wrong". And, over the last 2500 years or so, there certainly has been some deification of the Buddha, that's for sure. But he was fairly clear on the fact that he wasn't some divine being. I tend to think of the mysticism as cultural than specific to/required for Buddhism.
Even reading some of the older Buddhist stuff, the supernatural stuff is there to explain to the target audience and is as much parable as it is literal. If you just sort of gloss over that stuff and read what they're actually telling you that you should be doing, there isn't really a requirement that you literally believe in it. It's not incompatible with believing in it, but it's not required either.
It may well be that someone might view Western Buddhists as having "stripped out the religion"... however, reading the texts and what they're saying, there really isn't an requirement you believe in it. It's just that the language and culture of the people who were expounding it was also rooted in Hinduism and that context.
For me, I don't have any problem being both an atheist and a Buddhist. And, really, if anybody does have a problem... well, that's their attachment not mine. If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.
Since according to Buddhism, the goal is to reach enlightment and therefore not be reincarnated, the fact that there are more people alive today than at any point in the past (and according to some math I have seen more people are alive today than the sum of all the people who lived before 1900), it seems that there is some logical disconnect. Shouldn't the number of living beings be steadily decreasing?
Because Buddhism and Hinduism includes all life forms, throughout the entire universe, for all time. Their cosmology included billions and billions of worlds, being created and destroyed endlessly. It's not just that God did a malloc() of N life-forms on Earth, and that's the whole thing. It takes into account a vast and (seemingly) limitless universe.
Birth as a human is just the best chance you have of getting out of Samsara because you can be aware of it and try to make changes.
Do you, or do you not, have to believe in reincarnation to be a Buddhist? If you do have to believe in reincarnation, then you clearly have to believe in something that does not make sense.
Actually, you do not have to believe in reincarnation to be a Buddhist. It doesn't work that way.
A lot of people (myself included) don't necessarily literally believe in reincarnation, but still think of themselves as Buddhists. Some of it you're free to treat as metaphor and the like which was included because you couldn't just tell everybody their religions were wrong. Think of it as a modified version of Pascal's Wager... at least, that's what I do. It's a little more abstract than strict and literal reincarnation (and an entirely different reincarnation than, say, Hindus envision).
Buddhism can work in conjunction with any religion, but at it's core, it's more like a series of useful things to do to not create more suck in the world and be happier in life. And, to get rid some of your negative behaviors.
There is no "if you don't believe this you can't be a Buddhist". It's as much about cultivating self awareness and compassion as anything so specific.
You can get into some pretty funky metaphysics between the different schools, but there is room to not need to delve into some of that quite so in depth.
Many forms of Buddhism believe that the rebirth of those with especially bad karma leads to existence among the living as a ghost. In spite of some recent Western attempts to proclaim a "Buddhism without beliefs" (little more than an attempt to rewrite the whole religion so that it doesn't make us uncomfortable)
If by Western attempts you mean well-known scholars like The Dalai Lama and Thicht Naht Hahn? Or Shunryu Suzuki or Pema Chodron?
Buddha was fairly clear about the fact that it's not intended to be a religion, and that he wasn't some supreme being. He was mortal, and expounded things that mortals should do. The pre-existing gods where Buddhism moved to didn't need to be purged wholesale, and have been incorporated/kept in many places.
Buddhism does not have a requirement in beliefe of a supernatural being, a creator god, or deification the the Buddha. Western Buddhists might differ from Buddhists from Thailand or Sri Lanka, but fundamentally, it hasn't been "rewritten" to appease us. It's fairly malleable to begin with, and if you step away from a specific cultural context, none of that is required for the rest of it.
Buddhism has the concept of ghosts, but you're allowed to treat them as something you don't need to literally believe in.
Of course, reincarnation almost necessitates the existence of ghosts as the energy persists and is still in existence. Of course, the super-natural stuff can be taken as metaphor or as a concession to older superstitions and beliefs.
Oh, that and the fact that Buddhism isn't technically a religion in that there's no creator god and you don't need to believe in anything that doesn't make sense. It's more of a philosophy than a religion. (Though, in some places it still gets viewed like a religion.)
Nothing about that says "possible ghost" to me, but "tombstone in background with light on it" -- these people seem to be really reaching.
The few times I've tried to watch any of those ghost hunter shows it always seems like it's dramatized, or a bunch of people sitting around convinced that everything around them is proof of a ghost. "Zomg, the floor creaked".
Hard to say if it's a hoax, or people looking too hard for something, and interpreting everything they see as 'proof'. It's hard not to cynically think that someone off camera who is part of it is scuffing their feet or something.
It comes off as really inflammatory until the third or fourth time you read it. He doesn't say take the jury out of the equation, he is advocating that the standard the jury should use in overruling the Patent Office should be "clear and convincing evidence standard" instead of the "preponderance standard" that Microsoft is arguing should be applied. So he's douchey , but not evil douchey.
Ah... evidentiary standards and what constitutes proof... not what I was really thinking that was saying at all.
Then I thank you, and I cede the point that the person I responded to made, and subsequent replies.
Though, I'm still not clear if Microsoft wanted a higher standard of evidence or lower... I should think a higher benefits them as they're the defendant, so much better for them if it's harder to prove. So, I've probably just answered by own question.
Sorry, yes. I'm hoping the courtswon't use the amicus brief to establish a new precedent that sides with the solicitor general that says the USPTO shouldn't be second guessed by a jury.
For more specific legal advice, contact a lawyer.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Money.
Specifically, the money they feel they should be getting paid every single time you watch a program, and on every single device.
Content providers would love it if we reached the level where every time I watched a movie I had bought on DVD, they get paid for it. Watch an episode again on your PVR, they get paid for it. Re-read a book, they get paid for it. In their ideal world, a single viewing is licensed as a one-time event, with each person watching being part of the revenue stream.
I've already heard the argument that fast forwarding commercials should be illegal because the advertiser paid for that, and you should be obligated to watch. This, of course, completely ignores the fact that local markets already change the ads to those they've sold, and that in a re-run of an episode, it's likely to be a different set of commercials. But, they'd like their commercials to be an unalterable part of the broadcast.
Dude, when "OMG" and "LOL" get added to the Oxford Dictionary, it's too late to start worrying about what's "allowed".
Let's face it, if they're just adding "rotoscope" and "suicide door" to the lexicon (both words which have been around for ever), a dictionary isn't always definitive on what words people are using in practice.
You can now be free to make up geek-bonics as you please. ;-)
Wow, I looked at that headline and my brain saw "Inside a Verizon Wireless Sandwich".
Must eat lunch on time.
*laugh* OK, fair enough ... I've never heard the term before, and all of the hits for "plastic foil" seem to be Chinese companies.
The term seems to be in use, but nothing I would call authoritative on the subject. Though, someone filed a patent relating to it.
OK, how about this then?
Do not feed the troll.
The battle is all uphill.
Snow melts in spring.
Wow, all the irrational zeal and enthusiasm of RMS and a four digit ID. Bravo sir.
I'm afraid I disagree with you ... just because it's not idealogically pure enough for you doesn't cause it to cease to be a computer. Some of you guys are just way too rabid in your assertions. You remind me of Stalin and his purges for crying out loud, you come across as bordering on zealotry with the need to shout down anybody who disagrees with you.
Boo hoo, you don't have unlimited freedom to do what you want with it, and you are horribly oppressed ... help help, come see the violence inherent in the system. Both an Xbox and a PS3 are locked down too ... are they not computers? I know for a fact there are supercomputers made from PS3s ... oh, but someone has Linux running on it, so that makes everything OK. Right, gotcha. Same hardware, different OS, that turns it into a computer.
I'm sorry, but you're not the keeper of the definition of a computer ... it's got a CPU, memory, storage, input and output, and is capable of running Turing-complete languages. That makes it a computer.
Sometimes you guys get so mired down in whether you have the freedom to port Tux Racer to something that you go around making these big sweeping statements about how it's not good enough because it's a limited platform ... and you ignore the freedom of someone to actually buy one of these devices and get usage out of it. Keep your politics out of my consumer choices, and shut up about it.
Drooling, rabid, ideological fanboi-ism doesn't really accomplish anything of actual value. It certainly doesn't allow for any dialog, because you've already decided that You Are Right and that everyone else if a fucking moron.
In conclusion, Have a Nice Day ... but remember, it's not all about you.
Except, this is punishing a company for the actions of its suppliers ... actions which the company at risk of being sued has no control or influence over (and quite possibly no knowledge).
This is not "if you steal our stuff and sell a product in our country we sue you" ... this is "if you buy from someone who steals our stuff, you are liable for it". This is 3rd party liability.
So, if I hire you to paint my house, and you are in arrears on your child support, I can be held liable for your child support. Or, if I hire you to design my web page, and I assume that in good faith you've paid for your development tools but you've pirated them, I can be sued for hiring you and not policing your software licenses.
This is not cracking down on people who pirate software ... this is cracking down on people who have business arrangements with people who might have pirated software. This is an incredibly stupid law, and it grossly skews everything in favor of Microsoft.
Everybody else is now on the hook for what 3rd parties do in terms of software licenses and intellectual property. That is just plain old bullshit.
Seriously, read the Groklaw piece. Nothing good comes from a law like this.
Except, how is a business supposed to know if its suppliers are running pirated software?
This basically says that Microsoft now demands that anybody buying a widget from anywhere in the world effectively enforces a software audit on its suppliers. You know what happens if you tell your supplier they need to open up their stuff to you for scrutiny just in case they're doing something offensive to a 3rd party? They laugh at you, and cancel the deal.
If I'm buying foam packing peanuts from China, do you really think I have the clout to get them to prove to me they haven't pirated Excel? Because, that's what this bill is asking for. This is a stupid law, and one that tries to make enforcement of Microsoft's products the responsibility of people who might not even be in the computer industry.
It's just not practical or feasible.
Is the US "most likely" to be affected by this?
I've sort of gotten the impression that the US was unlikely to be affected.
Is this just fear mongering?
Sure, why not? It's called a tablet computer, and it's, well, personal.
I think once you started having CPUs and could write programs for them, phones definitely became "computers". Heck, I bet your Windows Mobile phone has more resources than many of our first computers did. I know mine had less than 16K, and read everything from a tape cassette.
What about your smart-phone, or an iPad, makes it not a computer? Over the last bunch of years, they've largely converged and now do many of the same things.
Right up until they started trading really bad debts as if it had value, and allowing that to begin to underwrite things which actually had value.
At a certain point, nothing was actually backing them, and they weren't really assets.
It was based on speculation and bad debt, and everybody went around saying it was a good idea. At a certain point, the money system became pretty much entangled with ponzi schemes, and everybody believed it would keep working.
After the tsunami in 2004 their web-site did allow you to earmark it specifically for that.
I have seen them do this on other campaigns as well.
Of course, that doesn't mean they use it all for the selected purpose or that it doesn't go into their general coffers afterwards.
Except, people believe in stuff that doesn't make sense all of the time.
People believe in trickle-down economics, though it makes no sense to me and doesn't seem to have ever worked as claimed.
People believe that the "free market" exists, and will always help us to find the optimal solution to all problems. That makes no sense whatsoever as it seems to presume that everybody makes choices based on perfect information, and that people aren't unfairly manipulating the system.
People believed that Asset Backed Paper Commodities made sense or that you could ignore the fundamentals of how money works and still get away with it.
People believe all sorts of crazy shit all the time.
Most people's beliefs aren't epistemologically consistent, because most people don't/can't apply that level of rigor within their own thought processes.
You seem to believe that epistemology actually gets you anything beyond an academic discussion -- like things would disappear into a puff of illogic if proved wrong. You can parrot your formulation of truth all you like too ... there's numerous forms of epistemology, that doesn't make any of them into universal laws or anything.
Ghosts? Yeti? What the hell is going on with all of these paranormal/crypto-zoology stories today?
To be a Buddhist, you have to decide to go for refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And you more or less have to decide that you believe in it and that it's a good idea. I guess if you truly wanted to go through a formal ceremony and call that the threshold, you can do that too.
And, you can be a lousy Buddhist like you can be a lousy Catholic. So, maybe someone might kick me out of the club or something. But, really, it's not for someone else to say if I'm a Buddhist or not.
And, truthfully, a lot of people don't get too bogged down in the literal nature of that. I understand what you're saying, but the Dalai Lama is pretty quick to say "unless you're doing something scholarly, you don't need to focus on that too much".
Yes, it did inherit the Vedic pantheon, because that would have been the background of Siddartha. However, he also says that those being are also stuck in Samsara, and mostly talks about how they'll have the same fate as us, just over a longer period of time. They don't mean "supreme being" in the sense that he is in control of everything, but that it's a "better" state.
Oh, I'm not saying that the sutras aren't used any more, or even that the imagery isn't there. But, a lot of it is aspirational/instructional, and there is room for interpretation if this is literal, or merely intended to not just come out and say "your religion is wrong". And, over the last 2500 years or so, there certainly has been some deification of the Buddha, that's for sure. But he was fairly clear on the fact that he wasn't some divine being. I tend to think of the mysticism as cultural than specific to/required for Buddhism.
Even reading some of the older Buddhist stuff, the supernatural stuff is there to explain to the target audience and is as much parable as it is literal. If you just sort of gloss over that stuff and read what they're actually telling you that you should be doing, there isn't really a requirement that you literally believe in it. It's not incompatible with believing in it, but it's not required either.
It may well be that someone might view Western Buddhists as having "stripped out the religion" ... however, reading the texts and what they're saying, there really isn't an requirement you believe in it. It's just that the language and culture of the people who were expounding it was also rooted in Hinduism and that context.
For me, I don't have any problem being both an atheist and a Buddhist. And, really, if anybody does have a problem ... well, that's their attachment not mine. If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.
Because Buddhism and Hinduism includes all life forms, throughout the entire universe, for all time. Their cosmology included billions and billions of worlds, being created and destroyed endlessly. It's not just that God did a malloc() of N life-forms on Earth, and that's the whole thing. It takes into account a vast and (seemingly) limitless universe.
Birth as a human is just the best chance you have of getting out of Samsara because you can be aware of it and try to make changes.
Actually, you do not have to believe in reincarnation to be a Buddhist. It doesn't work that way.
A lot of people (myself included) don't necessarily literally believe in reincarnation, but still think of themselves as Buddhists. Some of it you're free to treat as metaphor and the like which was included because you couldn't just tell everybody their religions were wrong. Think of it as a modified version of Pascal's Wager ... at least, that's what I do. It's a little more abstract than strict and literal reincarnation (and an entirely different reincarnation than, say, Hindus envision).
Buddhism can work in conjunction with any religion, but at it's core, it's more like a series of useful things to do to not create more suck in the world and be happier in life. And, to get rid some of your negative behaviors.
There is no "if you don't believe this you can't be a Buddhist". It's as much about cultivating self awareness and compassion as anything so specific.
You can get into some pretty funky metaphysics between the different schools, but there is room to not need to delve into some of that quite so in depth.
If by Western attempts you mean well-known scholars like The Dalai Lama and Thicht Naht Hahn? Or Shunryu Suzuki or Pema Chodron?
Buddha was fairly clear about the fact that it's not intended to be a religion, and that he wasn't some supreme being. He was mortal, and expounded things that mortals should do. The pre-existing gods where Buddhism moved to didn't need to be purged wholesale, and have been incorporated/kept in many places.
Buddhism does not have a requirement in beliefe of a supernatural being, a creator god, or deification the the Buddha. Western Buddhists might differ from Buddhists from Thailand or Sri Lanka, but fundamentally, it hasn't been "rewritten" to appease us. It's fairly malleable to begin with, and if you step away from a specific cultural context, none of that is required for the rest of it.
Buddhism has the concept of ghosts, but you're allowed to treat them as something you don't need to literally believe in.
Of course, reincarnation almost necessitates the existence of ghosts as the energy persists and is still in existence. Of course, the super-natural stuff can be taken as metaphor or as a concession to older superstitions and beliefs.
Oh, that and the fact that Buddhism isn't technically a religion in that there's no creator god and you don't need to believe in anything that doesn't make sense. It's more of a philosophy than a religion. (Though, in some places it still gets viewed like a religion.)
Wow, love the image of a possible ghost.
Nothing about that says "possible ghost" to me, but "tombstone in background with light on it" -- these people seem to be really reaching.
The few times I've tried to watch any of those ghost hunter shows it always seems like it's dramatized, or a bunch of people sitting around convinced that everything around them is proof of a ghost. "Zomg, the floor creaked".
Hard to say if it's a hoax, or people looking too hard for something, and interpreting everything they see as 'proof'. It's hard not to cynically think that someone off camera who is part of it is scuffing their feet or something.
I remain unconvinced.
Ecch, that reminds me ... must not visit Slashdot next Friday ... that pink "OMG Ponies" color scheme is just evil.
Ah ... evidentiary standards and what constitutes proof ... not what I was really thinking that was saying at all.
Then I thank you, and I cede the point that the person I responded to made, and subsequent replies.
Though, I'm still not clear if Microsoft wanted a higher standard of evidence or lower ... I should think a higher benefits them as they're the defendant, so much better for them if it's harder to prove. So, I've probably just answered by own question.
Sorry, yes. I'm hoping the courtswon't use the amicus brief to establish a new precedent that sides with the solicitor general that says the USPTO shouldn't be second guessed by a jury.
For more specific legal advice, contact a lawyer. ;-)