Because a backwater of the executive branch keeps asking the court to change it's mind and let them do whatever they want, doesn't tell us anything about, or contradict, precedent.
I hope you're right, I really do. But, I really have visions of the Solicitor General establishing a new precedent saying that the USPTO's decisions should be final.
The US solicitor general, which represents the federal government in the Supreme Court, on Friday filed an amicus brief in support of i4i, saying that the US Patent and Trademark Office should not be second-guessed by a jury.
If they take away recourse to the courts, then they better get the obviousness part sorted out before they grant the bloody thing. Because, as it stands right now, you can patent things which everyone else feels is obvious... the USPTO just pushes it through and lets the courts decide so they can get paid and move on with filling their quota.
Well, as I don't install Flash on my desktop machines, I would actually have to go get my iPad to view that, as You Tube has transcoded everything to work for me. I have thought Flash to be a Steaming Heap of Innovative Technology for years, and avoid it like the plague.
And, strangely enough, I'm not asserting that an iPad can replace a newspaper. Nor am I saying it replaces a laptop for most people. Merely, as you quoted, that they're different things and used differently.
Soon there will be a point where convertible laptops will be as compact and affordable as a regular tablet.
Soon? As in not now? As in vaporware? Products which will exist "soon" don't factor into most purchasing decisions as they're hypothetical. Microsoft has said they'd have an iPad killer "soon" for a while (or for that matter, an iPod killer), and they don't. Not even close.
Then any consumer will naturally pick the more useful one.
And from this, you conclude they will all arrive at the decision you feel they should make? There's more than one set of criteria to decide "the more useful one", and it may well be that a lot of people don't want a convertible laptop.
It's why your phone is now your music player and maybe even your camera, and you don't carry separate devices around.
No, it's why your devices have all converged.
My cell phone, which I use very little, is a dumb phone. Well, that's not true, in theory it has a camera and the ability to play music but I don't use either (or care to, or for that matter, remember how). My music player is my iPod, and if I want a camera, I have a DSLR or a compact digital that I use. My iPod has 160GB of space... can I do this on my phone?
I've seen the phones on a camera, and, quite frankly, continue to be unimpressed. Convergence gives us devices that do a half-assed job of several things.
While convertible laptops will likely come on the market soon, and be cheap and light and all that... like a netbook, it isn't going to be what everybody wants. People will buy a format that most appeals to them, and it may be for a set of criteria you can't even relate to.
Hopefully, you will find the device of your dreams one day. But, what you're looking for and what the rest of the market is looking for might be wildly divergent.
Who thinks a tablet could replace a laptop? Tech journalists who don't know shit about tech, and various Starbucks-dwelling types (who also don't know shit about tech), that's who.
So, in your mind the market of people who aren't interested in tech is negligible and should be discounted?
Hell, I've worked in the industry for 15+ years, plus university and a good decade before that of playing with computers. Not everybody cares "about tech", and even some of us who do don't want to care all of the time. Maybe those people who don't "know shit about tech" don't actually give a fuck, and have different wants and needs from their devices than you?
The market for computing devices is not monolithic, thankfully. Obviously, a lot of people have chosen to have tablets and find value in them. The sales figures and the fact that everyone is trying to come up with a competing product makes that fairly obvious.
Everybody I know with an iPad works professionally in the technical consulting field and have at least 15 years of technical experience... and at the end of the day, the device they use for 'lightweight computing' doesn't isn't a laptop, it's an iPad. Heck, most if not all of these people have a laptop from work, and at least 2-3 other computers at home. At least one of them is a VP with 25 years industry experience.
So, maybe other people want different things than you, and that's fine for them. Because, I know a fair few people who know an awful lot about tech who actually have these things.
Maybe you can only see the world through the lens of your immediate, personal needs. But, you should try to avoid extrapolating that to apply to everyone else.
A tablet is an oversized PDA with a focus on bells and whistles instead of useful functions. Do not want.
Define 'useful'. And, for that matter, define 'bells and whistles' since I'm not sure my iPad has anything I'd call that.
I'm not going to use my tablet to code on, or to write a technical document or create visio diagrams, that's true.
But, for getting into a more comfortable chair, or sitting in the back-yard or the hammock at my parents place, or at the hotel bar or in the airport... I actually find the form factor to be usable in a lot of circumstances where I wouldn't want a laptop. For me a laptop is mostly something I put on a desk and use it like a desktop.
I can sit in a comfortable chair in the hotel lobby, cross my legs or slouch in my chair and still check my email in several different accounts, check the news, and maybe play sudoku or Pocket Frogs or something. It's used more for consuming content than doing anything like my professional work. But it's become something I get quite a lot of use out of, and on business trips I use it far more often than my laptop (which I still drag around with me).
To me, they're very different devices, and used very differently.
And yet, I have not once seen someone holding up a laptop to their face and reading or browsing the world-wide web on it on my daily commute with the bus. But I do that with my iPad and have seen other people do that with other tablet computers. So, all those morons that claim that netbooks etc. are far superior to tablets are obviously wrong! I spend 1 1/2 hours a day on the bus and that's why I love my iPad. I also really enjoy it the few times a year that I have to fly.
Can't say if a tablet is "better", or just different.
But I can say when I travel on business, the last few times I've brought both my iPad and my laptop. My laptop largely sits in the laptop bag just in case I need it (though the last two trips I haven't so it's been dead weight). I use my iPad in airports, hotel lobbies, restaurants, my hotel room, in my recliner, laying down on the sofa... all sorts of places I don't use my laptop. Both because my laptop is much bulkier and awkward, and for security reasons, my company has disabled wireless. I just find the iPad to be more convenient.
I couldn't replace my work laptop with an iPad, but I do use my iPad differently... and when I'm travelling, far more often. To me, the two form factors have entirely different usage patterns. A tablet may not be for everybody, but for those of us with one, it's hard to imagine not having one.
Then there is the part where this is only going to factor in when the call centers are overloaded, a situation where something that only works a lot of time can still do lots of good.
Well, Slashdot being comprised of a large number of cynical, jaded people who have worked in engineering related jobs... we look for the ways this will go horribly wrong first, and then decide if those outweigh the planned benefits. If your false-positive/false-negative rate is too high, your system becomes junk.
This reminds me a lot of polygraphs... voice-stress analysis might be a lot smarter than we expect it to be... but, there's a reason why polygraphs aren't admissible in many places in court. It's vague and subjective in a lot of cases. As a result, associated technology isn't always readily trusted by some of us.
Should have seen her when I accidentally ran over her cat.
While I'm willing to concede that maybe she was a little excitable, I'm pretty sure if you run over most people's pet they're going to have a pretty big stress reaction... that doesn't seem like a very fair example.:-P
This is very nice from the signal analysis perspective, but the implication that emergency call may be delayed if the caller is not stressed is a bad idea
I was kind of thinking the same thing... if the person making the call is an off-duty first-responder, you would expect them to know exactly what they need, but have less stress in their voice because they're better trained.
Delaying your response because someone is cool under pressure might actually cause some new problems.
At the end of the day, a computer to most people is intended to be a tool for productivity. The device itself is secondary to what I actually want to accomplish.
They don't want (or care) to be "good at computers", they'd just prefer the computer did what they wanted with the least hassle. They just want to print something, look up a recipe, or, apparently, play Farmville.
Similarly, I fly on business... I have no interest in being "good at planes", I just want the damned thing to work, and get me there. Same goes for plumbing, and even the engine of my car.
Many people want their computer to be more like a microwave or their TV... It does what it does well, consistently, and without any surprises.
Older people have less time for fiddly bullshit which is secondary to what they're actually trying to do. My iPad is something I actually use a fair bit, precisely because it is less fiddly, and because I use for such different things I don't even sit in the same kind of chair as I do when I use a computer. I'm not trying to do my professional work on it, I'm doing essentially leisure activities on it.
There's a case to be made for not HAVING to do some of these tasks. For people who aren't interested in the nuts and bolts, or just don't care anymore, it is nice to have the option of something that just goes and doesn't need a whole lot of attention.
At the very least, I should think knowing what you might be able to take cover behind would come in handy.
At, least until you can decide how to respond more decisively.
(Of, course, like most Slashdotters, I'll just stop at the taking cover phase and leave the actual soldiering to people like you... I think it's safe to say most people reading here would not be very useful in a firefight, no matter how many video games they've played.;-)
I actually saw this initially as a larger bit of technology on Discovery a couple of years ago. It could triangulate and range gun-shots pretty damned well.
I suspect this is the same thing but evolved a bit and scaled down to be portable.
Given what it purports to do, I suspect it's pretty easy to verify... Shoot various guns at various ranges, and see if several people spread out over a distance can all point to the source. I should think that would be something the army could set up in an extremely short period of time.
No wonder they drink so much. Every time they go outside and look up, all they see is a depressing cloud blocking all the sunlight. Being sh*t faced is probably the only way to get the gloom out of the day.
Funny, reminds me of San Francisco, or what I'm told Seattle is like... Maybe I was unlucky and always travelled to San Fran mostly in the crappy, damp seaon, but it didn't feel like a happy place to me.
Cold, wet, and miserable do not make for an upbeat environment.
It's getting comical reading how everyone is going after google every time they have a product that ends up being successful
Only when they run roughshod over the applicable laws to what they're doing.
People aren't slagging them because they came up with Street View or that they made Android... they violated privacy laws (and some might say computer access laws by sniffing Wi Fi) in some places, and they may have violated copyright by taking stuff from Linux and stripping out the copyright.
Go ahead, be successful. But, don't cut corners and skirt around the law in the process. That's what people are concerned about.
When what you directly copy doesn't meet the minimum standards for being protected by copyright?
Truthfully, I've never really understood what the threshold is for something you can copyright.
If you believe that Google is wrong here then that means you believe that SCO is right.
I'm not sure that anybody ever ruled that header files aren't copyright-able... I think it was determined that SCO never owned the copyright in the first place, and therefore didn't have any legal standing.
Over the (many) years of SCO, I've become lost in the legal arguments. I honestly have no idea if this is a violation or not. But, the gist of the articles is that at best this is dubious, and at worst, it's a blatant copyright violation.
This won't play into a goddamn thing. It's headers. read the first post. Headers are not copyrighted. This seems to be about as blatant a lack of comprehension you can get.
Well, from the last article linked from the summary:
Linus Torvalds himself has clearly rejected the idea of using the original Linux kernel headers in programs that aren't licensed under the GPL. In a posting to the official Linux kernel mailing list, he made the following unequivocal statements:
"In short: you do _NOT_ have the right to use a kernel header file (or any other part of the kernel sources), unless that use results in a GPL'd program."
"So you can run the kernel and create non-GPL'd programs [...]
BUT YOU CAN NOT USE THE KERNEL HEADER FILES TO CREATE NON-GPL'D BINARIES.
Comprende?"
Now, I have no idea if Linus making this assertion is a fully valid legal opinion, but he's sure as hell under the impression that they're certainly copyrighted.
And, the second link in the summary says:
Recently, Ray Nimmer, a well-known copyright law professor, observed that there could also be a problem with the way Google used some key Linux software code, called kernel header files, to create a vitally important element of Android. In fact, the way that Google used these files creates a legal quandary for manufacturers of Android devices and many developers writing code and applications for those devices.
So, I'm not entirely convinced that your assertion that the header files aren't copyrighted is actually true.
Most of these articles seem to be saying that this quite likely is a violation of copyright.
Personally, my reading of GPLv2 tells me that simply including GPLv2 header files does not mean that your application must also be GPLv2 (otherwise a large part of the embedded market simply wouldn't exist).
I think if a large part of the embedded market is using GPL'd headers, they're likely in direct violation of the license and know it.
Google copied 2.5 megabytes of code from more than 700 Linux kernel header files with a homemade program that drops source code comments and some other elements, and daringly claims (in a notice at the start of each generated file) that the extracted material constitutes "no copyrightable information".
So, take a bunch of copyrighted (or, copylefted) code, stripping out the comments, and then claim there's no copyrightable information???
Seriously? How can they even attempt to claim this. This seems to be about as blatant as you can get.
I'll be curious to see how this plays out, and if this might lead to the GPL being upheld in a court.
"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff."
At last, the English language's obsession with what time something occurred serves it well. Usually it just serves to confuse the hell out of ESL learners, since the ESL teachers love to test for obscure tenses.
Try French. It's got several verb tenses for which there is no equivalent in English.
Some of those can be pretty hard to wrap your head around.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you're right, I really do. But, I really have visions of the Solicitor General establishing a new precedent saying that the USPTO's decisions should be final.
That would be bad.
In terms of being highly adapted for the terrain they occupy, as well as the climate ... I'd call that somewhat elegant.
Now, cameltoe, that's a whole different story. Considered by some to be the most elegant design in nature. ;-)
Oh, Really?
The feds don't seem to agree:
If they take away recourse to the courts, then they better get the obviousness part sorted out before they grant the bloody thing. Because, as it stands right now, you can patent things which everyone else feels is obvious ... the USPTO just pushes it through and lets the courts decide so they can get paid and move on with filling their quota.
Well, as I don't install Flash on my desktop machines, I would actually have to go get my iPad to view that, as You Tube has transcoded everything to work for me. I have thought Flash to be a Steaming Heap of Innovative Technology for years, and avoid it like the plague.
And, strangely enough, I'm not asserting that an iPad can replace a newspaper. Nor am I saying it replaces a laptop for most people. Merely, as you quoted, that they're different things and used differently.
Soon? As in not now? As in vaporware? Products which will exist "soon" don't factor into most purchasing decisions as they're hypothetical. Microsoft has said they'd have an iPad killer "soon" for a while (or for that matter, an iPod killer), and they don't. Not even close.
And from this, you conclude they will all arrive at the decision you feel they should make? There's more than one set of criteria to decide "the more useful one", and it may well be that a lot of people don't want a convertible laptop.
No, it's why your devices have all converged.
My cell phone, which I use very little, is a dumb phone. Well, that's not true, in theory it has a camera and the ability to play music but I don't use either (or care to, or for that matter, remember how). My music player is my iPod, and if I want a camera, I have a DSLR or a compact digital that I use. My iPod has 160GB of space ... can I do this on my phone?
I've seen the phones on a camera, and, quite frankly, continue to be unimpressed. Convergence gives us devices that do a half-assed job of several things.
While convertible laptops will likely come on the market soon, and be cheap and light and all that ... like a netbook, it isn't going to be what everybody wants. People will buy a format that most appeals to them, and it may be for a set of criteria you can't even relate to.
Hopefully, you will find the device of your dreams one day. But, what you're looking for and what the rest of the market is looking for might be wildly divergent.
So, in your mind the market of people who aren't interested in tech is negligible and should be discounted?
Hell, I've worked in the industry for 15+ years, plus university and a good decade before that of playing with computers. Not everybody cares "about tech", and even some of us who do don't want to care all of the time. Maybe those people who don't "know shit about tech" don't actually give a fuck, and have different wants and needs from their devices than you?
The market for computing devices is not monolithic, thankfully. Obviously, a lot of people have chosen to have tablets and find value in them. The sales figures and the fact that everyone is trying to come up with a competing product makes that fairly obvious.
Everybody I know with an iPad works professionally in the technical consulting field and have at least 15 years of technical experience ... and at the end of the day, the device they use for 'lightweight computing' doesn't isn't a laptop, it's an iPad. Heck, most if not all of these people have a laptop from work, and at least 2-3 other computers at home. At least one of them is a VP with 25 years industry experience.
So, maybe other people want different things than you, and that's fine for them. Because, I know a fair few people who know an awful lot about tech who actually have these things.
Maybe you can only see the world through the lens of your immediate, personal needs. But, you should try to avoid extrapolating that to apply to everyone else.
Define 'useful'. And, for that matter, define 'bells and whistles' since I'm not sure my iPad has anything I'd call that.
I'm not going to use my tablet to code on, or to write a technical document or create visio diagrams, that's true.
But, for getting into a more comfortable chair, or sitting in the back-yard or the hammock at my parents place, or at the hotel bar or in the airport ... I actually find the form factor to be usable in a lot of circumstances where I wouldn't want a laptop. For me a laptop is mostly something I put on a desk and use it like a desktop.
I can sit in a comfortable chair in the hotel lobby, cross my legs or slouch in my chair and still check my email in several different accounts, check the news, and maybe play sudoku or Pocket Frogs or something. It's used more for consuming content than doing anything like my professional work. But it's become something I get quite a lot of use out of, and on business trips I use it far more often than my laptop (which I still drag around with me).
To me, they're very different devices, and used very differently.
Can't say if a tablet is "better", or just different.
But I can say when I travel on business, the last few times I've brought both my iPad and my laptop. My laptop largely sits in the laptop bag just in case I need it (though the last two trips I haven't so it's been dead weight). I use my iPad in airports, hotel lobbies, restaurants, my hotel room, in my recliner, laying down on the sofa ... all sorts of places I don't use my laptop. Both because my laptop is much bulkier and awkward, and for security reasons, my company has disabled wireless. I just find the iPad to be more convenient.
I couldn't replace my work laptop with an iPad, but I do use my iPad differently ... and when I'm travelling, far more often. To me, the two form factors have entirely different usage patterns. A tablet may not be for everybody, but for those of us with one, it's hard to imagine not having one.
Well, Slashdot being comprised of a large number of cynical, jaded people who have worked in engineering related jobs ... we look for the ways this will go horribly wrong first, and then decide if those outweigh the planned benefits. If your false-positive/false-negative rate is too high, your system becomes junk.
This reminds me a lot of polygraphs ... voice-stress analysis might be a lot smarter than we expect it to be ... but, there's a reason why polygraphs aren't admissible in many places in court. It's vague and subjective in a lot of cases. As a result, associated technology isn't always readily trusted by some of us.
While I'm willing to concede that maybe she was a little excitable, I'm pretty sure if you run over most people's pet they're going to have a pretty big stress reaction ... that doesn't seem like a very fair example. :-P
Do sociopaths do that very often?
I mean, if you lack "a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience", are you really calling 911 to save lives?
I agree this sounds like a potentially bad idea ... just not sure if your example is one of the likely corner cases.
I was kind of thinking the same thing ... if the person making the call is an off-duty first-responder, you would expect them to know exactly what they need, but have less stress in their voice because they're better trained.
Delaying your response because someone is cool under pressure might actually cause some new problems.
At the end of the day, a computer to most people is intended to be a tool for productivity. The device itself is secondary to what I actually want to accomplish.
They don't want (or care) to be "good at computers", they'd just prefer the computer did what they wanted with the least hassle. They just want to print something, look up a recipe, or, apparently, play Farmville.
Similarly, I fly on business ... I have no interest in being "good at planes", I just want the damned thing to work, and get me there. Same goes for plumbing, and even the engine of my car.
Many people want their computer to be more like a microwave or their TV ... It does what it does well, consistently, and without any surprises.
Older people have less time for fiddly bullshit which is secondary to what they're actually trying to do. My iPad is something I actually use a fair bit, precisely because it is less fiddly, and because I use for such different things I don't even sit in the same kind of chair as I do when I use a computer. I'm not trying to do my professional work on it, I'm doing essentially leisure activities on it.
There's a case to be made for not HAVING to do some of these tasks. For people who aren't interested in the nuts and bolts, or just don't care anymore, it is nice to have the option of something that just goes and doesn't need a whole lot of attention.
And, if that dies down, there's always the ever-popular terrorism to scare the children.
At the very least, I should think knowing what you might be able to take cover behind would come in handy.
At, least until you can decide how to respond more decisively.
(Of, course, like most Slashdotters, I'll just stop at the taking cover phase and leave the actual soldiering to people like you ... I think it's safe to say most people reading here would not be very useful in a firefight, no matter how many video games they've played. ;-)
I actually saw this initially as a larger bit of technology on Discovery a couple of years ago. It could triangulate and range gun-shots pretty damned well.
I suspect this is the same thing but evolved a bit and scaled down to be portable.
Given what it purports to do, I suspect it's pretty easy to verify ... Shoot various guns at various ranges, and see if several people spread out over a distance can all point to the source. I should think that would be something the army could set up in an extremely short period of time.
Funny, reminds me of San Francisco, or what I'm told Seattle is like ... Maybe I was unlucky and always travelled to San Fran mostly in the crappy, damp seaon, but it didn't feel like a happy place to me.
Cold, wet, and miserable do not make for an upbeat environment.
Only when they run roughshod over the applicable laws to what they're doing.
People aren't slagging them because they came up with Street View or that they made Android ... they violated privacy laws (and some might say computer access laws by sniffing Wi Fi) in some places, and they may have violated copyright by taking stuff from Linux and stripping out the copyright.
Go ahead, be successful. But, don't cut corners and skirt around the law in the process. That's what people are concerned about.
Truthfully, I've never really understood what the threshold is for something you can copyright.
I'm not sure that anybody ever ruled that header files aren't copyright-able ... I think it was determined that SCO never owned the copyright in the first place, and therefore didn't have any legal standing.
Over the (many) years of SCO, I've become lost in the legal arguments. I honestly have no idea if this is a violation or not. But, the gist of the articles is that at best this is dubious, and at worst, it's a blatant copyright violation.
Well, from the last article linked from the summary:
Now, I have no idea if Linus making this assertion is a fully valid legal opinion, but he's sure as hell under the impression that they're certainly copyrighted.
And, the second link in the summary says:
So, I'm not entirely convinced that your assertion that the header files aren't copyrighted is actually true.
Most of these articles seem to be saying that this quite likely is a violation of copyright.
I think if a large part of the embedded market is using GPL'd headers, they're likely in direct violation of the license and know it.
How is directly copying it not a derivative work?
So, take a bunch of copyrighted (or, copylefted) code, stripping out the comments, and then claim there's no copyrightable information???
Seriously? How can they even attempt to claim this. This seems to be about as blatant as you can get.
I'll be curious to see how this plays out, and if this might lead to the GPL being upheld in a court.
Started well, that sentence. ;-)
Try French. It's got several verb tenses for which there is no equivalent in English.
Some of those can be pretty hard to wrap your head around.
What, you mean they've removed AC? Some might argue that's an improvement. :-P