It's an attempt to intrude on and limit what I can do with my hardware, which is unacceptable. It's as if they barged into my home and demanded to to have a guard standing there to make sure I don't get the idea of duplicating a DVD.
As an user, I find it's hard to find something to contribute to.
I want filters and subscriptions -- notify me when something new in the "open source hardware" category becomes available. Notify when something new with "arduino" in it appears. Things like that.
Instead it's a site that requires me to regularly search for stuff by hand, and which ocassionally sends mail 95% composed of stuff that doesn't interest me at all.
Once the world decided to switch away from CFCs, even with an exception, soon enough there wouldn't have been anybody to make it anyway. There can't be that much profit in ocassionally selling small amounts to NASA.
And if they did keep making it, it'd be at astronomical prices, and you'd be whining instead about NASA wasting money instead of switching to one of the perfectly good alternatives that cost 10 times less.
It does not matter. If I have a promise to get my money back, which applies to one specific component, I expect it to be upheld. In my view, if Lenovo didn't want to play by those rules, they wouldn't ship it with Windows installed.
Why would it be an outlier? Why would the military consider women for that position if they thought they might be unsuitable in any manner? To appease the yet inexistent Women's liberation movement? Also it's not an outlier, search for photos of computers of the same era, and you find quite a lot of women.
My guess is that it's much simpler. Designing the ENIAC was a man's job. Perhaps programming it was the unglamorous chore, a sort of maintenance task somewhat akin to sweeping the floor. Or maybe because they saw similarity with a switchboard operator.
Later, programming gained prestige, so obviously men wanted those jobs and would have the advantage.
If women have something that inherently makes them less suitable for programming on average, why would somebody have them as the programmers of a military system, when the military (especially in those times) is heavily male dominated?
Those are just warnings, they don't intent to legally bind you into anything.
Licensing is another thing entirely, the terms are attached for Windows and Windows only. It's not part of the product, but simply bundled with it, and the separate license it carries only make that stronger.
If the board came with a licensing agreement for the capacitors on board, then yes, I would expect to be able to refund that particular component.
N9 doesn't run Symbian. It runs Harmattan, which is a transitional system between Maemo and Meego. It's Linux based. From the userspace it looks a lot like a normal Linux system, though the N900 was much better in that respect.
Funny thing is that America seems to have the same issue.
Before I started talking people from the US, I've never heard of people being concerned about their 1/4th of Irish or Russian heritage. But in the US that seems to be a common interest. I suppose that's because the US is a relatively new country and other cultures have much more history and tradition.
I don't think that whether you pay or not matters that much.
Cloud services are always paid for, whether by advertising, collection of data, or actual payment by the user. They all have a business model of some sort. It's not the sort of thing you can run from a box in your closet because you feel like it, and eat the cost because it's not a big deal to you.
So even if you pay, the exact same thing happen. So you pay $10 per month or whatever. Big deal, you're still insignificant in comparison to what's needed to pay for the entire infrastructure, and you have no significant influence on the company that runs it. If it starts being unprofitable, it will get shut down, even if you still want to pay those $10.
1) and 3) are necessary characteristics of a system that's intended to make data hard to take down. If you can know there are 4 copies, you can get the servers where they reside removed. Then we're back to having the problem this story is about.
2) is probably a temporary problem. Here's why: there can't be that much of it in existence. Production has to be small. With a small amount of content, the amount of requests will also stay fairly small, because people aren't going to redownload the same thing they already have. But on Freenet, what one has in the downloads folder doesn't matter. Data must be actively accessed to persist. My guess is that as Freenet grows and other kinds of traffic become much larger in proportion, any kind of unpopular content will have a harder time remaining stored. Of course it'll still exist, but it'll get buried in some obscure corner and be hard to retrieve.
4) seems to be getting better. With bandwidth and hardware now being much better than when Freenet got started I noticed that performance seems to have got considerably more tolerable.
Freenet is exactly that. Unfortunately it's nowhere near the normal web performance-wise.
Freenet uses a distributed data store, where information is pushed into the grid by the uploader, then spreads around further when accessed. That unfortunately means that things only survive long term if they're accessed. On the good side, data doesn't depend on the provider to keep existing. If people keep accessing something, it will remain present in the network.
It's also rather painfully slow. We're talking of minutes to load a webpage, though once the node is well connected to the network it can perform fairly well.
It's not very user friendly. Besides the slowness, conservation of data is not guaranteed, and Freenet addresses are long hashes. There ae no friendly domain names. All you can have is a categorized Yahoo styled index, and bookmarks.
Freenet has mostly static content. Things like forums are possible and exist but it takes special Freenet-targeted technology. You can't run any random web forum on it. There's a forum included in the Freenet system itself, you can access it from the interface.
The other option is Tor hidden services. That's the usual web, except the Tor network obscures the location of the actual server and its clients. Performance is usually good. Unlike with Freenet, there's still a single server somewhere, which if found can be taken down.
Given any dataset, you can come up with a formula that would match it.
That doesn't mean though that if they tried doing this back when he was on his 3rd or even 20th murder, they'd have managed to come up with something useful.
The vast, vast majority of work isn't Important. The people who make large real world changes are very few. The vast majority has the function of a cog in a machine. Some are lucky to be a valuable and well taken care of cog, but it's still a cog.
Even if you're really happy with your job, unless you're one of those incredibly rare people whose work saves many lives, or dramatically improves living conditions, or something of that sort, I doubt very much you'll wish you could have done more of it on your death bed.
My satisfaction with my job is usually quite good. At some points it's been really outstanding. But even in the most satisfying times, I can assure you that if I found out I was going to die in 6 months, I'd be out of there in a week at most.
Solar will never, ever work for cars of the kind people normally drive. There's just not enough surface area on a car to collect enough power to move a modern vehicle. All solar cars are completely unusable in practice due to their complete lack of protection, accomodation or anything a normal car offers.
On the other hand, pretty much all the energy we consume (save geothermal) comes from the Sun at some point. And there's more than enough of it if it can be harvested.
Things are what they are, not what you think they are, to put it in some way. Believing you can fly if you jump of a cliff doesn't make you able to. Believing organic matter has something magical to that can't be reproduced artifically doesn't make it so either (dispoved by WÃhler's synthesis of urea)
In the same way, it doesn't matter what somebody believes what a phone is, it's still a computer.
I'm immediately reminded of countless Slashdot posts decrying the rise of appliance computing and lamenting the industry's move away from "general-purpose computing." That phrase is actually a euphemism for "nerd playground made by nerds for nerds," because that is what is actually being missed. Nerds feel power when they invest time and master a system, but non-nerds have neither the time nor desire to make computing a hobby. To them, computers are simply a means to get a job done, and that's the extent of their interest.
There's no conflict between a general purpose device and an easy to use one. I don't see how lack of DRM and user restrictions would suddenly mean anything different for the interface. All it means for most users is the ability to install unofficial applications. For the rest, the UI can be exactly the same.
Doctorow argues that an appliance computer isn't a specialized computing device but a general-purpose computer running "spyware." This is a highly politicized perspective to take.
And an entirely correct one. If you're not the owner of your hardware, then somebody else is. And if they can make money by collecting all the data they can on you, why wouldn't they?
Stick-shift automobiles are generally more efficient gas-wise because you are able to directly control the gears used to move the vehicle, but most people today drive automatics. They don't want to mess with things, or tweak things, or dissect things. The car is a tool, and that is also true of computers.
Yes, a computer is a tool. A tool should do what it's told. A car should drive wherever I want, a hammer should hammer whatever I want, and a computer should execute whatever code I want. The tool is my slave and I'm its master, and that's the only relationship I'm willing to accept.
Disregarding the pandering videogame terminology for a moment, this is a perfect example of the freedom-fighting perspective that appeals to techies and convinces them that they are soldiers in a "war". RMS has made a career out of this, and while his insistence on open technologies does contribute to progress in the long term, it's that step over the line into delusion that makes me cringe. There's no war. We're not soldiers. We're not fighting a "mini-boss" in a video game, and we're not "level designers." We're just nerds who like to tinker, and that is a niche demographic in this business. The free market has discovered that the best way to make a seamless experience is to close parts of it down so the user doesn't screw it up (and any of you who have done tech support already understand how painfully easy it is for non-techies to do just that).
Bunch of nonsense. The reality is whatever we make it be. If we decide to make a war where there wasn't one before, then there will be a war. The "free market" isn't some sort of deity, it's simply the consequence of the actions of people.
Besides, there's nothing approaching a free market in the modern economy. The cost of entry into say, the cell phone market is enormous, and all the existing players are busy making turf grabs to make sure nobody new moves in.
Probably, posting this will get me modded down, but I just wanted to comment on the bitterness toward appliance computing that has sprung up in online tech communities since the popularization of mobile devices like the iPad. There's this self-absorbed attitude that I just can't wrap my head around, a petulant voice that screams "Don't tell me what to do!" like a child throwing a tantrum. It's so out of touch with where the industry has headed in the last 10 years that it risks marginalizing its believers, turning them into crotchety, narrow-minded, unpleasant people.
You know, I don't get your position either. I used to hear that America was the Land Of The Free, where I imagine a sentiment like "Don't tell me what to
Even if it cost $10K, it'd still accelerate like a Porsche. In my understanding, it's hard to make an electric car with a crappy acceleration, because that would mean that you're getting near the limits of the motor's torque by just accelerating a car with only yourself in it. A car like that full of people and loaded with stuff for a trip might not even be able to move.
Electric motors have such excellent characteristics that it's possible to make an electric car without a transmission, connecting the motor directly to the wheel. Also, the acceleration just depends on the motor, which is a cheap part of the car. The expensive thing is the battery.
So it's a rich person's toy. Or at least an upper-middle-class person's toy.
I'm very amazed by the amount of this kind of criticism in the US, because I had the impression that in the US, cars are a Big Deal, and most americans would find something as utilitarian as a Smart ridiculous. Most talk I've seen seems to indicate that in the US a car is almost a second home and must provide a substantial amount of comfort, safety, and bragging rights. But here that's somehow a bad thing. Weird.
It accelerates faster than a Porsche 911 and has other luxury features. Ergo it's a rich person's toy.
No, it accelerates like that because it's electric. It's not an optional "luxury feature" that was included, but an inherent characteristic of an electric motor. They have near their maximum torque when starting.
Why the heck does anybody care about the Mayan calendar?
I mean, the US is AFAIK overwhelmingly made up of a mix of abrahamic religions. To me it seems that to make the mayan calendar seriously, you'd have to subscribe to their religion, and how many believers in it can there be?
Thank you for the response. Now I see where your coming from. But let's take it a step back. Creation will happen whether there are patents or not. Can we agree on that?
Of course. In fact it's crucial to my argument, which is that patents are not vital for it to happen.
The goal though is disclosure. I'll tell the world about my wheel if I get some sort of exlcusivity. That exclusivity IS a weapon against the competition. That's exactly what a patent is. It's anti-competitive by nature.
Yes, but in IT, the disclosure is rarely worth anything.
Look at the 1 click patent: I don't need any of the disclosure that it provides. It's trivial to implement just from the knowledge of what is being patented. There are quite a few of those. Take the patent on the progress bar. I don't need to read it to implement one from scratch either.
So I'm still unconvinced the disclosure (which is unreadable to me in most cases anyway) is worth exchanging anything at all for it.
As for the delay, honestly, whether you sue someone or not is a huge decision. If it would cost 2 million for Acme to sue yoyodyne, but in 2002 it looked like yoyodyne was only going to take away 100k in business, it doesn't make sense to sue them. And no one can really predict the future. In 2007 though, "holy crap, yoyodyne is a big issue, and they are doing exactly what we did," then it makes sense to sue. Plus there's the delay that you're not going to know all your competitors right away, etc, etc. There are dozens of factors that come into play.
Then why do trademarks work in the way they do? Exactly the same thing you said applies to them.
I don't buy that the software industry is faster-paced than any other. Moorse's Law? Not software related. Pharma? New drugs come out every day.
Patents last 20 years, right? 20 years ago we were using floppy drives. The 3 1/2 HD floppy drive appeared in 1987, I think. So let's suppose that in 1990 somebody patented a way of formatting floppies to higher capacity (such things existed, not sure if any were patented, though). Floppies were on their way out in 2001 or so, and that patent would expire in 2010, long after nobody used those anymore except for some ancient legacy machinery (where nobody is going to introduce anything of the sort, as they simply maintain the box that has been there for a decade)
So here again the disclosure part is useless: by the point the invention can be used freely, it's long obsolete anyway, so there's no benefit to society from the disclosure at this point.
This is very unlike the expired patents on things like combustion engines, which are still useful technology.
You're assuming it's a given that the progress of science and the useful arts are not being promoted. I disagree.
To me the current mess in the phone area with everybody suing everybody else means that something is obviously wrong. Patents are supposed to entice to create, not to be used as weapons against the competition.
Your arguments that the software industry is somehow special still don't add up. It's no different.
It moves much faster than other industries, and is much less understood. The faster development rate alone justifies a custom length of patents in the field, in my view.
Parties don't release their work simultaneously: someone releases it first.
That's not the point, the point is that Acme releases their product in year 2000, Yoyodyne releases their competing product in year 2002, and suddenly in 2007 they decide to sue each other. To me that's evidence of the brokenness of the concept.
If the patent was being used for the intended purpose, then Acme wouldn't wait for 7 years, nor Yoyodyne would have allowed the release of the first product to incorporate some of their tech, they'd sue immediately. Such delays indicate that neither company cared about any exclusivity, and it's not what made them create their inventions.
Since both inventions have been out for years in the market, the thing the patent was supposed to do (motivate the creation) has already been achieved. IMO at this point any patents should be invalidated.
The way I see it, the one and only purpose of a patent is to motivate invention and ensure that the resources spent on development are not wasted. For that reason there should be no such thing as a defensive patent, and IMO they should work like trademarks and work on a "use it or lose it" basis.
If you do something that is different than any of these steps, e.g., you do use a shopping cart model and periodically the cart object is polled and processed, then you aren't infringing the patent (this is not legal advice). I am just spitballing here too
And right here is a problem. You, even as a lawyer, must add that disclaimer because you don't really know for sure if that's going to fly or not.
Even if I paid a lawyer and asked them that, I would probably get told that even if it is found not to infringe, they still can drag me to court over it, and subject me to all kinds of unpleasant things like injunctions until the matter is resolved. A non-multinational can't afford this.
So the most likely result is: I will not implement anything of the sort, even if I'm sure I've got a completely new take on it that's not covered by the patent. And thus the progress of arts and sciences suffers, because attempting to innovate in the field is risky, and the safest thing to do is not to touch anything related.
They didn't patent the idea of one-click, they patented a specific way of doing it. You can license the patent or just choose not to use the Amazon one-click method.
No, they effectively claimed ownership of the idea.
Apple licensed it, B&N added a second click and still got sued. So Amazon seems to control the idea in its entirety right now. Your workaround with polling seems to be inexistent, probably due to seeing how well B&N's attempt at a workaround went. Mom & Pop's web shop certainly can't afford to go that way.
Still, that doesn't answer the fundamental thing: What the heck is the point? Do you seriously think that it's such a new idea that unless it could be patented, nobody would have spent the effort on developing it?
Slashdot Mirror
Not any more ironic than the position that governments shouldn't limit speech
It's an attempt to intrude on and limit what I can do with my hardware, which is unacceptable. It's as if they barged into my home and demanded to to have a guard standing there to make sure I don't get the idea of duplicating a DVD.
As an user, I find it's hard to find something to contribute to.
I want filters and subscriptions -- notify me when something new in the "open source hardware" category becomes available. Notify when something new with "arduino" in it appears. Things like that.
Instead it's a site that requires me to regularly search for stuff by hand, and which ocassionally sends mail 95% composed of stuff that doesn't interest me at all.
I don't think that would have mattered much.
Once the world decided to switch away from CFCs, even with an exception, soon enough there wouldn't have been anybody to make it anyway. There can't be that much profit in ocassionally selling small amounts to NASA.
And if they did keep making it, it'd be at astronomical prices, and you'd be whining instead about NASA wasting money instead of switching to one of the perfectly good alternatives that cost 10 times less.
It does not matter. If I have a promise to get my money back, which applies to one specific component, I expect it to be upheld. In my view, if Lenovo didn't want to play by those rules, they wouldn't ship it with Windows installed.
Why would it be an outlier? Why would the military consider women for that position if they thought they might be unsuitable in any manner? To appease the yet inexistent Women's liberation movement? Also it's not an outlier, search for photos of computers of the same era, and you find quite a lot of women.
My guess is that it's much simpler. Designing the ENIAC was a man's job. Perhaps programming it was the unglamorous chore, a sort of maintenance task somewhat akin to sweeping the floor. Or maybe because they saw similarity with a switchboard operator.
Later, programming gained prestige, so obviously men wanted those jobs and would have the advantage.
Explain the third paragraph, then. Photo for additional evidence.
If women have something that inherently makes them less suitable for programming on average, why would somebody have them as the programmers of a military system, when the military (especially in those times) is heavily male dominated?
Those are just warnings, they don't intent to legally bind you into anything.
Licensing is another thing entirely, the terms are attached for Windows and Windows only. It's not part of the product, but simply bundled with it, and the separate license it carries only make that stronger.
If the board came with a licensing agreement for the capacitors on board, then yes, I would expect to be able to refund that particular component.
N9 doesn't run Symbian. It runs Harmattan, which is a transitional system between Maemo and Meego. It's Linux based. From the userspace it looks a lot like a normal Linux system, though the N900 was much better in that respect.
Nope! I was just wondering if somebody would make a Fist of the North Star joke and what it would be.
I was trying to come up with something, but wasn't getting any decent ideas.
Funny thing is that America seems to have the same issue.
Before I started talking people from the US, I've never heard of people being concerned about their 1/4th of Irish or Russian heritage. But in the US that seems to be a common interest. I suppose that's because the US is a relatively new country and other cultures have much more history and tradition.
I don't think that whether you pay or not matters that much.
Cloud services are always paid for, whether by advertising, collection of data, or actual payment by the user. They all have a business model of some sort. It's not the sort of thing you can run from a box in your closet because you feel like it, and eat the cost because it's not a big deal to you.
So even if you pay, the exact same thing happen. So you pay $10 per month or whatever. Big deal, you're still insignificant in comparison to what's needed to pay for the entire infrastructure, and you have no significant influence on the company that runs it. If it starts being unprofitable, it will get shut down, even if you still want to pay those $10.
I think:
1) and 3) are necessary characteristics of a system that's intended to make data hard to take down. If you can know there are 4 copies, you can get the servers where they reside removed. Then we're back to having the problem this story is about.
2) is probably a temporary problem. Here's why: there can't be that much of it in existence. Production has to be small. With a small amount of content, the amount of requests will also stay fairly small, because people aren't going to redownload the same thing they already have. But on Freenet, what one has in the downloads folder doesn't matter. Data must be actively accessed to persist. My guess is that as Freenet grows and other kinds of traffic become much larger in proportion, any kind of unpopular content will have a harder time remaining stored. Of course it'll still exist, but it'll get buried in some obscure corner and be hard to retrieve.
4) seems to be getting better. With bandwidth and hardware now being much better than when Freenet got started I noticed that performance seems to have got considerably more tolerable.
Freenet is exactly that. Unfortunately it's nowhere near the normal web performance-wise.
Freenet uses a distributed data store, where information is pushed into the grid by the uploader, then spreads around further when accessed. That unfortunately means that things only survive long term if they're accessed. On the good side, data doesn't depend on the provider to keep existing. If people keep accessing something, it will remain present in the network.
It's also rather painfully slow. We're talking of minutes to load a webpage, though once the node is well connected to the network it can perform fairly well.
It's not very user friendly. Besides the slowness, conservation of data is not guaranteed, and Freenet addresses are long hashes. There ae no friendly domain names. All you can have is a categorized Yahoo styled index, and bookmarks.
Freenet has mostly static content. Things like forums are possible and exist but it takes special Freenet-targeted technology. You can't run any random web forum on it. There's a forum included in the Freenet system itself, you can access it from the interface.
The other option is Tor hidden services. That's the usual web, except the Tor network obscures the location of the actual server and its clients. Performance is usually good. Unlike with Freenet, there's still a single server somewhere, which if found can be taken down.
Given any dataset, you can come up with a formula that would match it.
That doesn't mean though that if they tried doing this back when he was on his 3rd or even 20th murder, they'd have managed to come up with something useful.
What a load of crap.
The vast, vast majority of work isn't Important. The people who make large real world changes are very few. The vast majority has the function of a cog in a machine. Some are lucky to be a valuable and well taken care of cog, but it's still a cog.
Even if you're really happy with your job, unless you're one of those incredibly rare people whose work saves many lives, or dramatically improves living conditions, or something of that sort, I doubt very much you'll wish you could have done more of it on your death bed.
My satisfaction with my job is usually quite good. At some points it's been really outstanding. But even in the most satisfying times, I can assure you that if I found out I was going to die in 6 months, I'd be out of there in a week at most.
That's almost entirely backwards.
Solar will never, ever work for cars of the kind people normally drive. There's just not enough surface area on a car to collect enough power to move a modern vehicle. All solar cars are completely unusable in practice due to their complete lack of protection, accomodation or anything a normal car offers.
On the other hand, pretty much all the energy we consume (save geothermal) comes from the Sun at some point. And there's more than enough of it if it can be harvested.
Things are what they are, not what you think they are, to put it in some way. Believing you can fly if you jump of a cliff doesn't make you able to. Believing organic matter has something magical to that can't be reproduced artifically doesn't make it so either (dispoved by WÃhler's synthesis of urea)
In the same way, it doesn't matter what somebody believes what a phone is, it's still a computer.
There's no conflict between a general purpose device and an easy to use one. I don't see how lack of DRM and user restrictions would suddenly mean anything different for the interface. All it means for most users is the ability to install unofficial applications. For the rest, the UI can be exactly the same.
And an entirely correct one. If you're not the owner of your hardware, then somebody else is. And if they can make money by collecting all the data they can on you, why wouldn't they?
Yes, a computer is a tool. A tool should do what it's told. A car should drive wherever I want, a hammer should hammer whatever I want, and a computer should execute whatever code I want. The tool is my slave and I'm its master, and that's the only relationship I'm willing to accept.
Bunch of nonsense. The reality is whatever we make it be. If we decide to make a war where there wasn't one before, then there will be a war. The "free market" isn't some sort of deity, it's simply the consequence of the actions of people.
Besides, there's nothing approaching a free market in the modern economy. The cost of entry into say, the cell phone market is enormous, and all the existing players are busy making turf grabs to make sure nobody new moves in.
You know, I don't get your position either. I used to hear that America was the Land Of The Free, where I imagine a sentiment like "Don't tell me what to
And you again missed mine.
Even if it cost $10K, it'd still accelerate like a Porsche. In my understanding, it's hard to make an electric car with a crappy acceleration, because that would mean that you're getting near the limits of the motor's torque by just accelerating a car with only yourself in it. A car like that full of people and loaded with stuff for a trip might not even be able to move.
Electric motors have such excellent characteristics that it's possible to make an electric car without a transmission, connecting the motor directly to the wheel. Also, the acceleration just depends on the motor, which is a cheap part of the car. The expensive thing is the battery.
I'm very amazed by the amount of this kind of criticism in the US, because I had the impression that in the US, cars are a Big Deal, and most americans would find something as utilitarian as a Smart ridiculous. Most talk I've seen seems to indicate that in the US a car is almost a second home and must provide a substantial amount of comfort, safety, and bragging rights. But here that's somehow a bad thing. Weird.
No, it accelerates like that because it's electric. It's not an optional "luxury feature" that was included, but an inherent characteristic of an electric motor. They have near their maximum torque when starting.
There's one thing I still don't get:
Why the heck does anybody care about the Mayan calendar?
I mean, the US is AFAIK overwhelmingly made up of a mix of abrahamic religions. To me it seems that to make the mayan calendar seriously, you'd have to subscribe to their religion, and how many believers in it can there be?
Of course. In fact it's crucial to my argument, which is that patents are not vital for it to happen.
Yes, but in IT, the disclosure is rarely worth anything.
Look at the 1 click patent: I don't need any of the disclosure that it provides. It's trivial to implement just from the knowledge of what is being patented. There are quite a few of those. Take the patent on the progress bar. I don't need to read it to implement one from scratch either.
So I'm still unconvinced the disclosure (which is unreadable to me in most cases anyway) is worth exchanging anything at all for it.
Then why do trademarks work in the way they do? Exactly the same thing you said applies to them.
Patents last 20 years, right? 20 years ago we were using floppy drives. The 3 1/2 HD floppy drive appeared in 1987, I think. So let's suppose that in 1990 somebody patented a way of formatting floppies to higher capacity (such things existed, not sure if any were patented, though). Floppies were on their way out in 2001 or so, and that patent would expire in 2010, long after nobody used those anymore except for some ancient legacy machinery (where nobody is going to introduce anything of the sort, as they simply maintain the box that has been there for a decade)
So here again the disclosure part is useless: by the point the invention can be used freely, it's long obsolete anyway, so there's no benefit to society from the disclosure at this point.
This is very unlike the expired patents on things like combustion engines, which are still useful technology.
To me the current mess in the phone area with everybody suing everybody else means that something is obviously wrong. Patents are supposed to entice to create, not to be used as weapons against the competition.
It moves much faster than other industries, and is much less understood. The faster development rate alone justifies a custom length of patents in the field, in my view.
That's not the point, the point is that Acme releases their product in year 2000, Yoyodyne releases their competing product in year 2002, and suddenly in 2007 they decide to sue each other. To me that's evidence of the brokenness of the concept.
If the patent was being used for the intended purpose, then Acme wouldn't wait for 7 years, nor Yoyodyne would have allowed the release of the first product to incorporate some of their tech, they'd sue immediately. Such delays indicate that neither company cared about any exclusivity, and it's not what made them create their inventions.
Since both inventions have been out for years in the market, the thing the patent was supposed to do (motivate the creation) has already been achieved. IMO at this point any patents should be invalidated.
The way I see it, the one and only purpose of a patent is to motivate invention and ensure that the resources spent on development are not wasted. For that reason there should be no such thing as a defensive patent, and IMO they should work like trademarks and work on a "use it or lose it" basis.
And right here is a problem. You, even as a lawyer, must add that disclaimer because you don't really know for sure if that's going to fly or not.
Even if I paid a lawyer and asked them that, I would probably get told that even if it is found not to infringe, they still can drag me to court over it, and subject me to all kinds of unpleasant things like injunctions until the matter is resolved. A non-multinational can't afford this.
So the most likely result is: I will not implement anything of the sort, even if I'm sure I've got a completely new take on it that's not covered by the patent. And thus the progress of arts and sciences suffers, because attempting to innovate in the field is risky, and the safest thing to do is not to touch anything related.
No, they effectively claimed ownership of the idea.
Apple licensed it, B&N added a second click and still got sued. So Amazon seems to control the idea in its entirety right now. Your workaround with polling seems to be inexistent, probably due to seeing how well B&N's attempt at a workaround went. Mom & Pop's web shop certainly can't afford to go that way.
Still, that doesn't answer the fundamental thing: What the heck is the point? Do you seriously think that it's such a new idea that unless it could be patented, nobody would have spent the effort on developing it?