You're trying to define innovate to mean the same thing as invent. That's not what it means. It means "Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.". It's hard to argue that Apple doesn't do this. They find markets where there's room for improvement in the products and then release a product which is better is some way.
I agree, but then there's the stuff that Apple plain invented. FireWire? ADB? AppleTalk? TrueType? Even the PowerPC wouldn't exist without Apple's involvement. This idea that Apple doesn't create anything is frankly bizarre, and I think it must just be sour grapes, because it has very little basis in reality.
Bill Gates was telling us for years we'd have tablets and slates that we could carry around with us, and the concept was proliferated and demonstrated before him on Star Trek which got it from other sources etc. etc. etc.
Or by Apple, with the (highly innovative, at the time) Newton.
Why would Bill Gates invest in Apple if Jobs admitted that Apple wouldn't survive long enough to win a patent lawsuit against MS anyway?
You know the answer to that. Apple wouldn't survive as such, but the lawsuit would. See: SCO Group. Jobs was saying he had a strong enough case to win a massive settlement somewhere down the line, and Gates knew it. To get that settlement would take years, though, and investing Apple's resources in lawsuits while it struggled in the products market would probably mean the death of Apple's products business. The effect would be to take Apple the tech company and replace it with Apple-as-SCO-Group. Jobs was banking that Gates would see the wisdom of not just throwing one of the great, innovative American computer tech companies onto the scrapheap, and that there would be more value for both companies in cementing a closer partnership. He was right.
A company which does make stuff, but makes a practice of filing broad patents on every aspect of what they make, however trivial, and then digs them up and uses them to extort payment from others is also engaging in patent trolling. Thus Unisys with the LZW patent, Microsoft with the various FAT long-file-name patents, etc.
But when do you get to use a loaded word like "extort" and when is it merely ordinary, run-of-the-mill patent licensing, which is very clearly part of the purpose of having patent law in the first place? IBM has one of the largest patent portfolios in the world. Is it a "patent troll"? I hardly think so. Wall Street and economists don't appear to think so, either; IBM is considered a blue chip stock.
Apple has not really been an innovative company since the 1970s, at least in the sense of innovative companies advancing the state of technology
Since the 1970s? In other words, there was nothing innovative about the Macintosh or any product Apple has shipped since? That's just absurd.
Apple has been and continues to be a highly innovative company. The fact that you had to cherry-pick some random example like the Mach kernel (which Apple really only got on board with when it acquired NeXT) demonstrates how full of it you are.
Want to hear a joke? It's called "The New York Times". Media these days is so slanted that every news piece has an agenda. If you were to rely on the popular media for your news and information, well, you can forget about being well informed. They excel at filtering out information that disagrees with their world view.
OK, so you call the New York Times a joke, but you base that on the fact that they do not publish detailed analysis of guar gum futures? Somehow I don't think that's part of their charter.
The only story here is that there are a lot of people paying a lot of money for a crappy product.
And there's nothing new about that.
In the 1980s, before the Web, there was a big newsletter trend. People would create newsletters that were literally a few pages of xeroxed content on a specialized subject, and they would sell subscriptions for $300, $2,000, or whatever.
The fact that the content seems ridiculously expensive legitimizes it in the mind of the subscriber. If they gave it away it would have no value.
I read a get-rich-quick book once where the strategy was "make newsletters." Seriously.
You've already offered an entire essay's worth of opinions to explain not only what we, the Slashdot-reading public, believe, but why we believe it. Impressive that you have such insight without ever speaking to us. Have you considered going into psychology? You could conduct your whole practice over the Internet.
Re:I've been observing Stratfor since its inceptio
on
Is Stratfor a "Joke"?
·
· Score: 1
But I rather be more precise and quote the figure that I gather from several test cases that I carried out myself
It's not "more precise" unless we can understand the nature of the "several test cases."
So far you've said you're talking about specific areas with which you're "very familiar" but which are so obscure that newspapers don't cover them at all, therefore it's impossible to compare the coverage, but you've arrived at the very specific figure of 23 percent (but you'll be more vague if we prefer).
Sounds pretty convenient to me. It also sounds like the kind of thing people say after a four-day meth bender. No offense.
I thought of that. Last time I put something up on the free list, it was gone in no time. But something like this? When LCD TVs are so cheap, and arguably much better? It seems unlikely I could find anyone willing to go through the effort (but I'd probably be surprised, I guess).
and a host of other horrific diseases that have killed millions of people are directly related to the fact that humans eat meat when it is, in fact, not necessary to sustain life.
I'm sorry, but you don't know enough about MRSA, influenza, antibiotics, or disease to be able to make such a claim.
There are people who study medicine and there are people who read books they buy at the supermarket. The two activities aren't even remotely the same thing.
by the way, if there is something wrong with the food supply, then perhaps restaurants and grocery stores could stop throwing it out when its perfectly good to eat, . . . or perhaps the government could stop paying farmers to not grow things. and maybe most of food costs , if they were not related to packaging , marketing, reprocessing, re-reprocessing, value added, etc,..... until those things happen, i am not sure i will ever be convinced there is a 'food shortage'.
So a bunch of rich people don't bother to take a "doggy bag" home when they eat at the restaurants near your house, and from that you infer that U.S. farmers can produce and transport enough food to feed the entire world? And you think the reason people starve is because processing, packaging, marketing, and advertising costs have driven up the cost of a box of Hot Pockets too high?
I can see why you're afraid of science... it's full of logic!
Every year it has become more and more of a hassle to get a reasonable amount of cash when I go on vacation.
Er... why? Do you do a lot of spelunking? I've had a problem using a foreign ATM maybe once or twice, and it was only that particular ATM, not all of them in the entire country. And why would you bring U.S. cash, when the credit card companies (including your ATM card) generally have access to better exchange rates than anyone who would take your cash?
A 24" CRT is still massive. Never ceased to be massive. I mean, ever tried to lift such a beast? You may have had to reinforce your desk before putting one of those on it! That huge chunk of glass just won't get any lighter, no matter what.
I still have a 32" CRT TV, and one of the main things that's keeping me from getting a flat screen of some kind is WTF am I going to do with this beast? It's 150 lbs, but that's deceptive. It's 150 lbs of poorly-balanced, somewhat fragile dead weight. One person cannot carry it anywhere, at least nobody I've seen has figured out how. Two can manage, but I don't own a car. Funny how people are willing to deliver stuff for next to nothing, but you can't find someone to haul it back out again.
In 1978 in the U.S. his code was NOT automatically copyrighted unless he placed a copyright notice on each source file.
Yes it was. Why is it that copyright is one of the things where/.ers always feel a need to "correct" people with misinformation? Automatic copyright was one of the provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976, which came into effect on January 1, 1978. Look it up.
According to the legal definition, a single general term is not copyrightable, however a non-generic term is.
That's not true. You can't copyright any single term, just like you can't copyright the title of a book.
Read the text of that claim you cite. The work's title is "EMAIL." The actual work being submitted is the text of a computer printout, i.e. the source code of his email program.
Unfortunately, those trademarks were actually filed after this guy claims he invented the term EMAIL. But you're onto something. Here's an issue of Popular Mechanics from August 1983 where, on page 107, it says very clearly: "Both The Source and CompuServe (the two largest computer networks)... began their services by offering electronic mail (called EMAIL on CompuServe and SMAIL on The Source)..." So not only was CompuServe more than likely operating a nationwide email network before 1982, but it actually called it EMAIL (all caps), just like what the guy claims he "copyrighted."
I did some digging. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, you can't "copyright a term."
Here's his actual claim. What he did was register the copyright on his software. The title of his software is "EMAIL." That doesn't give him any kind of rights to the term, and it is not proof that he was the first one to use the term, either. There could have been a thousand software systems that called themselves that -- there just isn't a government record to prove it. Either A.) they didn't register their copyrights with the copyright office; or B.) they did so before 1978, which is as far back as the current online records go.
...for the record, what he did appear to contribute (or at least copyright) was the word 'EMAIL', although 'electronic mail' existed as early as 1965.
This claim in itself is fishy. You can't copyright "terms." That's not what copyright is for. Copyright is for individual works. He could have copyrighted his source code (in fact it was automatically copyrighted as soon as he wrote it), but there's no way he could claim ownership of a "term" other than by trademarking it. Some bad reporting happened somewhere along the line, here, and now it's getting regurgitated all over the Interwebs.
It's kind of funny, actually. If you think about it, it's pretty impressive that a standard, old-fashioned passport can take such abuse and still remain not just legible, but a verifiably authentic document. Passports are a pretty nice example of materials engineering. And then they laminate a chip into the cover that's so fragile that it breaks if you sit on it wrong? Was that really worth the effort/expense?
Ever worked security at a bar or nightclub? Lots of Americans use their passports as their primary form of identification. Why, I could not tell you. Often there are no visa stamps visible in the passports; they just carry the passport instead of a state-issued ID. And I'd say about half the time, these passports are beat all to shit. Seriously, they look like old leather belts. I can't imagine that the RFID chip would work. From my experience, most Americans have absolutely no concept of this idea that you should "respect the document" of a passport. They don't treat them any better than they do their phone or their keys.
Slashdot Mirror
You're trying to define innovate to mean the same thing as invent. That's not what it means. It means "Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.". It's hard to argue that Apple doesn't do this. They find markets where there's room for improvement in the products and then release a product which is better is some way.
I agree, but then there's the stuff that Apple plain invented. FireWire? ADB? AppleTalk? TrueType? Even the PowerPC wouldn't exist without Apple's involvement. This idea that Apple doesn't create anything is frankly bizarre, and I think it must just be sour grapes, because it has very little basis in reality.
Bill Gates was telling us for years we'd have tablets and slates that we could carry around with us, and the concept was proliferated and demonstrated before him on Star Trek which got it from other sources etc. etc. etc.
Or by Apple, with the (highly innovative, at the time) Newton.
Why would Bill Gates invest in Apple if Jobs admitted that Apple wouldn't survive long enough to win a patent lawsuit against MS anyway?
You know the answer to that. Apple wouldn't survive as such, but the lawsuit would. See: SCO Group. Jobs was saying he had a strong enough case to win a massive settlement somewhere down the line, and Gates knew it. To get that settlement would take years, though, and investing Apple's resources in lawsuits while it struggled in the products market would probably mean the death of Apple's products business. The effect would be to take Apple the tech company and replace it with Apple-as-SCO-Group. Jobs was banking that Gates would see the wisdom of not just throwing one of the great, innovative American computer tech companies onto the scrapheap, and that there would be more value for both companies in cementing a closer partnership. He was right.
A company which does make stuff, but makes a practice of filing broad patents on every aspect of what they make, however trivial, and then digs them up and uses them to extort payment from others is also engaging in patent trolling. Thus Unisys with the LZW patent, Microsoft with the various FAT long-file-name patents, etc.
But when do you get to use a loaded word like "extort" and when is it merely ordinary, run-of-the-mill patent licensing, which is very clearly part of the purpose of having patent law in the first place? IBM has one of the largest patent portfolios in the world. Is it a "patent troll"? I hardly think so. Wall Street and economists don't appear to think so, either; IBM is considered a blue chip stock.
Apple has not really been an innovative company since the 1970s, at least in the sense of innovative companies advancing the state of technology
Since the 1970s? In other words, there was nothing innovative about the Macintosh or any product Apple has shipped since? That's just absurd.
Apple has been and continues to be a highly innovative company. The fact that you had to cherry-pick some random example like the Mach kernel (which Apple really only got on board with when it acquired NeXT) demonstrates how full of it you are.
Worst. Submission. Ever.
Want to hear a joke? It's called "The New York Times".
Media these days is so slanted that every news piece has an agenda. If you were to rely on the popular media for your news and information, well, you can forget about being well informed. They excel at filtering out information that disagrees with their world view.
OK, so you call the New York Times a joke, but you base that on the fact that they do not publish detailed analysis of guar gum futures? Somehow I don't think that's part of their charter.
The only story here is that there are a lot of people paying a lot of money for a crappy product.
And there's nothing new about that.
In the 1980s, before the Web, there was a big newsletter trend. People would create newsletters that were literally a few pages of xeroxed content on a specialized subject, and they would sell subscriptions for $300, $2,000, or whatever.
The fact that the content seems ridiculously expensive legitimizes it in the mind of the subscriber. If they gave it away it would have no value.
I read a get-rich-quick book once where the strategy was "make newsletters." Seriously.
At the risk of repeating myself.
Please don't bother.
You've already offered an entire essay's worth of opinions to explain not only what we, the Slashdot-reading public, believe, but why we believe it. Impressive that you have such insight without ever speaking to us. Have you considered going into psychology? You could conduct your whole practice over the Internet.
But I rather be more precise and quote the figure that I gather from several test cases that I carried out myself
It's not "more precise" unless we can understand the nature of the "several test cases."
So far you've said you're talking about specific areas with which you're "very familiar" but which are so obscure that newspapers don't cover them at all, therefore it's impossible to compare the coverage, but you've arrived at the very specific figure of 23 percent (but you'll be more vague if we prefer).
Sounds pretty convenient to me. It also sounds like the kind of thing people say after a four-day meth bender. No offense.
This article struck me as pretty weak. The Economist has done a series of articles on Kodak and I think theirs were much more thorough and insightful.
Technological change: The last Kodak moment?
Kodak's woes: Out of focus
Kodak files for bankruptcy protection: Gone in a flash
I'm not sure how much of that is accessible to nonsubscribers...
I thought of that. Last time I put something up on the free list, it was gone in no time. But something like this? When LCD TVs are so cheap, and arguably much better? It seems unlikely I could find anyone willing to go through the effort (but I'd probably be surprised, I guess).
and a host of other horrific diseases that have killed millions of people are directly related to the fact that humans eat meat when it is, in fact, not necessary to sustain life.
I'm sorry, but you don't know enough about MRSA, influenza, antibiotics, or disease to be able to make such a claim.
There are people who study medicine and there are people who read books they buy at the supermarket. The two activities aren't even remotely the same thing.
by the way, if there is something wrong with the food supply, then perhaps restaurants and grocery stores could stop throwing it out when its perfectly good to eat, . . . or perhaps the government could stop paying farmers to not grow things. and maybe most of food costs , if they were not related to packaging , marketing, reprocessing, re-reprocessing, value added, etc,..... until those things happen, i am not sure i will ever be convinced there is a 'food shortage'.
So a bunch of rich people don't bother to take a "doggy bag" home when they eat at the restaurants near your house, and from that you infer that U.S. farmers can produce and transport enough food to feed the entire world? And you think the reason people starve is because processing, packaging, marketing, and advertising costs have driven up the cost of a box of Hot Pockets too high?
I can see why you're afraid of science ... it's full of logic!
People think not having porn in the App Store is the big issue. But no, people generally get porn on a web browser, not in an app.
I like the way you think! Do you have a newsletter?
Every year it has become more and more of a hassle to get a reasonable amount of cash when I go on vacation.
Er... why? Do you do a lot of spelunking? I've had a problem using a foreign ATM maybe once or twice, and it was only that particular ATM, not all of them in the entire country. And why would you bring U.S. cash, when the credit card companies (including your ATM card) generally have access to better exchange rates than anyone who would take your cash?
A 24" CRT is still massive. Never ceased to be massive. I mean, ever tried to lift such a beast? You may have had to reinforce your desk before putting one of those on it! That huge chunk of glass just won't get any lighter, no matter what.
I still have a 32" CRT TV, and one of the main things that's keeping me from getting a flat screen of some kind is WTF am I going to do with this beast? It's 150 lbs, but that's deceptive. It's 150 lbs of poorly-balanced, somewhat fragile dead weight. One person cannot carry it anywhere, at least nobody I've seen has figured out how. Two can manage, but I don't own a car. Funny how people are willing to deliver stuff for next to nothing, but you can't find someone to haul it back out again.
In 1978 in the U.S. his code was NOT automatically copyrighted unless he placed a copyright notice on each source file.
Yes it was. Why is it that copyright is one of the things where /.ers always feel a need to "correct" people with misinformation? Automatic copyright was one of the provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976, which came into effect on January 1, 1978. Look it up.
Here's Popular Science from September 1980, though unfortunately they don't call it "email" -- they abbreviate it "EM."
According to the legal definition, a single general term is not copyrightable, however a non-generic term is.
That's not true. You can't copyright any single term, just like you can't copyright the title of a book.
Read the text of that claim you cite. The work's title is "EMAIL." The actual work being submitted is the text of a computer printout, i.e. the source code of his email program.
Unfortunately, those trademarks were actually filed after this guy claims he invented the term EMAIL. But you're onto something. Here's an issue of Popular Mechanics from August 1983 where, on page 107, it says very clearly: "Both The Source and CompuServe (the two largest computer networks) ... began their services by offering electronic mail (called EMAIL on CompuServe and SMAIL on The Source)..." So not only was CompuServe more than likely operating a nationwide email network before 1982, but it actually called it EMAIL (all caps), just like what the guy claims he "copyrighted."
I did some digging. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, you can't "copyright a term."
Here's his actual claim. What he did was register the copyright on his software. The title of his software is "EMAIL." That doesn't give him any kind of rights to the term, and it is not proof that he was the first one to use the term, either. There could have been a thousand software systems that called themselves that -- there just isn't a government record to prove it. Either A.) they didn't register their copyrights with the copyright office; or B.) they did so before 1978, which is as far back as the current online records go.
...for the record, what he did appear to contribute (or at least copyright) was the word 'EMAIL', although 'electronic mail' existed as early as 1965.
This claim in itself is fishy. You can't copyright "terms." That's not what copyright is for. Copyright is for individual works. He could have copyrighted his source code (in fact it was automatically copyrighted as soon as he wrote it), but there's no way he could claim ownership of a "term" other than by trademarking it. Some bad reporting happened somewhere along the line, here, and now it's getting regurgitated all over the Interwebs.
It's kind of funny, actually. If you think about it, it's pretty impressive that a standard, old-fashioned passport can take such abuse and still remain not just legible, but a verifiably authentic document. Passports are a pretty nice example of materials engineering. And then they laminate a chip into the cover that's so fragile that it breaks if you sit on it wrong? Was that really worth the effort/expense?
Ever worked security at a bar or nightclub? Lots of Americans use their passports as their primary form of identification. Why, I could not tell you. Often there are no visa stamps visible in the passports; they just carry the passport instead of a state-issued ID. And I'd say about half the time, these passports are beat all to shit. Seriously, they look like old leather belts. I can't imagine that the RFID chip would work. From my experience, most Americans have absolutely no concept of this idea that you should "respect the document" of a passport. They don't treat them any better than they do their phone or their keys.