The reason nobody did it is because engineers thought it was a BAD IDEA.
I think the 1-click patent is a crock for many reasons, but to play devils advocate here: this point actually undermines the obvious argument, because it suggests that people in the field thought it could not be done. When prior art teaches _away_ from doing something in a particular way, and the patent in question finds a way to "make it work" in spite of that, then the solution is likely to be deemed non-obvious. From the Teleflex ruling; The Court relied upon the corollary principle that when the prior art teaches away from combining certain known elements, discovery of a successful means of combining them is more likely to be nonobvious. Id., at 51-52. When Adams designed his battery, the prior art warned that risks were involved in using the types of electrodes he employed. The fact that the elements worked together in an unexpected and fruit-ful manner supported the conclusion that Adams's design was not obvious to those skilled in the art
True in the past, but the tides have started to turn as of the Teleflex ruling. Obviousness has for a long time been very difficult to show because the courts had used a too rigid definition. However, SCOTUS has said that merely using components in a way that their combination yields only the expected result could be sufficient, and has also encouraged the use of "common sense" in determining obviousness, as opposed to the very narrow test. I hope to see a lot more BS patents like this invalidated in the coming years.
What cracks me up are the radio ads that go something like "Are you tired of your complicated cell phone plan? Well sign up for Verizular's new anytime family direct, and enjoy 1000 free anytime minutes for only $26 per month to the three people you call the most on even numbered weekdays. What could be simpler! Rates subject to change, void where prohibited, network maintenance surcharge and cost recovery taxes apply...etc"
It's the same as credit card promotions, grocery club cards and coupons, mail-in rebates, etc. You and I may realize how pointless all these offers are, but so many people love playing the game and thinking they got a great deal by finding the perfect plan that was made Just For Them. Nobody does anything unless there's some game aspect to it - warfare, terrorism, finance, dating, business, taxes, politics, you name it. We are so desperate to play games that we'll create them even for things as ridiculous as cell calling plans.
And more importantly for the industry, the pricing games allow them to avoid to avoid their service becoming a simple commodity. If the plans reflected their actual cost structure they would simply charge per bit, and fierce competition would quickly drive everyone's margins to nothing. But as long as they keep it a marketing game of adding ridiculous "value add" services and tricking you into complicated pricing traps, they can keep gouging.
It's just that for pretty much everything except GUIs, open source always wins so there isn't much of a competition for long. Remember in the nineties when there were scores of startups all making web server software? Remember Unix?
They're giving you something you do want at a (higher) price they think it's worth. The lower price you never paid for something you didn't want is irrelevant.
I disagree. The lower price that people were not paying (whether because of piracy or just not consuming music) is the crux of this entire issue.
If you increase the price on something, people complain. But if you just throw them a bone, even something that costs you nothing, they will pay more. In this case they reduced quality and added DRM, then reversed those features to justify a higher price. If they had just gone to $1.30 per track in the first place, nobody would have bitten, because they would have seen it as a massive ripoff since we all know that their costs are practically zero compared to CD. But by manipulating people's perceptions of the value of their product in this way, they can get away with it.
The lower price that one never paid may be irrelevant if you're trying to analyze the absolute value of something in a vacuum, but not in the real world where people will always apply some frame of reference based on what they've purchased in the past.
While on the one hand it is nice to see this pressure to get rid of DRM for "purchased" tracks, it is pretty disappointing to see that the move will also come with an increase in price. They gave us something we didn't want in the first place, and now they're using the taking away of it to justify a higher price? WTF?
This is just a continuation of the trend towards higher prices for music, in spite of plummeting costs for media and distribution. Wax cylinders -> Lps -> tapes -> Cds -> downloads - it just gets easier to move the data, but the price never goes down!
in case you mis-read the summary like I did at first: it was not Hans Reiser who confessed, but Sean Sturgeon, someone his wife previously dated. It is also unclear from TFA when they say "a one-time friend of Reiser's" whether they are talking about Hans or his wife.
Irrespective of whether Hans is really guilty, if this isn't enough to show a reasonable doubt I don't know what is. In light of this, it would seem quite plausible that he was framed.
Interesting tidbit at the end of TFA:According to testimony in preliminary hearings in the case, Nina Reiser had once dated Sturgeon, but broke off their relationship in January 2006 because she was unhappy with his lifestyle and taste for sadomasochism.
I never would have guessed that there was a tradeoff between the quality and speed of compression! No way! Next they'll be saying things like 1080p HD offers quality at the expense of computational power required!
If you really mean quality (as opposed to compression ratio) you've got it backwards. Lossless compression algorithms are generally simpler than lossy ones, especially on the encode side. Lossy algorithms have to do a lot of additional work converting signals to the frequency domain and applying complex perceptual models.
Don't bother reading TFA, there is no more information there than what's in the summary. Just some additional hand waving about how this enabling technology will magically detect and fix hardware bugs.
I'm sure the professor has developed _something_, but the article sure doesn't give any clue what it might be. This story is nothing more than an exceptionally poor description of what any FPGA can do.
They tested this on Mythbusters and had difficulty getting phones to interfere even in contrived scenarios such as at point blank range, with very old navigation equipment.
I've never heard of any incident where navigation equipment was actually affected by a cell phone in the real world. Wouldn't you think if it were even possible, it would have happened at least once?
Recently I was on a flight where this chick yacked on some business call for almost 30 minutes while we were waiting to back out from the gate. I wish assholes wouldn't use cell phones on the airplane, same as in restaurants or movies. It sucks, but why do we need this BS excuse about interference?
Umm... at what point does it ever make sense to build a datacenter that doesn't have the ability to run off its own power?
Umm... that wasn't the question!
The _ability_ to generate emergency backup power vs _cost effectively_ powering 24x7 continuous operation are completely different requirements. A one thousand times higher cost per MWh might be acceptable for backup power, but for continuous daily power, the grandparent poses a pretty interesting question as to when it becomes cost effective to produce your own. Seems inevitable that google would tackle that problem at some point, at the rate they're scaling.
Why do the various distribution schemes out there have to have DRM in order to be viable? For some reason allofmp3.com worked just fucking fine for everyone (streaming and/or downloading) without the DRM.
You haven't addressed the point at all. Of course DRM sucks for _purchased_ music. We all understand that, because we've been purchasing music without DRM (i.e. CDs) for years. We know it works, and we know that in this case, the DRM only penalizes the people who are PAYING for the music. We know that for THAT model, it's a bad idea.
But allofmp3 didn't give you unlimited, flat rate access. If you're not interested in such a service, that's fine, but many people are. So the question is, would such a service would be viable without DRM?
I used to be dyed-in-the-wool against DRM, but since using Rhapsody with the Sansa player and with Squeezebox* I have to say it is pretty hard to defend the position that DRM is universally bad. It is hard to imagine how you could have a service like Rhapsody without DRM. Having "all the music" accessible whenever you want, for a flat monthly rate, really changes your listening habits and how you think about music "ownership".
This article (linked from this comment) makes the salient point that what we are talking about here is one very specific form of price fixing, which is agreements between a manufacturer and its dealers. It is not about allowing collusion between would-be competitors. I would agree that the latter is quite harmful.
1. A semi-trailer with 10000 boxes costs less pollution to ship than 10000 separate courrier shipments. There is no contest.
You're kidding, right? If everyone bought everything from Amazon there would be FAR less pollution. Nobody would drive around in their individual car shopping. A UPS truck carrying a whole neighborhood's stuff along one route is far more efficient, I'd guess on the order of 100x.
Um, forgive me, but "because manufacturers can't control their street prices" sounds to me exactly like "free market forces". "Price control" is the antithesis of a free market.
Sorry but that is dead wrong. In a FREE market, manufacturers are FREE to make pricing agreements with their dealers. Dealers in turn, a FREE to refuse to carry products if they don't like the terms, and consumers are FREE to not buy the products if they feel they are overpriced.
I'm not saying that a free market is a panacea. But you are really confused if you think that's what we have now!
Can you give me a good reason we should prop up an obsolete business model besides nostalgia or personal preference?
I'm not talking about propping up anyone. The situation is kind of counter-intuitive. Right now we have laws which were originally designed to force competition to exist (between dealers who have similar cost structures) where it naturally might otherwise be controlled through agreements between manufacturers and their dealers. Now the situation is different because we have two channels with vastly different cost structure, and we should maybe let the free market do it's thing. You seem to be in favor of a free market but also in favor of the anti price fixing laws. You can't have it both ways.
It sounds like what you're saying is actually: Free market forces => manufacturers can't control their street prices.
No that's not what I'm saying. In a free market, as a manufacturer I could say "if you want to sell my product, you must charge this much." However, what we have currently is restrictions that prevent them from dictating street price to their channel. I'm suggesting that while this might have been a reasonable thing before e-commerce, it should probably be reevaluated now.
it would drive up consumer prices across the board.
Is the submitter suggesting that the periodic sales by mom & pop storesare responsible for keeping retail prices in check "across the board?"
Anti - price fixing laws are actually becoming quite a real problem or manufacturers and retailers, because they have to juggle the retail channel (which really needs 30%) with the online channel, which can be profitable on only about 6% margin. Preventing online from undercutting retail means giving them less margin, which is fair, but even then they can undercut until their margin is absolutely microscopic and still make money, whereas the retailer can not.
If you're happy with a world where brick and mortar retailers just can't exist, then by all means keep the current system and they will die, and not because of free market forces, but because manufacturers can't control their street prices.
I forgot to mention one more group: bible thumpers. I've run into quite a few (mostly older) Christians who seem to think it's respectable NOT to be on the internet. Because, you know, that's where all the Bad Stuff is.
This is such an obviously biased sample. Who the hell has time to answer a survey about whether or not they use the internet, do they plan to use the internet, why not, etc? I'll tell you who: lonely/isolated/old/redneck people who are just happy to talk to anyone, even a speed dialing survey taker. I can't imagine that anyone who is "with it" enough to be on the internet would feel like taking such a survey.
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The reason nobody did it is because engineers thought it was a BAD IDEA.
I think the 1-click patent is a crock for many reasons, but to play devils advocate here: this point actually undermines the obvious argument, because it suggests that people in the field thought it could not be done. When prior art teaches _away_ from doing something in a particular way, and the patent in question finds a way to "make it work" in spite of that, then the solution is likely to be deemed non-obvious. From the Teleflex ruling;
The Court relied upon the corollary principle that when the prior art teaches away from combining certain known elements, discovery of a successful means of combining them is more likely to be nonobvious. Id., at 51-52. When Adams designed his battery, the prior art warned that risks were involved in using the types of electrodes he employed. The fact that the elements worked together in an unexpected and fruit-ful manner supported the conclusion that Adams's design
was not obvious to those skilled in the art
True in the past, but the tides have started to turn as of the Teleflex ruling. Obviousness has for a long time been very difficult to show because the courts had used a too rigid definition. However, SCOTUS has said that merely using components in a way that their combination yields only the expected result could be sufficient, and has also encouraged the use of "common sense" in determining obviousness, as opposed to the very narrow test. I hope to see a lot more BS patents like this invalidated in the coming years.
What cracks me up are the radio ads that go something like "Are you tired of your complicated cell phone plan? Well sign up for Verizular's new anytime family direct, and enjoy 1000 free anytime minutes for only $26 per month to the three people you call the most on even numbered weekdays. What could be simpler! Rates subject to change, void where prohibited, network maintenance surcharge and cost recovery taxes apply...etc"
It's the same as credit card promotions, grocery club cards and coupons, mail-in rebates, etc. You and I may realize how pointless all these offers are, but so many people love playing the game and thinking they got a great deal by finding the perfect plan that was made Just For Them. Nobody does anything unless there's some game aspect to it - warfare, terrorism, finance, dating, business, taxes, politics, you name it. We are so desperate to play games that we'll create them even for things as ridiculous as cell calling plans.
And more importantly for the industry, the pricing games allow them to avoid to avoid their service becoming a simple commodity. If the plans reflected their actual cost structure they would simply charge per bit, and fierce competition would quickly drive everyone's margins to nothing. But as long as they keep it a marketing game of adding ridiculous "value add" services and tricking you into complicated pricing traps, they can keep gouging.
It's just that for pretty much everything except GUIs, open source always wins so there isn't much of a competition for long. Remember in the nineties when there were scores of startups all making web server software? Remember Unix?
the higher prices will also come with higher quality audio.
You mean the same quality we had before, with CDs? Do you think those extra bits cost them anything?
I think you've made my point!
They're giving you something you do want at a (higher) price they think it's worth. The lower price you never paid for something you didn't want is irrelevant.
I disagree. The lower price that people were not paying (whether because of piracy or just not consuming music) is the crux of this entire issue.
If you increase the price on something, people complain. But if you just throw them a bone, even something that costs you nothing, they will pay more. In this case they reduced quality and added DRM, then reversed those features to justify a higher price. If they had just gone to $1.30 per track in the first place, nobody would have bitten, because they would have seen it as a massive ripoff since we all know that their costs are practically zero compared to CD. But by manipulating people's perceptions of the value of their product in this way, they can get away with it.
The lower price that one never paid may be irrelevant if you're trying to analyze the absolute value of something in a vacuum, but not in the real world where people will always apply some frame of reference based on what they've purchased in the past.
While on the one hand it is nice to see this pressure to get rid of DRM for "purchased" tracks, it is pretty disappointing to see that the move will also come with an increase in price. They gave us something we didn't want in the first place, and now they're using the taking away of it to justify a higher price? WTF?
This is just a continuation of the trend towards higher prices for music, in spite of plummeting costs for media and distribution. Wax cylinders -> Lps -> tapes -> Cds -> downloads - it just gets easier to move the data, but the price never goes down!
in case you mis-read the summary like I did at first: it was not Hans Reiser who confessed, but Sean Sturgeon, someone his wife previously dated. It is also unclear from TFA when they say "a one-time friend of Reiser's" whether they are talking about Hans or his wife.
Irrespective of whether Hans is really guilty, if this isn't enough to show a reasonable doubt I don't know what is. In light of this, it would seem quite plausible that he was framed.
Interesting tidbit at the end of TFA:According to testimony in preliminary hearings in the case, Nina Reiser had once dated Sturgeon, but broke off their relationship in January 2006 because she was unhappy with his lifestyle and taste for sadomasochism.
Sounds like they're all a bunch of real whackos!
I never would have guessed that there was a tradeoff between the quality and speed of compression! No way! Next they'll be saying things like 1080p HD offers quality at the expense of computational power required!
If you really mean quality (as opposed to compression ratio) you've got it backwards. Lossless compression algorithms are generally simpler than lossy ones, especially on the encode side. Lossy algorithms have to do a lot of additional work converting signals to the frequency domain and applying complex perceptual models.
Don't bother reading TFA, there is no more information there than what's in the summary. Just some additional hand waving about how this enabling technology will magically detect and fix hardware bugs.
I'm sure the professor has developed _something_, but the article sure doesn't give any clue what it might be. This story is nothing more than an exceptionally poor description of what any FPGA can do.
They tested this on Mythbusters and had difficulty getting phones to interfere even in contrived scenarios such as at point blank range, with very old navigation equipment.
I've never heard of any incident where navigation equipment was actually affected by a cell phone in the real world. Wouldn't you think if it were even possible, it would have happened at least once?
Recently I was on a flight where this chick yacked on some business call for almost 30 minutes while we were waiting to back out from the gate. I wish assholes wouldn't use cell phones on the airplane, same as in restaurants or movies. It sucks, but why do we need this BS excuse about interference?
Umm... at what point does it ever make sense to build a datacenter that doesn't have the ability to run off its own power?
Umm... that wasn't the question!
The _ability_ to generate emergency backup power vs _cost effectively_ powering 24x7 continuous operation are completely different requirements. A one thousand times higher cost per MWh might be acceptable for backup power, but for continuous daily power, the grandparent poses a pretty interesting question as to when it becomes cost effective to produce your own. Seems inevitable that google would tackle that problem at some point, at the rate they're scaling.
Nah, any computer programmer knows that 1 AND 1 = 1. Were you referring to XOR, by any chance?
Quoi? XOR is indeed equivalent to addition, but he never said that AND means "plus". AND is of course equivalent to multiplication:
1 x 1 = 1
1 x 0 = 0
0 x 1 = 0
0 x 0 = 0
Why do the various distribution schemes out there have to have DRM in order to be viable? For some reason allofmp3.com worked just fucking fine for everyone (streaming and/or downloading) without the DRM.
You haven't addressed the point at all. Of course DRM sucks for _purchased_ music. We all understand that, because we've been purchasing music without DRM (i.e. CDs) for years. We know it works, and we know that in this case, the DRM only penalizes the people who are PAYING for the music. We know that for THAT model, it's a bad idea.
But allofmp3 didn't give you unlimited, flat rate access. If you're not interested in such a service, that's fine, but many people are. So the question is, would such a service would be viable without DRM?
I used to be dyed-in-the-wool against DRM, but since using Rhapsody with the Sansa player and with Squeezebox* I have to say it is pretty hard to defend the position that DRM is universally bad. It is hard to imagine how you could have a service like Rhapsody without DRM. Having "all the music" accessible whenever you want, for a flat monthly rate, really changes your listening habits and how you think about music "ownership".
* I work for Slim/Logitech
Touché. However, I still think this particular situation is unduly restrictive of business.
This article (linked from this comment) makes the salient point that what we are talking about here is one very specific form of price fixing, which is agreements between a manufacturer and its dealers. It is not about allowing collusion between would-be competitors. I would agree that the latter is quite harmful.
1. A semi-trailer with 10000 boxes costs less pollution to ship than 10000 separate courrier shipments. There is no contest.
You're kidding, right? If everyone bought everything from Amazon there would be FAR less pollution. Nobody would drive around in their individual car shopping. A UPS truck carrying a whole neighborhood's stuff along one route is far more efficient, I'd guess on the order of 100x.
Um, forgive me, but "because manufacturers can't control their street prices" sounds to me exactly like "free market forces". "Price control" is the antithesis of a free market.
Sorry but that is dead wrong. In a FREE market, manufacturers are FREE to make pricing agreements with their dealers. Dealers in turn, a FREE to refuse to carry products if they don't like the terms, and consumers are FREE to not buy the products if they feel they are overpriced.
I'm not saying that a free market is a panacea. But you are really confused if you think that's what we have now!
Can you give me a good reason we should prop up an obsolete business model besides nostalgia or personal preference?
I'm not talking about propping up anyone. The situation is kind of counter-intuitive. Right now we have laws which were originally designed to force competition to exist (between dealers who have similar cost structures) where it naturally might otherwise be controlled through agreements between manufacturers and their dealers. Now the situation is different because we have two channels with vastly different cost structure, and we should maybe let the free market do it's thing. You seem to be in favor of a free market but also in favor of the anti price fixing laws. You can't have it both ways.
It sounds like what you're saying is actually: Free market forces => manufacturers can't control their street prices.
No that's not what I'm saying. In a free market, as a manufacturer I could say "if you want to sell my product, you must charge this much." However, what we have currently is restrictions that prevent them from dictating street price to their channel. I'm suggesting that while this might have been a reasonable thing before e-commerce, it should probably be reevaluated now.
it would drive up consumer prices across the board.
Is the submitter suggesting that the periodic sales by mom & pop storesare responsible for keeping retail prices in check "across the board?"
Anti - price fixing laws are actually becoming quite a real problem or manufacturers and retailers, because they have to juggle the retail channel (which really needs 30%) with the online channel, which can be profitable on only about 6% margin. Preventing online from undercutting retail means giving them less margin, which is fair, but even then they can undercut until their margin is absolutely microscopic and still make money, whereas the retailer can not.
If you're happy with a world where brick and mortar retailers just can't exist, then by all means keep the current system and they will die, and not because of free market forces, but because manufacturers can't control their street prices.
I don't know about you, but the basement I live in is more than 20 feet long.
I forgot to mention one more group: bible thumpers. I've run into quite a few (mostly older) Christians who seem to think it's respectable NOT to be on the internet. Because, you know, that's where all the Bad Stuff is.
This is such an obviously biased sample. Who the hell has time to answer a survey about whether or not they use the internet, do they plan to use the internet, why not, etc? I'll tell you who: lonely/isolated/old/redneck people who are just happy to talk to anyone, even a speed dialing survey taker. I can't imagine that anyone who is "with it" enough to be on the internet would feel like taking such a survey.