And saying on a Facebook page swamped with baseless accusations and speculation is going to do a whole lot more? What about the problem of safe and effective drugs being recalled due to uninformed public hysteria on a Facebook page?
Unfortunately if you boycot the bad guys they'll just waive their falling sales numbers as proof that their 'intellectual property' is being stolen. This will be followed by more lawsuits to 'redress the balance' and lobbying for greater protectionism in law. It is regrettable that the lawmakers across most of the 1st world seem to be far too self serving to work out what is really best for the population as a whole and come up with a balanced approach to IP.
Not really. It's only been trialled on a single type of cancer, but the way it works is effectively teaching the bodies own white blood cells how to target and kill the cancer cells. I am not an expert in this field by any means, but that technique should translate to most if not all types of cancer.
I know the Apple fanbois will be out in force to defend this as they believe Apple should be the only player in the market place, but Apple's new litigious dream of being the only player in the market is bad for everyone. Apple didn't invent the smart phone or the tablet, so if monopolies of these devices were allowed then Apple wouldn't have been able to make their beloved iDevices in the first place.
The reason Apple themselves are doing this is because they want to control the way everyone consumes media. They want to replace the PC, newspapers, magazines, and ultimately the TV putting them all under their control and charging their 30% fee for allowing access to content producers to their public. For this strategy to work long term, especially in the face of free competition from Android where large corporates can set up their own channels and distribution mechanisms, they need 80+% market share (20 - 40% just isn't enough to command the fees Apple want to charge). They've seen how their early lead in the smart phone marketplace has been eroded and now surpassed by Android, and they fear that the same will happen with the iPad.
This isn't about protecting intellectual property or Apple wanting just reward for their 'innovation'. This is a land grab aimed at capturing and locking in market share through litigation. Apple *are* scared of Android, and especially these latest tablets like the Samsung, not because they're currently outselling the iPad but because they will most likely be the first steps to Android gaining momentum in the tablet market and establishing itself as a viable competitor. Once that happens it will only be a matter of time as Apple cannot keep up with the huge variety of products their competitors will release - exactly what happened in the smart phone arena.
Hey, don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. And it's clear that poor old Apple is having their intellectual property stolen! Look how similar these other tablets look to Apples invention (forgetting all those that came before and looked like that too).
Truth is that Apple IS running scared. They stole a march on the smartphone market by coming out with a better product than the competition. However they've struggled to keep ahead of the curve and Android phones are outselling the iPhone 5 to 2 with the difference growing all the time. In a few years they'll have retreated all the way back into being a niche supplier charging a big premium for their kit.
They again shook up the tablet sector with a different, better product but Android is starting to catch up with the Samsung tab being the strongest competitor. Apple are absolutely running scared as they can see the same thing that happened with the iPhone happening with the iPad.
That's not to say that the company will fail in any way - merely that they'll be one of many competitors with a sub 20% market share. And that just isn't good enough for their ambitions, which seems to be to provide all the channels via which we consume media which in turn requires a large market share, so they have their lawyers out there fighting for that dream. Apple have a good tech and design team, but they're not good enough to grab that monopoly only through building a better product. The legal route is the only one that can work for them.
Wow, one laptop makes a trend true now does it. Well I have upgraded to Lion as well and in the last week or so since I jumped my previously fine 2009 17" Macbook Pro has crashed out completely twice. One second it's running, the next it's totally powered off. This has happened once on battery power, once whilst plugged in.
So there are some problems out there, just because it hasn't affected you doesn't mean it ain't so!
Whilst you trivialise the problem to a degree (scalability and reliability of an NHS sized system is not trivial) it still shouldn't take a small team more than a few months, and a budget in the hundreds of thousands of pounds, to build such a system. This could then be incrementally evolved over time on a budget in the hundreds of thousands per annum (maybe low millions depending on speed of development). You do then have the data entry problem to consider, but that is surmountable for a fraction of the budget of these big IT solutions.
However that's not how the government thinks. They want to go all encompassing from day one, speccing out a bloated and unworkable unholy mess that the end user doesn't want or need, and certainly doesn't understand, that takes a budget several orders of magnitude more than is required. Then throughout the project more and more people will hear about it and give their input or point of flaws, causing massive amounts of feature creep and confusion, affecting budgets, delivery time lines, and ultimately the quality of the end product.
As a final anecdote, as a small web agency we once were involved in the build of a website for a London borough. We were in competition with some much bigger agencies, but we went back with a good proposal, some great design concepts, and what we felt was a fair budget. The decision maker loved our whole proposal except for the cost - he actually made us double the cost of the build, simply because that then matched his budget so that it wouldn't be cut the next year (spend it or lose it!) and because it brought it in to line with the bigger agencies (so his managers wouldn't think our offering was less feature rich because it was cheaper). This way of thinking is not unique to the the public sector but is endemic throughout it, and the big suppliers prey upon this.
Beyond that how can this be the product of evolution, rather than the brain itself simply adapting? We're at best fifteen years into the information age. Where is the natural selection, survival of the fittest, and all that? There isn't any. The brain has always been able to cope with multiple streams of information, we're just exercising it more and more in this arena.
Actually the vast majority of websites, even business websites, are really low traffic and they benefit far more from storage space (especially when shared with other sites) than speed. Operating system RAM caching will usually make up any performance deficit those kinds of low traffic sites may experience, where the majority of the traffic that does go to their sites tends to be read only and directed at only a few pages on any given day. Premature optimisation adds either (or both) complexity and expense, and is unnecessary for 90+% of the web.
Scalability is a nice problem to have, and the majority of websites would do an awful lot better if they worried about driving traffic more than they worried about scalability.
But if, say, Ford were to finally invent a flying car, and decided to register a patent titled "door lock... on a flying car". Would you be happy if Ford were then able to stop any other manufacturer from building a flying car simply because they held a patent on the door locks? Never mind that door locks had been on cars, Ford were awarded them specifically for flying cars.
This is what Apple has done. People invented sliding locks and mechanisms hundreds if not thousands of years before Apple copied this simple mechanism and were awarded a patent for it because they did it "on a mobile phone". That isn't innovation and certainly isn't worth twenty years of market exclusivity. And it's a really lame way to try and compete in a free market.
It is a simplistic argument, but so is your response. Were Apple the first to manufacture a smart phone or a tablet? No. Were innovators automatically granted unrestricted monopolies on market segments that they create, then you would not have your beloved iDevices in the first place. Competition drives the market place, spurring Apple on to create new toys for you to buy just as much as any other company. Without competition all you will end up with is stagnation.
Many other people did it with physical side controls - this isn't some amazing new mechanism that Apple invented. All Apple did was translate a physical device and action to an on screen one. Do you honestly think this is an amazing innovation worthy of 20 years of monopoly?
I'm happy to vote with my wallet - Apple is not happy for me to do so and wishes to limit my choices by forcing others out of the market through litigation. This is why I'm unhappy with them.
Copying doesn't preclude improving upon, so that isn't what Samsung is accused of. Plus the two patents mentioned are for trivial UX features that are hardly ground breaking innovation in and of themselves.
Part of the reason that people are venting at Apple in this case is because yet again we see the absurdity of the patent and legal systems ably demonstrated by what is a pretty lame lawsuit (we think this product may infringe our patents, so ban all imports and give us full access so we can decide if this is actually the case or not - i.e. they're not even saying that it definitely infringes). I mean seriously, how on earth is sliding your finger across the screen to unlock the device something so amazingly innovative that Apple should be able to patent it?!
Another big part of the reason is that instead of competing by producing a better product and letting the market decide, Apple are increasingly hiding behind their lawyers. Their response to Android in general has been to sue rather than to find a better way to compete in the open market place. They could produce better devices, a wider range of devices, they could release the OS and allow other manufacturers to build iDevices, they could choose to specialise in various niches, they could try and revolutionise another market sector, etc. They have chosen to do absolutely none of those things, despite the end consumer benefitting from any and all of them, instead releasing relatively minor incremental updates to the same products and attempting to use the legal system to wipe out the competition.
The average consumer never benefits when a single manufacturer focussed on the premium end of the market is given free reign of entire classes of device. As a consumer, even an Apple fanboi (if you are one), you should be cheering on the competition knowing that it means more people will find the ideal device for them and that the competition will push all the manufacturers to keep improving their products at a far faster rate than if one company maintains a monopoly.
The wise person looks objectively at the evidence, not merely following the herd. Scientific consensus has been proven both right and wrong many times throughout history and shouldn't be considered an effective measure of how true or not a theory is.
But the severity of the reaction will diminish each time they pull this stunt. By the 5th or 6th iteration it's likely to be such a subdued reaction that they'll get away with it completely. It seems to be human nature that each time we are outraged by something, the impact each time it happens slowly diminishes until we accept it as part of life.
You needn't be so specific in targeting the conservatives - it's true of all politicians from all sides across the whole world. If a report or scientific study doesn't give the result they want, then they reframe the question and try to bury or hide the original. The EU even do it with national referendums (e.g. the Irish vote to ratify the Lisbon treaty that had to be held a second time as they didn't get the result they wanted).
As they saying goes, never let the truth get in the way of a good story!
If there's a financial gain to be made, and the judge seems to think that Oracle at least have some legitimate claim deep within their case, then this won't change much.
They most certainly did. Here's a helpful graph for you that shows the number of offenses by each paper as recorded by the Information Commissioners Office: Guido Fawkes Blog
Whilst not on the same scale as the Trinitiy Mirror group the Guardian Media Group are in the same ballpark as News International when compared to the overall number of offenses.
The Guardian are famous for their holier than though, do as we say not as we do, approach to their reporting. For example they campaign consistently against tax evasion yet the Guardian Group itself has used numerous loopholes to avoid taxes, using the same mechanisms they criticise others for using.
What you're witnessing in the media and politics at the moment is a bunch of hypocritical self servers sniping at their competitors and idealogical enemies totally disregarding their own failings and involvement in the same or similar activities. They're all at it, the entire establishment is corrupt, and they all have their own agendas that they're trying to advance.
Handy graph for you showing the number of offences the Information Commissioners Office recorded for each of the papers. You can verify the numbers yourself via the ICO's website.
And in other news every major newspaper in the UK engaged in the same practices, with the information commissioners previous investigation showing that News International was a much smaller infringer than both the Trinity Mirror Group and Associated Newspapers (Daily Mail).
Without having read TFA I would imagine that this is aimed more at people who pirate music and sell it as genuine. Their customers think they're buying from a legitimate source.
So in a way this is a good thing, but is likely to be the thin end of a wedge where once people accept PayPal policing their users in this way then you'll start to see people having their PayPal accounts disabled for unrelated activities that someone or other doesn't approve of.
Maybe the way to reform patent law is that if a company patents something in a published standard that they use, promote or approve of; then they lose the right to collect royalties for that patent. If only that could be enshrined in law somehow.
Except modern JS engines use JIT compiling just like Java to run natively, and they are plenty fast enough to get some serious number crunching done. As fast as well written C? No, but nor are any other higher level languages (please note the well written part). Each language is a tool that should be used for its strengths, with no one language the panacea that can solve any problem. Javascript has its place, both as a universal language across the web browser but also in many other scenarios where it's popularity is growing. It's used in a couple of No SQL databases, for example, as a query language capable of processing huge amounts of data. It's used for server side scripting, even writing event based servers using Node.js that are really easy to write and highly scalable (at least to mid-sized problems). Point is it's going to be around for a while, it's performant, and you can use it to get real work done.
Slashdot Mirror
And saying on a Facebook page swamped with baseless accusations and speculation is going to do a whole lot more? What about the problem of safe and effective drugs being recalled due to uninformed public hysteria on a Facebook page?
Unfortunately if you boycot the bad guys they'll just waive their falling sales numbers as proof that their 'intellectual property' is being stolen. This will be followed by more lawsuits to 'redress the balance' and lobbying for greater protectionism in law. It is regrettable that the lawmakers across most of the 1st world seem to be far too self serving to work out what is really best for the population as a whole and come up with a balanced approach to IP.
Not really. It's only been trialled on a single type of cancer, but the way it works is effectively teaching the bodies own white blood cells how to target and kill the cancer cells. I am not an expert in this field by any means, but that technique should translate to most if not all types of cancer.
I know the Apple fanbois will be out in force to defend this as they believe Apple should be the only player in the market place, but Apple's new litigious dream of being the only player in the market is bad for everyone. Apple didn't invent the smart phone or the tablet, so if monopolies of these devices were allowed then Apple wouldn't have been able to make their beloved iDevices in the first place.
The reason Apple themselves are doing this is because they want to control the way everyone consumes media. They want to replace the PC, newspapers, magazines, and ultimately the TV putting them all under their control and charging their 30% fee for allowing access to content producers to their public. For this strategy to work long term, especially in the face of free competition from Android where large corporates can set up their own channels and distribution mechanisms, they need 80+% market share (20 - 40% just isn't enough to command the fees Apple want to charge). They've seen how their early lead in the smart phone marketplace has been eroded and now surpassed by Android, and they fear that the same will happen with the iPad.
This isn't about protecting intellectual property or Apple wanting just reward for their 'innovation'. This is a land grab aimed at capturing and locking in market share through litigation. Apple *are* scared of Android, and especially these latest tablets like the Samsung, not because they're currently outselling the iPad but because they will most likely be the first steps to Android gaining momentum in the tablet market and establishing itself as a viable competitor. Once that happens it will only be a matter of time as Apple cannot keep up with the huge variety of products their competitors will release - exactly what happened in the smart phone arena.
Hey, don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. And it's clear that poor old Apple is having their intellectual property stolen! Look how similar these other tablets look to Apples invention (forgetting all those that came before and looked like that too).
Truth is that Apple IS running scared. They stole a march on the smartphone market by coming out with a better product than the competition. However they've struggled to keep ahead of the curve and Android phones are outselling the iPhone 5 to 2 with the difference growing all the time. In a few years they'll have retreated all the way back into being a niche supplier charging a big premium for their kit.
They again shook up the tablet sector with a different, better product but Android is starting to catch up with the Samsung tab being the strongest competitor. Apple are absolutely running scared as they can see the same thing that happened with the iPhone happening with the iPad.
That's not to say that the company will fail in any way - merely that they'll be one of many competitors with a sub 20% market share. And that just isn't good enough for their ambitions, which seems to be to provide all the channels via which we consume media which in turn requires a large market share, so they have their lawyers out there fighting for that dream. Apple have a good tech and design team, but they're not good enough to grab that monopoly only through building a better product. The legal route is the only one that can work for them.
I actually mostly agree with you but there is another scenario. Keep the information secret so that the bad guys don't know that you know.
Wow, one laptop makes a trend true now does it. Well I have upgraded to Lion as well and in the last week or so since I jumped my previously fine 2009 17" Macbook Pro has crashed out completely twice. One second it's running, the next it's totally powered off. This has happened once on battery power, once whilst plugged in.
So there are some problems out there, just because it hasn't affected you doesn't mean it ain't so!
Whilst you trivialise the problem to a degree (scalability and reliability of an NHS sized system is not trivial) it still shouldn't take a small team more than a few months, and a budget in the hundreds of thousands of pounds, to build such a system. This could then be incrementally evolved over time on a budget in the hundreds of thousands per annum (maybe low millions depending on speed of development). You do then have the data entry problem to consider, but that is surmountable for a fraction of the budget of these big IT solutions.
However that's not how the government thinks. They want to go all encompassing from day one, speccing out a bloated and unworkable unholy mess that the end user doesn't want or need, and certainly doesn't understand, that takes a budget several orders of magnitude more than is required. Then throughout the project more and more people will hear about it and give their input or point of flaws, causing massive amounts of feature creep and confusion, affecting budgets, delivery time lines, and ultimately the quality of the end product.
As a final anecdote, as a small web agency we once were involved in the build of a website for a London borough. We were in competition with some much bigger agencies, but we went back with a good proposal, some great design concepts, and what we felt was a fair budget. The decision maker loved our whole proposal except for the cost - he actually made us double the cost of the build, simply because that then matched his budget so that it wouldn't be cut the next year (spend it or lose it!) and because it brought it in to line with the bigger agencies (so his managers wouldn't think our offering was less feature rich because it was cheaper). This way of thinking is not unique to the the public sector but is endemic throughout it, and the big suppliers prey upon this.
Beyond that how can this be the product of evolution, rather than the brain itself simply adapting? We're at best fifteen years into the information age. Where is the natural selection, survival of the fittest, and all that? There isn't any. The brain has always been able to cope with multiple streams of information, we're just exercising it more and more in this arena.
Actually the vast majority of websites, even business websites, are really low traffic and they benefit far more from storage space (especially when shared with other sites) than speed. Operating system RAM caching will usually make up any performance deficit those kinds of low traffic sites may experience, where the majority of the traffic that does go to their sites tends to be read only and directed at only a few pages on any given day. Premature optimisation adds either (or both) complexity and expense, and is unnecessary for 90+% of the web.
Scalability is a nice problem to have, and the majority of websites would do an awful lot better if they worried about driving traffic more than they worried about scalability.
But if, say, Ford were to finally invent a flying car, and decided to register a patent titled "door lock... on a flying car". Would you be happy if Ford were then able to stop any other manufacturer from building a flying car simply because they held a patent on the door locks? Never mind that door locks had been on cars, Ford were awarded them specifically for flying cars.
This is what Apple has done. People invented sliding locks and mechanisms hundreds if not thousands of years before Apple copied this simple mechanism and were awarded a patent for it because they did it "on a mobile phone". That isn't innovation and certainly isn't worth twenty years of market exclusivity. And it's a really lame way to try and compete in a free market.
It is a simplistic argument, but so is your response. Were Apple the first to manufacture a smart phone or a tablet? No. Were innovators automatically granted unrestricted monopolies on market segments that they create, then you would not have your beloved iDevices in the first place. Competition drives the market place, spurring Apple on to create new toys for you to buy just as much as any other company. Without competition all you will end up with is stagnation.
Many other people did it with physical side controls - this isn't some amazing new mechanism that Apple invented. All Apple did was translate a physical device and action to an on screen one. Do you honestly think this is an amazing innovation worthy of 20 years of monopoly?
I'm happy to vote with my wallet - Apple is not happy for me to do so and wishes to limit my choices by forcing others out of the market through litigation. This is why I'm unhappy with them.
Copying doesn't preclude improving upon, so that isn't what Samsung is accused of. Plus the two patents mentioned are for trivial UX features that are hardly ground breaking innovation in and of themselves.
Part of the reason that people are venting at Apple in this case is because yet again we see the absurdity of the patent and legal systems ably demonstrated by what is a pretty lame lawsuit (we think this product may infringe our patents, so ban all imports and give us full access so we can decide if this is actually the case or not - i.e. they're not even saying that it definitely infringes). I mean seriously, how on earth is sliding your finger across the screen to unlock the device something so amazingly innovative that Apple should be able to patent it?!
Another big part of the reason is that instead of competing by producing a better product and letting the market decide, Apple are increasingly hiding behind their lawyers. Their response to Android in general has been to sue rather than to find a better way to compete in the open market place. They could produce better devices, a wider range of devices, they could release the OS and allow other manufacturers to build iDevices, they could choose to specialise in various niches, they could try and revolutionise another market sector, etc. They have chosen to do absolutely none of those things, despite the end consumer benefitting from any and all of them, instead releasing relatively minor incremental updates to the same products and attempting to use the legal system to wipe out the competition.
The average consumer never benefits when a single manufacturer focussed on the premium end of the market is given free reign of entire classes of device. As a consumer, even an Apple fanboi (if you are one), you should be cheering on the competition knowing that it means more people will find the ideal device for them and that the competition will push all the manufacturers to keep improving their products at a far faster rate than if one company maintains a monopoly.
The wise person looks a scientific consensus
The wise person looks objectively at the evidence, not merely following the herd. Scientific consensus has been proven both right and wrong many times throughout history and shouldn't be considered an effective measure of how true or not a theory is.
Appeals court overturns original ruling as ineffective and instead orders banks to seal all their doors preventing access for bank robbers.
But the severity of the reaction will diminish each time they pull this stunt. By the 5th or 6th iteration it's likely to be such a subdued reaction that they'll get away with it completely. It seems to be human nature that each time we are outraged by something, the impact each time it happens slowly diminishes until we accept it as part of life.
You needn't be so specific in targeting the conservatives - it's true of all politicians from all sides across the whole world. If a report or scientific study doesn't give the result they want, then they reframe the question and try to bury or hide the original. The EU even do it with national referendums (e.g. the Irish vote to ratify the Lisbon treaty that had to be held a second time as they didn't get the result they wanted).
As they saying goes, never let the truth get in the way of a good story!
If there's a financial gain to be made, and the judge seems to think that Oracle at least have some legitimate claim deep within their case, then this won't change much.
They most certainly did. Here's a helpful graph for you that shows the number of offenses by each paper as recorded by the Information Commissioners Office: Guido Fawkes Blog
Whilst not on the same scale as the Trinitiy Mirror group the Guardian Media Group are in the same ballpark as News International when compared to the overall number of offenses.
The Guardian are famous for their holier than though, do as we say not as we do, approach to their reporting. For example they campaign consistently against tax evasion yet the Guardian Group itself has used numerous loopholes to avoid taxes, using the same mechanisms they criticise others for using.
What you're witnessing in the media and politics at the moment is a bunch of hypocritical self servers sniping at their competitors and idealogical enemies totally disregarding their own failings and involvement in the same or similar activities. They're all at it, the entire establishment is corrupt, and they all have their own agendas that they're trying to advance.
Guido Fawkes Blog
Handy graph for you showing the number of offences the Information Commissioners Office recorded for each of the papers. You can verify the numbers yourself via the ICO's website.
And in other news every major newspaper in the UK engaged in the same practices, with the information commissioners previous investigation showing that News International was a much smaller infringer than both the Trinity Mirror Group and Associated Newspapers (Daily Mail).
Without having read TFA I would imagine that this is aimed more at people who pirate music and sell it as genuine. Their customers think they're buying from a legitimate source.
So in a way this is a good thing, but is likely to be the thin end of a wedge where once people accept PayPal policing their users in this way then you'll start to see people having their PayPal accounts disabled for unrelated activities that someone or other doesn't approve of.
What could possibly go wrong?
Maybe the way to reform patent law is that if a company patents something in a published standard that they use, promote or approve of; then they lose the right to collect royalties for that patent. If only that could be enshrined in law somehow.
Except modern JS engines use JIT compiling just like Java to run natively, and they are plenty fast enough to get some serious number crunching done. As fast as well written C? No, but nor are any other higher level languages (please note the well written part). Each language is a tool that should be used for its strengths, with no one language the panacea that can solve any problem. Javascript has its place, both as a universal language across the web browser but also in many other scenarios where it's popularity is growing. It's used in a couple of No SQL databases, for example, as a query language capable of processing huge amounts of data. It's used for server side scripting, even writing event based servers using Node.js that are really easy to write and highly scalable (at least to mid-sized problems). Point is it's going to be around for a while, it's performant, and you can use it to get real work done.