Then how does Apple check if the gift certificate holder is a US resident?
By your IP address. Although the company is pretty much defunct, Liquid Audio held patents on using your IP address to determine your country of origin.
The outline of the idea, however, is as given in the claims, which need to be sufficiently specific to allow a working implementation to be produced based on the description.
No: the preferred embodiment description prior to the claims does that. The claims themselves don't have to describe how to make an implementation.
However, the claims themselves do not cover the general idea as I originally said.
Again, it depends on how broad the claim is. If you got a patent on a steam engine that contained a broad claim about converting steam into mechanical motion, then whether you generate steam by burning wood or coal or whatever, or move up/down or back/forward along rails, is irrelevant: you are in violation. The job of a patent attorney is to get the broadest claims possible to cover as much as possible, including methods and other inventions that don't currently exist.
For example, here the general idea is password management.
Well if you want to go crazy with generality, the general idea is security: passwords are just one method for providing security. No, the least-general "general idea" is using one master password to provide access to others so users only have to remember one password. If you invent something else that does that, you are in violation.
Also try to remember that a patent is for a specific implemenation of an invention and does not cover the general idea of the invention itself.
Wrong: a patent is precisely for protection of an idea. A patent application contains a detailed description of the "preferred embodiment" of said invention, but the key word is preferred. Other embodiments that perform the same thing are still violations if the claims are broad enough. If the patent contains a claim that covers a system that uses a master password to access other passwords, then how you implement yours is irrelevant if it does the same thing: it's still a violation.
There are already ISPs in many countries that provide service from behind a NAT firewall. This kills many people's freedom of speech and the spirit of the Internet where everyone had their own servers and ran whatever they wanted.
No, what kills many people's freedom of speech are totalitarian governments such as China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia where you can be jailed for speaking out on a street corner. Citizens of such countries have far more to worry about than being behind a NAT.
As for your "spirit of the Internet": what a whimsical invention. There is no such thing. The Internet was started as a tool of the military, government, and academia. It was never intended to be in peopel's homes much less giving all of them servers. Most people don't even know what a server is, much less how to set one up and run it.
... ipv6 killer apps (your fridge telling your tv that you need more milk)...
This can be done just fine on your home LAN now with IPv4. There's no reason that either your 'fridge' or your TV need publicly-routable addresses to accomplish this.
Reading the FAQ, you realise that you still have to pay something, due to Dolby's patents.
That doesn't mean it's proprietary: it just means compnents are patented. Again, AAC is a standard. The patents will eventually expire. Neither can be said for WMA.
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is at the core of the MPEG-4 and 3GPP specifications... AAC was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia...
AAC is an industry standard not under the control of Apple. WMA is a proprietary invention of Microsoft who own and control it totally. So how, exactly, is AAC more proprietary?
The Napster kinks in licenses and stuff like that are only a sign of how the record industry still hasn't embraced this age of electronic media.
But the record industry has with the iTunes music store: it has uniform licensing for every song in the store from the big-5 labels. Why the industry hasn't done the same with Napster isn't clear. Maybe Steve took the label execs out to better places for lunch or something.
... if they write it in house, they maintain full controll and rights to the code as well as have the option to profit not only from the finished product, but from licensing their own code.
The context is library code. For example, in my case, it is a C++ XML library. There really isn't any monetary value in (yet another) XML library. There isn't any profit in licensing a proprietary XML library when there are very good, free, open-source alternatives. As for maintaining full control, well, yeah, OK; but, in reality, other than being able to say one has full control, it's a vacuous value. How often does XML change? By your arguments, they should write their own libC, or TCP stack, or any number of other things just so they have "full control."
There are lots and lots of people out there using the GPL because it was what was handy, because they don't understand it, because they don't really care about it...
That's not the fault of the GPL.
So you wouldn't be amenable to licensing your source code under different terms if someone approached you and offered you a licensing fee?
I never said I wouldn't. However, the few times I've been approached, the people wanted to pay me so little as to not make the effort worth it (a few hundred dollars), so I turned them down.
Not wanting anyone to... hire you to code for their proprietary software, because all proprietary software is evil? Fanaticism.)
Sigh... read and heed my sig: I NEVER SAID all prorietary software is evil. First, if someone wants to hire me, I have the absolute right to refuse. Second, I refused because they offered me too little money: it had nothing to do with any software being evil.
For some strange reason, companies balk at spending, say, $2000 to license code; and they seemingly have no problem spending a lot more than that to have it written in-house (developer salary to write, debug, document; plus loaded cost of developer time: health insurace, office space, equipment use, etc).
I write proprietary software for a living and I have no problem with doing it because I'm fairly well compensated. If anything, software I write on my own time should cost more.
I use the GPL because I do it for free on my own time. What I get in return is your code. If I don't get that, why should I allow you to use mine?
BTW, I hate the GPL, myself.
Then either you don't write open-source software or you're foolish to let other people profit off your efforts without getting anything back either to yourself or the open-source community as a whole.
Congratulations: you've just described the LGPL (pretty much). It's up to the author to decide that license to use. If the author intended what you descibe, then s/he would have used the LGPL or equivalent license.
All that aside, at least I couldn't care less about GPL acceptance: don't accept it, don't use my code.
I'm a hacker, but I don't consider mispelling words "cool." (I don't see how anybody over the age of about 14 could.) I prefer clarity, simplicity, and elegance.
I'm not a hacker either because it's cool or I choose to call myself such. I am one because I am: I write software that "scratches an itch." Whether somebody else considers me a hacker or cool because of it is irrelevant. I couldn't care less.
Somebody who calls themselves a hacker because they think it's cool probably shouldn't be one.
Wouldn't it be easier simply to have a splitter with a phone always attached? You can turn the ringer off on the phone. The end result would be the same.
I have a cell phone for all communication purposes...
What do you do if you have to call some company's customer support, or, more generally, any number where you will be on hold for a while? Do you really burn all those cell-plan minutes? Do you pay a premium for a large bucket of any-time minutes?
I gave up on.mac and set up an old G4 as my home webserver. It's free, I'm in control, and I've learned a lot. Tell me, what scripts can you run on.mac? Does.mac support perl? mySQL?
I have both.Mac and my own 24/7/365 Linux server on an old G4. I have.Mac host most of my content since my DSL upstream is only 128Kbps (as are most upstream caps). To run CGIs or other scripts, I simply have the web pages on.Mac point to my home server. That tiny bit of upstream bandwidth can be handled no problem. It's also nice to have a complete mirror of my site as a backup.
re: carrying an iPod, here's a heads-up: nobody really needs more than about 12 hour's worth of MP3 capacity for a daily commute...)
While true, nobody wants to sit around deciding on which MP3 files to download to his player every morning, then waiting for them to download.
The point of having a large-capacity MP3 player (such as the iPod) is so that you don't have to do that: you just take your entire music collection with you and you can listen to whatever you feel like on a given morning without having to decide beforehand.
The Palm Tungsten-W is not a phone as-is. You can't just hold it up to your ear and talk into it. A seperate earpiece and microphone is required. To me, this is really dumb. Scenario: phone starts ringing. You'd like to answer it, but can't because you're fumbling around trying to find and attach the earpiece.
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As for your "spirit of the Internet": what a whimsical invention. There is no such thing. The Internet was started as a tool of the military, government, and academia. It was never intended to be in peopel's homes much less giving all of them servers. Most people don't even know what a server is, much less how to set one up and run it.
For some strange reason, companies balk at spending, say, $2000 to license code; and they seemingly have no problem spending a lot more than that to have it written in-house (developer salary to write, debug, document; plus loaded cost of developer time: health insurace, office space, equipment use, etc).
I write proprietary software for a living and I have no problem with doing it because I'm fairly well compensated. If anything, software I write on my own time should cost more.
I use the GPL because I do it for free on my own time. What I get in return is your code. If I don't get that, why should I allow you to use mine?
Then either you don't write open-source software or you're foolish to let other people profit off your efforts without getting anything back either to yourself or the open-source community as a whole.All that aside, at least I couldn't care less about GPL acceptance: don't accept it, don't use my code.
I'm not a hacker either because it's cool or I choose to call myself such. I am one because I am: I write software that "scratches an itch." Whether somebody else considers me a hacker or cool because of it is irrelevant. I couldn't care less.
Somebody who calls themselves a hacker because they think it's cool probably shouldn't be one.
The point of having a large-capacity MP3 player (such as the iPod) is so that you don't have to do that: you just take your entire music collection with you and you can listen to whatever you feel like on a given morning without having to decide beforehand.
The Palm Tungsten-W is not a phone as-is. You can't just hold it up to your ear and talk into it. A seperate earpiece and microphone is required. To me, this is really dumb. Scenario: phone starts ringing. You'd like to answer it, but can't because you're fumbling around trying to find and attach the earpiece.