Actually, given that they are FRAND patents, Apple should pay (by the rules stipulated in the FRAND terms) the same rate that everyone else paid for those patents. No more, no less.
Whatever that figure is, that is what Apple should pay.
it's 2.25% not $2.25. If the device cost 100 dollars then it would be $2.25 but since Apple seems to think it needs to charge $300-$500 for anything with rounded edges and a shiny cover it's likely to cost much more than that. I personally find it hilarious that they are hoping to rig some kind of sweetheart deal when they are gonna be on the ass end of a legal ass fucking.
Does Samsung "think it needs to charge" $300-500 for anything with rounded edges and a shiny cover too?
Maybe they charge that because that's what it costs to make (plus profit).
I'm not sure how the argument that Apple's phones are somehow overpriced holds much water when they are very similar in price to Android handsets of similar quality like the Galaxy line.
So what you're saying is that OS X and Linux are not viable competitors to Windows?
Oh, Windows isn't a monopoly. Gotcha.
So what's this all about again?
That is exactly what I am saying, in terms of marketshare. OS X is currently at around 7% (but of new sales, makes up about 20%), and Linux is.... considerably below that. At the time of the court ruling, those numbers were further skewed towards Microsoft. Microsoft was found guilty by a court of abusing its monopoly position in the OS market, hence the subsequent restrictions placed on it.
It is absolutely not possible for Apple to be in that position since it never reached monopoly status in the smartphone market, hence the GP's Apple bash is just nonsensical. Even at the height of it's surging success, while everyone else was suddenly realising there was a market in it, they were simply displacing RIM.
The relative qualities of the OSes do not matter - merely that one of your choices is not in an effective monopoly position.
One person doesn't have to be. Reality tells you via actual verifiable facts that iOS is not a monopoly, thus the GP's post is nonsense (or calls for a world where the government can force any business to sell something it doesn't want to).
Did Apple really do the high DPI display R&D? I thought they bought the displays from Samsung and LG (and maybe others), and that those displays varied in quality, suggesting that each manufacturer has their own process rather than just doing what uncle Apple tells them to.
When he says "Apple invested a lot of money" into the process he means exactly that - Samsung and LG didn't just drop the cash on the R&D for those panels, even though they did the work. They did the work because Apple cut them a hefty cheque.
See also, ARM CPUs made by Samsung - Apple gave them a huge bundle of setup cash to improve their facilities to get the A6 line of CPUs rolling.
The point is that *even though Apple itself is not doing the actual work of lifting the pick, swinging it at the rock, collecting the coal*, they are still driving the market for those technologies that no other vendor is willing to pay for. Samsung will make high DPI panels for anyone who wants them - Apple is not special in that respect - but they were the first ones willing to pay for the R&D. Once that expensive R&D is paid for though, the "build to a price, race to the bottom" vendors will come knocking.
It's a good thing that they demand this of Microsoft. I mean, without setting this precedent, how else could we be offered the chance to freely and without jumping over hurdles obtain Firefox (or Chrome, for that matter) on our iPhones?
Ah, this old chestnut again.
You can't have it both ways - either Android is "crushing" iOS and is a serious and worthwhile competitor... or iOS is a monopoly.
Both of those things cannot be true.
So, if you think that this browser choice should be enforced on iOS you are conceding that Android is not a viable alternative and simply insignificant in the face of iOS.
Repeat after me: it's not illegal to have restrictions in your products and/or services if you are not in a monopoly position.
If iOS had a 90%+ marketshare (of smartphones, to cut off your second argument since they have a 100% share of their own product which is also not illegal) then the discussion would be different.
I'm going to assume that it leads your vehicle by some distance, so that you are driving into lit road. If no cars pass for a short time, it turns off. I doubt it will literally come on as your car passes the particular light in question.
I'm not sure we're *quite* ready to know yet that the iPad mini's pricing is too high and that the product is consequently a failure.
Can't be absolutely sure, but it is the consensus, as witnessed by AAPL getting a 3 1/4% haircut that day. If you want more data on it, google "ipad mini too expensive" and you will find plenty of folks announcing their decision to go Android. Overpriced and underspecced, what was Tim Cook thinking?
He was probably thinking "cheapasses are going to complain anyway (just look at the iMac news - it has a BTO for the 680MX, absolutely the very fastest and latest GPU on offer and people are still moaning), so let's not release at cost like Google, I imagine the whiners make a lot of noise and make it seem like there are more of them than there really are".
Result: iPad Mini preorder stock sold out in a couple of days, despite people supposedly "not buying and going Android".
What does such a major shakeup say about Tim Cook's leadership?
He is going to lead and hold people accountable?
No, he's going to purge the previous leadership and replace them with his friends and/or lackeys.
Why to fanboys continually think that Apple works differently to other corporations. This is a stock standard procedure in any corporate change of leadership.
So, Job's protege, hand selected by him from a dark office and thrust into the upper echelons of Apple and given free reign to do anything he wanted, accountable only to Jobs himself gets... promoted?
The guy who ran hardware design for over a decade under Jobs, who decided to retire but was so popular among his team that he was offered a *gigantic* package of cash and stock to come back is.... brought out of retirement and promoted.
Likewise with guys like Eddy Cue who have been around for years.
I'm not following how this is "purging the previous leadership and replacing them with friends and/or lackeys".
Oh right, the opposite of that! Now it makes sense.
We spent more as a nation (the UK) on cellphone ringtones last year than we did on fusion power research, and we have JET in Oxford.
Maybe if they were actually given serious funding you could complain about them asking for more.
Just a couple of weeks shaved off Afghanistan and/or Iraq would fund the project for quite a while.
I see you haven't been following along with the level of research - the JET could run net positive (just), but they have not done so because it would just be a dickwaving exercise and their budget is tight, and doing that experiment would make it hard for the current series they are running (experimenting with different wall materials, where you need to keep going inside the torus).
I can think of no technology which has comparable levels of continued failure. It's time to put large scale fusion research to bed until other necessary technologies have caught up, and put the money saved into solar/wind/hydro generation and grid improvements.
It's hard to deliver results with a drip, drip, drip of funding. Despite this, what has been achieved so far is a very long way from "continued failure".
Seriously, troll mod for the parent comment? I'd be interested to know exactly what in that comment merited such a moderation, bearing in mind that "I disagree" is not a valid reason.
What must Apple do before you fanbois finally even admit that their behaviour is not optimal? Rape a puppy?
Post a stawman argument on their website?
Nah, just kidding.
I personally don;t think think this is "not optimal" behaviour. I'm not sure what you haters were expecting? They complied with the court order exactly (many of you, submitter included, raged about it "not being an apology" despite the court not ordering them to do any such thing), posting the literally exact words that the court ordered them to post in the font size specified by the court, and then a literal quote by the judge. Nowhere does it say that the text must be alone or not accompanied by any other text relating to it.
The only thing they did wrong was post it on a page linked to from the homepage - the court ordered them to put it on the homepage itself, so in that manner they have defied the court and need to be pulled up on it.
How are they skirting around the ruling? The court ordered very specific text to be posted. Apple used exactly that text, then followed it up with the judge's quote.
The only thing they didn't do correctly is post it directly on the homepage - they merely linked to it from the homepage. There's no "spirit" to disregard. The court ordered something specific at a specific font size and they copied and pasted the text out of the court's ruling document and onto the website.
Apple didn't even follow the letter of what the judge told them to do (and it was not a request, it was a court order) The judge told them to acknowledge that Samsung did not infringe. Rather than do that, all they did was acknowledge that *court* had determined that Samsung did not infringe. This is a mere recitation of historically verifiable facts, and not an acknowledgement that Samsung did not infringe, which is what the judge told Apple to do.
Wow, misinformation city!
The court told Apple exactly what to put on their website, word for word and Apple did exactly that. They then also added the judge's quote after it verbatim.
The only thing they didn't comply with directly was putting the text directly on the homepage, they just put a link to it on the homepage.
...they required an acknowledgement of design differences
The UK Court told Apple exactly the wording to put on the website, and Apple did not comply. I would hope this results in a hefty Contempt of Court penalty for Apple's executives and lawyers.
Why? They posted the requested text exactly. They didn't put it directly on the homepage, so you could argue that they are not compliant there (the link to it is on the homepage), but the very first thing on the page is the text that the court ordered Apple to post, word for word.
This sort of "apology" is the sort of thing I expect from a petulant child and should be corrected swiftly and definitively.
Didn't the court actually instruct Apple exactly what it should write? Why not just write the notice for Apple and have them post it on their website instead of leaving it up to Apple's lawyers to set the wording?
However, I still had to LOL after reading it. Apple really has balls as big as its war chest. Bravo, Apple, bravo.
Yes, the court did, and Apple posted the ordered words exactly. Then they added the verbatim quote from the judge after it.
What they didn't do was post it on their EU homepage - they put it on a page that you have to click to get to via a link that says "Apple/Samsung court judgement" which is on the homepage.
The court did not tell them to apologise, so I'm not sure exactly what slashdot is expecting there.
It brings us back to... the mathematical formula that defines what the terms mean!
Wow, that was quite a circle, but we got there in the end.
Compare the term "retina display", which has a defined meaning with another marketing term, used by toothpaste: "pro-argin formula". That term really does have no meaning whatsoever, and has just been coined to sound sciencey.
To go back to the car analogy, the brand name of the vehicle is not analogous (that would be the comparison to the terms "iPhone", "iPad", "Nexus" etc), but something like "Hemi" or "HDi" would be more appropriate. Any vehicle marketed with an HDi engine has a high pressure common rail (among other things), yet Ford calls that feature by a different name. It doesn't mean you can't compare the two things. Just because Ford doesn't use the term HDi does not make it meaningless as a comparison tool. It defines a set of specifications, unlike a term like "pro-argin formula" in the toothpaste - that has no meaning, so you can't compare it with another toothpaste product. Or to go way off the marketing deep end, the Colgate bicarb toothpaste that, according to the advertising, releases "oxygen bubbles" when you brush to give you better cleaning. I'm not sure what chemistry degree they took, but that's just not even close to being accurate (but of course, oxygen sounds "healthier" than carbon dioxide).
It still is not anything but pure market speak since no other company can use that term to describe their display. It doesn't mean anything except what Apple says it means. If next week they decide to change the definition and you miss the "announcement", how will you know? Can you give me any legal reason they could not do that?
You are just grasping at straws now, or grasping at the strawman, one might say. What's to stop Intel changing the definition of "Core i"? How will you know?! What will you do?! The sky will fall, Chicken Little! Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!
You don't need to take their word for it - that's the point. It has a defined mathematical formula that gives you the display dpi required at various distances. For a tablet like the iPad Apple has determined that the average distance is 18 inches. For the iPhone it is 10 inches (these distances vary person to person, but it's the mean value that Apple uses, so it's a useful baseline to compare).
The reason they "claim" you won't be ale to distinguish the pixels is because they went out and actually took measurements across hundreds of different users during product development. They didn't just pick a number out of the air.
You mean to say you've never used a trademarked term during a product comparison before? Or does this ban on trademarked terms apply exclusively to Apple?
When you're comparing to the Galaxy SIII, (oh shit, sorry, useless marking term), when comparing to the "large astronomical structure containing bilions of stars, 19th letter of the alphabet, number between 2 and 4", doesn't it get difficult to avoid all trademarked terms? I mean, after all, they're all useless and meaningless right?
I think you don't understand what a marketing term is. The meaning you are desperately trying to preach to the enlightened does not alter it's marketing bullshitness, depending on the person it means either "exclusive Apple tech that makes things look better" or "high-resolution display". To the former it is pure bullshit marketing that is used to make it feel superior without any comparable data, to the later it is redundant.
It doesn't just mean "high resolution display" though, does it? That's what the apple haters are desperate to believe but it simply isn't true. The set containing displays that are "retina" is a subset of the set containing all "high resolution" displays, but that does not make all high resolution displays retina displays.
It's as if the trademark on the term suddenly causes an outbreak of stupid in people who hate Apple. Tell me, when comparing the Large Korean Multipurpose Manufacturing Company's Humanoid Robot OS mobile telecommunications device called "large astronomical structure containing bilions of stars, 19th letter of the alphabet, number between 2 and 4" to another device, do you avoid all trademarks as "useless marketing terms" too?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, given that they are FRAND patents, Apple should pay (by the rules stipulated in the FRAND terms) the same rate that everyone else paid for those patents. No more, no less.
Whatever that figure is, that is what Apple should pay.
it's 2.25% not $2.25. If the device cost 100 dollars then it would be $2.25 but since Apple seems to think it needs to charge $300-$500 for anything with rounded edges and a shiny cover it's likely to cost much more than that. I personally find it hilarious that they are hoping to rig some kind of sweetheart deal when they are gonna be on the ass end of a legal ass fucking.
Does Samsung "think it needs to charge" $300-500 for anything with rounded edges and a shiny cover too?
Maybe they charge that because that's what it costs to make (plus profit).
I'm not sure how the argument that Apple's phones are somehow overpriced holds much water when they are very similar in price to Android handsets of similar quality like the Galaxy line.
So what you're saying is that OS X and Linux are not viable competitors to Windows?
Oh, Windows isn't a monopoly. Gotcha.
So what's this all about again?
That is exactly what I am saying, in terms of marketshare. OS X is currently at around 7% (but of new sales, makes up about 20%), and Linux is.... considerably below that. At the time of the court ruling, those numbers were further skewed towards Microsoft. Microsoft was found guilty by a court of abusing its monopoly position in the OS market, hence the subsequent restrictions placed on it.
It is absolutely not possible for Apple to be in that position since it never reached monopoly status in the smartphone market, hence the GP's Apple bash is just nonsensical. Even at the height of it's surging success, while everyone else was suddenly realising there was a market in it, they were simply displacing RIM.
The relative qualities of the OSes do not matter - merely that one of your choices is not in an effective monopoly position.
One person isn't saying both things.
One person doesn't have to be. Reality tells you via actual verifiable facts that iOS is not a monopoly, thus the GP's post is nonsense (or calls for a world where the government can force any business to sell something it doesn't want to).
Did Apple really do the high DPI display R&D? I thought they bought the displays from Samsung and LG (and maybe others), and that those displays varied in quality, suggesting that each manufacturer has their own process rather than just doing what uncle Apple tells them to.
When he says "Apple invested a lot of money" into the process he means exactly that - Samsung and LG didn't just drop the cash on the R&D for those panels, even though they did the work. They did the work because Apple cut them a hefty cheque.
See also, ARM CPUs made by Samsung - Apple gave them a huge bundle of setup cash to improve their facilities to get the A6 line of CPUs rolling.
The point is that *even though Apple itself is not doing the actual work of lifting the pick, swinging it at the rock, collecting the coal*, they are still driving the market for those technologies that no other vendor is willing to pay for. Samsung will make high DPI panels for anyone who wants them - Apple is not special in that respect - but they were the first ones willing to pay for the R&D. Once that expensive R&D is paid for though, the "build to a price, race to the bottom" vendors will come knocking.
It's a good thing that they demand this of Microsoft. I mean, without setting this precedent, how else could we be offered the chance to freely and without jumping over hurdles obtain Firefox (or Chrome, for that matter) on our iPhones?
Ah, this old chestnut again.
You can't have it both ways - either Android is "crushing" iOS and is a serious and worthwhile competitor... or iOS is a monopoly.
Both of those things cannot be true.
So, if you think that this browser choice should be enforced on iOS you are conceding that Android is not a viable alternative and simply insignificant in the face of iOS.
Repeat after me: it's not illegal to have restrictions in your products and/or services if you are not in a monopoly position.
If iOS had a 90%+ marketshare (of smartphones, to cut off your second argument since they have a 100% share of their own product which is also not illegal) then the discussion would be different.
interactive lights that switch on as cars pass
That sounds impressively unhelpful and annoying.
Why?
I'm going to assume that it leads your vehicle by some distance, so that you are driving into lit road. If no cars pass for a short time, it turns off. I doubt it will literally come on as your car passes the particular light in question.
The metal effect was called "brushed metal" and I was never a fan.
I'm not sure we're *quite* ready to know yet that the iPad mini's pricing is too high and that the product is consequently a failure.
Can't be absolutely sure, but it is the consensus, as witnessed by AAPL getting a 3 1/4% haircut that day. If you want more data on it, google "ipad mini too expensive" and you will find plenty of folks announcing their decision to go Android. Overpriced and underspecced, what was Tim Cook thinking?
He was probably thinking "cheapasses are going to complain anyway (just look at the iMac news - it has a BTO for the 680MX, absolutely the very fastest and latest GPU on offer and people are still moaning), so let's not release at cost like Google, I imagine the whiners make a lot of noise and make it seem like there are more of them than there really are".
Result: iPad Mini preorder stock sold out in a couple of days, despite people supposedly "not buying and going Android".
What does such a major shakeup say about Tim Cook's leadership?
He is going to lead and hold people accountable?
No, he's going to purge the previous leadership and replace them with his friends and/or lackeys.
Why to fanboys continually think that Apple works differently to other corporations. This is a stock standard procedure in any corporate change of leadership.
So, Job's protege, hand selected by him from a dark office and thrust into the upper echelons of Apple and given free reign to do anything he wanted, accountable only to Jobs himself gets... promoted?
The guy who ran hardware design for over a decade under Jobs, who decided to retire but was so popular among his team that he was offered a *gigantic* package of cash and stock to come back is.... brought out of retirement and promoted.
Likewise with guys like Eddy Cue who have been around for years.
I'm not following how this is "purging the previous leadership and replacing them with friends and/or lackeys".
Oh right, the opposite of that! Now it makes sense.
We spent more as a nation (the UK) on cellphone ringtones last year than we did on fusion power research, and we have JET in Oxford.
Maybe if they were actually given serious funding you could complain about them asking for more.
Just a couple of weeks shaved off Afghanistan and/or Iraq would fund the project for quite a while.
I see you haven't been following along with the level of research - the JET could run net positive (just), but they have not done so because it would just be a dickwaving exercise and their budget is tight, and doing that experiment would make it hard for the current series they are running (experimenting with different wall materials, where you need to keep going inside the torus).
I can think of no technology which has comparable levels of continued failure. It's time to put large scale fusion research to bed until other necessary technologies have caught up, and put the money saved into solar/wind/hydro generation and grid improvements.
It's hard to deliver results with a drip, drip, drip of funding. Despite this, what has been achieved so far is a very long way from "continued failure".
If that's your position then the lack of security must also be proven.
You cannot say "it's Microsoft's responsibility to prove they are insecure, otherwise it is 'safe to say' that it is less secure".
That's called hypocrisy.
Is that weight under Earth gravity, weight during acceleration to the asteroid, weight during cruise, or weight while it's being fired at the surface?
I see we have someone here who doesn't know what a cite is. For shame with such a low UID.
No log in, no opinion.
Log in first, then perhaps you can discuss the relative quality of a logged in poster's reply to an AC.
Seriously, troll mod for the parent comment? I'd be interested to know exactly what in that comment merited such a moderation, bearing in mind that "I disagree" is not a valid reason.
What must Apple do before you fanbois finally even admit that their behaviour is not optimal? Rape a puppy?
Post a stawman argument on their website?
Nah, just kidding.
I personally don;t think think this is "not optimal" behaviour. I'm not sure what you haters were expecting? They complied with the court order exactly (many of you, submitter included, raged about it "not being an apology" despite the court not ordering them to do any such thing), posting the literally exact words that the court ordered them to post in the font size specified by the court, and then a literal quote by the judge. Nowhere does it say that the text must be alone or not accompanied by any other text relating to it.
The only thing they did wrong was post it on a page linked to from the homepage - the court ordered them to put it on the homepage itself, so in that manner they have defied the court and need to be pulled up on it.
How are they skirting around the ruling? The court ordered very specific text to be posted. Apple used exactly that text, then followed it up with the judge's quote.
The only thing they didn't do correctly is post it directly on the homepage - they merely linked to it from the homepage. There's no "spirit" to disregard. The court ordered something specific at a specific font size and they copied and pasted the text out of the court's ruling document and onto the website.
Apple didn't even follow the letter of what the judge told them to do (and it was not a request, it was a court order) The judge told them to acknowledge that Samsung did not infringe. Rather than do that, all they did was acknowledge that *court* had determined that Samsung did not infringe. This is a mere recitation of historically verifiable facts, and not an acknowledgement that Samsung did not infringe, which is what the judge told Apple to do.
Wow, misinformation city!
The court told Apple exactly what to put on their website, word for word and Apple did exactly that. They then also added the judge's quote after it verbatim.
The only thing they didn't comply with directly was putting the text directly on the homepage, they just put a link to it on the homepage.
...they required an acknowledgement of design differences
The UK Court told Apple exactly the wording to put on the website, and Apple did not comply. I would hope this results in a hefty Contempt of Court penalty for Apple's executives and lawyers.
Why? They posted the requested text exactly. They didn't put it directly on the homepage, so you could argue that they are not compliant there (the link to it is on the homepage), but the very first thing on the page is the text that the court ordered Apple to post, word for word.
This sort of "apology" is the sort of thing I expect from a petulant child and should be corrected swiftly and definitively.
Didn't the court actually instruct Apple exactly what it should write? Why not just write the notice for Apple and have them post it on their website instead of leaving it up to Apple's lawyers to set the wording?
However, I still had to LOL after reading it. Apple really has balls as big as its war chest. Bravo, Apple, bravo.
Yes, the court did, and Apple posted the ordered words exactly. Then they added the verbatim quote from the judge after it.
What they didn't do was post it on their EU homepage - they put it on a page that you have to click to get to via a link that says "Apple/Samsung court judgement" which is on the homepage.
The court did not tell them to apologise, so I'm not sure exactly what slashdot is expecting there.
Ah, you're finally getting it!
It brings us back to... the mathematical formula that defines what the terms mean!
Wow, that was quite a circle, but we got there in the end.
Compare the term "retina display", which has a defined meaning with another marketing term, used by toothpaste: "pro-argin formula". That term really does have no meaning whatsoever, and has just been coined to sound sciencey.
To go back to the car analogy, the brand name of the vehicle is not analogous (that would be the comparison to the terms "iPhone", "iPad", "Nexus" etc), but something like "Hemi" or "HDi" would be more appropriate. Any vehicle marketed with an HDi engine has a high pressure common rail (among other things), yet Ford calls that feature by a different name. It doesn't mean you can't compare the two things. Just because Ford doesn't use the term HDi does not make it meaningless as a comparison tool. It defines a set of specifications, unlike a term like "pro-argin formula" in the toothpaste - that has no meaning, so you can't compare it with another toothpaste product. Or to go way off the marketing deep end, the Colgate bicarb toothpaste that, according to the advertising, releases "oxygen bubbles" when you brush to give you better cleaning. I'm not sure what chemistry degree they took, but that's just not even close to being accurate (but of course, oxygen sounds "healthier" than carbon dioxide).
It still is not anything but pure market speak since no other company can use that term to describe their display. It doesn't mean anything except what Apple says it means. If next week they decide to change the definition and you miss the "announcement", how will you know? Can you give me any legal reason they could not do that?
You are just grasping at straws now, or grasping at the strawman, one might say. What's to stop Intel changing the definition of "Core i"? How will you know?! What will you do?! The sky will fall, Chicken Little! Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!
You don't need to take their word for it - that's the point. It has a defined mathematical formula that gives you the display dpi required at various distances. For a tablet like the iPad Apple has determined that the average distance is 18 inches. For the iPhone it is 10 inches (these distances vary person to person, but it's the mean value that Apple uses, so it's a useful baseline to compare).
The reason they "claim" you won't be ale to distinguish the pixels is because they went out and actually took measurements across hundreds of different users during product development. They didn't just pick a number out of the air.
You mean to say you've never used a trademarked term during a product comparison before? Or does this ban on trademarked terms apply exclusively to Apple?
When you're comparing to the Galaxy SIII, (oh shit, sorry, useless marking term), when comparing to the "large astronomical structure containing bilions of stars, 19th letter of the alphabet, number between 2 and 4", doesn't it get difficult to avoid all trademarked terms? I mean, after all, they're all useless and meaningless right?
I think you don't understand what a marketing term is. The meaning you are desperately trying to preach to the enlightened does not alter it's marketing bullshitness, depending on the person it means either "exclusive Apple tech that makes things look better" or "high-resolution display". To the former it is pure bullshit marketing that is used to make it feel superior without any comparable data, to the later it is redundant.
It doesn't just mean "high resolution display" though, does it? That's what the apple haters are desperate to believe but it simply isn't true. The set containing displays that are "retina" is a subset of the set containing all "high resolution" displays, but that does not make all high resolution displays retina displays.
It's as if the trademark on the term suddenly causes an outbreak of stupid in people who hate Apple. Tell me, when comparing the Large Korean Multipurpose Manufacturing Company's Humanoid Robot OS mobile telecommunications device called "large astronomical structure containing bilions of stars, 19th letter of the alphabet, number between 2 and 4" to another device, do you avoid all trademarks as "useless marketing terms" too?