If your society is full of violent individuals, places "being a strong warrior" above everything else, and you can get randomly killed at any time, I think that slows down scientific progress alot.
Indeed. For this matter, I will quote the Thraddash from Star Controll II.
Talk! Bah, talk is for sissies, weaklings like those of Culture Fourteen. For ten thousand years, we Thraddash have fought and died, learned and improved. Then, along came Culture Fourteen which claimed that all this -- this perfect method......was wrong! -- that each time we violently transformed to a new Culture we inevitably blasted ourselves back at least five hundred years in development. Hmph! Some people just cannot accept the cost of progress. Indeed, the FOOLISHNESS of Culture Fourteen's peaceful whining was revealed when they were conquered by Culture Fifteen after only a ten year reign. And did the change to Culture Fifteen set us back five hundred years? NO! SNORT! Two, maybe three hundred years, tops.
HAR HAR!
In my opinion, individuals need to be "peaceful" enough for society to be rather stable in order for science to progress.
True, but it's hard to deny that warfare has led to a lot of development. Jared Diamond makes a pretty strong argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel that one of the reason Europe got ahead was it being organized into a number of large and fairly stable states that were always competing and frequently fighting. It's hard to argue war hasn't spurred a lot of development (even if it hasn't always resulted in greater prosperity, what with the blowing shit up. HAR HAR!). So, I think the operative term is peaceful enough. That doesn't mean peaceful in any particular situation, like say arriving at a new world to colonize that happens to be inhabited by a primitive civilization.
THE resource we have that is worth something is the earth itself, but it's only worth something to aliens, in my opinion, if they are biologically similar to us (breathe oxygen, similar temperature tolerances, etc.).
True. We can't assume alien life would have the same nature as ours. Though on the other hand you can argue that for life anything like "as we know it", as in chemical based, there'd have to be a solvent with properties like liquid water. If they do require earth-like planets to live on with an oxygen atmosphere and oceans and everything, that's probably a worst-case scenario for us. They'd have every reason to single out our planet then.
Again, however, I would argue that if they have the capability of getting here, they are probably not "starved" in terms of energy. They would probably be capable of building themselves a new planet next to ours.
It depends. If the laws of physics are pretty much how we understand them, just the aliens are more advanced than us, then they'll have arrived here on sub-light-speed colony ships. They might have fusion reactors, but that's not going to make terraforming Mars quick and easy. If they can travel FTL, then sure, who knows what they can do and maybe building a planet is feasible. Otherwise, if they've come here it's because they're interested in earth for good or ill.
I find that idea rather ridiculous. We are sentient. Do you think there is something such as being "supersentient"?
Hehe. True that. Doesn't mean they'll care though.;)
The difference here is that we have nukes, which function well as a sort of universal trump card. It's likely that our arsenal would at least inconvenience them, but it could do much more. Of course, it could also do much less.
Our arsenal as it stands now would be pretty useless for repelling aggressive space invaders. They could just lob chunks of rock at us from high orbit or the moon while being essentially immune to retaliation. Hypothetically we could design rockets designed to carry nuclear warheads that far, but we'd still be at a crazy disadvantage versus the opponent who could just drop things down our gravity well.
But it wouldn't do much less to our planet. If we saw an unstoppable alien aggressor, we could threaten to nuke ourselves. Sure, we may all die, but it'd still be a major bargaining chip.
Only if what they wanted was us, or some other aspect of life on earth rather than other resources. But yeah, in some cases threatening suicide can be a useful gambit.
Scientific discovery generally does much better in an open, cooperative society. I'm not saying that it's impossible without one, just that it proceeds much slower. Space-faring species would very likely have nearly species-wide cooperation in their past.
Possibly, but that doesn't mean they automatically think of any other species as equals that should be cooperated with, rather than exploited. The scientific advancement and open sharing that characterized The Enlightenment was not extended to the people of places the empires of Enlightenment Europe went and colonized. They could just as easily see us as a bunch of hairless primates who don't deserve to take part in their glorious undertakings.
Also, the universe doesn't quite seem to be teeming with life, or we'd have seen it by now.
Way premature to say that. Our solar system isn't teeming with obvious life, but we've only just begun to be able to find exoplanets, and spectroscopy of such planets to find basic aspects of their chemical makeups is in its infancy. We're quite a way from being able to say these planets aren't teeming with life.
The intellegence needed for space travel almost has to imply a sense of the beauty of the universe, and from there, life.
Or, the sheer determination and practicality required for space travel -- especially if it's multi-generational sub-light-speed interstellar travel -- could imply a complete dedication to their goals and disregard for any of our silly philosophical objections like "but life is precious!"
Look at it this way -- sea travel requires quite a bit of intelligence, yet after months of travel people landed on the other shore and their first thought wasn't "wow, look at the beauty of life!", it was "wow, these savages have lots of gold, let's take it!"
I'd like to think the Golden Rule applies. Maybe that's naive, but interstellar travel is one of the milestones of scientific acheivement. I hope that that implies some moral strength.
Societal advancement gave the Spaniards a sense of moral strength too.
I don't think it's at all the case that achieving some milestone in science implies any measure of morality. So in that sense I do think you're being extremely naive. However I may be naive too in that I hope that we can develop moral strength alongside our technological strength, and that we will see beauty in the the universe and in life ourselves. But I don't think it's a given for us, and certainly not for any alien race.
That always bugged me too. The idea that we should be exploring other planets in case we screw this one up just doesn't work... how badly would be have to screw this one up that starting from scratch would be easier than fixing this one???
Seriously, there's practically nothing we could do that would make earth less habitable than Mars. Global Thermonuclear War? Even if Ferris Bueller had failed to talk down that computer, the end result would be a planet far more suitable than human life. Gigantic meteor impact? They've happened before. Mass extinction followed, but the biosphere itself pressed on, as did the oxygen atmosphere it created. On post-KT-repeat earth, you could still walk around and breath the air, maybe with the help of a dust mask, and maybe find some resilient plants and animals to eat. As opposed to requiring a massive infrastructure just to keep you from dying in moments on the surface of Mars. We could poison and kill every ecosystem on earth and what remained would still be a better starting point for 'rebooting' than any other heavenly body we know of.
And you're right, we're probably much better off preventing these situations from happening in the first place than trying to move off-world in case they happen.
On the other hand, I do believe that in the very long term self-sustaining off-world colonies are both possible and desirable.
It's just the idea that we could actually pull that off, yet not be able to pull off keeping the earth habitable even in the aftermath of severe catastrophe, seems pretty silly to me.
so the alleged 'faith' only exists in your imagination.
Isn't that pretty much always the case? Someone who doesn't like (a specific field or conclusion of) science will claim that the science itself is based entirely on untested assumptions and is thus equivalent to faith or "dogma", and the claimant will never have bothered to find out what actual assumptions are being made and what testing has been done to verify the hypothesis. It is, itself, a claim based entirely on a pre-existing belief that the science must be wrong.
"I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass."
So... an alternate headline would be "Ancient Sumerian on grass hears voice of God".
Look, it's not like the government takes my word for it on most of the numbers I submit, anyway. If I put in the wrong number from my W-2 or W-9, they replace it with the right number, and either send me the bill or deduct from my account if I underpaid. So if they were consistently lousy with their records, this would be happening all the time.
I once got a letter from the IRS informing me that I didn't report interest income from a bank account I forgot about because it had so little money in it, so since I'd payed by direct deposit they just deducted the $0.15 from my account.
Another time I got a digit wrong on my W-2 amount, and the IRS informed me that they'd corrected the amount and credited me with the $400 I didn't need to pay, and if I thought this was an error to please call them (even if I thought it was, would I?) They do the same thing for math errors you make.
Anyway, my point is, for most of the basic things that you put on a 1040 in a boring year, the government already knows and more to the point already considers the numbers they have to be authoritative unless disputed.
So... My employer and banks still send me the tax info they usually do, the gov sends me their numbers and calculated tax liability, and if it's all right -- which it probably will be, the gov gets their numbers from the same banks and employers I do after all -- then I just pay it and am done with it. If it's not you do the 1040-Difficult like normal. I'm not seeing the huge problem here.
It also says that Kittinger's fall lasted minutes. Why then did Kittinger not break the sound barrier after 35 seconds into hist descent?
It's not just how far you fall, it's how high is terminal velocity due to wind resistance. Higher up the air is thinner and you can go faster. This new jumper will still be higher than the previous record holder even after 35 seconds. And he won't be going super-sonic from then until he pulls the parachute; he will slow down as he gets lower in the atmosphere.
The things they've won on appeal are anti-trust cases against them, like with the FTC, like I keep saying. The patent cases have not been getting overturned. Samsung settled with them on anti-trust charges (against samsung), not patents.
This is one of their few patent-related victories, and as already mentioned, it's not a court case.
They took SOME ideas from JEDEC. Please show me where the ideas behind their own Rambus memory was in the ideas that they "borrowed".
The ideas for the patents behind their own RDRAM (Rambus DRAM) memory was their own idea and are perfectly fine and valid. Anyone who wanted to use RDRAM technology has properly licensed it.
The patents that cover DDR are not the patents that cover RDRAM, because the technologies have virtually nothing in common! The patents covering DDR are the ones Rambus filed after listening in on JEDEC meetings and hearing the ideas of the other JEDEC members!
If Rambus hadn't filed those patents based on other people's technology, and only had the patents on their own invention, RDRAM, there would be no patent suits.
So who cares that RDRAM came before DDR? They are not based on the same technology, and even RAMBUS knows that even if you don't.
But this thread wasn't about the validity Rambus' patents and whether or not they invented them.
Uh, Jane Q made it about that.
It was about the premise that anything that patented the only way to do something is too obvious to deserve a patent. Which is not always a valid statement.
That's definitely not always a valid statement, I completely agree. Sometimes it is valid, sometimes it isn't.
As Jane Q Public wrote, it is sometimes so obvious only AFTER reading the patent.
Sure, in some cases having nothing to do with Rambus.
But everyone else didn't, possibly until reading the work of the patent makers.
There are many cases of concurrent development. Most actual inventions in this area take years to develop, so if you're anywhere close to someone else in coming out with a successful implementation of an idea, chances are you had to have been working on it before the other party disclosed the idea in a patent.
Besides, most engineers are not doing patent searches on the explicit advice of their legal departments. So, "possibly", sure. Practically, not so often.
You realize that the majority of that "x% more thingamabobs a year" has to do with device physics and process technology, not the logic/protocol/signal integrity technology that's people like Rambus involves themselves in?
"The ultimate thingamabobs/sec technology" isn't obvious. That doesn't mean any particular improvement in things/sec wasn't obvious. Obviously.
What do you want to bet those aren't the patents they are winning on?
Oh just about anything since anybody who was interested in the technology they actually invented paid for it.:P
But that is a point. They did patent a few obvious things. On the other hand, they had some innovative technology of their own blatantly stolen.
It's not that they were obvious. It's that they didn't invent them. Someone else did. But because of how fucked our patent system is, being the first one to file a patent is more important than being the one to invent.
Anyway, I haven't seen any cases where their actual technology was blatantly stolen. I've only seen cases where their patent rights to the technology they stole was upheld.
TFA gives no indication which this is, but since it's NVidia that suggests it's related to GDDR in which case it's the later.
What they patented were ways to make fast memory, cheaper.
Nothing about Rambus' technology was every about "cheaper". Their memory technology was inherently more expensive than others because it required additional serialization logic chips.
It's pretty easy to say "Why didn't I think of that?" after the fact. It is the one who gets there first that gets the patent. That IS innovation.
You mean the one who gets to the patent office first? "Why didn't I think of that?" is what Rambus said when they overheard the discussions at JEDEC, but then they realized it didn't matter that they didn't think of it first, since nobody else thought of patenting it first. Yay Rambus?
They're kinda a troll and kinda not. They were awarded patents for their inventions... and they were awarded patents for what they overheard at JEDEC and then ran off and patented (and no one else did first because the whole point was to devise a patent-royalty-free standard).
But usually, if the solution isn't in textbooks, widely published research papers, or discussed at symposiums, but only dislosed via the patent then it isn't widely known. I mean, the patent lawyer at my company explicitly told my whole group not to do patent searches and just come up with solutions on our own, because patents are such a minefield the odds of you infringing one no matter what is very high, and knowingly doing so (which any kind of patent search, even if it didn't turn up the relevant one, could imply) is treble damages. Ergo most engineers are not working from the known-via-patent-disclosure solution, but coming up with it on their own. And if they're all coming up with the same one, then guess what? It was probably an obvious solution.
Um... only one of those is actually Rambus winning a patent royalty case. The rest are Rambus not losing anti-trust cases against them. Which I said they won, and the WP page supports them winning. The second "victory" was Rambus being able to concede defeat and pay Samsung's legal bills despite Samsung wanting to continue litigation.
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If your society is full of violent individuals, places "being a strong warrior" above everything else, and you can get randomly killed at any time, I think that slows down scientific progress alot.
Indeed. For this matter, I will quote the Thraddash from Star Controll II.
HAR HAR!
In my opinion, individuals need to be "peaceful" enough for society to be rather stable in order for science to progress.
True, but it's hard to deny that warfare has led to a lot of development. Jared Diamond makes a pretty strong argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel that one of the reason Europe got ahead was it being organized into a number of large and fairly stable states that were always competing and frequently fighting. It's hard to argue war hasn't spurred a lot of development (even if it hasn't always resulted in greater prosperity, what with the blowing shit up. HAR HAR!). So, I think the operative term is peaceful enough. That doesn't mean peaceful in any particular situation, like say arriving at a new world to colonize that happens to be inhabited by a primitive civilization.
THE resource we have that is worth something is the earth itself, but it's only worth something to aliens, in my opinion, if they are biologically similar to us (breathe oxygen, similar temperature tolerances, etc.).
True. We can't assume alien life would have the same nature as ours. Though on the other hand you can argue that for life anything like "as we know it", as in chemical based, there'd have to be a solvent with properties like liquid water. If they do require earth-like planets to live on with an oxygen atmosphere and oceans and everything, that's probably a worst-case scenario for us. They'd have every reason to single out our planet then.
Again, however, I would argue that if they have the capability of getting here, they are probably not "starved" in terms of energy. They would probably be capable of building themselves a new planet next to ours.
It depends. If the laws of physics are pretty much how we understand them, just the aliens are more advanced than us, then they'll have arrived here on sub-light-speed colony ships. They might have fusion reactors, but that's not going to make terraforming Mars quick and easy. If they can travel FTL, then sure, who knows what they can do and maybe building a planet is feasible. Otherwise, if they've come here it's because they're interested in earth for good or ill.
I find that idea rather ridiculous. We are sentient. Do you think there is something such as being "supersentient"?
Hehe. True that. Doesn't mean they'll care though. ;)
I'm reading about a new theory that argues H. Sapiens actually DID die out and was replaced by the nearly identical H. Idioticus.
That's a theory only an idiot would concoct!
So... I guess it makes a lot of sense then.
slowing down due to entropy.
Entropy doesn't work that way!
Here, I think I know someone who can explain it better.
Why would there be selection pressure for general purpose tools in a creature too dumb to use it?
They weren't general purpose until we realized they could be used that way.
The difference here is that we have nukes, which function well as a sort of universal trump card. It's likely that our arsenal would at least inconvenience them, but it could do much more. Of course, it could also do much less.
Our arsenal as it stands now would be pretty useless for repelling aggressive space invaders. They could just lob chunks of rock at us from high orbit or the moon while being essentially immune to retaliation. Hypothetically we could design rockets designed to carry nuclear warheads that far, but we'd still be at a crazy disadvantage versus the opponent who could just drop things down our gravity well.
But it wouldn't do much less to our planet. If we saw an unstoppable alien aggressor, we could threaten to nuke ourselves. Sure, we may all die, but it'd still be a major bargaining chip.
Only if what they wanted was us, or some other aspect of life on earth rather than other resources. But yeah, in some cases threatening suicide can be a useful gambit.
Scientific discovery generally does much better in an open, cooperative society. I'm not saying that it's impossible without one, just that it proceeds much slower. Space-faring species would very likely have nearly species-wide cooperation in their past.
Possibly, but that doesn't mean they automatically think of any other species as equals that should be cooperated with, rather than exploited. The scientific advancement and open sharing that characterized The Enlightenment was not extended to the people of places the empires of Enlightenment Europe went and colonized. They could just as easily see us as a bunch of hairless primates who don't deserve to take part in their glorious undertakings.
Also, the universe doesn't quite seem to be teeming with life, or we'd have seen it by now.
Way premature to say that. Our solar system isn't teeming with obvious life, but we've only just begun to be able to find exoplanets, and spectroscopy of such planets to find basic aspects of their chemical makeups is in its infancy. We're quite a way from being able to say these planets aren't teeming with life.
The intellegence needed for space travel almost has to imply a sense of the beauty of the universe, and from there, life.
Or, the sheer determination and practicality required for space travel -- especially if it's multi-generational sub-light-speed interstellar travel -- could imply a complete dedication to their goals and disregard for any of our silly philosophical objections like "but life is precious!"
Look at it this way -- sea travel requires quite a bit of intelligence, yet after months of travel people landed on the other shore and their first thought wasn't "wow, look at the beauty of life!", it was "wow, these savages have lots of gold, let's take it!"
I'd like to think the Golden Rule applies. Maybe that's naive, but interstellar travel is one of the milestones of scientific acheivement. I hope that that implies some moral strength.
Societal advancement gave the Spaniards a sense of moral strength too.
I don't think it's at all the case that achieving some milestone in science implies any measure of morality. So in that sense I do think you're being extremely naive. However I may be naive too in that I hope that we can develop moral strength alongside our technological strength, and that we will see beauty in the the universe and in life ourselves. But I don't think it's a given for us, and certainly not for any alien race.
Ziggle-Blop-Beep-BOON is "First Post"
What you said is "Cram your primary sensory and cognitive protusion into your the nearest available waste orifice".
NOT cool man. You trying to start an interstellar war? Inaccuracy kills.
No no...
"Effectively" = "'Perfect' is a very effective word to use in marketing campaigns".
That always bugged me too. The idea that we should be exploring other planets in case we screw this one up just doesn't work... how badly would be have to screw this one up that starting from scratch would be easier than fixing this one???
Basically by implementing one of the concepts on this page to destroy the earth utterly.
Seriously, there's practically nothing we could do that would make earth less habitable than Mars. Global Thermonuclear War? Even if Ferris Bueller had failed to talk down that computer, the end result would be a planet far more suitable than human life. Gigantic meteor impact? They've happened before. Mass extinction followed, but the biosphere itself pressed on, as did the oxygen atmosphere it created. On post-KT-repeat earth, you could still walk around and breath the air, maybe with the help of a dust mask, and maybe find some resilient plants and animals to eat. As opposed to requiring a massive infrastructure just to keep you from dying in moments on the surface of Mars. We could poison and kill every ecosystem on earth and what remained would still be a better starting point for 'rebooting' than any other heavenly body we know of.
And you're right, we're probably much better off preventing these situations from happening in the first place than trying to move off-world in case they happen.
On the other hand, I do believe that in the very long term self-sustaining off-world colonies are both possible and desirable.
It's just the idea that we could actually pull that off, yet not be able to pull off keeping the earth habitable even in the aftermath of severe catastrophe, seems pretty silly to me.
so the alleged 'faith' only exists in your imagination.
Isn't that pretty much always the case? Someone who doesn't like (a specific field or conclusion of) science will claim that the science itself is based entirely on untested assumptions and is thus equivalent to faith or "dogma", and the claimant will never have bothered to find out what actual assumptions are being made and what testing has been done to verify the hypothesis. It is, itself, a claim based entirely on a pre-existing belief that the science must be wrong.
The ironing is deciduous.
"I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass."
So... an alternate headline would be "Ancient Sumerian on grass hears voice of God".
Look, it's not like the government takes my word for it on most of the numbers I submit, anyway. If I put in the wrong number from my W-2 or W-9, they replace it with the right number, and either send me the bill or deduct from my account if I underpaid. So if they were consistently lousy with their records, this would be happening all the time.
I once got a letter from the IRS informing me that I didn't report interest income from a bank account I forgot about because it had so little money in it, so since I'd payed by direct deposit they just deducted the $0.15 from my account.
Another time I got a digit wrong on my W-2 amount, and the IRS informed me that they'd corrected the amount and credited me with the $400 I didn't need to pay, and if I thought this was an error to please call them (even if I thought it was, would I?) They do the same thing for math errors you make.
Anyway, my point is, for most of the basic things that you put on a 1040 in a boring year, the government already knows and more to the point already considers the numbers they have to be authoritative unless disputed.
So... My employer and banks still send me the tax info they usually do, the gov sends me their numbers and calculated tax liability, and if it's all right -- which it probably will be, the gov gets their numbers from the same banks and employers I do after all -- then I just pay it and am done with it. If it's not you do the 1040-Difficult like normal. I'm not seeing the huge problem here.
If not, terminal velocity in the lithosphere is approximately 0 mph.
Lol, nice.
It also says that Kittinger's fall lasted minutes. Why then did Kittinger not break the sound barrier after 35 seconds into hist descent?
It's not just how far you fall, it's how high is terminal velocity due to wind resistance. Higher up the air is thinner and you can go faster. This new jumper will still be higher than the previous record holder even after 35 seconds. And he won't be going super-sonic from then until he pulls the parachute; he will slow down as he gets lower in the atmosphere.
The things they've won on appeal are anti-trust cases against them, like with the FTC, like I keep saying. The patent cases have not been getting overturned. Samsung settled with them on anti-trust charges (against samsung), not patents.
This is one of their few patent-related victories, and as already mentioned, it's not a court case.
They took SOME ideas from JEDEC. Please show me where the ideas behind their own Rambus memory was in the ideas that they "borrowed".
The ideas for the patents behind their own RDRAM (Rambus DRAM) memory was their own idea and are perfectly fine and valid. Anyone who wanted to use RDRAM technology has properly licensed it.
The patents that cover DDR are not the patents that cover RDRAM, because the technologies have virtually nothing in common! The patents covering DDR are the ones Rambus filed after listening in on JEDEC meetings and hearing the ideas of the other JEDEC members!
If Rambus hadn't filed those patents based on other people's technology, and only had the patents on their own invention, RDRAM, there would be no patent suits.
So who cares that RDRAM came before DDR? They are not based on the same technology, and even RAMBUS knows that even if you don't.
Do your research, what I'm saying is a matter of public record in court cases.
The only similarity between DDR2 and RDRAM is that the data lines are double pumped, and if you think they "invented" that, you're a fool.
But this thread wasn't about the validity Rambus' patents and whether or not they invented them.
Uh, Jane Q made it about that.
It was about the premise that anything that patented the only way to do something is too obvious to deserve a patent. Which is not always a valid statement.
That's definitely not always a valid statement, I completely agree. Sometimes it is valid, sometimes it isn't.
As Jane Q Public wrote, it is sometimes so obvious only AFTER reading the patent.
Sure, in some cases having nothing to do with Rambus.
But everyone else didn't, possibly until reading the work of the patent makers.
There are many cases of concurrent development. Most actual inventions in this area take years to develop, so if you're anywhere close to someone else in coming out with a successful implementation of an idea, chances are you had to have been working on it before the other party disclosed the idea in a patent.
Besides, most engineers are not doing patent searches on the explicit advice of their legal departments. So, "possibly", sure. Practically, not so often.
You realize that the majority of that "x% more thingamabobs a year" has to do with device physics and process technology, not the logic/protocol/signal integrity technology that's people like Rambus involves themselves in?
"The ultimate thingamabobs/sec technology" isn't obvious. That doesn't mean any particular improvement in things/sec wasn't obvious. Obviously.
What do you want to bet those aren't the patents they are winning on?
Oh just about anything since anybody who was interested in the technology they actually invented paid for it. :P
But that is a point. They did patent a few obvious things. On the other hand, they had some innovative technology of their own blatantly stolen.
It's not that they were obvious. It's that they didn't invent them. Someone else did. But because of how fucked our patent system is, being the first one to file a patent is more important than being the one to invent.
Anyway, I haven't seen any cases where their actual technology was blatantly stolen. I've only seen cases where their patent rights to the technology they stole was upheld.
TFA gives no indication which this is, but since it's NVidia that suggests it's related to GDDR in which case it's the later.
What they patented were ways to make fast memory, cheaper.
Nothing about Rambus' technology was every about "cheaper". Their memory technology was inherently more expensive than others because it required additional serialization logic chips.
It's pretty easy to say "Why didn't I think of that?" after the fact. It is the one who gets there first that gets the patent. That IS innovation.
You mean the one who gets to the patent office first? "Why didn't I think of that?" is what Rambus said when they overheard the discussions at JEDEC, but then they realized it didn't matter that they didn't think of it first, since nobody else thought of patenting it first. Yay Rambus?
They're kinda a troll and kinda not. They were awarded patents for their inventions... and they were awarded patents for what they overheard at JEDEC and then ran off and patented (and no one else did first because the whole point was to devise a patent-royalty-free standard).
What?
That's different obviously.
But usually, if the solution isn't in textbooks, widely published research papers, or discussed at symposiums, but only dislosed via the patent then it isn't widely known. I mean, the patent lawyer at my company explicitly told my whole group not to do patent searches and just come up with solutions on our own, because patents are such a minefield the odds of you infringing one no matter what is very high, and knowingly doing so (which any kind of patent search, even if it didn't turn up the relevant one, could imply) is treble damages. Ergo most engineers are not working from the known-via-patent-disclosure solution, but coming up with it on their own. And if they're all coming up with the same one, then guess what? It was probably an obvious solution.
Um... only one of those is actually Rambus winning a patent royalty case. The rest are Rambus not losing anti-trust cases against them. Which I said they won, and the WP page supports them winning. The second "victory" was Rambus being able to concede defeat and pay Samsung's legal bills despite Samsung wanting to continue litigation.