What has always really bothered me about these cases is that RightsHaven didn't even own the right to sue when the infringement first occurred. They only got the rights afterwards and then claimed that the infringement that never infringed them when it had initially occurred was actionable to them. How judges let them get away with this ex post facto claim is totally beyond me.
To sell high-speed service with a data cap you can blow through is a total fraking (BSG reference) joke!
The punchline of this fraking joke is that while they complain that Data Hogs destroy the experience for everyone else on your shared cable loop, all of those problems just magically disappear the moment you are willing to pay a 2X to 3X higher monthly amount. No changes to the hardware at all - just a bigger check to the cable company. Like I said - Fraking Joke!
This particular patent was Especially Invalid. It is basically a patent for using XML in a particular way to store a word processing document. XML is a generalized specification for storing any sort of data in a human readable manner. The patent was the equivalent of taking a general purpose automobile and patenting its ability to drive on 2-lane mountain roads. That you couldn't drive your car on 2-lane mountain roads without a license from (and payment to) the patent holder. No one would have ever accepted that, and this patent should have been thrown out of court the moment it arrived, long before any ignorant jury verdict. The SCOTUS should put a spike through the heart of this thing once and forever!
Microsoft should be required to pay this man's salary at the rate he was being paid when he left FOR THE FULL LENGTH OF THE NON-COMPETE AGREEMENT! I mean, those jerks own his soul for that period and there is no way they shouldn't have to pay for that. Let a progressive state implement THAT provision into their worker laws and we might see a whole lot less of this garbage.
Nice to know that in The Land of the Free, it's not really YOUR MONEY to do with as you wish. Instead it's your money to do with only what the government approves of, regardless of what may be legal anywhere else in the world.
For a country that has decided at the federal level NOT to enforce immigration laws and not permit the states to do so either, it is sure interesting that the greatest threat we obviously face these days is Internet Poker.
Let's revisit this when they actually have a working prototype car. And remember that these days internal combustion isn't as simple as just building an efficient engine. You have every kind of restriction from what fuel it can burn to what emissions it can emit to how much noise it can generate to what temperature range it must be operable over - not to mention what is it's operational lifetime? A competitive engine has a lot of conditions that it has to meet.
What a bunch of cowards!! Jailbroken phones are legal in the USA - one of the few places where that country still leads the world - even if it was a hard fight to get there.
I think less of Toyota for this retreat, not more.
Pandora is now gone from my Android phone. It is only unfortunate that the uninstaller I used didn't allow me to send them a profane nastygram in the process. It should be labeled MALWARE in the apps store.
The old truism is that anybody can make a code that they can't break themselves.
One is also left to wonder if the old equipment that terrorists use had left him subjected to the dreaded Pentium FDIV bug? Or did he use it as a feature?
Personally I think this is a crap idea and leads me to think less of the FSF. Google, no doubt, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars minimum working on their application. They put their expense and effort into it in order to make gMail a superior product. For FSF to try and confiscate their work in this public shaming sort of manner so that their competitors don't have to work nearly as hard as Google did in the first place -- all in the name of elusive security -- is a bad joke and demeans the FSF overall.
Your problem is that you clearly don't understand the difference between a little corporate malfeasance and National Defense. If it was your safety and security being threatened you might feel a little bit different about it – or not, if you're an idiot. Non-idiots already know that diplomacy is like making sausage – something best not observed too closely.
And you are correct that you are probably happier living in Iceland than in the USA. That makes us happy too.
Apple should fork over a pile of dosh. Not so sure about RIM, but Apple was founded on stealing ideas from other people like PARC. Heck, even the name was taken from the Beatles - for which Apple has had to pay for twice now. And they sue for names not even remotely their own - anyone remember iPood?
But don't think that I'm picking on Apple alone. Disney's history is hardly Snow White either. And now Disney is the biggest hypocrite in the Don't Steal From Me crowd after Apple.
Personally I've always liked The Hobbit far more than the LotR trilogy. A much more compact and enjoyable tale - once you could get past the opening jammed full of what are hobbits, 13 dwarves all with names, and what's that wizard doing in all of this? I do realize that this is sacrilege comparable to saying that I likes PC's more than Apples.
If they can demand your Facebook login, why not your personal e-mail accounts? After all, who knows what seditious material you might be sending and receiving there?
And why not an anal examination of all of the hard drives in your household's personal computers? The RIAA does that on the most flimsy of pretenses.
A lot of people have the opinion that the ACLU is only about shutting down the speech of Christians/Whites/Men/*insert majority group here.* I think this case proves that not to be the case, and demonstrates the good that the ACLU actually does:
Too bad that the ACLU isn't as willing to support the Second Amendment as they are the First one and the other parts of The Bill of Rights.
This move by Apple totally screws over the authors who want to sell anywhere else but Apple - and who wants just a single distributor handling their work?
Here's how it works to the author's disadvantage. Amazon returns 70% royalties to the publisher, who then takes their cut before returning the rest to the author. If Amazon is forced to sell through the Apple store, Apple takes that 30% and Amazon gets nothing - which isn't good for Amazon. Amazon can't raise the price of books sold through Apple with a convenience fee for the ease of purchasing through the App store, nor can they discount their product in other markets, because Apple DEMANDS the lowest price available. If Amazon is to stay in business they either have to not sell through Apple at all - the publishers can cut their own deal through Apple and keep the 70% that Apple gives them leaving Amazon out entirely - or take a larger cut themselves returning say only 50% to the publishers, who will pay their authors correspondingly less as a result. In the end it will be the authors who take the hit for Apple's actions.
Frankly Apple is Evil and I wish that people wouldn't buy their overpriced, over-restricted crap.
As for Amazon, their best move would be to pull their Kindle software from Apple and focus on Android - while doing their best to sue Apple into oblivion for Illegal Tying. After all, would you buy a car that you could only fill with one brand of gasoline regardless of how high the price of that brand of gasoline went?
Or Amazon could create such a superior book buying and experience that Apple can't compete and Amazon has some leverage with them.
And if Amazon does raise prices everywhere to still eek out some profits from Apple, then ALL OF US end up paying the Apple tax even if we don't ever touch a piece Apple hardware.
We're all stupid if we let Apple get away with this crap!
Wouldn't it be a hoot if when Google bought On2 and VP8 and got the patents with it, that they have some essential patent that H.264 violates and the G-men tell MPEG LA that they are going to shut down H.264 entirely?
Alternatively we all just sit around until these stupid patents expire, at which point we all have 1GB fiber to the house and are watching uncompressed videos in 3D anyway.
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Apple really needs to get over themselves.
What has always really bothered me about these cases is that RightsHaven didn't even own the right to sue when the infringement first occurred. They only got the rights afterwards and then claimed that the infringement that never infringed them when it had initially occurred was actionable to them. How judges let them get away with this ex post facto claim is totally beyond me.
To sell high-speed service with a data cap you can blow through is a total fraking (BSG reference) joke!
The punchline of this fraking joke is that while they complain that Data Hogs destroy the experience for everyone else on your shared cable loop, all of those problems just magically disappear the moment you are willing to pay a 2X to 3X higher monthly amount. No changes to the hardware at all - just a bigger check to the cable company. Like I said - Fraking Joke!
This particular patent was Especially Invalid. It is basically a patent for using XML in a particular way to store a word processing document. XML is a generalized specification for storing any sort of data in a human readable manner. The patent was the equivalent of taking a general purpose automobile and patenting its ability to drive on 2-lane mountain roads. That you couldn't drive your car on 2-lane mountain roads without a license from (and payment to) the patent holder. No one would have ever accepted that, and this patent should have been thrown out of court the moment it arrived, long before any ignorant jury verdict. The SCOTUS should put a spike through the heart of this thing once and forever!
Microsoft should be required to pay this man's salary at the rate he was being paid when he left FOR THE FULL LENGTH OF THE NON-COMPETE AGREEMENT! I mean, those jerks own his soul for that period and there is no way they shouldn't have to pay for that. Let a progressive state implement THAT provision into their worker laws and we might see a whole lot less of this garbage.
Nice to know that in The Land of the Free, it's not really YOUR MONEY to do with as you wish. Instead it's your money to do with only what the government approves of, regardless of what may be legal anywhere else in the world.
For a country that has decided at the federal level NOT to enforce immigration laws and not permit the states to do so either, it is sure interesting that the greatest threat we obviously face these days is Internet Poker.
RIP Groklaw. You changed the world for the better.
Let's revisit this when they actually have a working prototype car. And remember that these days internal combustion isn't as simple as just building an efficient engine. You have every kind of restriction from what fuel it can burn to what emissions it can emit to how much noise it can generate to what temperature range it must be operable over - not to mention what is it's operational lifetime? A competitive engine has a lot of conditions that it has to meet.
What a bunch of cowards!! Jailbroken phones are legal in the USA - one of the few places where that country still leads the world - even if it was a hard fight to get there.
I think less of Toyota for this retreat, not more.
If you want to understand the tidal gradient around a very dense object, go read Larry Niven's Neutron Star.
/. is slipping.
And you shouldn't have had to scan down 123 postings to find this.
Actually all those Glee songs may be outing your orientation. :^)
Pandora is now gone from my Android phone. It is only unfortunate that the uninstaller I used didn't allow me to send them a profane nastygram in the process. It should be labeled MALWARE in the apps store.
Italian Justice == Oxymoron.
The old truism is that anybody can make a code that they can't break themselves.
One is also left to wonder if the old equipment that terrorists use had left him subjected to the dreaded Pentium FDIV bug? Or did he use it as a feature?
Personally I think this is a crap idea and leads me to think less of the FSF. Google, no doubt, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars minimum working on their application. They put their expense and effort into it in order to make gMail a superior product. For FSF to try and confiscate their work in this public shaming sort of manner so that their competitors don't have to work nearly as hard as Google did in the first place -- all in the name of elusive security -- is a bad joke and demeans the FSF overall.
Your problem is that you clearly don't understand the difference between a little corporate malfeasance and National Defense. If it was your safety and security being threatened you might feel a little bit different about it – or not, if you're an idiot. Non-idiots already know that diplomacy is like making sausage – something best not observed too closely.
And you are correct that you are probably happier living in Iceland than in the USA. That makes us happy too.
Apple should fork over a pile of dosh. Not so sure about RIM, but Apple was founded on stealing ideas from other people like PARC. Heck, even the name was taken from the Beatles - for which Apple has had to pay for twice now. And they sue for names not even remotely their own - anyone remember iPood?
But don't think that I'm picking on Apple alone. Disney's history is hardly Snow White either. And now Disney is the biggest hypocrite in the Don't Steal From Me crowd after Apple.
Personally I've always liked The Hobbit far more than the LotR trilogy. A much more compact and enjoyable tale - once you could get past the opening jammed full of what are hobbits, 13 dwarves all with names, and what's that wizard doing in all of this? I do realize that this is sacrilege comparable to saying that I likes PC's more than Apples.
Donate, or sell it, either way this would be the best possible place for it.
How about pull a Harlan? Just how's that The Last Dangerous Visions thing coming anyway?
And just where do I get this free orange juice?
If they can demand your Facebook login, why not your personal e-mail accounts? After all, who knows what seditious material you might be sending and receiving there?
And why not an anal examination of all of the hard drives in your household's personal computers? The RIAA does that on the most flimsy of pretenses.
Really, where does it end?
Too bad that the ACLU isn't as willing to support the Second Amendment as they are the First one and the other parts of The Bill of Rights.
This move by Apple totally screws over the authors who want to sell anywhere else but Apple - and who wants just a single distributor handling their work?
Here's how it works to the author's disadvantage. Amazon returns 70% royalties to the publisher, who then takes their cut before returning the rest to the author. If Amazon is forced to sell through the Apple store, Apple takes that 30% and Amazon gets nothing - which isn't good for Amazon. Amazon can't raise the price of books sold through Apple with a convenience fee for the ease of purchasing through the App store, nor can they discount their product in other markets, because Apple DEMANDS the lowest price available. If Amazon is to stay in business they either have to not sell through Apple at all - the publishers can cut their own deal through Apple and keep the 70% that Apple gives them leaving Amazon out entirely - or take a larger cut themselves returning say only 50% to the publishers, who will pay their authors correspondingly less as a result. In the end it will be the authors who take the hit for Apple's actions.
Frankly Apple is Evil and I wish that people wouldn't buy their overpriced, over-restricted crap.
As for Amazon, their best move would be to pull their Kindle software from Apple and focus on Android - while doing their best to sue Apple into oblivion for Illegal Tying. After all, would you buy a car that you could only fill with one brand of gasoline regardless of how high the price of that brand of gasoline went?
Or Amazon could create such a superior book buying and experience that Apple can't compete and Amazon has some leverage with them.
And if Amazon does raise prices everywhere to still eek out some profits from Apple, then ALL OF US end up paying the Apple tax even if we don't ever touch a piece Apple hardware.
We're all stupid if we let Apple get away with this crap!
Wouldn't it be a hoot if when Google bought On2 and VP8 and got the patents with it, that they have some essential patent that H.264 violates and the G-men tell MPEG LA that they are going to shut down H.264 entirely?
Alternatively we all just sit around until these stupid patents expire, at which point we all have 1GB fiber to the house and are watching uncompressed videos in 3D anyway.