I think that I actually agree with Blackberry on this one, though I'd think this would fall into trademark territory more than patent technology. Maybe the curved ridges on the keys somehow have a patent I guess...
Rule of thumb: IP law is so complicated that it's safe to assume that (1) TFA got it wrong, (2) the Slashdot summary and title got it wrong, (3) all slashdot posters (including me) got it wrong, with the sole exception of NewYorkCountryLawyer. I think the only way is to read what the actual filing said, and then look up patents, and then look up the claims section of those patents.
As far as I can tell, Blackberry complained that Typo Keyboard infringed one or more of:
* US Patent 7629964 - a patent about the invention of a particular angling+placement of keys on a handheld mobile device where the keys are optimally placed and angled to allow two-thumb typing. It looks like there was thought and extensive user research into figuring out that particular angling and placement. While it was obvious that some kind of angling+placement would be good, I guess no one had done the inventive work to figure out that particular angling+placement.
* US Patent 8162552 - a patent about the invention of a particular ramping of individual keys for the same end. I know that HP had beveled keys before. This patent is for a particular angling and beveling and crest and so on. Again it looks obvious that some kind of beveling is useful, but I guess no one had done the inventive work to pick out this particular angling and beveling. It looks like anyone who used a DIFFERENT angling and beveling wouldn't infringe on this patent.
* US Design Patent D685775 - a design patent which is very specifically for Blackberry's design. Design patents are for the ornamental shape of a functional item, and only apply when the design is novel and not the obvious shape for devices. I guess we didn't have the particular Blackberry proportions or layout on other devices before.
* Blackberry's trade dress. Trade dress is about the recognizable look of a product, that would let consumers readily recognize whether something is distinctively a Blackberry from its distinctive shape, colors etc.
I don't know on the basis of which of these the temporary sales ban was enacted. But I do know that Blackberry keyboards are indeed nicer to type on than any other phone keyboards I've used, and it really does suggest there was something non-obvious about their research into key placement and contours and their particular results. And I do think that Blackberry keyboards have a distinctive recognizable look. From photos, that Typo keyboard really did look a heck of a lot like a Blackberry in both its overall form. If indeed it also copied the particulars of Blackberry placement/beveling, rather than using any of the INFINITE other possible placement/beveling, then it seems like a slam dunk for Blackberry.
There's a ZERO sense to that idea. You might as well put a nuke on a completely unrelated aircraft. It's not like anyone's going to rely on visually IDing a civilian aircraft while it's on its way.
??? VLC on win8 is free! At least, it was free when I downloaded it an hour ago.
There were a load of FALSE vlc apps on the store for $3.49 and $3.99, with similar branding, trying to scam money. Did you get suckered by one of these?
So, it's a disease for which there is no prevention nor a cure
But there are some candidates in Phase 3 clinical trials at the moment, which all will work best if they can have an early diagnosis. I think that's why news of diagnostics tests is good. If any of these candidates pass their phase3 trials, they'd probably be on the market in 2017 - 2018.
* You can develop native apps in it for Android and iOS
* It is a more advanced language than the alternative languages, e.g. with its "async" language support. (which has been recently copied into Python, and is under committee review for inclusion JS and C++, but has been in VB/C# for four years already).
(disclaimer: I work on the C#/VB language design team at Microsoft. And I'm darned proud of it.)
You should include the Manifesto of Futurism. It's quite moving.
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
F.T. Marinetti, Le Figaro (Paris), 20 February 1909
We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling. An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls.
Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged over falls and through gourges to the sea. Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles.
In my book, referring to illegal migrants as just "illegals" is itself racist. At least dignify them with a noun that gives them some agency or humanity. The term "illegal" is solely about how they're affected by current laws and says nothing inherent to them.
I was curious about this "seemingly bulletproof" sandbox as described in the summary. But the opening paragraph on Microsoft's website explains: These security mitigation technologies do not guarantee that vulnerabilities cannot be exploited
Every time you switch to a new dentist, he or she looks over your mouth and declares that they teeth are all in terrible shape, that the previous dentist did poor work, and it will all have to be redone properly.
Software developers are the same. They see a legacy piece of code, see only the ugly cruft and hacks, think they can do better by rewriting from scratch, but their rewrite ends up with all of its new cruft and hacks as well.Oh, and the subtle "long tail" bug fixes that had previously been fixed in the legacy codebase? None of those make it into the rewrite... instead it comes with its own fresh long tail of bugs.
Citation needed. The wikipedia page contains your assertion ("true one-way mirrors do not and can not exist") but it backs it up with a now-dead link that, when it was active, never said anything of the kind...
Two-Way Mirrors, copyright 1999, Jim Loy
A two-way mirror is often called a "one-way mirror" by members of the general public. The misconception is that such a mirror acts as a mirror from one side, and acts as a window (letting light through) from the other side. Actually, the two-way mirror is letting about half of the light through, and reflecting the other half of the light, from both sides. it is also called a half-silvered surface, as just enough reflecting metal film (usually aluminum as far as I can determine) is deposited on the glass, so that about half of the light is reflected.
So, why does a two-way mirror seem to behave like the two sides are different? It behaves this way when one side is in the dark. Then almost no light goes from the dark side to the light side, and almost no light is reflected back from the dark side to the dark side. Most of the light comes from the bright side. Plenty of light travels through the mirror, and plenty of light is reflected back. To people on both sides of the mirror, the light from the bright side overwhelms the light from the dark side. So, people on the bright side see a mirror, and people on the dark side see a window. See the above diagram.
Robin Williams told a joke about policemen in the South having mirrors on the inside of their glasses. Good joke, but such glasses are two-way mirrors, and are shaped so that your eyes are always in the dark.
You're wrong! The point is that we start with the default assumption that all groups will provide EQUALLY inaccurate data, both psychotic people with a history of heavy pot use, and psychotic people without that history.
Here's a simplified example. Imagine if everyone, when asked their height, gave an answer with errors of up to two whole feet (i.e. terribly inaccurate), and that people in general overestimated their own heights, but both men and women have the SAME kinds of errors in their reported heights.
Now survey 410 people at random about their height. You won't get correct average heights. But you will get correct the correct DIFFERENCE in height between men and women, about 6", with a high degree of accuracy. That's because of the assumption that everyone provided equally inaccurate data, and so the inaccuracies cancel out.
I'm not a statisticianololgist, but passing out surveys to psychotic people in a mental hospital doesn't seem to me to be the best way to gather accurate data for a study.
Really? I think it's the *BEST* way to gather the information this study needs.
How would it be inaccurate? They're comparing subgroups of psychotic people so inaccuracies will cancel each other out. Unless you believe there's an inverse correlation between pot use and reported pot use?
Nah, it isn't that at all. Many people who would vote for republicans frequent the interweb and even this site. Generally, the smarter a person gets, the more republican they tend to lean in ideology even if they insist on remaining democrats or liberals. And before anyone marks that down, I said lean as in their positions tend towards but doesn't necessarily hit.
That's a strong claim. Do you have evidence for it?
My impression is a but different... that the more wealth someone squires, the less ashamed they are about voting for their own greedy self interest, and the less they care to vote on behalf of the poor and needy and disenfranchised.
Does anyone else think that before we allow commercial drone use we should also start thinking about some laws on how drones can be used?
No. Laws are like code. Don't optimize prematurely. Don't try to build a framework (in code or in laws) until you have several working examples and understand how things work in practice.
Wake up people. This "currency" is never going to have anything close to wide adoption. The inability to charge back is the #1 reason that prevents any consumer from perceiving it as a safe currency against vendor fraud.
My local QFC and Safeway have yams, sweet potatoes and celery for 99c/lb (zip code 98122 to look it up yourself). My two local second-rate produce stores are systematically cheaper, eg. 2lb tomatoes for 50c I got last time (at the intersection of 23rd & Ranier in Seattle, a few doors down from Remo Borachini) so I picked a number that was closer to the more expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that I actually agree with Blackberry on this one, though I'd think this would fall into trademark territory more than patent technology. Maybe the curved ridges on the keys somehow have a patent I guess...
Rule of thumb: IP law is so complicated that it's safe to assume that (1) TFA got it wrong, (2) the Slashdot summary and title got it wrong, (3) all slashdot posters (including me) got it wrong, with the sole exception of NewYorkCountryLawyer. I think the only way is to read what the actual filing said, and then look up patents, and then look up the claims section of those patents.
As far as I can tell, Blackberry complained that Typo Keyboard infringed one or more of:
* US Patent 7629964 - a patent about the invention of a particular angling+placement of keys on a handheld mobile device where the keys are optimally placed and angled to allow two-thumb typing. It looks like there was thought and extensive user research into figuring out that particular angling and placement. While it was obvious that some kind of angling+placement would be good, I guess no one had done the inventive work to figure out that particular angling+placement.
* US Patent 8162552 - a patent about the invention of a particular ramping of individual keys for the same end. I know that HP had beveled keys before. This patent is for a particular angling and beveling and crest and so on. Again it looks obvious that some kind of beveling is useful, but I guess no one had done the inventive work to pick out this particular angling and beveling. It looks like anyone who used a DIFFERENT angling and beveling wouldn't infringe on this patent.
* US Design Patent D685775 - a design patent which is very specifically for Blackberry's design. Design patents are for the ornamental shape of a functional item, and only apply when the design is novel and not the obvious shape for devices. I guess we didn't have the particular Blackberry proportions or layout on other devices before.
* Blackberry's trade dress. Trade dress is about the recognizable look of a product, that would let consumers readily recognize whether something is distinctively a Blackberry from its distinctive shape, colors etc.
I don't know on the basis of which of these the temporary sales ban was enacted. But I do know that Blackberry keyboards are indeed nicer to type on than any other phone keyboards I've used, and it really does suggest there was something non-obvious about their research into key placement and contours and their particular results. And I do think that Blackberry keyboards have a distinctive recognizable look. From photos, that Typo keyboard really did look a heck of a lot like a Blackberry in both its overall form. If indeed it also copied the particulars of Blackberry placement/beveling, rather than using any of the INFINITE other possible placement/beveling, then it seems like a slam dunk for Blackberry.
That's not true. On Windows 8, calc.exe remains a windowed desktop app that's identical to what it was in Windows 7.
As for Freecell (and Minesweeper) they were considerably enhanced and are now touch friendly. My mother plays the daily challenges every day.
There's a ZERO sense to that idea. You might as well put a nuke on a completely unrelated aircraft. It's not like anyone's going to rely on visually IDing a civilian aircraft while it's on its way.
??? VLC on win8 is free! At least, it was free when I downloaded it an hour ago.
There were a load of FALSE vlc apps on the store for $3.49 and $3.99, with similar branding, trying to scam money. Did you get suckered by one of these?
Snowden's not the one short on credibility. That honor goes to the NSA.
So, it's a disease for which there is no prevention nor a cure
But there are some candidates in Phase 3 clinical trials at the moment, which all will work best if they can have an early diagnosis. I think that's why news of diagnostics tests is good. If any of these candidates pass their phase3 trials, they'd probably be on the market in 2017 - 2018.
* Solanezumab from Lilly
* BACE1 inhibitor from Merck
* LMTX from TauRx
Disclaimer: I have family working on LMTX.
Why C# is the best language for mobile development...
http://blog.xamarin.com/eight-...
http://www.remobjects.com/elem...
* You can develop native apps in it for Android and iOS
* It is a more advanced language than the alternative languages, e.g. with its "async" language support. (which has been recently copied into Python, and is under committee review for inclusion JS and C++, but has been in VB/C# for four years already).
(disclaimer: I work on the C#/VB language design team at Microsoft. And I'm darned proud of it.)
I can. Here's the first step. (1) ignore the slashdot summary. (2) read the "CLAIMS" section of the patent. (3) then post about it.
In this case, what's being claimed is not a laser, is not a projection, and is arguably not even a keyboard.
Can you really get that graceful experience when upgrading from MacOS 9 direct to a modern Mac today? That's the timescale we're talking about.
You should include the Manifesto of Futurism. It's quite moving.
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
F.T. Marinetti, Le Figaro (Paris), 20 February 1909
We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.
An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls.
Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged over falls and through gourges to the sea.
Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles.
C#' is an ISO standard that runs (great) on ios, android, desktop Linux, netduino, as well as windows
I see this all the time from service industries, sellers on Amazon marketplace, conference speakers...
"If you think we did well, please write a positive review. If you think we did poorly, please let us know so we can improve our service."
It seems ubiquitous. I've always thought it slimy.
Agreed. But it kind of defeats the point of your quote.
"Some democracies spend too much then have a self-correcting tough period of financial austerity."
Interesting thought. Can you think of ANY democracies that followed this particular path into dictatorship?
I can't.
"I'm not a racist but..."
In my book, referring to illegal migrants as just "illegals" is itself racist. At least dignify them with a noun that gives them some agency or humanity. The term "illegal" is solely about how they're affected by current laws and says nothing inherent to them.
I was curious about this "seemingly bulletproof" sandbox as described in the summary. But the opening paragraph on Microsoft's website explains:
These security mitigation technologies do not guarantee that vulnerabilities cannot be exploited
So much for the hyped-up summary...
Developers are like dentists.
Every time you switch to a new dentist, he or she looks over your mouth and declares that they teeth are all in terrible shape, that the previous dentist did poor work, and it will all have to be redone properly.
Software developers are the same. They see a legacy piece of code, see only the ugly cruft and hacks, think they can do better by rewriting from scratch, but their rewrite ends up with all of its new cruft and hacks as well.Oh, and the subtle "long tail" bug fixes that had previously been fixed in the legacy codebase? None of those make it into the rewrite... instead it comes with its own fresh long tail of bugs.
...true one-way mirrors do not and can not exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Citation needed. The wikipedia page contains your assertion ("true one-way mirrors do not and can not exist") but it backs it up with a now-dead link that, when it was active, never said anything of the kind...
Two-Way Mirrors, copyright 1999, Jim Loy
A two-way mirror is often called a "one-way mirror" by members of the general public. The misconception is that such a mirror acts as a mirror from one side, and acts as a window (letting light through) from the other side. Actually, the two-way mirror is letting about half of the light through, and reflecting the other half of the light, from both sides. it is also called a half-silvered surface, as just enough reflecting metal film (usually aluminum as far as I can determine) is deposited on the glass, so that about half of the light is reflected.
So, why does a two-way mirror seem to behave like the two sides are different? It behaves this way when one side is in the dark. Then almost no light goes from the dark side to the light side, and almost no light is reflected back from the dark side to the dark side. Most of the light comes from the bright side. Plenty of light travels through the mirror, and plenty of light is reflected back. To people on both sides of the mirror, the light from the bright side overwhelms the light from the dark side. So, people on the bright side see a mirror, and people on the dark side see a window. See the above diagram.
Robin Williams told a joke about policemen in the South having mirrors on the inside of their glasses. Good joke, but such glasses are two-way mirrors, and are shaped so that your eyes are always in the dark.
You're wrong! The point is that we start with the default assumption that all groups will provide EQUALLY inaccurate data, both psychotic people with a history of heavy pot use, and psychotic people without that history.
Here's a simplified example. Imagine if everyone, when asked their height, gave an answer with errors of up to two whole feet (i.e. terribly inaccurate), and that people in general overestimated their own heights, but both men and women have the SAME kinds of errors in their reported heights.
Now survey 410 people at random about their height. You won't get correct average heights. But you will get correct the correct DIFFERENCE in height between men and women, about 6", with a high degree of accuracy. That's because of the assumption that everyone provided equally inaccurate data, and so the inaccuracies cancel out.
I'm not a statisticianololgist, but passing out surveys to psychotic people in a mental hospital doesn't seem to me to be the best way to gather accurate data for a study.
Really? I think it's the *BEST* way to gather the information this study needs.
How would it be inaccurate? They're comparing subgroups of psychotic people so inaccuracies will cancel each other out. Unless you believe there's an inverse correlation between pot use and reported pot use?
Nah, it isn't that at all. Many people who would vote for republicans frequent the interweb and even this site. Generally, the smarter a person gets, the more republican they tend to lean in ideology even if they insist on remaining democrats or liberals. And before anyone marks that down, I said lean as in their positions tend towards but doesn't necessarily hit.
That's a strong claim. Do you have evidence for it?
My impression is a but different... that the more wealth someone squires, the less ashamed they are about voting for their own greedy self interest, and the less they care to vote on behalf of the poor and needy and disenfranchised.
Don't encrypt the laptop.
Take a backup of the laptop hard drive, encrypt the backup. Upload that to an online storage service.
Wipe the free space or get a new hard drive.
Do you really actually do all that? Or is this just some weird thought experiment of yours?
Does anyone else think that before we allow commercial drone use we should also start thinking about some laws on how drones can be used?
No. Laws are like code. Don't optimize prematurely. Don't try to build a framework (in code or in laws) until you have several working examples and understand how things work in practice.
Wake up people. This "currency" is never going to have anything close to wide adoption. The inability to charge back is the #1 reason that prevents any consumer from perceiving it as a safe currency against vendor fraud.
Do you feel the same way about cash?
My local QFC and Safeway have yams, sweet potatoes and celery for 99c/lb (zip code 98122 to look it up yourself). My two local second-rate produce stores are systematically cheaper, eg. 2lb tomatoes for 50c I got last time (at the intersection of 23rd & Ranier in Seattle, a few doors down from Remo Borachini) so I picked a number that was closer to the more expensive.