Yes, and they have all been tried and they were all shit. I'm sure if Apple could have come up with something different they would have, but last time I checked they are still shipping mice.
I've used all of them, and they all worked pretty well. People certainly have their individual tastes (and I know people who can't live without their trackballs), but it would hardly have been a disaster for Apple if one or the other had been tied up with patents. They would have found a workaround, as Samsung will doubtless do, that was only marginally less desirable than the patented approach. (Do you really think this decision will put Samsung out of the smartphone business?) And users who wanted a mouse would have simply have bought one from whoever owned the patent and was selling it, just as many people bought 3-button mice for their Macs when Apple was only selling its one-button model. And in a few years, the patent would have expired and everybody would be using it. Big deal.
That isn't how it happened though, is it? Apple paid Xerox for a license to produce mice because Xerox owned the patent.
Before you pontificate on "how it happened," don't you think it might be wise to spend just a few minutes actually learning how it happened?
No, Apple didn't pay Xerox for a license to the mouse, because Xerox didn't own the patent. The mouse wasn't invented by Xerox, it was invented and patented by Douglas Engelbart at SRI International. The patent had only a few years left to run by the time Apple shipped the Macintosh, but Apple properly paid SRI for the license. Apple did not use Xerox's mouse design, which which was too expensive to manufacture to be practical for a consumer product, but developed (and patented) their own. Which didn't stop anybody from making and selling other mouse designs (although I'm sure there were some people who thought that every mouse shape other than Apple's was "shit"). So mouse patents did not prevent anybody from using a mouse, anymore than Apple's patents are likely to prevent anybody from making rectangular touch screen devices with rounded corners, but they probably contributed to the wide diversity of mouse designs and shapes that are available to consumers today.
There were many patents on motorcars, some of them quite broad, and Fords were far from the first. There were plenty of court cases, and despite being a bit of a latecomer to the business, Henry Ford and his lawyers did just fine. And in just a few years, all those patents expired, because the term of a patent is not actually all that long. And their overall impact on the development and sale of cars by multiple manufacturers was so small that you obviously are quite unaware of the history.
Ah yes, back to the notion that Apple's victory simply turned on a touch screen, a thin bezel, and rounded corners, which seems to be very popular among people whose reactions to the case are dominated by their own prejudices rather than the actual evidence or decision. In fact, Apple asserted numerous other patents. The "thin bezel, rounded corners" design patent (referred to as D'087) was found to be infringed by only 3 out of a long list of Samsung devices. So clearly the jury did not find it to be a broad patent unavoidably infringed by just about any touch phone, and it played a very minor role in Apple's win. Could it be maybe, that after sitting in court for all those hours and going over the evidence in detail, they figured out something you didn't?
No such patent was asserted against Samsung in the trial. If Apple really had a strong, broad patent on any use of multitouch on a cell phone, don't you think they would have asserted it against Samsung? Indeed, it would be the ultimate Kryptonite against smartphones. But as you correctly point out, many companies have been playing with multitouch implementations for years. So Apple may have patents on specific technical ways of implementing multitouch on a cell phone screen, or for specific uses of multitouch, but not a patent (or at least not one they think has a strong chance of standing up) on the general concept of using multitouch on a phone.
I didn't say only the mouse would be banned. Besides, if you ever used a laptop, trackballs and trackpads are god-awful compared to a mouse. Mini-joystick? What, you have a C64 nostalgia? There's a reason that thing died out.
Oh, so now you are asserting an imaginary patent on every conceivable pointing device, far more broad than any pointing device patent (and there have been quite a few) claimed by anybody? By the way Sony used a mini-joystick embedded in the keyboard on their laptops, and I know people who preferred it. I also know people who prefer a trackball (an early Apple laptop had one, as a matter of fact). And of course, any such patent would have expired many years ago. The mouse was patented, in fact--but its patent expired before it was used for any major computer system.
You can live without right clicking in windows too - everything is usually available from the regular menus. It's just MAJORLY inconvient, which is the point. To handle context menus like that, right click is the intuitive way, and pretty much the only one at that.
And yet Apple's current laptops completely lack a right-click button. But to the uncreative, the way they are accustomed to can seem like the One True Way.
Those phones never got even close to where I live, but as far as I saw in pictures and videos, WebOS was also guilty of every single charge that is levelled at Android.
Blatantly false. As the jury clearly recognized, many of Samsung's devices were cosmetically similar to the iPhone in a way the Palm phones never were.
just HOW is WebOS not "another cheap iOS copy" if android is?
Another straw man. Nowhere in the trial was it claimed that Android itself is a cheap iOS copy. In fact, Android was originally planned to support a phone design that didn't resemble the iPhone at all (although Blackberry might have had something to say about it). To its credit, Android is a very versatile OS, which made it possible to "skin" it to support an iPhone-like interface.
If you don't mind a phone and OS which is stuck in 2008
I take it you haven't used recent Blackberry models, which have evolved quite a bit since 2008. I still know quite a few people who prefer the Blackberry over the iPhone. Do you really think that it will be a good thing for the consumer if Blackberry is driven out of business and replaced by iClones?
Seriously, physical keyboards?
Yet prior to the release of the iPhone, it was conventional wisdom that it was impossible to create a virtual keyboard that would be popular with consumers. Yet now, some of the same people are dismissing Apple's use of virtual keyboards as "obvious." But there actually still are quite a few people who prefer the kind of well-crafted physical keyboard that the Blackberry devices offer. Do you really think it will be a good thing for the consumer if this sort of device becomes unavailable to consumers because everybody is playing follow-the-leader with Apple?
Know any PCs that don't make you type via keyboard (virtual or physical) to get characters into the machine?
This is kind of ridiculous don't you think, considering that any conceivable keyboard patent would have expired long before the computer age. And there are so many ways to implement and organize a keyboard (some of which are arguably superior to QWERTY) that it would be next to impossible to create a patent broad enough to cover all of them (you might want to look into Dvorak, or chording keyboards, or the various ergonomic keyboard designs).
Know any GUI that doesn't use a grid layout for it's icons?
I find it revealing that critics of the decision almost never seem to want to engage with Apple's actual claims, but rather with strawmen of their own creation: the notion that Apple asserted a patent on all multitouch (no such patent was even at issue in the trial), for example, or all square devices with rounded corners.
If pinch-to-zoom is really so wonderful, then doesn't Apple deserve a patent for creating it? And if it's trivial, then shouldn't there be alternatives that are at least close to as good that other manufacturers could use instead of copying Apple. I can think of lots of alternative gestures: clockwise vs. counterclockwise circle. Three or 4 finger pinch or up-down swipe. "L" gesture to zoom in and upside-down "L" to zoom out. Etc., etc.
And is search across the device and internet at once really such a big deal? I usually have an idea whether I want to search my device or the internet, and choosing one or the other is hardly a terrible imposition. I can think of rare occasions when it would be convenient, but it is not the sort of thing that could reasonably be considered to be crucial to any smartphone.
Your logic is pretty absurd. If I had patents for using mouse and keyboard combination for desktop computers and then sued the hell out of everyone who dared using it, would you also just shrug and tell them to be innovative?
Certainly. I have no doubt that Apple would be innovative enough to think of other approaches. There are lots of other possibilities: mini-joysticks, trackballs, trackpads.
If Microsoft sued everyone for using right-click context menus and double-click, would you agree with them and again propose linux, Apple etc to be innovative and come up with something else?
Uh, duh. Apple did come up with something else. Apple used a single button mouse for years, and in any case, such a patent would have expired by now (the life of a patent is not really all that long in the scheme of things). In fact, even to this day, Mac software is designed so that right-click is not essential, but only a convenience. And Apple's current mouse has no buttons at all; the entire top of the mouse is touch sensitive, so that if it were necessary, any kind of gesture could be substituted for right click.
It is in the nature of great design that a successful approach can start to seem (to the uncreative, at least) like the only possible way of doing things, but there are always alternatives that are nearly as good, or sometimes better. Has Apple really hit upon the One True Way of creating a smartphone? Perhaps. Certainly if everybody continues to slavishly follow Apple's lead, we'll never know.
Certainly there are alternatives. Palm's WebOS phones looked promising, but Palm was driven out of business by competition from cheap iClones, produced by companies like Samsung that could undersell creative companies like Palm, because unlike Palm, they did not have to invest in developing their own designs, or take the risk of introducing something new into the market. Blackberry is another alternative, but they are barely surviving due to competition from the horde of iClones. And Microsoft was able to come up with a design different enough from Apple's that Apple was willing to license them the few things they had in common.
No, my opinion based upon reading much of the evidence that was reported as the trial proceeded is that the jury would not have ruled in favor of Apple if it were true that Apple's case turned on nothing more than "rectangular with rounded corners" (as Apple's case has sometimes been inaccurately caricatured) -- and indeed, that was not the case. There is nothing about the ruling that prevents other companies from producing cell phones with that form factor -- but if they do, they should not (as Samsung did) slavishly imitate numerous other aspects of the look and feel of Apple's products, ranging from fine details of how touch control works on Apple's products to the design of the icons and even the design of the packaging.
If you really believe that Apple has discovered the One True Way for smartphones to work. On the other hand, the decision increases the incentives in favor of companies with the creativity to develop approaches that differ from Apple's, and will likely increase the diversity of designs available to consumers.
When I was a kid, my parents painted every scratch and scrape with mercury antiseptic. But they don't do that anymore, and they took mercury out of almost all of the vaccinations (the only exception is multi dose flu vaccine, and if you really want, you can pay for the more expensive single-dose shot without preservative)
Some say that autism incidence higher than when I was a kid. Could it be because kids today are not getting enough mercury?
Seat belts don't perfectly protect against injury in an accident, so don't make your kids wear one. Smoke alarms don't always enable the family to escape in a fire, so don't get one. Wearing a helmet when biking does not perfectly protect children from injury in a fall, so don't make your kid wear one. Crossing at the crosswalk does not perfectly protect against being hit by a car, so tell your kids it's OK to jaywalk Not getting in the car with strangers does not perfectly protect children from abduction, so tell your kids its OK
But there's plenty of parents whose children have problems within 72 hours of vaccines being administered to make at least the anecdotal cases seem compelling
To the innumerate, perhaps. Let's do some simple arithmetic:
Autism is typically diagnosed around the same time that children receive their childhood vaccinations, even in children who do not get vaccinated. Let's ignore the likely possibility that due to media reports, parents are more likely to be alert to symptoms of autism right after vaccination, and assume that children are vaccinated on a random date, and first exhibit clear symptoms of autism on a random date. If autism is unrelated to vaccination, what is the probability that a child in the US will first exhibit autistic symptoms within 72 hours (3 days) after vaccination?
3 days is 3/365 = 0.0082 year
About 4 million children are born in the US per year. Let's assume that they are all vaccinated in a single year (yes, I know children get multiple vaccinations throughout childhood but I'm being conservative)
Incidence of autism is hard to estimate as diagnostic criteria have changed and doctors are more likely today to consider a diagnosis of autism as opposed to simple mental retardation. Current estimates of incidence are around 1%, and a survey of incidence of autism in adults in Great Britain indicates this has been fairly stable for the past 70 years. But this is still somewhat controversial, so let's be very conservative and assume that only 1 child in 1000 will first exhibit clear symptoms of autism in a the same year as he or she gets a vaccination. How many children per year will, purely by chance, first exhibit clear symptoms of autism within 72 h of their vaccination?
4 million * 0.001 * 0.0082 = 33 per year So over 10 years about 330 children would have first exhibited autistic symptoms within 72 hours after vaccination. Expand the period after vaccination to 2 weeks (I've heard people blame vaccination when their child was diagnosed a month or two after a vaccination), and that number rises to 1,524.
So even if autism has nothing to do with vaccination, plenty of parents would have children who developed autistic symptoms with 72 h of vaccination.
Which helps to explain the scientific adage: "The plural of anecdote is not data."
The very fact of a recall campaign indicates a manufacturing error that affects a limited set of products. It is undeniably the case that there have been occasional manufacturing errors that necessitated recalls of particular manufacturing runs of batteries for many different products from many different companies. That is quite different from the implication that there is some sort of general tendency of batteries for the Mac (or any other product) to fail in this particular way.
For the most part, it's not cost effective to upgrade older computers aside from maxing out the RAM. But there will always be small market for hobbyists who actually enjoy fiddling with their computers.
I've upgraded CPUs, including laptop CPUs, in the past, but I've ultimately concluded that counting the time investment of doing it, its of marginal value. And the newer models usually have other enhancements that the upgraded older models can't match. Today, I'd rather keep the older one a bit longer and put the money saved on the CPU upgrade toward a new model.
With the older Macs with the removable batteries, the battery did not last that long even when new, so it didn't need to loose much capacity to render the Mac pretty much useless off the charger. Some of our older Macs have been through multiple batteries, and at $50-70 a pop, it adds up. We've had similar problems with Dell laptops. On the other hand, I've got a first-generation Air that is still going strong on its original battery. Even given the extra cost of having the battery replaced by Apple, it looks like we'll be saving money over the removable battery models.
At my work, we've had at least two dozen Mac laptops over the years. Most of the older ones have been through multiple batteries. I've never seen a single battery "swell up," or fail in any way other than simply ceasing to hold a charge for very long. Perhaps it happens, but it must be quite rare.
There's always a new frontier, and a 20 year monopoly in the latest patent gold-rush is a ridiculous restriction.
And don't the people who create the new frontier deserve some sort of reward for opening it up? 20 years is a pretty short time in the scheme of things. Very often, patents are close to expiration by the time they come into common use. For example, the patent on the computer mouse had already expired before it became a major feature of computer operating systems. And most of the time, there are workarounds that are nearly as good--or better. So patents prevent everybody from being "locked into" a single way of doing things without fully exploring alternatives.
Most open source products can't afford a "buck or two", and it completely invalidates their license.
If an open-source product is really all that valuable, users will be willing to pay a few bucks for a license. And there is no reason why open-source projects--if they truly innovate and do not merely piggyback on the advances of others--cannot develop their own patent and copyright portfolios to trade.
Funny, in the early days of computing there were no patents on software, and yet innovation happened anyways.
But there are plenty of examples in which the true innovators never managed to profit appreciably from their inventions. I suspect that spreadsheet programs would be much better today if Bricklin and Frankson had received royalties enabling them to pursue further development. They were also early innovators in GUI development, but they were pushed out of the market by imitators.
Yes, they are, unless you think the current spate of patent trolls suing businesses for "on the Internet" patents, or similar vile stuff isn't a bad thing.
Frankly, I think it is a pretty insignificant thing. For the most part, it is a transient problem dating from the early days of computing and the internet, when people were still figuring out how to do things (the sort of things that now seem "obvious" in hindsight, although many of them probably weren't so obvious at the time). But most of the really fundamental or genuinely obvious ones have expired, or will do so in the near future. The nonpracticing entities ("patent trolls") don't really stop any products from reaching the public, because the trolls are not looking to block progress, and most of them don't want the expense of an actual trial, they just want a payout. So at worst, they add a buck or two to the price of a product. Big. deal. Compared to the value of providing a financial incentive for companies to innovate, that seems a very, very minor expense.
Don't tell me that there are still people around who buy the silly notion that Apple is suing Samsung just for producing touch pad with rounded corners? Apple is not suing Samsung for being similar in any one respect, but rather for a pattern of copying numerous design features of Apple's products.
So how about companies whose expertise is not in coming up with novel ideas that don't work very well, but rather in design--taking concepts that are well known and finally making them actually work well? Clearly (considering how rarely it is done) that is often harder than coming up with the original germ of an idea. And it clearly is not risk free: there are many of examples of companies that introduced original designs, but failed because they could not compete with other companies who simply copied the designs of others.
Consider the fate of Palm, for example, who came up an original OS and user interface and produced a phone that debuted to stellar reviews, but died because they could not afford to compete with manufacturers selling cheap iClones, who could sell their phones at rock-bottom prices, because they didn't have to invest in design, or do user testing, or take the market risk of introducing a new design--they could piggyback on the design ideas already market-tested by Apple. And the same seems to be on the verge of happening to Blackberry, another company that developed its own designs and charted its own way instead of just rushing clones of "the latest thing" to the market.
Ironically, it appears that the consequence of weak patent protection of Apple's designs will likely be that consumers have only two choices when it comes to smart phones: an iPhone, or an iPhone imitator. Perhaps Microsoft will offer a second alternative (although design had never really been one of their strengths). But it's kind of sad if a company has to have the deep pockets of a Microsoft to introduce an original design.
And the consequence if that patent had been granted? Web browsers would likely have been dominated by one manufacturer in the early years But they were anyway--Internet Explorer. Or perhaps the patent holder would have agreed to license the patent, and everybody who produced a web browser would have had to pay a few bucks to that patent holder for a licensing fee, perhaps adding 5 bucks or so to the price of a computer.
And as of about 1996, when the patent expired, there would have been an explosion of web browsers from other developers. Which is pretty close to what happened anyway.
It doesn't require top-down control. It requires a free market, not a government monopolized one.
Naive platitudes aside, free markets function well only when consumers are capable of rapidly and accurately evaluating the benefits of one purveyor's product versus another and are able to shift from one purveyor to another without large transaction costs. So childhood education is an extraordinarily poor fit to free market ideology
- The consumers (the children) do not have the power to choose their own education provider; because any such decisions are be made by their parents, who do not directly experience the product.
- The consumers do not have the ability to judge the quality of the product (because you need to be educated to know whether the education provided is good are bad.
- Consequences of poor education often become evident after a substantial delay--i.e when the child fails to get into a good college (or go to college at all) or when the child fails to enter a profession that they would be good at because their prior education did not adequately expose them to the field. By that time, it's too late to switch your primary or secondary education provider.
- There are often substantial costs to switching schools; for example, it may be necessary to move, or commuting expenses may be involved.
So just from first principles, we would expect a free market to be inadequate to guarantee to all children their right to a decent education. In practice, there is little evidence. Moreover, objective evidence does not support the hypothesis that a free market is adequate to secure an adequate science education for all children--there are private schools that teach nonsense like creationism as science.
My Senators and Representatives vote in the same Congress with all the others. Note that this is no different from decisions made at the state level; I do not get to vote for every state representative. Perhaps you are confusing "having a say" with "being absolute dictator"
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I've used all of them, and they all worked pretty well. People certainly have their individual tastes (and I know people who can't live without their trackballs), but it would hardly have been a disaster for Apple if one or the other had been tied up with patents. They would have found a workaround, as Samsung will doubtless do, that was only marginally less desirable than the patented approach. (Do you really think this decision will put Samsung out of the smartphone business?) And users who wanted a mouse would have simply have bought one from whoever owned the patent and was selling it, just as many people bought 3-button mice for their Macs when Apple was only selling its one-button model. And in a few years, the patent would have expired and everybody would be using it. Big deal.
Before you pontificate on "how it happened," don't you think it might be wise to spend just a few minutes actually learning how it happened?
No, Apple didn't pay Xerox for a license to the mouse, because Xerox didn't own the patent. The mouse wasn't invented by Xerox, it was invented and patented by Douglas Engelbart at SRI International. The patent had only a few years left to run by the time Apple shipped the Macintosh, but Apple properly paid SRI for the license. Apple did not use Xerox's mouse design, which which was too expensive to manufacture to be practical for a consumer product, but developed (and patented) their own. Which didn't stop anybody from making and selling other mouse designs (although I'm sure there were some people who thought that every mouse shape other than Apple's was "shit"). So mouse patents did not prevent anybody from using a mouse, anymore than Apple's patents are likely to prevent anybody from making rectangular touch screen devices with rounded corners, but they probably contributed to the wide diversity of mouse designs and shapes that are available to consumers today.
There were many patents on motorcars, some of them quite broad, and Fords were far from the first. There were plenty of court cases, and despite being a bit of a latecomer to the business, Henry Ford and his lawyers did just fine. And in just a few years, all those patents expired, because the term of a patent is not actually all that long. And their overall impact on the development and sale of cars by multiple manufacturers was so small that you obviously are quite unaware of the history.
Ah yes, back to the notion that Apple's victory simply turned on a touch screen, a thin bezel, and rounded corners, which seems to be very popular among people whose reactions to the case are dominated by their own prejudices rather than the actual evidence or decision. In fact, Apple asserted numerous other patents. The "thin bezel, rounded corners" design patent (referred to as D'087) was found to be infringed by only 3 out of a long list of Samsung devices. So clearly the jury did not find it to be a broad patent unavoidably infringed by just about any touch phone, and it played a very minor role in Apple's win. Could it be maybe, that after sitting in court for all those hours and going over the evidence in detail, they figured out something you didn't?
No such patent was asserted against Samsung in the trial. If Apple really had a strong, broad patent on any use of multitouch on a cell phone, don't you think they would have asserted it against Samsung? Indeed, it would be the ultimate Kryptonite against smartphones. But as you correctly point out, many companies have been playing with multitouch implementations for years. So Apple may have patents on specific technical ways of implementing multitouch on a cell phone screen, or for specific uses of multitouch, but not a patent (or at least not one they think has a strong chance of standing up) on the general concept of using multitouch on a phone.
Oh, so now you are asserting an imaginary patent on every conceivable pointing device, far more broad than any pointing device patent (and there have been quite a few) claimed by anybody? By the way Sony used a mini-joystick embedded in the keyboard on their laptops, and I know people who preferred it. I also know people who prefer a trackball (an early Apple laptop had one, as a matter of fact). And of course, any such patent would have expired many years ago. The mouse was patented, in fact--but its patent expired before it was used for any major computer system.
And yet Apple's current laptops completely lack a right-click button. But to the uncreative, the way they are accustomed to can seem like the One True Way.
Blatantly false. As the jury clearly recognized, many of Samsung's devices were cosmetically similar to the iPhone in a way the Palm phones never were.
Another straw man. Nowhere in the trial was it claimed that Android itself is a cheap iOS copy. In fact, Android was originally planned to support a phone design that didn't resemble the iPhone at all (although Blackberry might have had something to say about it). To its credit, Android is a very versatile OS, which made it possible to "skin" it to support an iPhone-like interface.
I take it you haven't used recent Blackberry models, which have evolved quite a bit since 2008. I still know quite a few people who prefer the Blackberry over the iPhone. Do you really think that it will be a good thing for the consumer if Blackberry is driven out of business and replaced by iClones?
Yet prior to the release of the iPhone, it was conventional wisdom that it was impossible to create a virtual keyboard that would be popular with consumers. Yet now, some of the same people are dismissing Apple's use of virtual keyboards as "obvious." But there actually still are quite a few people who prefer the kind of well-crafted physical keyboard that the Blackberry devices offer. Do you really think it will be a good thing for the consumer if this sort of device becomes unavailable to consumers because everybody is playing follow-the-leader with Apple?
This is kind of ridiculous don't you think, considering that any conceivable keyboard patent would have expired long before the computer age. And there are so many ways to implement and organize a keyboard (some of which are arguably superior to QWERTY) that it would be next to impossible to create a patent broad enough to cover all of them (you might want to look into Dvorak, or chording keyboards, or the various ergonomic keyboard designs).
Another "duh" moment. To this day, Macs do n
I find it revealing that critics of the decision almost never seem to want to engage with Apple's actual claims, but rather with strawmen of their own creation: the notion that Apple asserted a patent on all multitouch (no such patent was even at issue in the trial), for example, or all square devices with rounded corners.
If pinch-to-zoom is really so wonderful, then doesn't Apple deserve a patent for creating it? And if it's trivial, then shouldn't there be alternatives that are at least close to as good that other manufacturers could use instead of copying Apple. I can think of lots of alternative gestures: clockwise vs. counterclockwise circle. Three or 4 finger pinch or up-down swipe. "L" gesture to zoom in and upside-down "L" to zoom out. Etc., etc.
And is search across the device and internet at once really such a big deal? I usually have an idea whether I want to search my device or the internet, and choosing one or the other is hardly a terrible imposition. I can think of rare occasions when it would be convenient, but it is not the sort of thing that could reasonably be considered to be crucial to any smartphone.
Certainly. I have no doubt that Apple would be innovative enough to think of other approaches. There are lots of other possibilities: mini-joysticks, trackballs, trackpads.
Uh, duh. Apple did come up with something else. Apple used a single button mouse for years, and in any case, such a patent would have expired by now (the life of a patent is not really all that long in the scheme of things). In fact, even to this day, Mac software is designed so that right-click is not essential, but only a convenience. And Apple's current mouse has no buttons at all; the entire top of the mouse is touch sensitive, so that if it were necessary, any kind of gesture could be substituted for right click.
It is in the nature of great design that a successful approach can start to seem (to the uncreative, at least) like the only possible way of doing things, but there are always alternatives that are nearly as good, or sometimes better. Has Apple really hit upon the One True Way of creating a smartphone? Perhaps. Certainly if everybody continues to slavishly follow Apple's lead, we'll never know.
Certainly there are alternatives. Palm's WebOS phones looked promising, but Palm was driven out of business by competition from cheap iClones, produced by companies like Samsung that could undersell creative companies like Palm, because unlike Palm, they did not have to invest in developing their own designs, or take the risk of introducing something new into the market. Blackberry is another alternative, but they are barely surviving due to competition from the horde of iClones. And Microsoft was able to come up with a design different enough from Apple's that Apple was willing to license them the few things they had in common.
No, my opinion based upon reading much of the evidence that was reported as the trial proceeded is that the jury would not have ruled in favor of Apple if it were true that Apple's case turned on nothing more than "rectangular with rounded corners" (as Apple's case has sometimes been inaccurately caricatured) -- and indeed, that was not the case. There is nothing about the ruling that prevents other companies from producing cell phones with that form factor -- but if they do, they should not (as Samsung did) slavishly imitate numerous other aspects of the look and feel of Apple's products, ranging from fine details of how touch control works on Apple's products to the design of the icons and even the design of the packaging.
If you really believe that Apple has discovered the One True Way for smartphones to work. On the other hand, the decision increases the incentives in favor of companies with the creativity to develop approaches that differ from Apple's, and will likely increase the diversity of designs available to consumers.
When I was a kid, my parents painted every scratch and scrape with mercury antiseptic.
But they don't do that anymore, and they took mercury out of almost all of the vaccinations (the only exception is multi dose flu vaccine, and if you really want, you can pay for the more expensive single-dose shot without preservative)
Some say that autism incidence higher than when I was a kid.
Could it be because kids today are not getting enough mercury?
Seat belts don't perfectly protect against injury in an accident, so don't make your kids wear one.
Smoke alarms don't always enable the family to escape in a fire, so don't get one.
Wearing a helmet when biking does not perfectly protect children from injury in a fall, so don't make your kid wear one.
Crossing at the crosswalk does not perfectly protect against being hit by a car, so tell your kids it's OK to jaywalk
Not getting in the car with strangers does not perfectly protect children from abduction, so tell your kids its OK
Now, who's the moron?
To the innumerate, perhaps. Let's do some simple arithmetic:
Autism is typically diagnosed around the same time that children receive their childhood vaccinations, even in children who do not get vaccinated. Let's ignore the likely possibility that due to media reports, parents are more likely to be alert to symptoms of autism right after vaccination, and assume that children are vaccinated on a random date, and first exhibit clear symptoms of autism on a random date. If autism is unrelated to vaccination, what is the probability that a child in the US will first exhibit autistic symptoms within 72 hours (3 days) after vaccination?
3 days is 3/365 = 0.0082 year
About 4 million children are born in the US per year. Let's assume that they are all vaccinated in a single year (yes, I know children get multiple vaccinations throughout childhood but I'm being conservative)
Incidence of autism is hard to estimate as diagnostic criteria have changed and doctors are more likely today to consider a diagnosis of autism as opposed to simple mental retardation. Current estimates of incidence are around 1%, and a survey of incidence of autism in adults in Great Britain indicates this has been fairly stable for the past 70 years. But this is still somewhat controversial, so let's be very conservative and assume that only 1 child in 1000 will first exhibit clear symptoms of autism in a the same year as he or she gets a vaccination. How many children per year will, purely by chance, first exhibit clear symptoms of autism within 72 h of their vaccination?
4 million * 0.001 * 0.0082 = 33 per year
So over 10 years about 330 children would have first exhibited autistic symptoms within 72 hours after vaccination. Expand the period after vaccination to 2 weeks (I've heard people blame vaccination when their child was diagnosed a month or two after a vaccination), and that number rises to 1,524.
So even if autism has nothing to do with vaccination, plenty of parents would have children who developed autistic symptoms with 72 h of vaccination.
Which helps to explain the scientific adage: "The plural of anecdote is not data."
The very fact of a recall campaign indicates a manufacturing error that affects a limited set of products. It is undeniably the case that there have been occasional manufacturing errors that necessitated recalls of particular manufacturing runs of batteries for many different products from many different companies. That is quite different from the implication that there is some sort of general tendency of batteries for the Mac (or any other product) to fail in this particular way.
For the most part, it's not cost effective to upgrade older computers aside from maxing out the RAM. But there will always be small market for hobbyists who actually enjoy fiddling with their computers.
I've upgraded CPUs, including laptop CPUs, in the past, but I've ultimately concluded that counting the time investment of doing it, its of marginal value. And the newer models usually have other enhancements that the upgraded older models can't match. Today, I'd rather keep the older one a bit longer and put the money saved on the CPU upgrade toward a new model.
when you carry it around a lot, an extra pound adds up pretty quickly. I just bought an 11" Air because the 13" is too heavy.
With the older Macs with the removable batteries, the battery did not last that long even when new, so it didn't need to loose much capacity to render the Mac pretty much useless off the charger. Some of our older Macs have been through multiple batteries, and at $50-70 a pop, it adds up. We've had similar problems with Dell laptops. On the other hand, I've got a first-generation Air that is still going strong on its original battery. Even given the extra cost of having the battery replaced by Apple, it looks like we'll be saving money over the removable battery models.
At my work, we've had at least two dozen Mac laptops over the years. Most of the older ones have been through multiple batteries. I've never seen a single battery "swell up," or fail in any way other than simply ceasing to hold a charge for very long. Perhaps it happens, but it must be quite rare.
And don't the people who create the new frontier deserve some sort of reward for opening it up? 20 years is a pretty short time in the scheme of things. Very often, patents are close to expiration by the time they come into common use. For example, the patent on the computer mouse had already expired before it became a major feature of computer operating systems. And most of the time, there are workarounds that are nearly as good--or better. So patents prevent everybody from being "locked into" a single way of doing things without fully exploring alternatives.
If an open-source product is really all that valuable, users will be willing to pay a few bucks for a license. And there is no reason why open-source projects--if they truly innovate and do not merely piggyback on the advances of others--cannot develop their own patent and copyright portfolios to trade.
But there are plenty of examples in which the true innovators never managed to profit appreciably from their inventions. I suspect that spreadsheet programs would be much better today if Bricklin and Frankson had received royalties enabling them to pursue further development. They were also early innovators in GUI development, but they were pushed out of the market by imitators.
Frankly, I think it is a pretty insignificant thing. For the most part, it is a transient problem dating from the early days of computing and the internet, when people were still figuring out how to do things (the sort of things that now seem "obvious" in hindsight, although many of them probably weren't so obvious at the time). But most of the really fundamental or genuinely obvious ones have expired, or will do so in the near future. The nonpracticing entities ("patent trolls") don't really stop any products from reaching the public, because the trolls are not looking to block progress, and most of them don't want the expense of an actual trial, they just want a payout. So at worst, they add a buck or two to the price of a product. Big. deal. Compared to the value of providing a financial incentive for companies to innovate, that seems a very, very minor expense.
Don't tell me that there are still people around who buy the silly notion that Apple is suing Samsung just for producing touch pad with rounded corners? Apple is not suing Samsung for being similar in any one respect, but rather for a pattern of copying numerous design features of Apple's products.
So how about companies whose expertise is not in coming up with novel ideas that don't work very well, but rather in design--taking concepts that are well known and finally making them actually work well? Clearly (considering how rarely it is done) that is often harder than coming up with the original germ of an idea. And it clearly is not risk free: there are many of examples of companies that introduced original designs, but failed because they could not compete with other companies who simply copied the designs of others.
Consider the fate of Palm, for example, who came up an original OS and user interface and produced a phone that debuted to stellar reviews, but died because they could not afford to compete with manufacturers selling cheap iClones, who could sell their phones at rock-bottom prices, because they didn't have to invest in design, or do user testing, or take the market risk of introducing a new design--they could piggyback on the design ideas already market-tested by Apple. And the same seems to be on the verge of happening to Blackberry, another company that developed its own designs and charted its own way instead of just rushing clones of "the latest thing" to the market.
Ironically, it appears that the consequence of weak patent protection of Apple's designs will likely be that consumers have only two choices when it comes to smart phones: an iPhone, or an iPhone imitator. Perhaps Microsoft will offer a second alternative (although design had never really been one of their strengths). But it's kind of sad if a company has to have the deep pockets of a Microsoft to introduce an original design.
And the consequence if that patent had been granted? Web browsers would likely have been dominated by one manufacturer in the early years But they were anyway--Internet Explorer.
Or perhaps the patent holder would have agreed to license the patent, and everybody who produced a web browser would have had to pay a few bucks to that patent holder for a licensing fee, perhaps adding 5 bucks or so to the price of a computer.
And as of about 1996, when the patent expired, there would have been an explosion of web browsers from other developers. Which is pretty close to what happened anyway.
Gosh, patents are really awful.
Naive platitudes aside, free markets function well only when consumers are capable of rapidly and accurately evaluating the benefits of one purveyor's product versus another and are able to shift from one purveyor to another without large transaction costs. So childhood education is an extraordinarily poor fit to free market ideology
- The consumers (the children) do not have the power to choose their own education provider; because any such decisions are be made by their parents, who do not directly experience the product.
- The consumers do not have the ability to judge the quality of the product (because you need to be educated to know whether the education provided is good are bad.
- Consequences of poor education often become evident after a substantial delay--i.e when the child fails to get into a good college (or go to college at all) or when the child fails to enter a profession that they would be good at because their prior education did not adequately expose them to the field. By that time, it's too late to switch your primary or secondary education provider.
- There are often substantial costs to switching schools; for example, it may be necessary to move, or commuting expenses may be involved.
So just from first principles, we would expect a free market to be inadequate to guarantee to all children their right to a decent education. In practice, there is little evidence. Moreover, objective evidence does not support the hypothesis that a free market is adequate to secure an adequate science education for all children--there are private schools that teach nonsense like creationism as science.
My Senators and Representatives vote in the same Congress with all the others. Note that this is no different from decisions made at the state level; I do not get to vote for every state representative. Perhaps you are confusing "having a say" with "being absolute dictator"