How about do not track me as an individual, but here is a list provided by my browser of things of which I'm interested.
Shows that you don't have a clue what this is about. The advertisers don't care who you are. They care about _what_ you are, gathered together from little bits and pieces of information.
But what I hate is that you can't know what I am interested in from my browser. I have searched extensively for information on behalf of others. Those searches have _nothing_ to do with my interests. I bought Christmas presents. They have nothing to do with my interests. I bought several of a series of books from Amazon after buying the first ones in a shop; Amazon wouldn't forget about the ones that I didn't buy from Amazon and wouldn't give up on offering them again and again. I made the mistake of buying Justin Bieber tickets for my granddaughter and her friends. Guess what. Bloody information trackers think that I like the little gnat.
But worst is that my computer is not my computer, it is shared with my wife. If you look at my eBay purchases you will think that I am schizophrenic or very weird - in reality it is purchases from two people mixed up. I received targetted ads based on a Christmas present that she bought for me, which somehow spoilt the surprise. So fuck targeted ads.
First, nowhere on that page does Microsoft pledge not to track you.
They don't have to. Safari has privacy settings, Google was fined $22.5 million for using hacks that managed to get around those privacy settings, so the presumption is that Microsoft isn't going to do anything that will get them a similar fine. The presumption was the same for Google, but Google proved us wrong.
Now, suppose the judge orders you to give your password, but the site TOS forbids you from giving out the password? Can a judge order you to violate a TOS?
Of course the judge can order it. Whether he or she is right or wrong to do it, that's another question. You can ask your lawyer to make the judge change that order. And if it turns out that the judge was wrong, then presumably the order would be changed. What you can't do is ignore the order. Well you can, but as we've seen here, it's unwise.
A judge ordering you to delete a facebook account is not violating your free speech. He's not saying you can't say things, just not in that particular forum.
What it really comes down to: A judge can order anything. When that happens there are two reasonable and one stupid thing to do: a. Do what the judge ordered. b. Take a lawyer who will try to get rid of the order. c. Don't do what the judge ordered.
c. gets you done for "contempt of court", so that's the stupid thing to do. You do what the judge said, or you fight it legally, but ignoring it gets you into trouble.
We have established over and over that an IP address is not a valid identifier. Even if they siezed his computer and verified the message came from his computer and only his fingerprints were on it, it doesn't prove he sent the message beyond a reasonable doubt.
You have a different view of "reasonable doubt" than most people. The IP address in itself is a good starting point for the police. Unless the IP address is shared and no further evidence leads to him, there is evidence of hacking, or at least this post was totally out of character, he will easily go down.
And who decides what a "terrorist threat" is? How do we know he wasn't being sarcastic?
It doesn't matter whether he was sarcastic. He made a threat. The words he spoke or posted are what counts. Whether he had the intent to kill, whether he had some intent but would have never gone through with it, whether he just wanted to frighten or annoy people, whether he was just stupid, or sarcastic, it doesn't matter.
Yes, but there's a presumption of future crimes that seems problematic. Note the final phrase in this quote from TFA:
Not presumption, assumption. If you make threats, then it is reasonable to suspect you might follow up on those threats. On the other hand, making murder threats _is_ a crime in itself, so a crime _has_ been committed.
There are two possibilities: a. It doesn't affect you. Most likely. b. They come to your home and offer to hand over £10,000 to you. You have the choice of taking the cash or complaining about violation of wiretapping laws. What will you do?
But once the shooting starts, the only defensive patent use is where you claim you hold a patent to what they are accusing you of doing. The way to defend yourself in a patent war is you try to show the other guys patents do not apply to you or are not valid in general.
Actually, that's not a defense. Your own patent is hopefully useful as prior art, but if the Patent Office managed to issue two patents for the same invention (which should obviously not happen), we can only assume that one of them should be invalid, but you'd first have to hope that it is theirs and not yours that should be invalid, _and_ you have to find the evidence to convince a court to judge theirs to be invalid.
Proportional response has been shown over and over not to work as a deterrent. Randomly-escalated crazy response does work as a deterrent: crazy is scary.
Absolutely. Google and Motorola are just plain crazy. Thanks for telling everyone on Slashdot. BTW. I heard estimates that Google makes about $2bn from maps on iDevices. And Apple just released their own maps with iOS 6. Guess why they are doing that. Maybe that's the reason for Google's crazyness.
Bounce back scrolling? You call this an invention? Things have been bouncing for, well basically since the universe began and the laws of physics settled down (I'm sure even they were a little different at the beginning), people have been adding bouncyness to things for donkeys years, I'm glad someone added some of this bouncyness to my car, or driving would be horrible.
You either misunderstand or misrepresent what Apple has patented there. They haven't patented a method to bounce a display. They patented a method to give feedback when a scrolling operation reaches the end in a way that doesn't obstruct the display and is obvious for the user to understand. Samsung is free to bounce whatever they want on their phones and tablets, as long as it isn't for giving feedback to the user that they scrolled to the end of the scroll area.
The patent tries to turn something obvious into something non-obvious by starting with a flawed implementation and then trying to remove the flaw. Here's their obviously flawed approach: Various devices connect to a communication server. Each device gives the communication server the user identification of the user currently using the device. When the user starts using a different device, the first device must be disconnected and then the second device must be connected to the communication server. And doing that is apparently worth a patent.
However, it is obvious that it's not a device connecting to the communication server, but a user. And the user just temporarily uses some device, and tells the communication server which device that is, but can obviously at any point in time tell the communication server that they are now using a different device. Totally obvious.
I guess that's one of the risks if your company chooses to focus on creating and pushing absolutely identical clones of one product, instead of providing a range of devices with different options and hardware from competing manufacturers...it's an all the eggs = one basket kinda t'ing. If your device violates a patent...all your devices are likely to violate the same patent in the same way.
I don't understand your argument. Samsung has lots of products, not just absolutely identical clones of the iPhone and iPad.
Your quoting web traffic as a metric for sales!? Do you really think that is sensible...as opposed to quoting sales! as sales. The fact that you are trying to display the illusion that Shops are buying and Android tablets to occupy expensive shelf, and stock space, shows an astonishing lack of insight into how basic retail works.
It is actual quite sensible to look at web traffic. Of the non-iPad tablets, a huge number are mostly used as eBook readers (Nook and Kindle). And while they reduce the iPad's "tablet market share", they are not really competing with the iPad. The 10% web traffic that wasn't on iPads however comes from real competitors.
Try 10 year old PCs. I have a Core 2 Quad here that's pretty much 5 years old and is still 5x faster than any phone in the geekbench data. Linpack is 1000x slower on any ARM than it is on a current x86 too.
Jack Dongarra published a paper how he got about 800 MFlops out of an iPad 2, using only one core, and estimates that about 1.5 GFlops should be possible. The iPhone 5 chip should run a lot faster. And no current x86 does 1500 GFlops.
Computer science is, practically by definition, a subset of math. But there are many branches of mathematics out there, and being great at one doesn't necessarily mean a person is great at all of them.
Many years ago, someone found a proof for the "Four Colour Theorem" that was assumed to be correct for many years and then refuted. For an experienced programmer, it would have been obvious that the proof couldn't be trusted, and for a slightly clever experienced programmer, it would have been not difficult to demonstrate that the proof was wrong. Unfortunately, there were no experienced programmers in the 19th century, so the proof stood for a few years.
it's so obvious it's been used already - in a more sophisticated form too, Nokia has had "turn over on table" silence for ages - turning it into a whack isn't really that much of a thing.
Consider the possibility that Nokia has this patented. And elsewhere mentioned was silencing by shaking, which may also be patented. Which both are obviously not the same as whacking, and in that case it would be quite reasonble to patent a method that works around other patented methods.
goes only to show how broken the Patent system is.
Not really. I think it shows that some things are obvious _after_ someone shows them. Is any phone implementing it already? If it's as obvious as you think, why not?
Perhaps instead, it could be that there's an inherent bias in being on slashdot, and that apple's case had merit, while samsung's didn't?
I think slashdot is so overrun by Google fans and Android fans that the exact opposite seems to be the case. There are lots of cases recently where people have been basly insulted for nothing but the crime of uttering an opinion favoring Apple.
This is brilliant! Just accuse them of a GPL violation and they'll be forced to prove their source code is different by revealing it.
Nobody can force you to release any source code, GPL or not. However, copying source code against GPL rules when the GPL license is the only thing that gives you permission, is plain old copyright infringement. And since this company just badly upset the copyright holder, they will have to pay for this.
I don't believe that is true. You can violate a patent by making an infringing product, but can you really violate a patent by using a device someone else made and which you bought?
If you couldn't, then you could get around any patent by setting up a company that creates the infringing product, sells it to you, and goes bankrupt. But as an end user, you may not actually be infringing. For example, a customer wouldn't be infringing on Amazon's one-click patent.
Coding it is not the problem. Figuring out that you _want_ the page to bounce that way, without anyone showing it to you, that is the invention.
And I think you are thinking about the wrong invention. The invention is not an implementation of "bouncing after you hit the bottom". The invention is an implementation of "giving the user some very intuitive and obvious feedback after they hit the bottom, so they know what's going on". You are free to create your own implementation of "giving the user some very intuitive and obvious feedback after they hit the bottom, so they know what's going on".
Slashdot Mirror
How about do not track me as an individual, but here is a list provided by my browser of things of which I'm interested.
Shows that you don't have a clue what this is about. The advertisers don't care who you are. They care about _what_ you are, gathered together from little bits and pieces of information.
But what I hate is that you can't know what I am interested in from my browser. I have searched extensively for information on behalf of others. Those searches have _nothing_ to do with my interests. I bought Christmas presents. They have nothing to do with my interests. I bought several of a series of books from Amazon after buying the first ones in a shop; Amazon wouldn't forget about the ones that I didn't buy from Amazon and wouldn't give up on offering them again and again. I made the mistake of buying Justin Bieber tickets for my granddaughter and her friends. Guess what. Bloody information trackers think that I like the little gnat.
But worst is that my computer is not my computer, it is shared with my wife. If you look at my eBay purchases you will think that I am schizophrenic or very weird - in reality it is purchases from two people mixed up. I received targetted ads based on a Christmas present that she bought for me, which somehow spoilt the surprise. So fuck targeted ads.
First, nowhere on that page does Microsoft pledge not to track you.
They don't have to. Safari has privacy settings, Google was fined $22.5 million for using hacks that managed to get around those privacy settings, so the presumption is that Microsoft isn't going to do anything that will get them a similar fine. The presumption was the same for Google, but Google proved us wrong.
Now, suppose the judge orders you to give your password, but the site TOS forbids you from giving out the password? Can a judge order you to violate a TOS?
Of course the judge can order it. Whether he or she is right or wrong to do it, that's another question. You can ask your lawyer to make the judge change that order. And if it turns out that the judge was wrong, then presumably the order would be changed. What you can't do is ignore the order. Well you can, but as we've seen here, it's unwise.
A judge ordering you to delete a facebook account is not violating your free speech. He's not saying you can't say things, just not in that particular forum.
What it really comes down to: A judge can order anything. When that happens there are two reasonable and one stupid thing to do: a. Do what the judge ordered. b. Take a lawyer who will try to get rid of the order. c. Don't do what the judge ordered.
c. gets you done for "contempt of court", so that's the stupid thing to do. You do what the judge said, or you fight it legally, but ignoring it gets you into trouble.
We have established over and over that an IP address is not a valid identifier. Even if they siezed his computer and verified the message came from his computer and only his fingerprints were on it, it doesn't prove he sent the message beyond a reasonable doubt.
You have a different view of "reasonable doubt" than most people. The IP address in itself is a good starting point for the police. Unless the IP address is shared and no further evidence leads to him, there is evidence of hacking, or at least this post was totally out of character, he will easily go down.
And who decides what a "terrorist threat" is? How do we know he wasn't being sarcastic?
It doesn't matter whether he was sarcastic. He made a threat. The words he spoke or posted are what counts. Whether he had the intent to kill, whether he had some intent but would have never gone through with it, whether he just wanted to frighten or annoy people, whether he was just stupid, or sarcastic, it doesn't matter.
Yes, but there's a presumption of future crimes that seems problematic. Note the final phrase in this quote from TFA:
Not presumption, assumption. If you make threats, then it is reasonable to suspect you might follow up on those threats. On the other hand, making murder threats _is_ a crime in itself, so a crime _has_ been committed.
Probably violates wiretapping laws.
There are two possibilities: a. It doesn't affect you. Most likely. b. They come to your home and offer to hand over £10,000 to you. You have the choice of taking the cash or complaining about violation of wiretapping laws. What will you do?
But once the shooting starts, the only defensive patent use is where you claim you hold a patent to what they are accusing you of doing. The way to defend yourself in a patent war is you try to show the other guys patents do not apply to you or are not valid in general.
Actually, that's not a defense. Your own patent is hopefully useful as prior art, but if the Patent Office managed to issue two patents for the same invention (which should obviously not happen), we can only assume that one of them should be invalid, but you'd first have to hope that it is theirs and not yours that should be invalid, _and_ you have to find the evidence to convince a court to judge theirs to be invalid.
I think that's a beautiful argument and I can't wait to see how the court weasels out of the proposed dilemma.
Quite simple: "If Apple wasn't in the market, nobody would have the slightest clue who to copy, which would be absolutely damaging for all consumers".
Proportional response has been shown over and over not to work as a deterrent. Randomly-escalated crazy response does work as a deterrent: crazy is scary.
Absolutely. Google and Motorola are just plain crazy. Thanks for telling everyone on Slashdot. BTW. I heard estimates that Google makes about $2bn from maps on iDevices. And Apple just released their own maps with iOS 6. Guess why they are doing that. Maybe that's the reason for Google's crazyness.
Bounce back scrolling? You call this an invention? Things have been bouncing for, well basically since the universe began and the laws of physics settled down (I'm sure even they were a little different at the beginning), people have been adding bouncyness to things for donkeys years, I'm glad someone added some of this bouncyness to my car, or driving would be horrible.
You either misunderstand or misrepresent what Apple has patented there. They haven't patented a method to bounce a display. They patented a method to give feedback when a scrolling operation reaches the end in a way that doesn't obstruct the display and is obvious for the user to understand. Samsung is free to bounce whatever they want on their phones and tablets, as long as it isn't for giving feedback to the user that they scrolled to the end of the scroll area.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal. We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas" - Steve Jobs.
Actually, Pablo Picasso. Now think about this quote again.
The patent tries to turn something obvious into something non-obvious by starting with a flawed implementation and then trying to remove the flaw. Here's their obviously flawed approach: Various devices connect to a communication server. Each device gives the communication server the user identification of the user currently using the device. When the user starts using a different device, the first device must be disconnected and then the second device must be connected to the communication server. And doing that is apparently worth a patent.
However, it is obvious that it's not a device connecting to the communication server, but a user. And the user just temporarily uses some device, and tells the communication server which device that is, but can obviously at any point in time tell the communication server that they are now using a different device. Totally obvious.
I guess that's one of the risks if your company chooses to focus on creating and pushing absolutely identical clones of one product, instead of providing a range of devices with different options and hardware from competing manufacturers...it's an all the eggs = one basket kinda t'ing. If your device violates a patent...all your devices are likely to violate the same patent in the same way.
I don't understand your argument. Samsung has lots of products, not just absolutely identical clones of the iPhone and iPad.
Your quoting web traffic as a metric for sales!? Do you really think that is sensible...as opposed to quoting sales! as sales. The fact that you are trying to display the illusion that Shops are buying and Android tablets to occupy expensive shelf, and stock space, shows an astonishing lack of insight into how basic retail works.
It is actual quite sensible to look at web traffic. Of the non-iPad tablets, a huge number are mostly used as eBook readers (Nook and Kindle). And while they reduce the iPad's "tablet market share", they are not really competing with the iPad. The 10% web traffic that wasn't on iPads however comes from real competitors.
who has been publishing the Top 500 Supercomputer list for many, many years. I would bet that he ran Linpack himself on the Cray-2.
Try 10 year old PCs. I have a Core 2 Quad here that's pretty much 5 years old and is still 5x faster than any phone in the geekbench data. Linpack is 1000x slower on any ARM than it is on a current x86 too.
Jack Dongarra published a paper how he got about 800 MFlops out of an iPad 2, using only one core, and estimates that about 1.5 GFlops should be possible. The iPhone 5 chip should run a lot faster. And no current x86 does 1500 GFlops.
Computer science is, practically by definition, a subset of math. But there are many branches of mathematics out there, and being great at one doesn't necessarily mean a person is great at all of them.
Many years ago, someone found a proof for the "Four Colour Theorem" that was assumed to be correct for many years and then refuted. For an experienced programmer, it would have been obvious that the proof couldn't be trusted, and for a slightly clever experienced programmer, it would have been not difficult to demonstrate that the proof was wrong. Unfortunately, there were no experienced programmers in the 19th century, so the proof stood for a few years.
it's so obvious it's been used already - in a more sophisticated form too, Nokia has had "turn over on table" silence for ages - turning it into a whack isn't really that much of a thing.
Consider the possibility that Nokia has this patented. And elsewhere mentioned was silencing by shaking, which may also be patented. Which both are obviously not the same as whacking, and in that case it would be quite reasonble to patent a method that works around other patented methods.
goes only to show how broken the Patent system is.
Not really. I think it shows that some things are obvious _after_ someone shows them. Is any phone implementing it already? If it's as obvious as you think, why not?
Perhaps instead, it could be that there's an inherent bias in being on slashdot, and that apple's case had merit, while samsung's didn't?
I think slashdot is so overrun by Google fans and Android fans that the exact opposite seems to be the case. There are lots of cases recently where people have been basly insulted for nothing but the crime of uttering an opinion favoring Apple.
This is brilliant! Just accuse them of a GPL violation and they'll be forced to prove their source code is different by revealing it.
Nobody can force you to release any source code, GPL or not. However, copying source code against GPL rules when the GPL license is the only thing that gives you permission, is plain old copyright infringement. And since this company just badly upset the copyright holder, they will have to pay for this.
I don't believe that is true. You can violate a patent by making an infringing product, but can you really violate a patent by using a device someone else made and which you bought?
If you couldn't, then you could get around any patent by setting up a company that creates the infringing product, sells it to you, and goes bankrupt. But as an end user, you may not actually be infringing. For example, a customer wouldn't be infringing on Amazon's one-click patent.
Coding it is not the problem. Figuring out that you _want_ the page to bounce that way, without anyone showing it to you, that is the invention.
And I think you are thinking about the wrong invention. The invention is not an implementation of "bouncing after you hit the bottom". The invention is an implementation of "giving the user some very intuitive and obvious feedback after they hit the bottom, so they know what's going on". You are free to create your own implementation of "giving the user some very intuitive and obvious feedback after they hit the bottom, so they know what's going on".