The thing that you seem to forget is that the 'obvious' test is applied BEFORE the patent is made public, not after. EVERYTHING is obvious once someone has done it.
The point of the patent system is to allow inventors time to recuperate their investment costs and earn a profit from their invention. It is supposed to protect inventors from more moneyed interests stealing their idea and using the advantage of existing production and distribution infrastructures to out-compete the inventor without any research expenditures because such an outcome would discourage invention. If the patent system only protects the interest of the rich, then it fails at the core goal of acting as an inducement for invention.
Instead it just acts as an additional barrier to entry protecting established actors and has the opposite effect of the intended goal. Established actors don't have as much of an incentive to invest in the production of innovations that could disturb their market position. Some obvious examples would be Kodak and Microsoft.
If you look at the first two sentences, that is exactly what has happened in Apple vs. Samsung. Well, Samsung is not "more moneyed", but they have plenty of money, and they certainly were using the advantage of existing production and distribution infrastructures, and they didn't have research expenditures. You are surely right that the patent system shouldn't _only_ protect the rich, but surely it shouldn't _not_ protect Apple because they have money.
I would suggest a legislation change - any car that drives around with your license plate should be declared legally yours. Imagine getting a letter from the police: "Dear Mr. xxxx, we just found a car with your license plate. If you hand over the cash for three speeding tickets and six parking tickets we'll hand over the car to you".
and if people were more attentive and better skilled drivers, that whole curve is shifted downward radically. Inattentiveness (lack of situational awareness) has a far better correlation with accidents than speed.
Sure. You should go on a training course then that teaches you safer driving.
On the other hand, people make mistakes, inevitably, and a driving style that doesn't cause mistakes to turn into accidents prevents accidents. Like not driving much faster (or much slower) than others, no abrupt lane changes, no abrupt acceleration or braking when not needed, not going straight to the fast lane when you join a motorway, leaving plenty of distance to the car in front of you, a non-aggressive driving style that doesn't try to put pressure on others.
If you measure speed at only one point, people find out where the cameras are and exceed the limit between cameras then slow down dramatically as they are about to pass the speed trap. That's both dangerous and it wrecks the smooth flow of traffic.
I can tell you that these f***ing retards looking for traffic cameras wreck things. When you leave London eastwards on the A13, you will regularly find these braind ead morons who go totally bonkers behind you when you don't go enough above the speed limit for their taste, and then they pass you, notice the next speeding camera, slam the brakes and force you to brake as well, slowing down well below the speed limit.
On one fine day a managed to drive behind a police car, exactly at the speed limit just as the police car did, noticed one idiot approaching behind me much too fast, lights flashing, indicator out, and I moved into the other lane just as he reached me. He didn't _quite_ crash into the police car, but they stopped him:-)
Actually, it's already a criminal offence to run some programs (DRM crackers etc.).
I'm quite sure it is also a criminal offence in many jurisdictions to use a word processor that you purchased completely legally, to write the planning for a murder, a kidnapping, a bank robbery and so on.
Couldn't Apple have payed their wage slaves better so they wouldn't want to risk their jobs by thieving?
Psychology works against you. Most criminals are notoriously bad at evaluating the consequences of their actions, so the risk of losing their jobs doesn't come into it. The other problem is that the more you give a person, the more they will think that they deserve to get. If paying more would help, then there would be no dishonest CEO anywhere in the world.
Also, Apple has very invasive hiring practices with the excuse to stop bad Apples. Doesn't work at all it seems, so why the invasive hiring practices?
Where do you get this information about "invasive hiring practices" from?
That assumes a person with some technical grasp would actually want an Apple product.
In my area (well paid software developers), the majority uses Macs as their private computers, with a huge number of iPhones, and a good number of iPads. I think there is a certain level of expertise where being able to overcome technical difficulties is a source of pride, but at a certain higher level you choose products where there is no need to overcome these difficulties.
I am assuming that the application cannot access the file system unless a file is within the applications sandbox, or opened through the operating systems open file API.
That includes dragging a file or a folder to the app, and keeping bookmarks of files that can be opened. What doesn't work is letting the user type in a path, which is not a good user interface anyway.
Unfortunately, Musopen provided the content in Apple lossless format instead of a widely used, open, non-patent-encumbered format such as FLAC.
Fortunately, Musopen provided the content in Apple lossless format, which is usable without installing any additional software on most computers, and which also plays without any effort of the user on the majority of portable music players.
http://www.blockmrecords.org/bach/
Played by James Kibbie, and as a quote from the website: "This project is sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, with generous support from Dr. Barbara Furin Sloat in honor of J. Barry Sloat, and with additional support from the Office of Vice-President for Research, the University of Michigan."
On the other hand unmarked police cars have been able to follow your car wherever it goes without a warrant, and that was not considered a privacy violation.
Without a warrant, but not without a police-related reason.
In the UK, there was a court case that explained that very well: A police officer claimed to be injured and collected pay without working, but his employer (the police) didn't quite believe him, so they watched his home to see if he was as badly injured as he claimed. He wasn't, it ended up in court, and there was the question whether the police was allowed to do what they did.
Result: While your employer is allowed to check whether you leave your home when you claim you are too sick to work, the police isn't. They have powers/rights that normal people and companies don't have, and with those rights come obligations, so they can't just watch you. However, in this case the police was actually the employer, and as an employer, they can do what other employers can do.
They wouldn't put any diplomats at risk, because they wouldn't be storming any embassy.
The UK can revoke the diplomatic status of an embassy on UK soil. So they could tell Ecuador "you don't have an embassy in the UK anymore". That is a process that takes some time, and Ecuador can safely bring all diplomats back home into their own country. When that is done, the building that formerly contained the Eucadorian embassy would then be an ordinary building, which UK police could enter.
And yes, any country with a UK embassy can tell the UK at any time to close down their embassy and leave.
If Samsung can find all these examples of prior art, how is it that Apple was granted patents in the first place? These are hardly the only examples of Apple being given patents on things that were obviously done by others well before they "innovated" them.
"Prior art" is, by definition, anything that existed before someone applied for a patent. Prior art in itself doesn't invalidate anything, it has to be _published_ prior art. Something that was hidden away does _not_ invalidate a patent.
That out of the way, prior art must also make the patented invention obvious. That is not at all clear. Samsung can of course find prior art, but they have to prove that this prior art actually makes anything that followed later obvious. And the answer to that question is frankly not obvious.
Most patents include in the patent application a long list of prior art. The patent applicant includes this list to demonstrate that they looked for previous inventions, and that their own invention is in some way different and novel.
A minor part is that just because Samsung finds someone who _claims_ prior art, doesn't mean there _is_ prior art. For Fiedler, for example, I heard that he showed _something_ to Apple, but that what he claims to be prior art was not created, and not published, before Apple applied for its patents. Similar, just because a Samsung designer _claims_ that she never saw any of the iPhone icons, doesn't mean her signature isn't on a Samsung document describing the iPhone UI, including icons.
As an example, if both me, my wife and my son denies any knowledge of copyright infringement, how will they get a search warrant ? Whose computer will they search ? Can they get permission to search two innocent peoples computer just because those computers sometimes are at the address in question ? How about my sons friends computers who are used on our WLAN ? How about hackers ?
Of course you can get search warrants against innocent people. As long as there is enough likelihood, before the search, that these people might be guilty. Then you do a search, find nothing, and conclude that the suspicion was likely wrong. Remember: Innocent until proven guilty. Which means you can actually _only_ get search warrants against people who are considered innocent.
We want system A to get data from system B and do the same calculations so a report from A matches B 100%. We also want to be able to change the data in system A after it comes from B... but the reports still need to match 100%.
Not impossible, actually easy. You import both the data and the report from B into A. Then they can change the data any way they like, you always use the report from B.
Which is why Siri and Google both are epic failures on their voice control. If I ask for something verbally and the phone returns something to display, that is a complete EPIC fail.
I thought all you had to do was use a little social engineering and you can do what you want with the data./ducks
That's not understanding the difference between DoS and security breach. It was possible (probably harder now) to convince Apple to let you remotely wipe an iPhone. That's bloody inconvenient for the rightful owner, but not a security breach.
How is "code like a porn star" anything but sexist?
That particular one is just incredible stupid, and whoever utters this on a stage should be removed immediately for proven idiocy. A porn star does things to tittilate viewers, not to achieve an actual goal. A porn star does things they know are damaging them and their ability to do what they are showing in the long term for money. So "coding like a porn star" would be about the most stupid thing a coder could do.
Samsung didn't copy Apple. Anyone with half a brain can tell the difference between Apple's products and Samsung's products.
Which, if true, is totally irrelevant. The question is whether everybody can distinguish between an iPad and a Galaxy Tab. Including people who don't know who makes which tablet. Including people who believe that "iPad" is a generic name, and that various companies could make iPads under various different names.
There is also the question whether people go just by looks and decide "this tablet looks almost like an iPad, so surely it must work almost as well as an iPad". Or whether people go just by looks and say "this looks almost like an iPad, so it is good enough for me".
Yup, that's right kids, basing purchasing decisions in part on corporate ethics is "douchebaggish". Just keep consuming mindlessly and it'll all turn out for the best!
"Douchebaggish" like copying instead of developing your own stuff. As proven by a 140 page Samsung document pointing out what needs to be changed on a Samsung phone because the iPhone does it better.
Well, if they are sugar pills, a sufficient quantity might kill a diabetic.
Well, no. Except in the sense that a sufficient quantity of anything will kill just about anybody. I think seven litres of water or so is lethal to a normal healthy person.
Eating sugar will increase your blood sugar level, and for a diabetic, it will stay high. That doesn't kill you. It will do a tiny bit of damage to your health which over a long time will kill you, but not in the short term. So if one pill has 100 mg of sugar, then 2000 pills a day over the next 20 years might kill you, but not any amount that you could convince someone to swallow.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that you seem to forget is that the 'obvious' test is applied BEFORE the patent is made public, not after. EVERYTHING is obvious once someone has done it.
I still can't figure out how a zipper works :-)
The point of the patent system is to allow inventors time to recuperate their investment costs and earn a profit from their invention. It is supposed to protect inventors from more moneyed interests stealing their idea and using the advantage of existing production and distribution infrastructures to out-compete the inventor without any research expenditures because such an outcome would discourage invention. If the patent system only protects the interest of the rich, then it fails at the core goal of acting as an inducement for invention.
Instead it just acts as an additional barrier to entry protecting established actors and has the opposite effect of the intended goal. Established actors don't have as much of an incentive to invest in the production of innovations that could disturb their market position. Some obvious examples would be Kodak and Microsoft.
If you look at the first two sentences, that is exactly what has happened in Apple vs. Samsung. Well, Samsung is not "more moneyed", but they have plenty of money, and they certainly were using the advantage of existing production and distribution infrastructures, and they didn't have research expenditures. You are surely right that the patent system shouldn't _only_ protect the rich, but surely it shouldn't _not_ protect Apple because they have money.
I would suggest a legislation change - any car that drives around with your license plate should be declared legally yours. Imagine getting a letter from the police: "Dear Mr. xxxx, we just found a car with your license plate. If you hand over the cash for three speeding tickets and six parking tickets we'll hand over the car to you".
and if people were more attentive and better skilled drivers, that whole curve is shifted downward radically. Inattentiveness (lack of situational awareness) has a far better correlation with accidents than speed.
Sure. You should go on a training course then that teaches you safer driving.
On the other hand, people make mistakes, inevitably, and a driving style that doesn't cause mistakes to turn into accidents prevents accidents. Like not driving much faster (or much slower) than others, no abrupt lane changes, no abrupt acceleration or braking when not needed, not going straight to the fast lane when you join a motorway, leaving plenty of distance to the car in front of you, a non-aggressive driving style that doesn't try to put pressure on others.
If you measure speed at only one point, people find out where the cameras are and exceed the limit between cameras then slow down dramatically as they are about to pass the speed trap. That's both dangerous and it wrecks the smooth flow of traffic.
I can tell you that these f***ing retards looking for traffic cameras wreck things. When you leave London eastwards on the A13, you will regularly find these braind ead morons who go totally bonkers behind you when you don't go enough above the speed limit for their taste, and then they pass you, notice the next speeding camera, slam the brakes and force you to brake as well, slowing down well below the speed limit.
:-)
On one fine day a managed to drive behind a police car, exactly at the speed limit just as the police car did, noticed one idiot approaching behind me much too fast, lights flashing, indicator out, and I moved into the other lane just as he reached me. He didn't _quite_ crash into the police car, but they stopped him
Actually, it's already a criminal offence to run some programs (DRM crackers etc.).
I'm quite sure it is also a criminal offence in many jurisdictions to use a word processor that you purchased completely legally, to write the planning for a murder, a kidnapping, a bank robbery and so on.
Couldn't Apple have payed their wage slaves better so they wouldn't want to risk their jobs by thieving?
Psychology works against you. Most criminals are notoriously bad at evaluating the consequences of their actions, so the risk of losing their jobs doesn't come into it. The other problem is that the more you give a person, the more they will think that they deserve to get. If paying more would help, then there would be no dishonest CEO anywhere in the world.
Also, Apple has very invasive hiring practices with the excuse to stop bad Apples. Doesn't work at all it seems, so why the invasive hiring practices?
Where do you get this information about "invasive hiring practices" from?
That assumes a person with some technical grasp would actually want an Apple product.
In my area (well paid software developers), the majority uses Macs as their private computers, with a huge number of iPhones, and a good number of iPads. I think there is a certain level of expertise where being able to overcome technical difficulties is a source of pride, but at a certain higher level you choose products where there is no need to overcome these difficulties.
I am assuming that the application cannot access the file system unless a file is within the applications sandbox, or opened through the operating systems open file API.
That includes dragging a file or a folder to the app, and keeping bookmarks of files that can be opened. What doesn't work is letting the user type in a path, which is not a good user interface anyway.
Unfortunately, Musopen provided the content in Apple lossless format instead of a widely used, open, non-patent-encumbered format such as FLAC.
Fortunately, Musopen provided the content in Apple lossless format, which is usable without installing any additional software on most computers, and which also plays without any effort of the user on the majority of portable music players.
Just saying: This is the complete organ works, not the complete works.
http://www.blockmrecords.org/bach/ Played by James Kibbie, and as a quote from the website: "This project is sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, with generous support from Dr. Barbara Furin Sloat in honor of J. Barry Sloat, and with additional support from the Office of Vice-President for Research, the University of Michigan."
On the other hand unmarked police cars have been able to follow your car wherever it goes without a warrant, and that was not considered a privacy violation.
Without a warrant, but not without a police-related reason.
In the UK, there was a court case that explained that very well: A police officer claimed to be injured and collected pay without working, but his employer (the police) didn't quite believe him, so they watched his home to see if he was as badly injured as he claimed. He wasn't, it ended up in court, and there was the question whether the police was allowed to do what they did.
Result: While your employer is allowed to check whether you leave your home when you claim you are too sick to work, the police isn't. They have powers/rights that normal people and companies don't have, and with those rights come obligations, so they can't just watch you. However, in this case the police was actually the employer, and as an employer, they can do what other employers can do.
They wouldn't put any diplomats at risk, because they wouldn't be storming any embassy.
The UK can revoke the diplomatic status of an embassy on UK soil. So they could tell Ecuador "you don't have an embassy in the UK anymore". That is a process that takes some time, and Ecuador can safely bring all diplomats back home into their own country. When that is done, the building that formerly contained the Eucadorian embassy would then be an ordinary building, which UK police could enter.
And yes, any country with a UK embassy can tell the UK at any time to close down their embassy and leave.
If Samsung can find all these examples of prior art, how is it that Apple was granted patents in the first place? These are hardly the only examples of Apple being given patents on things that were obviously done by others well before they "innovated" them.
"Prior art" is, by definition, anything that existed before someone applied for a patent. Prior art in itself doesn't invalidate anything, it has to be _published_ prior art. Something that was hidden away does _not_ invalidate a patent.
That out of the way, prior art must also make the patented invention obvious. That is not at all clear. Samsung can of course find prior art, but they have to prove that this prior art actually makes anything that followed later obvious. And the answer to that question is frankly not obvious.
Most patents include in the patent application a long list of prior art. The patent applicant includes this list to demonstrate that they looked for previous inventions, and that their own invention is in some way different and novel.
A minor part is that just because Samsung finds someone who _claims_ prior art, doesn't mean there _is_ prior art. For Fiedler, for example, I heard that he showed _something_ to Apple, but that what he claims to be prior art was not created, and not published, before Apple applied for its patents. Similar, just because a Samsung designer _claims_ that she never saw any of the iPhone icons, doesn't mean her signature isn't on a Samsung document describing the iPhone UI, including icons.
As an example, if both me, my wife and my son denies any knowledge of copyright infringement, how will they get a search warrant ? Whose computer will they search ? Can they get permission to search two innocent peoples computer just because those computers sometimes are at the address in question ? How about my sons friends computers who are used on our WLAN ? How about hackers ?
Of course you can get search warrants against innocent people. As long as there is enough likelihood, before the search, that these people might be guilty. Then you do a search, find nothing, and conclude that the suspicion was likely wrong. Remember: Innocent until proven guilty. Which means you can actually _only_ get search warrants against people who are considered innocent.
We want system A to get data from system B and do the same calculations so a report from A matches B 100%. We also want to be able to change the data in system A after it comes from B... but the reports still need to match 100%.
Not impossible, actually easy. You import both the data and the report from B into A. Then they can change the data any way they like, you always use the report from B.
Which is why Siri and Google both are epic failures on their voice control. If I ask for something verbally and the phone returns something to display, that is a complete EPIC fail.
Google for "Siri Eyes Free".
I thought all you had to do was use a little social engineering and you can do what you want with the data. /ducks
That's not understanding the difference between DoS and security breach. It was possible (probably harder now) to convince Apple to let you remotely wipe an iPhone. That's bloody inconvenient for the rightful owner, but not a security breach.
How is "code like a porn star" anything but sexist?
That particular one is just incredible stupid, and whoever utters this on a stage should be removed immediately for proven idiocy. A porn star does things to tittilate viewers, not to achieve an actual goal. A porn star does things they know are damaging them and their ability to do what they are showing in the long term for money. So "coding like a porn star" would be about the most stupid thing a coder could do.
Samsung didn't copy Apple. Anyone with half a brain can tell the difference between Apple's products and Samsung's products.
Which, if true, is totally irrelevant. The question is whether everybody can distinguish between an iPad and a Galaxy Tab. Including people who don't know who makes which tablet. Including people who believe that "iPad" is a generic name, and that various companies could make iPads under various different names.
There is also the question whether people go just by looks and decide "this tablet looks almost like an iPad, so surely it must work almost as well as an iPad". Or whether people go just by looks and say "this looks almost like an iPad, so it is good enough for me".
Seen the latest Apple notification systems? Look familiar?
Apple had notificications in MacOS 9, ca. 1999.
Yup, that's right kids, basing purchasing decisions in part on corporate ethics is "douchebaggish". Just keep consuming mindlessly and it'll all turn out for the best!
"Douchebaggish" like copying instead of developing your own stuff. As proven by a 140 page Samsung document pointing out what needs to be changed on a Samsung phone because the iPhone does it better.
Well, if they are sugar pills, a sufficient quantity might kill a diabetic.
Well, no. Except in the sense that a sufficient quantity of anything will kill just about anybody. I think seven litres of water or so is lethal to a normal healthy person.
Eating sugar will increase your blood sugar level, and for a diabetic, it will stay high. That doesn't kill you. It will do a tiny bit of damage to your health which over a long time will kill you, but not in the short term. So if one pill has 100 mg of sugar, then 2000 pills a day over the next 20 years might kill you, but not any amount that you could convince someone to swallow.
I think there is actually scientific evidence now that _thinking_ a celltower is switched on _does_ indeed affect some people's health negatively.
i think the logical conclusion is that we should put signs on all cell phone masts "permanently turned off to avoid negative health effects".