That's my point. By placing the DMCA above all other relevant laws, Atari v. Activision would be ruled differently. I don't like this new precedent and what it bodes for the future.
That's rather ignorant of what DMCA is about. The DMCA is about using technical measures to prevent someone from copying _your_ software and someone getting around this. If you install software made by Activision on a computer made by Atari, then only Activision could potentially complain about a DMCA violation, and only if Activision used technical measures to prevent the copying. Atari wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Same happened with Lexmark against ink cartridge manufacturers, where Lexmark was told that they hadn't quite understood the DMCA.
In this case, if Apple prevents you from copying Apple's software, that's protected by the DMCA. If Apple tried to prevent you from copying someone else's software (by installing it on a Mac, for example), that wouldn't be covered by the DMCA.
This gets me that first sale doctrine doesn't matter. The DMCA (which is overkill and bad legislation) takes precedence. The Psystar case reminds me of the Atari ruling, when Atari didn't want to allow third-party developers to make games for their console. Imagine if there were no third-party developers today. If Psystar legally purchased OSX software licenses, why shouldn't they be able to legally resell them with hardware? We have judges protecting a monopoly and frankly I don't understand it.
They are perfectly allowed to sell hardware together with a box with MacOS X. First sale doctrine allows that. However, the buyer is not allowed to install the software on the computer. And Psystar isn't allowed to install the software on the computer. The buyer _is_ of course allowed to install the software on an Apple branded computer.
Actually, if you buy MacOS X and install it on a Macintosh, the first sale doctrine doesn't allow you to sell the Macintosh with that copy of MacOS X installed. (However, Apple's SLA for MacOS X gives you that right).
What did they "take" from Apple? They paid full retail for the copies of OS X that they installed on the machines they sold. They took from Apple in roughly the same way that Ford "takes" from GM when someone buys a Focus instead of an Impala.
Apple has this special offer "buy a Macintosh, get an operating system upgrade at a hugely reduced price". Like many companies making offers "get this item worth $200 for $10 if you buy this other item for $1000". If you pick up ten of those "$10" items in a shop and leave $100 on the counter, they will charge you with theft.
Apple's problems wasn't that they were doing it; it's that they were selling it.
Not so much that they were selling it, but the fact that they insisted very, very loudly that they had the right to do so, and that Apple could do nothing about it. Apple really had no choice but to sue them. In the Hackintosh community, they all know that what they are doing isn't quite legal, but they also know that Apple will ignore this (since little damage is done, and there is probably a knowledgable bunch of people who will be assisting Apple's customers with problems when the need arises. I bet many Hackintosh users take their Grandma straight to the Apple Store when she needs a computer). The only thing they need to do is behave in such a way that Apple _can_ ignore them.
Remember when Atari tried blocking third-party software from their hardware and a judge ruled that they must allow for third-party use of their hardware?
This is all about copyright. Copyright allows the owner of the copyright to allow or disallow copying of their software, as they see fit. Note: Copying of _their_ software. That is what Apple does. They allow you to use _their_ software, MacOS X, on Apple branded computers, and not on other computers. I don't know about that Atari case, but what you say means Atari tried to prevent you from using someone else's software. Not _their_ software.
If Apple told you that you cannot run Windows, or Linux, on a Macintosh, that would be a completely different matter. But anyway, you ask this question, _after_ a court decided that Apple has that right, and another court decided, and SCOTUS denied an appeal about it?
You are completely misinterpreting this. Your comment about airports, cafes etc.: This ruling helps the owner of the open router; it doesn't affect the user of that open router (who would likely not be caught anyway), so there it doesn't make any difference. Your comment about home use: "Plausible deniability" isn't going to help you, it's "preponderance of evidence" that is against you. In this case, there wasn't just "Plausible deniability", there was about hundred people present at exactly the time when the copyright infringement happened, which was usually not the case. Had the copyright infringement happened at a different time, especially if it had happened at two different times, then it would have been quite possible that she got convicted. Just because it is _possible_ that someone uses your open WiFi, that doesn't make it likely.
In case of a corporation, they are usually responsible for what their employees are doing, so if there is evidence that an unknown employee of company X has caused damage in his role as an employee, then it is quite possible that company X has to pay for the damage. It is then up to them to find that employee and try to recover the money, or fire him or her, if they wish to do so.
If I lived in the UK could I ask the ISP to give me an unfiltered version? Or has the Parliament arbitrarily decided to be my surrogate dad, and control what I can or can not see? (It must be fun to be treated like a child.)
That's missing the point of the article. This is about websites where there is no good reason for blocking them in the first place. And consider that you might actually want to prevent access to websites that are unsuitable for your six year old child, and the tickle-me-elmo website which is absolutely suitable for your child is blocked. You don't want to remove filtering, you want the wrong filter for that website removed. For everybody.
If there is heavy bandwidth use, wifi is a nightmare. Remember its half the speed of 100 mbit, and its shared. Then if you are in an office building the wifi is crap by itself since every's wifi on your floor plus 7 above and below interferes with your wifi (yes there are several channels but you should be able to see how easily all channels get occupied).
As I'm getting older, I can't see this as a "nightmare". A "nightmare" is when I have to run around and fix the problem. This is the exact opposite - I can sit down and relax until the file transfer has finished. Not my fault if it takes a while:-)
Apple has to be paid for -any- 3rd party software. They just shifted the cost on to the developers. I imagine they'll shift even more to the cloud in the future, at which point you'll pay by the month or your device will be crippled.
Apple will absolutely distribute your software for free - if you agree to give it away to end users at no cost. You may also try to find a way to distribute your non-free software at lower cost to the same size of audience; good luck with that.
It is astonishing how weak the result is, and how hard it is to prove.
The "ordinary" Goldbach conjecture is: Every even number N >= 4 is the sum of two primes. For example, 100 = 3 + 97 = 11 + 89 = 17 + 83 = 29 + 71 = 41 + 59 = 47 + 53, so we see that sum numbers can be written as the sum of two primes in many different ways. We call a number that is the sum of two primes a "Goldbach number", then the conjecture says that every even integer N >= 4 is a Goldbach number.
The "weak" Goldbach conjecture is: Every odd number N >= 7 is the sum of three primes. At least one of these primes nust be odd, so we can express the weak conjecture as: For every odd N >= 7, there is an odd prime p = N - 4 such that N - p is a Goldbach number. Since there are many odd primes p = N - 4, only one out of a huge list of numbers of the form N - p need to be a Goldbach number.
1.Patents. By using (and releasing) a GPLv3 version of GCC, the extremely patent grant in the GPLv3 kicks in. This would probably require Apple to grant patent rights for things it doesn't want to grant rights for.
As an example: gcc just _might_ infringe on some patent that Apple holds, or there might be not totally unreasonable reason to make such a claim. Assuming that Apple has no intention of suing anyone over such a patent, with GPL v2 that is neither a problem for gcc, nor for Apple, nor for Apple distributing a GPL v2 licenced gcc compiler.
But with GPL v3, if there is such a patent, then Apple is not allowed to distribute the compiler without granting everyone a patent license. Now let's say Apple sues company X over infringement of patent Y, totally unrelated to GPL and gcc. And X figures out that gcc infringes on patent Y. And therefore Apple should have given everyone, including X, a license for that patent. Can you imagine the legal nightmare this could cause? Now if you are a lawyer for Apple, and you were asked whether Apple should distribute gcc 4.6, surely you would check the GPL v3 license and think of such things and tell the developers who want to distribute gcc that there is a significant legal risk.
There are a number of things attractive with LLVM/Clang: the code base is cleaner, some people feel better about the license, and so on. The quality of the generated code, however, is significantly worse, at least at this time.
Most of the time, code quality doesn't matter. In the very few cases where code quality really mattered to me, gcc and llvm optimisers both went out of their way to make it hard to create optimal code.
GPL'd software is open source, so if you don't think the documentation is sufficient go and read the source and write better documentation for it.
Here's the thing: If I don't think the documentation is sufficient that's it. I'm not going to waste my time reading the gcc source. It's not that entertaining and I have a lot better things to do with my time. And if the people who wrote the compiler can't be bothered writing documentation, why should I?
And WHY would a company want to avoid GPL compiler, unless it intends to distribute a sabotaged version of the compiler?
Apple had no problem using a GPL v2 licensed compiler. It looks like they have a huge problem using a GPL v3 licensed compiler. I suppose it has something to do with the difference in the licenses.
Now you might want to consider the effects on a software developer of integrating a compiler into your own product. Which happens for example if you use OpenGL, or OpenCL.
Do you file tax returns with IRS? Because if you aren't, you're breaking the law. The US is one of the few countries in the world which require their citizens to pay taxes no matter where they actually live.
So can Germans, British, Italians and so on live in the USA without paying taxes on their income?
Secondly, and this is just crazy to my mind, dereferencing a null pointer (ok, rephrase it in terms of sending messages to nil if you like)..... does not terminate the application. It's actually a "defined" operation in the sense that it's defined to return garbage or another nil. Sending a message to nil has no useful purpose so it is guaranteed to reflect a bug in your application, unless (worse) you have some "clever" programmer who decided to rely on this obscure behavior.
At that point anyone who actually uses Objective-C agrees that you are talking out of your arse. Standard C free () and realloc (), C++ delete operator - they all work just fine with null objects. And there's a reason for that.
Sending messages to nil is not "defined" in some obscure sense, it's defined. It's part of the language. It's not "clever" to rely on it, it is bloody stupid and ignorant to not rely on it.
Exactly correct. The two 10-second pieces of unskippable "educational" content will serve only to annoy those people who legally purchased the DVD and Bluray discs. Those who acquire illegal copies will not be subject to such annoyances.
So really they should make a law that all pirated movie copies must have these unskipable warnings.
So I'm confused what you are saying. First you say using DGPS will not work, then claim DGPS will work. You say the GP is wrong, only to repeat exactly what GP said as a "correction".
Very simple, really. SA transmits GPS signals, but with an error added. An ordinary GPS receiver therefore cannot figure out its exact position, you need this clever GPS receiver where you can type in what error SA is currently using.
Or you use a very simple method: You plug a GPS in the ground in a known location. You check where it thinks it is based on the GPS signal, and where you know that it is because you put it there and you know the place, and that gives you the exact error in the GPS signal.
In practice this is used to get highly accurate positioning that gets rid of the unintended errors caused by not-quite-exact satellite positions and the delays of the signals due to weather conditions.
2. They make an excellent bit of software that I have been using for free for years. Unless you helped them out you can't complain.
3. The guys creating Handbrake and the guys making video encoders are not the same people, so your rant is misdirected.
4. I mailed them two suggestions for improvements, and both got implemented. Now this may be because my suggestions were the kind of things that were (a) genuine improvements and (b) interesting for the developer and therefore would have been implemented anyway, but in my experience they are responsive to the right kind of suggestions.
This is the same judge that basically told the jury Google was guilty before they started to deliberate. Thus Googles call for a mistrial.
Can you please return your geek credentials? The judge didn't tell the jury Google was guilty, that's about the worst bullshit I've ever heard. The judge told the jury to assume that Oracles stuff was protected by copyright, and _then_ to decide whether the evidence said that Google actually copied or not.
The jury has decided, on the evidence, that Google copied Oracle's APIs. NOW the judge will decide whether this API is protected by copyright or not.
To explain this with a car analogy: There may be a legal argument whether you own a car or not. When you drive away in the car, you are accused of theft. The jury will decide whether there is evidence to prove that you took the car. The judge will decide whether the car was yours (and you were allowed to take it) or not (in which case taking it was theft).
Because this was for testing purposes? They aren't going to try a newly ramped-up process on what is a flagship product that has higher manufacturing costs and possibly risk lots of returns. They'll do it on the lower priced version that would be less costly if errors did pop up.
When this story came out first, it was reported that Apple moved the iPad 2 from a single core chip to a chip that is actual dual core with die shrink, but only one core used. That's what you would do if you want to "practice" the new process - the process might not be quite good enough yet to give enough yield for dual core chips, but enough for single core, and if they can't get enough they can still use the old chip (which is another good reason not to advertise the new chip).
Once the process is good enough, iPad 3+ or iPhone 5 will get the same chip but with two cores actually working, and iPad 2 will get the leftovers where one core doesn't work.
Pay 50% of the original value for something that likely has a completely dead battery which is not user replaceable? No Thanks. At least with an old Dell I can just slap in a new battery and it's otherwise still as good as it was when it came out.
Apple went from a user replacable battery that lives through 300 charges to a non-user replacable battery that lives through 1000 charges and has a much better charge in the first place. After two years, my MacBook Pro battery is almost new.
Apart from that, if you can't replace a non-user replacable battery in a MacBook Pro yourself, what business do you have posting on Slashdot?
The "quiet" nature of this change is likely to avoid attracting lawsuits from early adopters of iPad 2.0 that bought a (now) inferior product for more money.
That kind of lawsuit would have no merit whatsoever. However, a very good reason is that there is plenty of stock out there with the older processor. So since Apple doesn't tell anyone about the newer processor, you get either exactly what you paid for, or you get something better. You can't complain then. Same as people buying refurbished Macs sometimes get a bigger hard drive or more RAM than they paid for.
Safari lets the user choose in which situations cookies are accepted from a website. One of those situations is when the user fills out a form on the website, so clearly the user has knowingly interacted with the website. Google subverted this by secretly creating a form and pretending that it was filled out by the user, tricking Safari into accepting cookies. That was no accident, that was a deliberate trick to get around the user's privacy settings.
Since Google was on the hook for previous privacy violations, and had agreed to a settlement where they agreed that the FTC should check for further violations, a fine at this time is quite correct.
Slashdot Mirror
That's my point. By placing the DMCA above all other relevant laws, Atari v. Activision would be ruled differently. I don't like this new precedent and what it bodes for the future.
That's rather ignorant of what DMCA is about. The DMCA is about using technical measures to prevent someone from copying _your_ software and someone getting around this. If you install software made by Activision on a computer made by Atari, then only Activision could potentially complain about a DMCA violation, and only if Activision used technical measures to prevent the copying. Atari wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Same happened with Lexmark against ink cartridge manufacturers, where Lexmark was told that they hadn't quite understood the DMCA.
In this case, if Apple prevents you from copying Apple's software, that's protected by the DMCA. If Apple tried to prevent you from copying someone else's software (by installing it on a Mac, for example), that wouldn't be covered by the DMCA.
This gets me that first sale doctrine doesn't matter. The DMCA (which is overkill and bad legislation) takes precedence. The Psystar case reminds me of the Atari ruling, when Atari didn't want to allow third-party developers to make games for their console. Imagine if there were no third-party developers today. If Psystar legally purchased OSX software licenses, why shouldn't they be able to legally resell them with hardware? We have judges protecting a monopoly and frankly I don't understand it.
They are perfectly allowed to sell hardware together with a box with MacOS X. First sale doctrine allows that. However, the buyer is not allowed to install the software on the computer. And Psystar isn't allowed to install the software on the computer. The buyer _is_ of course allowed to install the software on an Apple branded computer.
Actually, if you buy MacOS X and install it on a Macintosh, the first sale doctrine doesn't allow you to sell the Macintosh with that copy of MacOS X installed. (However, Apple's SLA for MacOS X gives you that right).
What did they "take" from Apple? They paid full retail for the copies of OS X that they installed on the machines they sold. They took from Apple in roughly the same way that Ford "takes" from GM when someone buys a Focus instead of an Impala.
Apple has this special offer "buy a Macintosh, get an operating system upgrade at a hugely reduced price". Like many companies making offers "get this item worth $200 for $10 if you buy this other item for $1000". If you pick up ten of those "$10" items in a shop and leave $100 on the counter, they will charge you with theft.
Apple's problems wasn't that they were doing it; it's that they were selling it.
Not so much that they were selling it, but the fact that they insisted very, very loudly that they had the right to do so, and that Apple could do nothing about it. Apple really had no choice but to sue them. In the Hackintosh community, they all know that what they are doing isn't quite legal, but they also know that Apple will ignore this (since little damage is done, and there is probably a knowledgable bunch of people who will be assisting Apple's customers with problems when the need arises. I bet many Hackintosh users take their Grandma straight to the Apple Store when she needs a computer). The only thing they need to do is behave in such a way that Apple _can_ ignore them.
Remember when Atari tried blocking third-party software from their hardware and a judge ruled that they must allow for third-party use of their hardware?
This is all about copyright. Copyright allows the owner of the copyright to allow or disallow copying of their software, as they see fit. Note: Copying of _their_ software. That is what Apple does. They allow you to use _their_ software, MacOS X, on Apple branded computers, and not on other computers. I don't know about that Atari case, but what you say means Atari tried to prevent you from using someone else's software. Not _their_ software.
If Apple told you that you cannot run Windows, or Linux, on a Macintosh, that would be a completely different matter. But anyway, you ask this question, _after_ a court decided that Apple has that right, and another court decided, and SCOTUS denied an appeal about it?
I'm surprised by the ruling because it removes the teeth of most copyright law. Now anybody can upload anything safely at airports, cafés, hotel lobbies. Hell, do it from your home WiFi router only make sure you don't use encryption for plausible deniability.
You are completely misinterpreting this. Your comment about airports, cafes etc.: This ruling helps the owner of the open router; it doesn't affect the user of that open router (who would likely not be caught anyway), so there it doesn't make any difference. Your comment about home use: "Plausible deniability" isn't going to help you, it's "preponderance of evidence" that is against you. In this case, there wasn't just "Plausible deniability", there was about hundred people present at exactly the time when the copyright infringement happened, which was usually not the case. Had the copyright infringement happened at a different time, especially if it had happened at two different times, then it would have been quite possible that she got convicted. Just because it is _possible_ that someone uses your open WiFi, that doesn't make it likely.
In case of a corporation, they are usually responsible for what their employees are doing, so if there is evidence that an unknown employee of company X has caused damage in his role as an employee, then it is quite possible that company X has to pay for the damage. It is then up to them to find that employee and try to recover the money, or fire him or her, if they wish to do so.
If I lived in the UK could I ask the ISP to give me an unfiltered version? Or has the Parliament arbitrarily decided to be my surrogate dad, and control what I can or can not see? (It must be fun to be treated like a child.)
That's missing the point of the article. This is about websites where there is no good reason for blocking them in the first place. And consider that you might actually want to prevent access to websites that are unsuitable for your six year old child, and the tickle-me-elmo website which is absolutely suitable for your child is blocked. You don't want to remove filtering, you want the wrong filter for that website removed. For everybody.
...could be blocked! What about www.expertsexchange.com? Oh yeah, forgot the hyphen: that should be experts-exchange.com.
What reason would there be to block a website about sex change?
If there is heavy bandwidth use, wifi is a nightmare. Remember its half the speed of 100 mbit, and its shared. Then if you are in an office building the wifi is crap by itself since every's wifi on your floor plus 7 above and below interferes with your wifi (yes there are several channels but you should be able to see how easily all channels get occupied).
As I'm getting older, I can't see this as a "nightmare". A "nightmare" is when I have to run around and fix the problem. This is the exact opposite - I can sit down and relax until the file transfer has finished. Not my fault if it takes a while :-)
Apple has to be paid for -any- 3rd party software. They just shifted the cost on to the developers. I imagine they'll shift even more to the cloud in the future, at which point you'll pay by the month or your device will be crippled.
Apple will absolutely distribute your software for free - if you agree to give it away to end users at no cost. You may also try to find a way to distribute your non-free software at lower cost to the same size of audience; good luck with that.
It is astonishing how weak the result is, and how hard it is to prove.
The "ordinary" Goldbach conjecture is: Every even number N >= 4 is the sum of two primes. For example, 100 = 3 + 97 = 11 + 89 = 17 + 83 = 29 + 71 = 41 + 59 = 47 + 53, so we see that sum numbers can be written as the sum of two primes in many different ways. We call a number that is the sum of two primes a "Goldbach number", then the conjecture says that every even integer N >= 4 is a Goldbach number.
The "weak" Goldbach conjecture is: Every odd number N >= 7 is the sum of three primes. At least one of these primes nust be odd, so we can express the weak conjecture as: For every odd N >= 7, there is an odd prime p = N - 4 such that N - p is a Goldbach number. Since there are many odd primes p = N - 4, only one out of a huge list of numbers of the form N - p need to be a Goldbach number.
1.Patents. By using (and releasing) a GPLv3 version of GCC, the extremely patent grant in the GPLv3 kicks in. This would probably require Apple to grant patent rights for things it doesn't want to grant rights for.
As an example: gcc just _might_ infringe on some patent that Apple holds, or there might be not totally unreasonable reason to make such a claim. Assuming that Apple has no intention of suing anyone over such a patent, with GPL v2 that is neither a problem for gcc, nor for Apple, nor for Apple distributing a GPL v2 licenced gcc compiler.
But with GPL v3, if there is such a patent, then Apple is not allowed to distribute the compiler without granting everyone a patent license. Now let's say Apple sues company X over infringement of patent Y, totally unrelated to GPL and gcc. And X figures out that gcc infringes on patent Y. And therefore Apple should have given everyone, including X, a license for that patent. Can you imagine the legal nightmare this could cause? Now if you are a lawyer for Apple, and you were asked whether Apple should distribute gcc 4.6, surely you would check the GPL v3 license and think of such things and tell the developers who want to distribute gcc that there is a significant legal risk.
There are a number of things attractive with LLVM/Clang: the code base is cleaner, some people feel better about the license, and so on. The quality of the generated code, however, is significantly worse, at least at this time.
Most of the time, code quality doesn't matter. In the very few cases where code quality really mattered to me, gcc and llvm optimisers both went out of their way to make it hard to create optimal code.
GPL'd software is open source, so if you don't think the documentation is sufficient go and read the source and write better documentation for it.
Here's the thing: If I don't think the documentation is sufficient that's it. I'm not going to waste my time reading the gcc source. It's not that entertaining and I have a lot better things to do with my time. And if the people who wrote the compiler can't be bothered writing documentation, why should I?
And WHY would a company want to avoid GPL compiler, unless it intends to distribute a sabotaged version of the compiler?
Apple had no problem using a GPL v2 licensed compiler. It looks like they have a huge problem using a GPL v3 licensed compiler. I suppose it has something to do with the difference in the licenses.
Now you might want to consider the effects on a software developer of integrating a compiler into your own product. Which happens for example if you use OpenGL, or OpenCL.
Do you file tax returns with IRS? Because if you aren't, you're breaking the law. The US is one of the few countries in the world which require their citizens to pay taxes no matter where they actually live.
So can Germans, British, Italians and so on live in the USA without paying taxes on their income?
Secondly, and this is just crazy to my mind, dereferencing a null pointer (ok, rephrase it in terms of sending messages to nil if you like) ..... does not terminate the application. It's actually a "defined" operation in the sense that it's defined to return garbage or another nil. Sending a message to nil has no useful purpose so it is guaranteed to reflect a bug in your application, unless (worse) you have some "clever" programmer who decided to rely on this obscure behavior.
At that point anyone who actually uses Objective-C agrees that you are talking out of your arse. Standard C free () and realloc (), C++ delete operator - they all work just fine with null objects. And there's a reason for that.
Sending messages to nil is not "defined" in some obscure sense, it's defined. It's part of the language. It's not "clever" to rely on it, it is bloody stupid and ignorant to not rely on it.
Exactly correct. The two 10-second pieces of unskippable "educational" content will serve only to annoy those people who legally purchased the DVD and Bluray discs. Those who acquire illegal copies will not be subject to such annoyances.
So really they should make a law that all pirated movie copies must have these unskipable warnings.
So I'm confused what you are saying. First you say using DGPS will not work, then claim DGPS will work. You say the GP is wrong, only to repeat exactly what GP said as a "correction".
Very simple, really. SA transmits GPS signals, but with an error added. An ordinary GPS receiver therefore cannot figure out its exact position, you need this clever GPS receiver where you can type in what error SA is currently using.
Or you use a very simple method: You plug a GPS in the ground in a known location. You check where it thinks it is based on the GPS signal, and where you know that it is because you put it there and you know the place, and that gives you the exact error in the GPS signal.
In practice this is used to get highly accurate positioning that gets rid of the unintended errors caused by not-quite-exact satellite positions and the delays of the signals due to weather conditions.
Pity the Handbrake devs are dickwads.
1. It's not funny.
2. They make an excellent bit of software that I have been using for free for years. Unless you helped them out you can't complain.
3. The guys creating Handbrake and the guys making video encoders are not the same people, so your rant is misdirected.
4. I mailed them two suggestions for improvements, and both got implemented. Now this may be because my suggestions were the kind of things that were (a) genuine improvements and (b) interesting for the developer and therefore would have been implemented anyway, but in my experience they are responsive to the right kind of suggestions.
This is the same judge that basically told the jury Google was guilty before they started to deliberate. Thus Googles call for a mistrial.
Can you please return your geek credentials? The judge didn't tell the jury Google was guilty, that's about the worst bullshit I've ever heard. The judge told the jury to assume that Oracles stuff was protected by copyright, and _then_ to decide whether the evidence said that Google actually copied or not.
The jury has decided, on the evidence, that Google copied Oracle's APIs. NOW the judge will decide whether this API is protected by copyright or not.
To explain this with a car analogy: There may be a legal argument whether you own a car or not. When you drive away in the car, you are accused of theft. The jury will decide whether there is evidence to prove that you took the car. The judge will decide whether the car was yours (and you were allowed to take it) or not (in which case taking it was theft).
Because this was for testing purposes? They aren't going to try a newly ramped-up process on what is a flagship product that has higher manufacturing costs and possibly risk lots of returns. They'll do it on the lower priced version that would be less costly if errors did pop up.
When this story came out first, it was reported that Apple moved the iPad 2 from a single core chip to a chip that is actual dual core with die shrink, but only one core used. That's what you would do if you want to "practice" the new process - the process might not be quite good enough yet to give enough yield for dual core chips, but enough for single core, and if they can't get enough they can still use the old chip (which is another good reason not to advertise the new chip).
Once the process is good enough, iPad 3+ or iPhone 5 will get the same chip but with two cores actually working, and iPad 2 will get the leftovers where one core doesn't work.
Pay 50% of the original value for something that likely has a completely dead battery which is not user replaceable? No Thanks. At least with an old Dell I can just slap in a new battery and it's otherwise still as good as it was when it came out.
Apple went from a user replacable battery that lives through 300 charges to a non-user replacable battery that lives through 1000 charges and has a much better charge in the first place. After two years, my MacBook Pro battery is almost new.
Apart from that, if you can't replace a non-user replacable battery in a MacBook Pro yourself, what business do you have posting on Slashdot?
The "quiet" nature of this change is likely to avoid attracting lawsuits from early adopters of iPad 2.0 that bought a (now) inferior product for more money.
That kind of lawsuit would have no merit whatsoever. However, a very good reason is that there is plenty of stock out there with the older processor. So since Apple doesn't tell anyone about the newer processor, you get either exactly what you paid for, or you get something better. You can't complain then. Same as people buying refurbished Macs sometimes get a bigger hard drive or more RAM than they paid for.
Safari lets the user choose in which situations cookies are accepted from a website. One of those situations is when the user fills out a form on the website, so clearly the user has knowingly interacted with the website. Google subverted this by secretly creating a form and pretending that it was filled out by the user, tricking Safari into accepting cookies. That was no accident, that was a deliberate trick to get around the user's privacy settings.
Since Google was on the hook for previous privacy violations, and had agreed to a settlement where they agreed that the FTC should check for further violations, a fine at this time is quite correct.