I can't tell the difference between any two brands of jeans.
Some people are blind to things they don't care about. Most people can quite clearly distinguish between different designs of jeans, including different designs by the same manufacturer. And any manufacturer would sue the ass off any competitor who tried to copy their design.
Yet, TV manufacturers don't sue each other over the "trade dress" despite the fact that all the large black slabs look basically identical. You know why? Because form follows function. It's a TV: it's basically all display with a little bit of structure around it and a few controls beneath the screen. They all look the same.
My Samsung TV has a very distinctive design. If you removed all the logos, I could easily pick out a TV with the same design, and would assume it is the same brand as mine.
Unlike the iPad, the frame doesn't have rounded corners, whereas the iPad frame has rounded corners. Unlike the iPad, the display _has_ rounded corners while the iPad display is rectangular. And you can clearly see two stripes left and right of the display looking like the same material as the border of the frame.
Seriously, when all the idiots shout "Apple has patented rectangular devices with rounded corners", shouldn't you have at least checked that it has rounded corners?
What I'd like to know is how they could confuse customers into thinking they're buying an Apple device when "Samsung" is printed on the device and the box it comes in.
Missing the point. It is not about confusing customers into thinking they are buying an Apple device, it is about confusing customers into thinking they are buying an iPad.
Grandma goes to the store and says she wants to buy an iPad. Sales droid sells her an "iPad" made by Samsung. Grandma doesn't have a clue who makes the iPad, she's heard of Samsung before, and the box and the tablet look exactly how she remembers her son's iPad and the box it came in.
Interestingly, company logos cannot be part of a design patent, and therefore using a different company logo cannot possibly protect you against a claim of infringement.
The frame is substantially thicker than the display, which is usable from both sides and covered with a distinctive pattern. The frame has a very distinctive pattern in the corners where it has been enforced.
If Samsung copied this design instead of copying the iPad design, then Apple wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on.
Like the summary said. 2001: A Space Oddessy beat them both by about 40 years. Apple's "design patent" is even mor e absurd than their other patents and a lot of those are total rubbish to begin with.
Actually, no. One judge did actually look at footage from 2001: and said that it was impossible to see any details, so it is impossible to say whether the screen showed in the movie matches Apple's design patent in any way.
And it seems that you don't have a clue what a design patent means. You design a product, then you make drawings that describe as precisely as possible what the product looks like, and then you get a design patent. It doesn't have to be innovative whatsoever. It just has to be a design that wasn't there before, quite possibly by putting together a dozen different design decisions that have all been made before, just not in that particular combination.
To infringe on a design patent, you have to copy all the design decisions. Not just "rectangle with rounded corners" but all the other things in the design patent as well. That's why Apple is suing nobody but Samsung for copying their design, because everybody else of any importance has designed tablets that look different. Including lots of tablets with rounded corners that look different from the iPad by making substantially different design decisions somewhere.
The subsidies are a contractual agreement. They're not really the issue. The bigger issue is that the majority of carriers no longer provide any real discount for bringing a already paid for device to their network. The iPhone being the perfect example, I can buy it unlocked for full price. AT&T doesn't lower the bill one bit for this. T-Mobile will (from what I've heard) but can't support the device in most cases as a actual 3G device (This is changing slowly in some areas).
I think they should stop calling it "subsidy" and make contracts that really show what happens. An example: I just saw an offer in the UK "iPhone 4GS for free + some plan for £37 per month over 24 months". What they should do instead is to say "we sell an iPhone 4GS, you pay in 24 monthly installments of £20, plus we offer this plan for £17 a month". Let you switch the phone anytime you want - but of course you have to pay your 24 installments, because that is the purchase price. If you want a new phone after six months, you still pay for the old one, so it costs you. If you are happy with that phone for five years, then after 24 months you only pay for your voice and data plan and it gets cheap.
I fail to see your point. This was a shitty thing that someone did and they will be smacked down by ACLU. Your comment would be appropriate if this was an accepted behavior with no recourse.
In a place that _legitimately_ calls itself "free" a school teach or headmaster should never, ever even in the tiniest little corner of his mind entertain the idea that something like this could be done.
Whenever I hear Americans make that claim, I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.
I had school teachers who thought it was their job to teach the kids how to stand up for themselves and how to stand up to authority. Including theirs.
Steve Jobs said: "We were only 60 days away from bankruptcy when I arrived." --- "So I called Bill and told him I was in charge at Apple and to deal with me directly from now on. Bill helped us with an investment of cash." --- Jobs' vision AND Gates' money saved the Apple corporation, otherwise they would have gone the same way as Atari and Commodore (ran out of cash in the mid-90s).
Well, Microsoft were caught with their trousers down having shipped code that was stolen from Quicktime (although in all likelyhood Microsoft didn't _know_ it was stolen), so they got away with it very cheaply. The "60 days away from bankruptcy" is what you would except a new CEO to say; Gil Amelio probably wouldn't agree with it. Apple had a good billion dollars in cash when Microsoft invested $150 million.
Are you talking loud enough to be clearly heard the length of said bus. It is about volume more thann anything. Talk softly and no one is likely to care.
Many people think because the other person is so far away that they can't see them, they have to shout. On the other hand, even cheap phones are excellent at filtering out environmental noise, so even when you talk very quietly in a loud bus, you will be understood. It may be hard to understand the person you are talking to, but shouting won't help with that.
Next time you go on Facebook, find some nice photos of flowers, landscapes, birds and butterflies, and flag them as "unsuitable". Give these people something nice to look at for a change.
So seriously, leave off it. I get tired of any time there is a problem with $Product_X fans of it will point out how $Product_Y had a similar or worse error way back in the day and that somehow changes things.
Unless the $Product_X fans also point out that the maker of $Product_Y paid an awful lot of money to replace the broken CPUs.
That is what bothers me. If a bunch of ignorant Apple zealots want to insist that Apple invented rounded corners,
But Apple _did_ invent rounded corners. Really did. Before the Macintosh, nobody could do windows with rounded corners. Apple (or more precisely, Bill Atkinson, the guy who wrote Quickdraw) invented that.
Now of course there are the Samsung apologists who can't accept that Samsung copied the design of the iPad, which consists of "rounded corners" plus a dozen other things. And a design consists of many elements, each of them not noteworthy at all, but putting them all together creates a design. Everyone can use rounded corners without problems. They just can't use _all_ the points of a design patent at the same time.
so the San Francisco Canyon Company actually stole the code. Microsoft & Intel used the software they produced AND *ALLEGEDLY* (a word that every Apple fanboy really needs to learn) knew that the company was stealing the code. You may say, why did MS threaten Apple if it weren't true and the answer is that litigation would have been more expensive, whether or not Apple was correct.
Copyright infringement. Doesn't matter too much whether you know about it or not. By hiring a company that stole the code, and using the stolen code, Microsoft became legally responsible. Not morally, assuming they didn't know anything about the code theft (and they would have had to be bloody stupid to buy the code if they had known it was stolen).The same principle that allows the BSA to make a company pay big time if an employee, with or without knowledge of his superiors, uses pirated software.
At the end of the day, BillG is alive and SteveJ is not.
A few years, and we'll say: At the end of the day, MacOS X is alive and Windows is dead:-)
Seriously, Apple just pulled off the mother of all trolls: They made Microsoft believe that Mountain Lion would be a merge between MacOS X and iOS, and promptly Microsoft responded with Windows 8, which _is_ a merge between a desktop and a phone OS.
The problem isn't "skinny" models. The only thing a skinny model does it remind us that we're fat and generally unhealthy and is no different than walking by your local gym and comparing yourself to the people inside.
The only thing that a skinny model does is remind me that the man responsible for the advert is probably a pervert who would really want a young boy in the advert but can't because then he would be found out, so he uses a "woman" that comes as close as possible to what he really wants.
And do you really think this problem arose because they didn't write code to deal with leap years? I'm sure they are using an extremely well-tested base library of code that deals with exactly this, but date logic is used everywhere, and deciding what to test (to what depth) requires discernment. Oh yeah... maybe they could have squashed this bug by spending 2 or 3 days adjusting server clocks and creating fake test data across multiple subsystems and doing a full integration test at various set points. But what you don't see is that those 3 days cost them the time to find such-and-such 15 other bugs. Or that the testing schedule would have to extend by 6 months to test both the leap day concern and all other concerns deemed more risky than the leap-day concern but below the level of risk they were actually testing for.
An example posted on thedailywtf: A website lets you enter your date of birth and checks whether you are 21 or older. To do that, they take the current day, month, and year, subtract 21 from the year, convert to a date, and check whether this is before or after your date of birth. Guess what: On Feb 29th 2012, subtracting 21 from the year gives Feb 29th 1991, which throws an exception when converted to a date, which isn't caught.
simple. if you can't see all around you, don't fucking move until you can!
People make mistakes. So if I'm reversing out of a parking spot, and you walk behind my car, with lights clearly indicating that I'm reversing, and I hit you, you may have the law on your side, but I know it hurts you considerably more than it hurts me.
Especially if I move forward / backward over you a few times to make sure you can't sue me.
Every lossless decoder drops the phase information, because the ear cannot hear it. That's half the data dropped without any loss in sound quality. So if you convert AAC back to uncompressed, the individual values have no similarity with the original at all.
Here's what the article actually says: If you have a sound engineer who creates a recording with material that is badly distorted in the first place, then whatever Apple tries to do with "Mastered for iTunes" is not going to help, and the AAC encoded material sounds the same as AAC encoded material converted from a CD.
According to the article, the recording itself is not clipped, but it sounds as if clipping has happened at some time earlier in the production. Garbage-in, garbage-out principle.
Somewhere in between. From the fine article he reversed the phase on one and added it and listened to what fell out, which wasn't much. Essentially a lot of complicated analog foolishness to figure out the delta between two files. Would seem you could do a lot simpler version of this digitally, decode both into raw / wav files, then calculate the diff between the two raw files.
Every lossless decoder drops the phase information, because the ear cannot hear it. That's half the data dropped without any loss in sound quality. So if you convert AAC back to uncompressed, the individual values have no similarity with the original at all.
Imagine recording the same music with microphones that are one meter apart. The sound is the same to the human ear. But one meter is about 3 milliseconds, so any sound at 600 Hz will have exactly the opposite amplitude on both microphones.
So what he first had to do is take the CD and the encoded file, and then add the phase data from the CD back. Absolutely necessary for any meaningful results.
Lets be honest. The only thing you end up losing when going to 16-bit is lost below the noise floor anyway. You use 24 (or better) in the mixing process because that's when it matters.
Not true. The AAC encoder tries to reproduce its input as faithfully as possible. If you feed it with 16 bit data, that is floating-point data plus quantisation noise, then it tries to reproduce floating-point data plus quantisation noise. Reproducing the quantisation noise is not only pointless (because it is just noise), and takes more bits (because random noise cannot be compressed), or, since the number of bits is fixed, leads to lower quality. If you feed the encoder with floating-point data instead, then it doesn't have to try to encode the noise and has more bits available to encode the actual music.
Assuming that your video was recorded in the wilderness, you can sue for "slander of title", like in SCO vs. Novell. All conditions are met: A false statement was made to a third party, claiming that you are not the copyright holder. The claim is malicious since they cannot reasonably believe they are the copyright holder. And finally there are special damages, since ads are added to your video and the revenue is sent to them.
I don't see the difference between B and C. In both cases, the criminal clearly intended to kill the victim. Assuming that both crimes were planned, then the intent was the same, and both crimes qualify as murder in the first degree.
Here's my explanation: In any group, you will find people who hate others just because they belong to another group. Every person is about equally likely to perpetrate a crime due to that kind of hate. However, not every person is equally likely to be a victim. If group A has ten times as many members as group B, and there is an equally large percentage of group members willing to commit crimes against members of the other group, then group A will have ten times more perpetrators, with group B having ten times fewer targets, making members of group B 100 times more likely to be the victim.
That makes it quite obvious and a matter of basic fairness to have laws that makes life safer for members of group B.
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I can't tell the difference between any two brands of jeans.
Some people are blind to things they don't care about. Most people can quite clearly distinguish between different designs of jeans, including different designs by the same manufacturer. And any manufacturer would sue the ass off any competitor who tried to copy their design.
Yet, TV manufacturers don't sue each other over the "trade dress" despite the fact that all the large black slabs look basically identical. You know why? Because form follows function. It's a TV: it's basically all display with a little bit of structure around it and a few controls beneath the screen. They all look the same.
My Samsung TV has a very distinctive design. If you removed all the logos, I could easily pick out a TV with the same design, and would assume it is the same brand as mine.
I dunno, that looks EXACTLY like an iPad to me.
You need your eyes tested.
Unlike the iPad, the frame doesn't have rounded corners, whereas the iPad frame has rounded corners. Unlike the iPad, the display _has_ rounded corners while the iPad display is rectangular. And you can clearly see two stripes left and right of the display looking like the same material as the border of the frame.
Seriously, when all the idiots shout "Apple has patented rectangular devices with rounded corners", shouldn't you have at least checked that it has rounded corners?
What I'd like to know is how they could confuse customers into thinking they're buying an Apple device when "Samsung" is printed on the device and the box it comes in.
Missing the point. It is not about confusing customers into thinking they are buying an Apple device, it is about confusing customers into thinking they are buying an iPad.
Grandma goes to the store and says she wants to buy an iPad. Sales droid sells her an "iPad" made by Samsung. Grandma doesn't have a clue who makes the iPad, she's heard of Samsung before, and the box and the tablet look exactly how she remembers her son's iPad and the box it came in.
Interestingly, company logos cannot be part of a design patent, and therefore using a different company logo cannot possibly protect you against a claim of infringement.
The frame is substantially thicker than the display, which is usable from both sides and covered with a distinctive pattern. The frame has a very distinctive pattern in the corners where it has been enforced.
If Samsung copied this design instead of copying the iPad design, then Apple wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on.
Like the summary said. 2001: A Space Oddessy beat them both by about 40 years. Apple's "design patent" is even mor e absurd than their other patents and a lot of those are total rubbish to begin with.
Actually, no. One judge did actually look at footage from 2001: and said that it was impossible to see any details, so it is impossible to say whether the screen showed in the movie matches Apple's design patent in any way.
And it seems that you don't have a clue what a design patent means. You design a product, then you make drawings that describe as precisely as possible what the product looks like, and then you get a design patent. It doesn't have to be innovative whatsoever. It just has to be a design that wasn't there before, quite possibly by putting together a dozen different design decisions that have all been made before, just not in that particular combination.
To infringe on a design patent, you have to copy all the design decisions. Not just "rectangle with rounded corners" but all the other things in the design patent as well. That's why Apple is suing nobody but Samsung for copying their design, because everybody else of any importance has designed tablets that look different. Including lots of tablets with rounded corners that look different from the iPad by making substantially different design decisions somewhere.
The subsidies are a contractual agreement. They're not really the issue. The bigger issue is that the majority of carriers no longer provide any real discount for bringing a already paid for device to their network. The iPhone being the perfect example, I can buy it unlocked for full price. AT&T doesn't lower the bill one bit for this. T-Mobile will (from what I've heard) but can't support the device in most cases as a actual 3G device (This is changing slowly in some areas).
I think they should stop calling it "subsidy" and make contracts that really show what happens. An example: I just saw an offer in the UK "iPhone 4GS for free + some plan for £37 per month over 24 months". What they should do instead is to say "we sell an iPhone 4GS, you pay in 24 monthly installments of £20, plus we offer this plan for £17 a month". Let you switch the phone anytime you want - but of course you have to pay your 24 installments, because that is the purchase price. If you want a new phone after six months, you still pay for the old one, so it costs you. If you are happy with that phone for five years, then after 24 months you only pay for your voice and data plan and it gets cheap.
I fail to see your point. This was a shitty thing that someone did and they will be smacked down by ACLU. Your comment would be appropriate if this was an accepted behavior with no recourse.
In a place that _legitimately_ calls itself "free" a school teach or headmaster should never, ever even in the tiniest little corner of his mind entertain the idea that something like this could be done.
Whenever I hear Americans make that claim, I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.
I had school teachers who thought it was their job to teach the kids how to stand up for themselves and how to stand up to authority. Including theirs.
Steve Jobs said: "We were only 60 days away from bankruptcy when I arrived." --- "So I called Bill and told him I was in charge at Apple and to deal with me directly from now on. Bill helped us with an investment of cash." --- Jobs' vision AND Gates' money saved the Apple corporation, otherwise they would have gone the same way as Atari and Commodore (ran out of cash in the mid-90s).
Well, Microsoft were caught with their trousers down having shipped code that was stolen from Quicktime (although in all likelyhood Microsoft didn't _know_ it was stolen), so they got away with it very cheaply. The "60 days away from bankruptcy" is what you would except a new CEO to say; Gil Amelio probably wouldn't agree with it. Apple had a good billion dollars in cash when Microsoft invested $150 million.
Are you talking loud enough to be clearly heard the length of said bus. It is about volume more thann anything. Talk softly and no one is likely to care.
Many people think because the other person is so far away that they can't see them, they have to shout. On the other hand, even cheap phones are excellent at filtering out environmental noise, so even when you talk very quietly in a loud bus, you will be understood. It may be hard to understand the person you are talking to, but shouting won't help with that.
Next time you go on Facebook, find some nice photos of flowers, landscapes, birds and butterflies, and flag them as "unsuitable". Give these people something nice to look at for a change.
So seriously, leave off it. I get tired of any time there is a problem with $Product_X fans of it will point out how $Product_Y had a similar or worse error way back in the day and that somehow changes things.
Unless the $Product_X fans also point out that the maker of $Product_Y paid an awful lot of money to replace the broken CPUs.
That is what bothers me. If a bunch of ignorant Apple zealots want to insist that Apple invented rounded corners,
But Apple _did_ invent rounded corners. Really did. Before the Macintosh, nobody could do windows with rounded corners. Apple (or more precisely, Bill Atkinson, the guy who wrote Quickdraw) invented that.
Now of course there are the Samsung apologists who can't accept that Samsung copied the design of the iPad, which consists of "rounded corners" plus a dozen other things. And a design consists of many elements, each of them not noteworthy at all, but putting them all together creates a design. Everyone can use rounded corners without problems. They just can't use _all_ the points of a design patent at the same time.
so the San Francisco Canyon Company actually stole the code. Microsoft & Intel used the software they produced AND *ALLEGEDLY* (a word that every Apple fanboy really needs to learn) knew that the company was stealing the code. You may say, why did MS threaten Apple if it weren't true and the answer is that litigation would have been more expensive, whether or not Apple was correct.
Copyright infringement. Doesn't matter too much whether you know about it or not. By hiring a company that stole the code, and using the stolen code, Microsoft became legally responsible. Not morally, assuming they didn't know anything about the code theft (and they would have had to be bloody stupid to buy the code if they had known it was stolen).The same principle that allows the BSA to make a company pay big time if an employee, with or without knowledge of his superiors, uses pirated software.
At the end of the day, BillG is alive and SteveJ is not.
A few years, and we'll say: At the end of the day, MacOS X is alive and Windows is dead :-)
Seriously, Apple just pulled off the mother of all trolls: They made Microsoft believe that Mountain Lion would be a merge between MacOS X and iOS, and promptly Microsoft responded with Windows 8, which _is_ a merge between a desktop and a phone OS.
The problem isn't "skinny" models. The only thing a skinny model does it remind us that we're fat and generally unhealthy and is no different than walking by your local gym and comparing yourself to the people inside.
The only thing that a skinny model does is remind me that the man responsible for the advert is probably a pervert who would really want a young boy in the advert but can't because then he would be found out, so he uses a "woman" that comes as close as possible to what he really wants.
And do you really think this problem arose because they didn't write code to deal with leap years? I'm sure they are using an extremely well-tested base library of code that deals with exactly this, but date logic is used everywhere, and deciding what to test (to what depth) requires discernment. Oh yeah... maybe they could have squashed this bug by spending 2 or 3 days adjusting server clocks and creating fake test data across multiple subsystems and doing a full integration test at various set points. But what you don't see is that those 3 days cost them the time to find such-and-such 15 other bugs. Or that the testing schedule would have to extend by 6 months to test both the leap day concern and all other concerns deemed more risky than the leap-day concern but below the level of risk they were actually testing for.
An example posted on thedailywtf: A website lets you enter your date of birth and checks whether you are 21 or older. To do that, they take the current day, month, and year, subtract 21 from the year, convert to a date, and check whether this is before or after your date of birth. Guess what: On Feb 29th 2012, subtracting 21 from the year gives Feb 29th 1991, which throws an exception when converted to a date, which isn't caught.
i do not want to share a road with you.
simple. if you can't see all around you, don't fucking move until you can!
People make mistakes. So if I'm reversing out of a parking spot, and you walk behind my car, with lights clearly indicating that I'm reversing, and I hit you, you may have the law on your side, but I know it hurts you considerably more than it hurts me.
Especially if I move forward / backward over you a few times to make sure you can't sue me.
Every lossless decoder drops the phase information, because the ear cannot hear it. That's half the data dropped without any loss in sound quality. So if you convert AAC back to uncompressed, the individual values have no similarity with the original at all.
Double correctlon: Every _lossy_ _encoder_.
Here's what the article actually says: If you have a sound engineer who creates a recording with material that is badly distorted in the first place, then whatever Apple tries to do with "Mastered for iTunes" is not going to help, and the AAC encoded material sounds the same as AAC encoded material converted from a CD.
According to the article, the recording itself is not clipped, but it sounds as if clipping has happened at some time earlier in the production. Garbage-in, garbage-out principle.
Somewhere in between. From the fine article he reversed the phase on one and added it and listened to what fell out, which wasn't much. Essentially a lot of complicated analog foolishness to figure out the delta between two files. Would seem you could do a lot simpler version of this digitally, decode both into raw / wav files, then calculate the diff between the two raw files.
Every lossless decoder drops the phase information, because the ear cannot hear it. That's half the data dropped without any loss in sound quality. So if you convert AAC back to uncompressed, the individual values have no similarity with the original at all.
Imagine recording the same music with microphones that are one meter apart. The sound is the same to the human ear. But one meter is about 3 milliseconds, so any sound at 600 Hz will have exactly the opposite amplitude on both microphones.
So what he first had to do is take the CD and the encoded file, and then add the phase data from the CD back. Absolutely necessary for any meaningful results.
Lets be honest. The only thing you end up losing when going to 16-bit is lost below the noise floor anyway. You use 24 (or better) in the mixing process because that's when it matters.
Not true. The AAC encoder tries to reproduce its input as faithfully as possible. If you feed it with 16 bit data, that is floating-point data plus quantisation noise, then it tries to reproduce floating-point data plus quantisation noise. Reproducing the quantisation noise is not only pointless (because it is just noise), and takes more bits (because random noise cannot be compressed), or, since the number of bits is fixed, leads to lower quality. If you feed the encoder with floating-point data instead, then it doesn't have to try to encode the noise and has more bits available to encode the actual music.
Assuming that your video was recorded in the wilderness, you can sue for "slander of title", like in SCO vs. Novell. All conditions are met: A false statement was made to a third party, claiming that you are not the copyright holder. The claim is malicious since they cannot reasonably believe they are the copyright holder. And finally there are special damages, since ads are added to your video and the revenue is sent to them.
I don't see the difference between B and C. In both cases, the criminal clearly intended to kill the victim. Assuming that both crimes were planned, then the intent was the same, and both crimes qualify as murder in the first degree.
Here's my explanation: In any group, you will find people who hate others just because they belong to another group. Every person is about equally likely to perpetrate a crime due to that kind of hate. However, not every person is equally likely to be a victim. If group A has ten times as many members as group B, and there is an equally large percentage of group members willing to commit crimes against members of the other group, then group A will have ten times more perpetrators, with group B having ten times fewer targets, making members of group B 100 times more likely to be the victim.
That makes it quite obvious and a matter of basic fairness to have laws that makes life safer for members of group B.