Apple has no injunction against any Samsung 7" tablet, and hasn't tried to get one. So Apple is definitely not the reason for this withdrawal. Maybe Lenovo is right, and maybe Samsung has only sold 20,000 of these tablets to end user world wide so far.
Uh huh. What kind of moron compares refurb product to an item so new that it hasn't even shipped yet? If you are willing to go refurb, remaindered, etc. there are always all sort of deals to be had. Not that $399 for a REFURB outdated product is a deal unless you deeply inside the RDF.
An Apple refurbished product is quite often brand new; especially after a new product release when all the unsold products suddenly are refurbished. If it is not brand new, then it is better tested than a brand new model, and with items that can be bought customized there is a good chance to get more than you actually paid for. So it looks like you are a clueless twat who has no experience purchasing Apple products and getting the best possible value.
Second, I compared it with the iPad 1 because otherwise the comparison is just laughable. The outdated iPad 1 is lightyears ahead of this Lenovo product. The Touchpad that only sold for $99 is lightyears ahead of it. I'll bet that the Samsung product tha according to Lenovo only sold 20,000 units is lightyears ahead of it.
Good first step though, put a decent tablet out at non-apple prices.
You might compare to a refurbished iPad 1. Apple sells them for $399; this tablet is $249 with 16 GB and comes with an OS that isn't even designed for a tablet and probably not upgradeable and a much smaller screen that is even less usable in vertical mode. No competition unless you are really, really hard up but then you wouldn't spend $249.
Leverage is quite simple. "We'll use your software and pay you for it if you sign a statement that you won't tell anyone. If you don't sign the statement, no sale, no money". It's not Microsoft doing a deal like that, it will be some sales droid hired to sell Azure licenses who will get a nice commission from the sale, so he or she will do what it takes to get the deal and their commission.
Apple wasn't collecting users' actual location; they were collecting the cell towers they were near. Beyond that, it was a bug that, when reported, was fixed within days. Heaven forbid someone just tell Apple (or whatever company) that they have a bug, so not scare people over nothing.
Actually, the problem was that people don't have brains and get all excited. Apple couldn't read the information that was found stored on iPhones, so Apple couldn't use this information to track a user. And if someone wanted to find your location with this data, they first had to steal the phone from your pocket. In which case they know where the phone is anyway. But where common sense broke down completely was that all these idiots didn't realise that the information stored on the iPhone arrived there because it was sent from Apple's servers. So if Apple actually wanted to track iPhones, they could have done that very easily and very illegally without anyone noticing.
Most of the people are buying status and "cool" when they're buying those iPads. Those of us that want more control and ability have already bought Android stuff, where you can actually put on software that doesn't get the blessing from The Man.
Most people buy "hey, I can browse the internet!" and "hey, I can read my email", and "hey, it has a map that shows me where I am", and "hey, it plays music and videos and the TV show I missed yesterday", and "hey, I can download and read loads of books" and "hey, I can show you all my photos" and "hey, I can play Angry Birds" and so on and so on and they don't give a damn about status and "cool" when they are buying an iPad.
The problem here is that any CA that is in my list of root certificates is able to create a valid certificate for say www.google. com, and that some CA can be tricked into giving someone other than Google such a certificate. That is not enough, the attacker also has to redirect traffic that should go to www.google. com to their own server. The whole thing is mostly dangerous because _many_ people go to www.google. com in the first place; the same attack against say my homepage would have very little potential to cause damage.
Here is what browsers could do: Every time you visit a website and get back a certificate, record which CA issued the certificate. Then if www.google. com suddenly returns a certificate from a different CA, the browser can give you a warning. Now if I use Google to look up information about platypuses in Australia, I might not care. If I use it to find information that I know my government wouldn't want me to look at, I would be careful. If I give my credit card to Amazon and the CA has changed, I would be careful.
The attack would therefore be greatly reduced to users who just have a brand new computer with no browsing information yet.
If those vaccinated are still at risk -- that's one less reason to bother getting a vax, as far as many are concerned. It's taking a perceived risk in exchange for a non-guara...
Shows you don't have a clue how it works. Epidemics are prevented when a certain percentage of the population has a successful vaccination. Let's say 90% are needed. If the vaccination works 95% of the time, and everyone is vaccinated, then we have 95% successful vaccination, and everyone is fine. If the vaccination works 95% of the time, and 92% get a vaccination, then we have slightly over 87% successful vaccination, and an epidemic could hit almost 13% of the population.
As a result of fewer people getting a vaccination, the success rate needs to be improved. You do that by vaccinating everyone twice. Which is totally safe, but costs twice the money. So tax payers have to pay twice the cost of vaccination because of some idiots who are listening to a struck off medic who has been proved to have forged the data for his study.
Laws like this are why surveillance cameras in stores are video-only.
Please read the PDF with the judge's ruling. It quotes case law that when there is a surveillance camera openly visible in a store, then neither video nor audio recording are secret, and therefore don't fall under wiretapping law, and therefore are legal. It also states quite clearly that if I point my phone at you in clear view, then any photos, video recording _and_ audio recording that my phone makes are _not_ secret and therefore don't fall under wiretapping law.
They'll never permit that to happen. No, it'll get settled with a victory in some lower level court that won't matter. You can't appeal if you win.
You should have read the fine article. It is amazingly strong. This was not about a guy being arrested and then found innocent in court. This is about a guy suing the police for being arrested and winning the case.
First, the judge said that the right to film a police officer, or any other official, while doing their duty in a public state is so evidently guaranteed by the First Amendment that the judge doesn't even have to refer to any case law. And it is so clearly legal that any police officer arresting you for it is not just making a mistake, but breaking the law.
Second, the judge said that the Massachusetts wiretapping law is about _secretly_ recording. Interestingly, it has nothing to do with the police's right to privacy or not, and nothing to do with consent to the recording, but the only important thing in Massachusetts law is whether the recording is done secretly or not. So a secret recording could be illegal. An open recording, like this man did, with a phone in open view of the police men, is absolutely legal. And it is so obviously legal that a policeman arresting you for wiretapping in this situation is not just making a mistake, but breaking the law.
So what we learn: You can record a policeman doing his job in a public place, but you have to do it openly.
God damn it will you PLEASE draw the obvious conclusion and realise the poster most likely not a native speaker?
Most likely was a native speaker. Nobody who actually had to go to school and work hard to learn English would get caught making that kind of stupid mistake.
The judge decided only whether what Apple presented was enough to get a preliminary injunction or not. It is about stopping Samsung from selling right now or not. So this judge doesn't decide whether patents are valid or not. He decides whether he or she thinks that the patents would be found valid and infringed in a real court case. All the patents will be looked at for real at a later stage.
Any company that makes a practice of telling the customer that they are wong (what else can you call apple's behavior concerning user demands for flash, and interpreted code execution?)
A company that doesn't give customers the products they want, but the products they love. Sounds like a good plan to me. And what customers are asking for interpreted code execution? And Apple will continue systematicilly attacking companies that copy instead of competing, and rightfully so.
The analysis is basically thiis: would it have been obvious at the time to put these pieces of prior art together in order to create the claimed invention?
More exact: Would it have been obvious for someone with total and complete knowledge of all the prior art in existence, and with infinite amount of time and patience, but with no inventiveness of his own, to put these pieces of prior art together to create the claimed invention?
So if there are two commonly known pieces of prior art, but it is not obvious that combining them would give the wanted result, that is non-obvious. If there are two extremely obscure pieces of prior art, that nobody on Slashdot ever heard of, but it is clear when they are shown to you that combining them should give the wanted result, that is obvious.
If APIs are found to be protected under copyright, won't this mean something like Mono C# violates copyright as well?
The court didn't say "APIs are protected by copyright". The court said "there is no rule that APIs are never protected by copyright, therefore Google's request for summary judgement is rejected. The court will have to examine Oracle's APIs and then make a decision whether that particular API is copyright protected or not".
It will depend on the amount of creativity that went into writing the API. Now writing a good API is hard work and greatly appreciated, but that doesn't mean the author should be creative. It's more like a good API is not creative at all. On the other hand, a badly written API can be very creative and would then deserve copyright protection.
So we know now what companies have to do to beat the iPad: Build tablets and sell them for about $220 less than the cost of the parts. I wonder at which point Apple would start buying those tablets and taking them apart because that is cheaper than buying the parts. (I was told the Touchpad had the same screen as the original iPad, and what Apple pays for the screen is not far away from the $99 that the Touchpad sold for).
I guess HP didn't notice that it took Apple and Steve Jobs good ten years of hard work to get where they are now. HP thought they could achieve the same with a one time payment of $1.2bn.
In the UK, a huge price difference can be explained by 20% VAT added to the price, and cost of better consumer laws. Australia seems to have 10% sales tax and someone who knows might comment on consumer protection.
And if one product is too expensive, people are free to buy from competitors.
I'm sorry to say that but for an outside European observer the UK is becoming more and more like a totalitarian country.
Being an "outside European" living in the UK, I'll say you don't have a clue what you are talking about. The government that turned into something badly right wing and sinister without even realizing is gone. (Goodbye, Jacqui Smith, go and watch porn with your husband instead of watching what people are doing).
If you punish people for more than what they actually did, you are abandoning the rule of law and enter tyranny. It's as simple as that.
That is not happening. A judge always has some leeway in sentencing, depending on circumstances. They are using that leeway. While they were normally told "we don't have money to build more prisons, so be lenient", they are now told "everyone agrees that this scum needs to be locked away for as long as legally possible". And yes, everyone agrees. Quite a few criminals have been shopped by friends and relatives that were disgusted with what they did.
Europe has treaties that allow any European to buy goods and services in any other country. So all the Germans have to do is buy through a webshop in another country..
I doubt that covers the case where there is an injunction against the sale in one country. With 2 million Euros fine. So you can be sure that Samsung will do everything they can to prevent such sales.
The other problem is of course whether anyone wants a tablet that isn't an iPad. HP seems to have 90% of their tablets still in stores with nobody wanting to buy them.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has no injunction against any Samsung 7" tablet, and hasn't tried to get one. So Apple is definitely not the reason for this withdrawal. Maybe Lenovo is right, and maybe Samsung has only sold 20,000 of these tablets to end user world wide so far.
Uh huh. What kind of moron compares refurb product to an item so new that it hasn't even shipped yet? If you are willing to go refurb, remaindered, etc. there are always all sort of deals to be had. Not that $399 for a REFURB outdated product is a deal unless you deeply inside the RDF.
An Apple refurbished product is quite often brand new; especially after a new product release when all the unsold products suddenly are refurbished. If it is not brand new, then it is better tested than a brand new model, and with items that can be bought customized there is a good chance to get more than you actually paid for. So it looks like you are a clueless twat who has no experience purchasing Apple products and getting the best possible value.
Second, I compared it with the iPad 1 because otherwise the comparison is just laughable. The outdated iPad 1 is lightyears ahead of this Lenovo product. The Touchpad that only sold for $99 is lightyears ahead of it. I'll bet that the Samsung product tha according to Lenovo only sold 20,000 units is lightyears ahead of it.
Good first step though, put a decent tablet out at non-apple prices.
You might compare to a refurbished iPad 1. Apple sells them for $399; this tablet is $249 with 16 GB and comes with an OS that isn't even designed for a tablet and probably not upgradeable and a much smaller screen that is even less usable in vertical mode. No competition unless you are really, really hard up but then you wouldn't spend $249.
Leverage is quite simple. "We'll use your software and pay you for it if you sign a statement that you won't tell anyone. If you don't sign the statement, no sale, no money". It's not Microsoft doing a deal like that, it will be some sales droid hired to sell Azure licenses who will get a nice commission from the sale, so he or she will do what it takes to get the deal and their commission.
...if Apple's injunction against Samsung has anything to do with there supposedly only being 20,000 out of a million units sold?
No. It is a different tablet. Apple couldn't quite claim that customers would confuse a 7" Samsung tablet with a 10" Apple tablet.
Apple wasn't collecting users' actual location; they were collecting the cell towers they were near. Beyond that, it was a bug that, when reported, was fixed within days. Heaven forbid someone just tell Apple (or whatever company) that they have a bug, so not scare people over nothing.
Actually, the problem was that people don't have brains and get all excited. Apple couldn't read the information that was found stored on iPhones, so Apple couldn't use this information to track a user. And if someone wanted to find your location with this data, they first had to steal the phone from your pocket. In which case they know where the phone is anyway. But where common sense broke down completely was that all these idiots didn't realise that the information stored on the iPhone arrived there because it was sent from Apple's servers. So if Apple actually wanted to track iPhones, they could have done that very easily and very illegally without anyone noticing.
Most of the people are buying status and "cool" when they're buying those iPads. Those of us that want more control and ability have already bought Android stuff, where you can actually put on software that doesn't get the blessing from The Man.
Most people buy "hey, I can browse the internet!" and "hey, I can read my email", and "hey, it has a map that shows me where I am", and "hey, it plays music and videos and the TV show I missed yesterday", and "hey, I can download and read loads of books" and "hey, I can show you all my photos" and "hey, I can play Angry Birds" and so on and so on and they don't give a damn about status and "cool" when they are buying an iPad.
The problem here is that any CA that is in my list of root certificates is able to create a valid certificate for say www.google. com, and that some CA can be tricked into giving someone other than Google such a certificate. That is not enough, the attacker also has to redirect traffic that should go to www.google. com to their own server. The whole thing is mostly dangerous because _many_ people go to www.google. com in the first place; the same attack against say my homepage would have very little potential to cause damage.
Here is what browsers could do: Every time you visit a website and get back a certificate, record which CA issued the certificate. Then if www.google. com suddenly returns a certificate from a different CA, the browser can give you a warning. Now if I use Google to look up information about platypuses in Australia, I might not care. If I use it to find information that I know my government wouldn't want me to look at, I would be careful. If I give my credit card to Amazon and the CA has changed, I would be careful.
The attack would therefore be greatly reduced to users who just have a brand new computer with no browsing information yet.
If those vaccinated are still at risk -- that's one less reason to bother getting a vax, as far as many are concerned. It's taking a perceived risk in exchange for a non-guara...
Shows you don't have a clue how it works. Epidemics are prevented when a certain percentage of the population has a successful vaccination. Let's say 90% are needed. If the vaccination works 95% of the time, and everyone is vaccinated, then we have 95% successful vaccination, and everyone is fine. If the vaccination works 95% of the time, and 92% get a vaccination, then we have slightly over 87% successful vaccination, and an epidemic could hit almost 13% of the population.
As a result of fewer people getting a vaccination, the success rate needs to be improved. You do that by vaccinating everyone twice. Which is totally safe, but costs twice the money. So tax payers have to pay twice the cost of vaccination because of some idiots who are listening to a struck off medic who has been proved to have forged the data for his study.
Then why would you make another run at a loss after you were sold out?
Contracts probably. If HP ordered one million Touchpads, and they received 900,000 so far, the manufacturer might not let them off the hook.
Laws like this are why surveillance cameras in stores are video-only.
Please read the PDF with the judge's ruling. It quotes case law that when there is a surveillance camera openly visible in a store, then neither video nor audio recording are secret, and therefore don't fall under wiretapping law, and therefore are legal. It also states quite clearly that if I point my phone at you in clear view, then any photos, video recording _and_ audio recording that my phone makes are _not_ secret and therefore don't fall under wiretapping law.
They'll never permit that to happen. No, it'll get settled with a victory in some lower level court that won't matter. You can't appeal if you win.
You should have read the fine article. It is amazingly strong. This was not about a guy being arrested and then found innocent in court. This is about a guy suing the police for being arrested and winning the case.
First, the judge said that the right to film a police officer, or any other official, while doing their duty in a public state is so evidently guaranteed by the First Amendment that the judge doesn't even have to refer to any case law. And it is so clearly legal that any police officer arresting you for it is not just making a mistake, but breaking the law.
Second, the judge said that the Massachusetts wiretapping law is about _secretly_ recording. Interestingly, it has nothing to do with the police's right to privacy or not, and nothing to do with consent to the recording, but the only important thing in Massachusetts law is whether the recording is done secretly or not. So a secret recording could be illegal. An open recording, like this man did, with a phone in open view of the police men, is absolutely legal. And it is so obviously legal that a policeman arresting you for wiretapping in this situation is not just making a mistake, but breaking the law.
So what we learn: You can record a policeman doing his job in a public place, but you have to do it openly.
God damn it will you PLEASE draw the obvious conclusion and realise the poster most likely not a native speaker?
Most likely was a native speaker. Nobody who actually had to go to school and work hard to learn English would get caught making that kind of stupid mistake.
The judge decided only whether what Apple presented was enough to get a preliminary injunction or not. It is about stopping Samsung from selling right now or not. So this judge doesn't decide whether patents are valid or not. He decides whether he or she thinks that the patents would be found valid and infringed in a real court case. All the patents will be looked at for real at a later stage.
Any company that makes a practice of telling the customer that they are wong (what else can you call apple's behavior concerning user demands for flash, and interpreted code execution?)
A company that doesn't give customers the products they want, but the products they love. Sounds like a good plan to me. And what customers are asking for interpreted code execution? And Apple will continue systematicilly attacking companies that copy instead of competing, and rightfully so.
The analysis is basically thiis: would it have been obvious at the time to put these pieces of prior art together in order to create the claimed invention?
More exact: Would it have been obvious for someone with total and complete knowledge of all the prior art in existence, and with infinite amount of time and patience, but with no inventiveness of his own, to put these pieces of prior art together to create the claimed invention?
So if there are two commonly known pieces of prior art, but it is not obvious that combining them would give the wanted result, that is non-obvious. If there are two extremely obscure pieces of prior art, that nobody on Slashdot ever heard of, but it is clear when they are shown to you that combining them should give the wanted result, that is obvious.
If APIs are found to be protected under copyright, won't this mean something like Mono C# violates copyright as well?
The court didn't say "APIs are protected by copyright". The court said "there is no rule that APIs are never protected by copyright, therefore Google's request for summary judgement is rejected. The court will have to examine Oracle's APIs and then make a decision whether that particular API is copyright protected or not".
It will depend on the amount of creativity that went into writing the API. Now writing a good API is hard work and greatly appreciated, but that doesn't mean the author should be creative. It's more like a good API is not creative at all. On the other hand, a badly written API can be very creative and would then deserve copyright protection.
So we know now what companies have to do to beat the iPad: Build tablets and sell them for about $220 less than the cost of the parts. I wonder at which point Apple would start buying those tablets and taking them apart because that is cheaper than buying the parts. (I was told the Touchpad had the same screen as the original iPad, and what Apple pays for the screen is not far away from the $99 that the Touchpad sold for).
It can be an Android tablet. It can make "the iPad stink". But it can't both at the same time.
I guess HP didn't notice that it took Apple and Steve Jobs good ten years of hard work to get where they are now. HP thought they could achieve the same with a one time payment of $1.2bn.
In the UK, a huge price difference can be explained by 20% VAT added to the price, and cost of better consumer laws. Australia seems to have 10% sales tax and someone who knows might comment on consumer protection.
And if one product is too expensive, people are free to buy from competitors.
I'm sorry to say that but for an outside European observer the UK is becoming more and more like a totalitarian country.
Being an "outside European" living in the UK, I'll say you don't have a clue what you are talking about. The government that turned into something badly right wing and sinister without even realizing is gone. (Goodbye, Jacqui Smith, go and watch porn with your husband instead of watching what people are doing).
A whole generation of kids with that attitude, and it's society's problem.
Not saying it's not society's problem. Four years in prison will help a little bit reducing the problem.
If you punish people for more than what they actually did, you are abandoning the rule of law and enter tyranny. It's as simple as that.
That is not happening. A judge always has some leeway in sentencing, depending on circumstances. They are using that leeway. While they were normally told "we don't have money to build more prisons, so be lenient", they are now told "everyone agrees that this scum needs to be locked away for as long as legally possible". And yes, everyone agrees. Quite a few criminals have been shopped by friends and relatives that were disgusted with what they did.
Europe has treaties that allow any European to buy goods and services in any other country. So all the Germans have to do is buy through a webshop in another country..
I doubt that covers the case where there is an injunction against the sale in one country. With 2 million Euros fine. So you can be sure that Samsung will do everything they can to prevent such sales.
The other problem is of course whether anyone wants a tablet that isn't an iPad. HP seems to have 90% of their tablets still in stores with nobody wanting to buy them.