And yet I still predict Apple will do OK, even with a much reduced share of the pie... the pie is growing. And we still have to watch for Microsoft/Nokia. I doubt they will gain all that much, but we shall see.
I think there is a misconception about what "the market" is. Most people count phones and smartphones separately. That made sense two years ago, but not anymore. The cost of building something that qualifies as a "smartphone" is continuously going down so they cover more and more of the total phone market.
Apple's share in the smartphone market isn't growing because the smartphone market extends further to the bottom all the time. But Apple's share in the total phone market has been growing all the time and is now 5% world wide, 14% in the USA. The Android market is growing because phone makers switch from dumb phones to Android, but in the end these phone makers aren't going to sell more phones than they are selling now (there will be losers like Nokia which missed the Android bandwagon).
This is of course anecdotal, but I firmly fall into that category. I have no desire to pay 600 or more dollars for a keyboardless toy. Because that really is what these tablets are.
So people have a priori three possible preferences: iPad, Android pad, or no pad. And apparently one half of the customers have their preference in the order iPad before Android pad before no pad, and the other half have their preference in the order no pad before Android pad before iPad. (Not saying which half is the bigger one).
The first half buys iPads, the other half doesn't buy Android pads.
Ok TomTom, if you're telling them my location, heading, and speed... don't you think it would be rather easy for them to figure out who I am? I can easily imagine a cop sitting on a highway with dispatch calling him "ignore the guy doing 70, there's a dude doing 85 3min behind him." And that's the simplest iteration I Can think of.
Yeah, that's so easy to do when TomTom sends them a database dump with the last three months of traffic data.
cough *BS* cough They are using it to make more money and just place the cameras where the probability is higher to make money! Thanks TOM TOM your company was going downhill, but it will REALLY go downhill now!
According to the police in Essex, UK, they have about 100 boxes in the county, and 25 of them contain cameras. All 100 measure the speed, flash a light when you drive past too fast, and count the number of flashes. The main purpose of the boxes is to slow down traffic, and that works equally well with or without camera. They only have 25 cameras because having to handle photos from 100 cameras is too much work. After a while people start figuring out where they get flashed without getting a ticket, so the number of speeders increases. When that happens, they swap the cameras around.
Actually, the real complaint seems to be that TomTom collected speed data from volunteers, gave it in anonymous form to the police (among others), and the police used it to figure out on which roads people were regularly exceeding the speed limit, so the put up speeding cameras there.
In the end, it is the job of the police to find where people are driving dangerously and do something about it. If the police got lots of complaints from people living on a street about speeding, and acted on that information, that would be the same thing.
The problem comes when this file gets dumped on every computer that you plug your phone into. What happens when you sync your phone onto a computer that has been compromised by *pick your favorite mal-ware/trojan*. The person that compromised that computer can suddenly have access to that file and then they have all that information. And don't say that it doesn't matter because cell phone companies have that data, because their version of the data is encrypted and protected and not easily accessible.
Morons, bloody, bloody, bloody morons!
A trojan or virus on your computer isn't going to look for a file containing information where you have roughly been ages ago. It is going to look for passwords, credit card information, bank details, go through your email, use your machine to send spam, or to host child porn if you are really lucky. Nobody bloody cares where you've been.
Sorry, but the problem is that apple is not tracking anybody, its that apple is not tracking anybody....yet.
Also, there is the issue of why the phone is doing this in the first place. Why spend the time programming this 'feature' into a phone unless its going to be used for something.
Just because apple isnt doing anything evil with this data does not mean they could not later, or someone else could make a trojan to gather this data now that its widely known.
This was voted up as "insightful". God, I hate these morons.
For half a point of Slashdot credentials each: Come up with at least two valid reasons why some Apple developer created this database.
For another half point of Slashdot credentials: Explain why Apple has no need to store this data on a phone in order to get the data.
For another half point: Explain why the iPhone app store gives Apple the ability to withdraw apps from your phone (which so far has never been used).
Yes, they say it's anonymous in this part of the privacy policy. Unfortunately earlier they explain that it's sent along with a "unique device ID" so while they're correct that it's anonymous by the dictionary definition (your name is not attached) they most certainly can track a single device.
A "unique device ID" serves two very important purposes: First, it makes it impossible for some hacker to send fake location data to Apple's servers and make the service unusable. Second, it makes it impossible for hackers to send the MAC address of some router to the service and get its location back, allowing them to track for example where a person has moved if that person took their router with them. Google allows that; there is a website that located my router within 150m - surely close enough to endanger someone in witness protection.
Apple's claim is that only Location Services on iDevices can access this information. We don't know what they mean exactly by "unique device ID" - it might be some key that proves that the device is an iDevice and that is hidden away so it can only be used by Location Services. Even if it is just a "unique device ID", a very obvious and very legitimate use would be not to accept / return location data that is too far away. For example, if an iDevice asked for the location of a router that happens to be in San Francisco at 8am in the morning, then the service shouldn't report the coordinates of a router in New York at 9am.
From what I have read, Righthaven didn't actually aquire any copyrights. They aquired the right to sue for copyright violations. Which means they don't actually own any copyrights. Which means that when they sue for copyright infringement, they are actually lying because they have no copyrights that are infringed on. And they most know this, because the previous court told them off for exactly that reason.
I am wondering where the point would be reached where suing someone who you _know_ didn't do what you accuse them off would be criminal.
course, if you limit the MAC addresses of computers that your router will offer addresses to, it doesn't REALLY matter what kind of password you put on your network. This is a very simple and secure method, that really requires virtually no extra effort on your part (assuming you're moderately tech savvy).
I just googled to find something about MAC addresses, and found a link explaining how you get round that: Park your car near that network. Wait until someone connects to the network. Record their MAC address. Fake your own.
The only thing that all these measures do is keeping harmless people out, and to make sure that real hackers have no possible excuse if they go to court. (There have been cases where someone bought a new WiFi router, plugged it in, forgot to turn it on, their WiFi network worked fine until the neighbour moved and took their unprotected router with them).
Why is that even legal? What they're saying is that they will share your information with random third parties whether or not theirs any good reason to do so and fail to mention who exactly it is that they're sharing it with. On top of which they aren't promising that the 3rd parties will themselves be restricted to any sort of restrictions on what they do with it.
They are not sharing with "random third parties". There is a very limited number of companies providing the service that tells you your current location based on WiFi that your device can receive. These are Apple, Google, and the original, which is Skyhook. And the permission that you give: If you are using this service, where your device detects WiFi signals around it, determines their MAC addresses, and uses a server run by these three companies to determine your location and tell you the location, then you agree that this information is sent to them. And you tell me how are they are supposed to tell you where you are if you don't allow your phone to send them the information needed to determine your location.
But why on earth is that information kept? They could easily just dump old information, I'm thinking maybe 24hours. And phone owners should be able to turn this feature on or off as they please!
You post on Slashdot and can't think of a reason why? iPhones with GPS help updating Apple's database by reporting precise information about nearby routers to Apple's database. Now you don't want your phone to report the same information over and over and over again. Like my phone sending exactly where my neighbours' routers are every five minutes. And all the routers on my way to work twice every day. So how do you avoid this? You keep a list of known locations that you have sent, and don't send that information again.
Now maybe the developer who wrote the code should have thought of the paranoia, sheer stupidity, and sometimes hatred of the public, and kept the information somehow different, for example with some hashcode. But apparantly he wasn't paranoid enough himself and just wrote code to get the job done.
Apple should have said what this really is about: Your iDevice can't determine its position by using the MAC addresses of nearby WiFi points unless Apple knows the locations of those WiFi points. And Apple's servers can't tell your iDevice where it is right now, unless the iDevice gives them the information that Apple's servers need to determine the location of your iDevice.
I wonder if all those people who helped OpenStreetMap are aware that OpenStreetMap knows the exact location where they were when they collected the data.
On the other hand, there is a website know where you can enter the MAC address of a router, and it will give you the location of that router, based on data on Google's servers. I hope Apple doesn't allow the same thing. I would hope even more that Google would put a stop to this. According to what Apple says, this is a black box: Only when the location software in the iPhone OS asks for the information about routers that are physically nearby will it receive location information. And in that case, anyone with a working GPS could have the same information anyway, so this is no privacy breach.
Apple's designs are the bare minimal design that allows functionality (how many buttons on a iPhone/iPad?). When you make a design that is basically the bare minimum design that allows basic functionality it's hard for anyone else to make a simplistic design that doesn't seem similar -- If the requirements are the same, you'll end up with the same basic design...
Hypothetically, let's say a judge takes this argument really serious. And he says "yes, Samsung copied the iPhone design, but there is a good argument here that they had to. So the decision is: If Apple can show the court an equally minimal, but different looking design within six months from now, then Samsung pays $2bn. If not, Apple gets nothing". What outcome would you bet on? (Raymond Loewy was once hired by the plaintiff in a court case when the defendant used that argument, and he showed the court three completely new designs for a product the defendant claimed couldn't be designed any other way).
Apple better be careful. As long as Apple doesn't allow anybody to use their iOS on their phones, it seems hard to say how Apple is being harmed. What would happen to Apple's suit if Samsung states that they had to go Android because Apple refused to license iOS to them? That puts Apple on the spot of either shutting up or licensing iOS, which will kill the iphone money cow.
Samsung phone looks exactly like an iPhone. iPhone is the phone with the best reputation anywhere. Samsung copied the iPhone so that people would be misled to buy a Samsung phone when what they really wanted is an iPhone. As a consequence, every Samsung phone sold means one less iPhone sold which means the gross profit from one iPhone sale is gone. So damages are number of Samsung phones sold times gross profit for each iPhone sale times factor 3 for intentional infringement.
Android is totally irrelevant in this suite. Apple isn't suing Samsung for using Android, they are suing for building a phone that looks like an iPhone.
This isn't the first time apple has tried to sue over vague look and feel like assholes. Last time, in a saner era (well, apart from the thousands of nukes just waiting to rain down on USA and Russia and anyone in-between), they got their ass handed to them on a plate,
The last time Apple won the case, and eMachines and Future Computers (or something similar) had to stop selling computers that looked like iMacs. Apple had design patents that protected the design of the iMac. They have design patents that protect the design of the iPhone. So I expect the same outcome. Interestingly, eMachines also had a design patent for an all-in-one computer that reminded me strongly of an alien with ears so they must have been aware of the protection that design patents give you; they probably just liked Apple's design of the iMac better than their own.
Apple is suing one manufacturer of Android phones who happens to make phones that look pretty much exactly the same as iPhones. It should be pretty obvious to anyone that Apple doesn't like competitors making phones that look like iPhones. If we were to believe the conspiracy theories of "Business Insider", then we would have to believe that Apple doesn't mind their designs being copied. And that I find quite unbelievable. The simplest and therefore most likely explanation for this lawsuit is that Apple doesn't like their designs being copied.
What's your definition of comparable? Horsepower? Pentium D computers from the age of Doom 3 could spank the shit out of the iPad all day.
Actually, no, they couldn't. An ARM processor at that time was running significantly faster per clock than a Pentium IV (four times faster per clock with software that I wrote and measured), and an iPad 2 has two 1 GHz ARM cores. I'd say it runs slightly faster than a single core 3 GHz Pentium D.
In an interview on Radio 4 this morning, they had an expert (I forget who) comment on this news. He suggested that the data could be used against people in divorce proceedings. Snoop the phone, or subpoena it if you can't sneak access. Maybe you'll uncover a hidden affair, or a trip to the casinos, or that the vital business trip on that day the mother-in-law was supposed to visit seemed to involve going fishing. Something, anything, that can be used against the phone's owner.
Without any further information, this is just a file on a phone containing some numbers. It is completely worthless unless you get someone testifying what the data actually means. And the only people who really know are a few developers at Apple. And we have people saying already that there is data in the file that is nobody near where they have ever been. So this "expert" is talking out of his or her arse.
Type II diabetes is *correlated* with aging (first and foremost) and obesity. To jump to a conclusion about intakes of types of sugar is unsubstantiated nonsense. One of the many fallacies committed by the video is asserting the consequent, just as you are.
Every time you load a lot of sugar in easily accessible form into your body, your pancreas goes on overdrive producing insulin. Your cells work overtime to get rid of the sugar, and then they have a short break. Next time a load of sugar arrives, the same thing happens. It's no problem for a while, but eventually your body gives up. Yes, it takes years. That's why it is strongly correlated to age. And eating too much sugar makes you fat. That's why it is strongly correlated to being overweight.
I don't really care about _your_ health at all. But if you start having problems with your eyes (blurred vision in the morning) then you should have some tests to check if you have diabetes. And if you suddenly start losing weight without any visible reason then you should really act; that is your liver and kidney having to step in to remove sugar from your blood, and it will damage them and eventually kill you.
Sugar does nothing beneficial to you. You shouldn't take more than 90 grams per day; you probably get 30 grams in invisible form, leaving 60 grams. Sugar content is especially high in foods with reduced fat content - so people trying to eat healthy by avoiding fat get hit worst. So if you have a wife or girlfriend who is obsessive about avoiding fat: If they consciously avoid foods with high sugar content and pick foods with less sugar, and ignore fast contents completely, they will lose weight. And live healthier. And save money. And eat better tasting food.
How do you enforce a non-disclosure? Kindly ask the person not to use any of the knowledge or experience he acquired on the previous job? Even if the person was serious in agreeing to that, its hard to not subconsciously use the information and skills that you were hired to provide. How do you know the person used that information or information they had before their original job. If you want any type of successful restriction, non-compete is the real way to go.
Skills that you learn in your job are not a trade secret. Information can easily be a trade secret. But for most people in most situations, information can be kept separate. There have been very few cases where someone was prevented from taking up a new job; I think one case was a quite high level employee whose job it was to investigate marketing strategies of the companie's competitors, and a judge decided that in this particular case it was inevitable that he would use knowledge of his old companie's marketing strategy in a new job. Bot lets say an engineer developing graphics cards for ATI should be able to work at NVida without giving away trade secrets. (Remember that anything that is patented cannot be a trade secret).
This case also demonstrates the lengths to which Microsoft is willing to go to defend an infringement case. There was a full jury trial, a reexamination at the Patent Office, a (denied) request for a second reexamination, an appeal of the injunction to the Federal Circuit, an appeal of the case itself to the Federal Circuit, and now this appeal to the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court agrees with Microsoft, the case will go back to the trial court for a new trial, with, potentially, another round of appeals if Microsoft loses again.
If you have been fined $400 million or so, you can invest quite a few million into trying to reduce that number.
I'm always curious when I see this "Buggy flash is better than no flash". I can't think of a single time where my only possible route to the information I need is through a flash web site.
I once tried to book a hotel room, but couldn't because I didn't have Flash installed. Actually, I had Flash installed on my Mac, and it wasn't disabled in any way, but for some reason the site checked whether Flash for Windows was installed on your machine. They also had a link that would allow me to install Flash for Windows on my Mac.
I just heard this lunchtime that when they installed the new radar equipment on the top of Portsdown hill (Just outside Portsmouth - if you live close, the big blue buildings with the radar on Portsdown hill) they attached the motors only and had it turning for 2-3 weeks before any radar emitters were turned on. They got umpteen complaints from local residents during that period that the 'new radars' were interfering with their TV and causing 'bad reception'. All these phone numbers got logged as time-wasters for subsequent public complaints!
I'd say they need to change what these motors are doing:-)
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And yet I still predict Apple will do OK, even with a much reduced share of the pie... the pie is growing. And we still have to watch for Microsoft/Nokia. I doubt they will gain all that much, but we shall see.
I think there is a misconception about what "the market" is. Most people count phones and smartphones separately. That made sense two years ago, but not anymore. The cost of building something that qualifies as a "smartphone" is continuously going down so they cover more and more of the total phone market.
Apple's share in the smartphone market isn't growing because the smartphone market extends further to the bottom all the time. But Apple's share in the total phone market has been growing all the time and is now 5% world wide, 14% in the USA. The Android market is growing because phone makers switch from dumb phones to Android, but in the end these phone makers aren't going to sell more phones than they are selling now (there will be losers like Nokia which missed the Android bandwagon).
This is of course anecdotal, but I firmly fall into that category. I have no desire to pay 600 or more dollars for a keyboardless toy. Because that really is what these tablets are.
So people have a priori three possible preferences: iPad, Android pad, or no pad. And apparently one half of the customers have their preference in the order iPad before Android pad before no pad, and the other half have their preference in the order no pad before Android pad before iPad. (Not saying which half is the bigger one).
The first half buys iPads, the other half doesn't buy Android pads.
Ok TomTom, if you're telling them my location, heading, and speed... don't you think it would be rather easy for them to figure out who I am? I can easily imagine a cop sitting on a highway with dispatch calling him "ignore the guy doing 70, there's a dude doing 85 3min behind him." And that's the simplest iteration I Can think of.
Yeah, that's so easy to do when TomTom sends them a database dump with the last three months of traffic data.
cough *BS* cough They are using it to make more money and just place the cameras where the probability is higher to make money! Thanks TOM TOM your company was going downhill, but it will REALLY go downhill now!
According to the police in Essex, UK, they have about 100 boxes in the county, and 25 of them contain cameras. All 100 measure the speed, flash a light when you drive past too fast, and count the number of flashes. The main purpose of the boxes is to slow down traffic, and that works equally well with or without camera. They only have 25 cameras because having to handle photos from 100 cameras is too much work. After a while people start figuring out where they get flashed without getting a ticket, so the number of speeders increases. When that happens, they swap the cameras around.
Actually, the real complaint seems to be that TomTom collected speed data from volunteers, gave it in anonymous form to the police (among others), and the police used it to figure out on which roads people were regularly exceeding the speed limit, so the put up speeding cameras there. In the end, it is the job of the police to find where people are driving dangerously and do something about it. If the police got lots of complaints from people living on a street about speeding, and acted on that information, that would be the same thing.
The problem comes when this file gets dumped on every computer that you plug your phone into. What happens when you sync your phone onto a computer that has been compromised by *pick your favorite mal-ware/trojan*. The person that compromised that computer can suddenly have access to that file and then they have all that information. And don't say that it doesn't matter because cell phone companies have that data, because their version of the data is encrypted and protected and not easily accessible.
Morons, bloody, bloody, bloody morons!
A trojan or virus on your computer isn't going to look for a file containing information where you have roughly been ages ago. It is going to look for passwords, credit card information, bank details, go through your email, use your machine to send spam, or to host child porn if you are really lucky. Nobody bloody cares where you've been.
Sorry, but the problem is that apple is not tracking anybody, its that apple is not tracking anybody....yet. Also, there is the issue of why the phone is doing this in the first place. Why spend the time programming this 'feature' into a phone unless its going to be used for something. Just because apple isnt doing anything evil with this data does not mean they could not later, or someone else could make a trojan to gather this data now that its widely known.
This was voted up as "insightful". God, I hate these morons.
For half a point of Slashdot credentials each: Come up with at least two valid reasons why some Apple developer created this database.
For another half point of Slashdot credentials: Explain why Apple has no need to store this data on a phone in order to get the data.
For another half point: Explain why the iPhone app store gives Apple the ability to withdraw apps from your phone (which so far has never been used).
Yes, they say it's anonymous in this part of the privacy policy. Unfortunately earlier they explain that it's sent along with a "unique device ID" so while they're correct that it's anonymous by the dictionary definition (your name is not attached) they most certainly can track a single device.
A "unique device ID" serves two very important purposes: First, it makes it impossible for some hacker to send fake location data to Apple's servers and make the service unusable. Second, it makes it impossible for hackers to send the MAC address of some router to the service and get its location back, allowing them to track for example where a person has moved if that person took their router with them. Google allows that; there is a website that located my router within 150m - surely close enough to endanger someone in witness protection.
Apple's claim is that only Location Services on iDevices can access this information. We don't know what they mean exactly by "unique device ID" - it might be some key that proves that the device is an iDevice and that is hidden away so it can only be used by Location Services. Even if it is just a "unique device ID", a very obvious and very legitimate use would be not to accept / return location data that is too far away. For example, if an iDevice asked for the location of a router that happens to be in San Francisco at 8am in the morning, then the service shouldn't report the coordinates of a router in New York at 9am.
From what I have read, Righthaven didn't actually aquire any copyrights. They aquired the right to sue for copyright violations. Which means they don't actually own any copyrights. Which means that when they sue for copyright infringement, they are actually lying because they have no copyrights that are infringed on. And they most know this, because the previous court told them off for exactly that reason.
I am wondering where the point would be reached where suing someone who you _know_ didn't do what you accuse them off would be criminal.
course, if you limit the MAC addresses of computers that your router will offer addresses to, it doesn't REALLY matter what kind of password you put on your network. This is a very simple and secure method, that really requires virtually no extra effort on your part (assuming you're moderately tech savvy).
I just googled to find something about MAC addresses, and found a link explaining how you get round that: Park your car near that network. Wait until someone connects to the network. Record their MAC address. Fake your own.
The only thing that all these measures do is keeping harmless people out, and to make sure that real hackers have no possible excuse if they go to court. (There have been cases where someone bought a new WiFi router, plugged it in, forgot to turn it on, their WiFi network worked fine until the neighbour moved and took their unprotected router with them).
Why is that even legal? What they're saying is that they will share your information with random third parties whether or not theirs any good reason to do so and fail to mention who exactly it is that they're sharing it with. On top of which they aren't promising that the 3rd parties will themselves be restricted to any sort of restrictions on what they do with it.
They are not sharing with "random third parties". There is a very limited number of companies providing the service that tells you your current location based on WiFi that your device can receive. These are Apple, Google, and the original, which is Skyhook. And the permission that you give: If you are using this service, where your device detects WiFi signals around it, determines their MAC addresses, and uses a server run by these three companies to determine your location and tell you the location, then you agree that this information is sent to them. And you tell me how are they are supposed to tell you where you are if you don't allow your phone to send them the information needed to determine your location.
But why on earth is that information kept? They could easily just dump old information, I'm thinking maybe 24hours. And phone owners should be able to turn this feature on or off as they please!
You post on Slashdot and can't think of a reason why? iPhones with GPS help updating Apple's database by reporting precise information about nearby routers to Apple's database. Now you don't want your phone to report the same information over and over and over again. Like my phone sending exactly where my neighbours' routers are every five minutes. And all the routers on my way to work twice every day. So how do you avoid this? You keep a list of known locations that you have sent, and don't send that information again.
Now maybe the developer who wrote the code should have thought of the paranoia, sheer stupidity, and sometimes hatred of the public, and kept the information somehow different, for example with some hashcode. But apparantly he wasn't paranoid enough himself and just wrote code to get the job done.
Apple should have said what this really is about: Your iDevice can't determine its position by using the MAC addresses of nearby WiFi points unless Apple knows the locations of those WiFi points. And Apple's servers can't tell your iDevice where it is right now, unless the iDevice gives them the information that Apple's servers need to determine the location of your iDevice.
I wonder if all those people who helped OpenStreetMap are aware that OpenStreetMap knows the exact location where they were when they collected the data.
On the other hand, there is a website know where you can enter the MAC address of a router, and it will give you the location of that router, based on data on Google's servers. I hope Apple doesn't allow the same thing. I would hope even more that Google would put a stop to this. According to what Apple says, this is a black box: Only when the location software in the iPhone OS asks for the information about routers that are physically nearby will it receive location information. And in that case, anyone with a working GPS could have the same information anyway, so this is no privacy breach.
Apple's designs are the bare minimal design that allows functionality (how many buttons on a iPhone/iPad?). When you make a design that is basically the bare minimum design that allows basic functionality it's hard for anyone else to make a simplistic design that doesn't seem similar -- If the requirements are the same, you'll end up with the same basic design...
Hypothetically, let's say a judge takes this argument really serious. And he says "yes, Samsung copied the iPhone design, but there is a good argument here that they had to. So the decision is: If Apple can show the court an equally minimal, but different looking design within six months from now, then Samsung pays $2bn. If not, Apple gets nothing". What outcome would you bet on? (Raymond Loewy was once hired by the plaintiff in a court case when the defendant used that argument, and he showed the court three completely new designs for a product the defendant claimed couldn't be designed any other way).
I would expect higher incidence of homosexuality among mac users to contribute to this? Possibly in a statistically significant numbers?
If you are so desperate to pull, why don't you post your name, address and a photo?
Apple better be careful. As long as Apple doesn't allow anybody to use their iOS on their phones, it seems hard to say how Apple is being harmed. What would happen to Apple's suit if Samsung states that they had to go Android because Apple refused to license iOS to them? That puts Apple on the spot of either shutting up or licensing iOS, which will kill the iphone money cow.
Samsung phone looks exactly like an iPhone. iPhone is the phone with the best reputation anywhere. Samsung copied the iPhone so that people would be misled to buy a Samsung phone when what they really wanted is an iPhone. As a consequence, every Samsung phone sold means one less iPhone sold which means the gross profit from one iPhone sale is gone. So damages are number of Samsung phones sold times gross profit for each iPhone sale times factor 3 for intentional infringement.
Android is totally irrelevant in this suite. Apple isn't suing Samsung for using Android, they are suing for building a phone that looks like an iPhone.
This isn't the first time apple has tried to sue over vague look and feel like assholes. Last time, in a saner era (well, apart from the thousands of nukes just waiting to rain down on USA and Russia and anyone in-between), they got their ass handed to them on a plate,
The last time Apple won the case, and eMachines and Future Computers (or something similar) had to stop selling computers that looked like iMacs. Apple had design patents that protected the design of the iMac. They have design patents that protect the design of the iPhone. So I expect the same outcome. Interestingly, eMachines also had a design patent for an all-in-one computer that reminded me strongly of an alien with ears so they must have been aware of the protection that design patents give you; they probably just liked Apple's design of the iMac better than their own.
Apple is suing one manufacturer of Android phones who happens to make phones that look pretty much exactly the same as iPhones. It should be pretty obvious to anyone that Apple doesn't like competitors making phones that look like iPhones. If we were to believe the conspiracy theories of "Business Insider", then we would have to believe that Apple doesn't mind their designs being copied. And that I find quite unbelievable. The simplest and therefore most likely explanation for this lawsuit is that Apple doesn't like their designs being copied.
What's your definition of comparable? Horsepower? Pentium D computers from the age of Doom 3 could spank the shit out of the iPad all day.
Actually, no, they couldn't. An ARM processor at that time was running significantly faster per clock than a Pentium IV (four times faster per clock with software that I wrote and measured), and an iPad 2 has two 1 GHz ARM cores. I'd say it runs slightly faster than a single core 3 GHz Pentium D.
In an interview on Radio 4 this morning, they had an expert (I forget who) comment on this news. He suggested that the data could be used against people in divorce proceedings. Snoop the phone, or subpoena it if you can't sneak access. Maybe you'll uncover a hidden affair, or a trip to the casinos, or that the vital business trip on that day the mother-in-law was supposed to visit seemed to involve going fishing. Something, anything, that can be used against the phone's owner.
Without any further information, this is just a file on a phone containing some numbers. It is completely worthless unless you get someone testifying what the data actually means. And the only people who really know are a few developers at Apple. And we have people saying already that there is data in the file that is nobody near where they have ever been. So this "expert" is talking out of his or her arse.
Type II diabetes is *correlated* with aging (first and foremost) and obesity. To jump to a conclusion about intakes of types of sugar is unsubstantiated nonsense. One of the many fallacies committed by the video is asserting the consequent, just as you are.
Every time you load a lot of sugar in easily accessible form into your body, your pancreas goes on overdrive producing insulin. Your cells work overtime to get rid of the sugar, and then they have a short break. Next time a load of sugar arrives, the same thing happens. It's no problem for a while, but eventually your body gives up. Yes, it takes years. That's why it is strongly correlated to age. And eating too much sugar makes you fat. That's why it is strongly correlated to being overweight.
I don't really care about _your_ health at all. But if you start having problems with your eyes (blurred vision in the morning) then you should have some tests to check if you have diabetes. And if you suddenly start losing weight without any visible reason then you should really act; that is your liver and kidney having to step in to remove sugar from your blood, and it will damage them and eventually kill you.
Sugar does nothing beneficial to you. You shouldn't take more than 90 grams per day; you probably get 30 grams in invisible form, leaving 60 grams. Sugar content is especially high in foods with reduced fat content - so people trying to eat healthy by avoiding fat get hit worst. So if you have a wife or girlfriend who is obsessive about avoiding fat: If they consciously avoid foods with high sugar content and pick foods with less sugar, and ignore fast contents completely, they will lose weight. And live healthier. And save money. And eat better tasting food.
How do you enforce a non-disclosure? Kindly ask the person not to use any of the knowledge or experience he acquired on the previous job? Even if the person was serious in agreeing to that, its hard to not subconsciously use the information and skills that you were hired to provide. How do you know the person used that information or information they had before their original job. If you want any type of successful restriction, non-compete is the real way to go.
Skills that you learn in your job are not a trade secret. Information can easily be a trade secret. But for most people in most situations, information can be kept separate. There have been very few cases where someone was prevented from taking up a new job; I think one case was a quite high level employee whose job it was to investigate marketing strategies of the companie's competitors, and a judge decided that in this particular case it was inevitable that he would use knowledge of his old companie's marketing strategy in a new job. Bot lets say an engineer developing graphics cards for ATI should be able to work at NVida without giving away trade secrets. (Remember that anything that is patented cannot be a trade secret).
This case also demonstrates the lengths to which Microsoft is willing to go to defend an infringement case. There was a full jury trial, a reexamination at the Patent Office, a (denied) request for a second reexamination, an appeal of the injunction to the Federal Circuit, an appeal of the case itself to the Federal Circuit, and now this appeal to the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court agrees with Microsoft, the case will go back to the trial court for a new trial, with, potentially, another round of appeals if Microsoft loses again.
If you have been fined $400 million or so, you can invest quite a few million into trying to reduce that number.
I'm always curious when I see this "Buggy flash is better than no flash". I can't think of a single time where my only possible route to the information I need is through a flash web site.
I once tried to book a hotel room, but couldn't because I didn't have Flash installed. Actually, I had Flash installed on my Mac, and it wasn't disabled in any way, but for some reason the site checked whether Flash for Windows was installed on your machine. They also had a link that would allow me to install Flash for Windows on my Mac.
I did not book that hotel room.
I just heard this lunchtime that when they installed the new radar equipment on the top of Portsdown hill (Just outside Portsmouth - if you live close, the big blue buildings with the radar on Portsdown hill) they attached the motors only and had it turning for 2-3 weeks before any radar emitters were turned on. They got umpteen complaints from local residents during that period that the 'new radars' were interfering with their TV and causing 'bad reception'. All these phone numbers got logged as time-wasters for subsequent public complaints!
I'd say they need to change what these motors are doing :-)