It would also be nice if 4+ GB USB drives were cheap enough to use them for movies instead of optical disks, but we're not quite there yet. I wonder if they would be significantly cheaper using ROM instead of flash RAM. They would be like those game cartridges for the old Atari and Commodore systems, but smaller. Anyway, it would be nice. I can get "Kingston Data Traveller" USB drives 1GB for £2.99, 4GB for £9.99, 8GB for £15.99. With h.264, you can easily store movies at 0.5 GB/hour, got enough for playback on a laptop, so this would be 2 hours for £2.99, 8 hours for £9.99, 16 hours for £15.99.
So, Wozniak tells it like it is, that Jobs has made some bad choices, and the world explodes? Actually, Wozniak and Jobs just have a very different point of view. Wozniak is a man who can produce technology. Jobs cannot do anything himself, but he can force a company to create a product that customers want. These are very, very different qualities. It will happen very often that something that Apple comes out with is not optimal from Wozniak's point of view. Like the Edge vs. 3G thing: From Wozniak's point of view, Edge is hugely inferior to 3G. From Jobs' point of view, Edge is technologically 90 percent as good as 3G, and the better battery life makes it better. They are obviously both right, it just depends on your point of view.
I am a mathematician. I may have an idea of how to SOLVE the travelling salesman problem in polynomial time.... The probability that you win a few million pound by buying a single lottery ticket is much much higher than then probability that you solve the travelling salesman problem in polynomial time.
Actually, I think many of the biggest companies actually would be in favor of abolishing software patents at this point. I wonder where Microsoft stands today. For them, patents are the biggest weapon against genuine competitors. On the other hand, patents make them an ideal target for more and more patent trolls, and this starts getting really expensive. Half a billion here, and half a billion there, and soon we are talking about real money:-)
It's pretty easy to "re-implement" newly developed pharmaceutical drugs as well... That is a completely different situation. With drugs, the expensive things are: Trying out one million possible chemicals and finding out that 999,999 don't have any positive effect. Then conducting studies to prove that the one drug that seems to have a positive effect doesn't have any side effects, like killing people.
Both of these factors are not there with software. Nobody writes down one million little C functions and then picks out the one that works. Your comparison with h.264 doesn't cut it either. h.264 contains an awful lot of work, and the people creating it did an excellent job. However, none of that should be patentable. The _ideas_ in h.264 are all quite straightforward and simple, and _ideas_ are what gets patented. The real hard work that gives h.264 its value cannot be patented. And as we have seen with MP3, you combine all these ideas, put all the work in, cover it with about 200 patents, and ten years later some troll comes crawling out of the woodwork with two patents and wants hundreds of millions.
That was an extremely annoying case. A patent troll being awarded much more than ten times the money for two measly patents that the MP3 people got for licensing a package of 200 patents.
I've heard a very few good developers speak in favor of patents. Bill Atkinson comes to mind but he was speaking more in the abstract vs the reality. Bill Atkinson holds a patent for the implementation of regions in Quickdraw. If you ever looked at how he did it, then yes, his idea is very clever, absolutely not obvious, and quite efficient (especially in storage requirements). On the other hand, any decent programmer could easily implement regions in a different, less efficient way. For example, Windows uses regions in GDI under a different name, using a very straightforward implementation that is not covered by that patent.
The way things are going now, Atkinson would have a patent on restricting drawing operations to an arbitrary area, which would include clipping, alpha blending, flood fill, everything. With a good patent lawyer, Bill Atkinson would have a complete stranglehold on the whole industry.
Take the Blackberry/RIM case as an example, the other company just patented 'wireless e-mail' instead of a usable documented working prototype. I think what actually happened there was two companies trying to get into the same market, both trying to develop products, both patenting ideas on the way, and one being financially successful, the other not. Since they both had patents, it was inevitable that each company got into conflict with the other parents. However, since only one company was successful (better product, better marketing, better luck, whatever reason), the successful company was sued. If RIM had lost the fight to the market, _they_ would have sued and won 500 million.
By the way, this case showed that not even having valid patents for your own inventions can protect you, if someone else has a valid patent on the same invention.
Without patents, there is no point in spending tremendous time, money and effort creating something new because somebody else will steal it. Why bother studying for an university exam when you can simply copy from your neighbor? In large parts of the industry, the attitude is: Keep your bloody inventions. Nobody wants them. Do you think Apple had to _steal_ to come up with the idea to give away vouchers at a coffee shop? (Someone claims they have a patent on that). Do you think someone needs to _steal_ the idea that a teacher can send a message to a student? (That is covered by patents). Do you think eBay had to _steal_ to come up with the idea of a "Buy me now" button?
Software is protected by copyright. You can't steal someone else's software. And the things that are patented, they don't take time, money and effort to create. What takes time, money and effort is the implementation. And the sad trend today is: Come up with a little idea. Write it down in the vaguest terms possible and get a patent. Then wait for someone to turn up with a successful product, make sure your vaguely written patent matches something they've done, and sue.
If they're hiding other performance enhancing APIs this could really hurt them when people do cross platform benchmarks. For example, IF the Photoshop on Windows outperforms the Mac version because Adobe doesn't know about a secret API then people may lean towards Windows PCs. This is not _really_ about performance enhancements. The operating system has a new feature (since about 2002) that prevents applications from redrawing the screen more often than the display frequency - redrawing more often is just a waste of energy. For example, if I wrote code that lets you click on an icon and drag that icon around the screen, the icon will be redrawn only 60 times per second, no matter how fast your graphics card is. Redrawing it 2000 times per second would be pointless because you can't see it.
Now if I do something stupid: Instead of redrawing the icon to where the mouse cursor is, I move it one pixel closer to the mouse cursor each time I redraw. Which is stupid. Now redrawing 2000 times per second would make it follow the cursor much quicker. And this new feature slows your computer down. But only because I wrote stupid code. Or if you copy a file, and you update a progress bar after every kilobyte of data copied, which is just as stupid. The file copying is suddenly limited by the speed of the graphics card, and with Apple's change done in 2002 it now copies 60K per second only, because the code is too stupid.
In very, very rare cases both Firefox and WebKit do that kind of stupid thing. What they both should really do is fix the stupid code, instead they both use a workaround to disable a very useful feature.
I guarantee you they are doing it out of laziness and convenience -- not maliciousness.
It probably goes something like this:
The guy who wrote the unpublished function is just down the hall, overhears the problem you are having and offers a suggestion. But the company doesn't want to support that function for the next ten years so they don't publish it. But it solves the problem so into Safari it goes. In this case, the situation is somewhat different: Safari developer says: "Safari slowed down because of something in WebKit". WebKit developer down the hall says: "No problem, follow the publicly available documentation and add these two lines to the plist file, and Safari will be quick." Safari developer says: "Fine, it works. But when I thought about it: There are these dozens of applications that use WebKit, and each one will slow down if they don't add these two lines of code". WebKit developer thinks about it. Goes down the hall, and asks the Quartz developers. And they tell him an undocumented method that will make WebKit fast for everyone who uses it (most help files are displayed using WebKit, for example), so everyone using WebKit is happy; that is Safari and dozens of other products.
Firefox can be made fast using just the same documented method. If the Firefox team created a library that they offer to other applications to use, they would have to tell them to use the same two lines of code. So the effect is not an unfair advantage of Safari over Firefox, it is Apple helping WebKit users who are too stupid to find the documented method to be fast.
If the only difference is the performance, then that's *exactly* what it means.
Try pulling your head out of Steve's ass long enough to make an objective assessment before you post next time. Either you didn't read TFA, or you didn't understand it (which is quite possible, because it is a performance trap that you need to be aware of).
MacOS X usually uses "display throttling": A very useful technique to safe power. If your monitor can only display 60 frames per second, then it is absolutely pointless to draw more than 60 fps, because nobody can ever see the frames in between. That's why MacOS X will only update the screen 60 times per second, unless you somehow tell it idfferently.
For most things, that is absolutely fine. In this case, someone tries to scroll a frame up one pixel at a time. Because of display throttling, this will scroll only 60 pixels per second. Without display throttling, it might scroll say 300 pixels per second. On the other hand, Firefox could produce exactly the same effect by scrolling five pixels at a time. When scrolling 300 times per second, the user can actually only see every fifth frame, so the display would be absolutely one hundred percent the same. So if Firefox wants to make that scrolling twice as fast as Safari, no problem, no undocumented APIs needed, just scroll 10 piexels at a time.
And remember that as the article said, the Firefox team found _one_ way to disable display throttling that is documented, and one that is undocumented. Both achieve the same thing. So what is the complaint? And one thing that is hard to judge: Has anyone asked a question on the Apple developer mailing lists, which would be a sensible thing to do? If you read through the comments to TFA, posting a question on the Carbon dev mailing list would have got the answer. People working on WebKit commented to the article, I don't think they would have kept anything secret if someone from FireFox had asked them.
I think it would severely hurt industry across the EU if the sale of Microsoft products were banned, especially since the EU has to deal with the rest of the world who for the most part use Microsoft products. It's just not possible for free/open source software to inter-operate effectively with Microsoft products at the moment, which was kind of the whole point of the anti-trust ruling. If Microsoft products were banned in the EU, that would be Microsoft's problem and nobody elses. Of course if that happened then FOSS software should better document their interfaces or risk a fine:-)
Banning MS products in Europe would be devastating to the world economy (and even worse for the European economy). The switching costs would be enormous, and then you have problems with communicating between MS-users outside Europe and non-MS-users in Europe. It wouldn't be devastating at all. Dell would ship gazillions of boxes with Linux. Apple would add a "Start" menu to MacOS X so that Windows users feel at home:-) And the MS-users outside Europe who feel they have problems communicating with non-MS-users in Europe would switch to OpenOffice.
What's the threshhold for being a monopoly. Just being the most popular isn't enough. Some make of car would be the most popular, but that doesn't mean they have a monopoly. If Apple and Linux continue to make strides on the desktop, could MS have their monopoly status revoked? At what point is MS no longer a monopoly? There is no simple rule, but two important aspects are: How difficult it is for a newcomer to get into the market, and what advantage you have just by the fact that you have a huge market share.
For example, Apple has a huge market share in the market of portable music players. However, when you decide which player to buy, it doesn't matter one bit what players everyone else is using. You can get music from your CDs to play on every player, you can buy music online for every player. You may not be able to copy music from your friends' iPods to your player, but that would be illegal anyway. So that weighs heavily against Apple having a monopoly.
On the other hand, when we talk about word processors, lots of people might send you documents written using a word processor that has high market share, and you would want a word processor that can read these documents. If each word processor could only read its own documents, then you would want the same word processor as everyone else. You would buy that word processor not because of its quality, but because of its market share. If I produce a better word processor, I can still not sell it, because I don't have a market share yet. That's why it is much more likely that a word processor can be a monopoly. Or an operating system.
Windows would lose its monopoly status if customers can make their purchase decision based on price and quality, without regarding the market power that Microsoft has. Let's say Apple tells PCWorld that they can't sell Macs anymore (I don't know if they sell them anyway). That would be a bit less profit for PCWorld, but they would have more shelf space for other products. Now let's say Microsoft tells Dell that they can't sell computers with Windows anymore. Dell would be bankrupt. That is monopoly power.
If you have a large Fairplay AAC collection you are stuck to one make of music player. You are not. Apple has done from day one what Microsoft would only do after getting a $1.3bn fine: Provided interoperability.
Exactly the same software that you use do download music with FairPlay DRM allows you to burn the music to CDs, from which you can re-import it either using the same software in MP3 format, or in one of several lossless formats. Or you can put that CD into a multitude of different computers, running software from a multitude of different manufacturers, that will let you re-import the music in any format imaginable.
If microsoft defies the EU and refuses to pay the fine, their executives in the EU would certainly be arrested... There are other possibilities. Just as an example, Dell owes Microsoft quite a bit of money every year. So after confiscating all the furniture in all Microsoft offices in Europe, the EU would then make a phone call to Dell: "All that money you owe to Microsoft, send that to the EU, please... ". When that happens, Dell will either pay or close business in Europe. If they close business in Europe, then HP gets the same phone call, and so on, until you can buy nothing but Macs and Linux machines in Europe.
I thought about that for a while when I read about some mapping company being sold for a few billion dollars.
The USA has a total of about four million miles of road. How would you go about mapping it all, and at what cost? Take a car, a driver and a passenger, the passenger having a notebook with GPS. And the notebook needs some pretty clever software. As the driver drives along, the passenger keeps track of everything that is going on - his job is to type in the name of the road, suitability for what kind of traffic, obstacles, and where you can turn. You'd probably want a separate input device for special functions, like road to the left, road to the right, or for "missed something" (the driver probably can't just stop anytime). So the software keeps building up a database, keeps track of things that are missing (if you typed in "there is a left turn here" then you'll have to follow that turn at some time).
With all overhead, you should be able to build a road map at about 10 miles per hour (less in New York, but more on country roads that stretch for miles). That is 400,000 hours. Lets say you can do 2000 hours a year, that is 200 cars driving around for a year. 400 people doing the work. If the job pays $60,000 a year, that is $24,000,000 in wages. You'd drive a total of say 12 million miles; at 100,000 miles per car that is 120 cars destroyed. Say $20,000 per car, that is $6 mil. $30 million, double it for everything I forgot, that is about $60 million to get complete road maps of the USA from scratch.
Personally I'm curious what proof that a file has been downloaded the judge would like to see in future cases. The judge would need more than that: Proof that a file was _illegally_ downloaded. There is another problem here for the RIAA. If they send out a private investigator to find evidence of illegal copying, and the private investigator copies a song from your hard drive using Kazaa or whatever, then this is _not_ an illegal copy. He was doing this on behalf of and with the permission of the copyright owner, so there was no copyright infringement.
Prosecution: "Your honour, the defendant repeatedly said in public that he was going to kill his wife, shoot her, cut her throat, poison her. What more evidence do you want that he murdered her?" Judge: "Maybe something like a dead body? His wife is sitting besides him, breathing quite normally, and I heard her snoring, so I won't find the defendant guilty".
Really? What about your fair-use right to make a backup? If you _try_ to sell it, then it cannot be a backup. Therefore, the copy that you made was already copyright infringement, without selling it.
On the other hand, if you open a market stall with 100 original CDs, a CD burner, and lots of empty CDRs, and offer to make copies for money, that is not copyright infringement until the moment when you actually make a copy. No customers, no copy made, no copyright infringement.
You just have to be different; even in the smallest way. Get past one of the primary claims, not the dependent ones as they don't count, and the patent doesn't hold. That's what Kodak thought when they developed a process for creating instant pictures that was entirely different from what Polaroid used, until Polaroid sued them and won $900 million.
Its not about taking or not. Its about size. A company worth billions suing 100,000s of people isn't cool. A mother getting charged 200k+$ to give to some rich guy with a porsche. I think there are two different things here. Big company suing 100,000s of people (actually, they don't. It's ten thousands, that is much less) could be Ok. Let's say the RIAA finds out that you downloaded 20 Britney Spears songs, and they demand that you pay one dollar each (about what you would have paid anyway if you had done it legally), and sue you for $3 each if you don't pay up, I think there wouldn't be too many complaints. And if this happens to ten thousand people, there would still be no complaint. The problem is that they don't ask for $1 or $3 per song, but for $750 to $150,000 which is just a very unreasonable amount.
A company with a sense of fair play. By trying to patent their specific gestures, thus locking everyone else out, Apple IS patent trolling, imho. First, you don't have any idea whether or not Apple tries to lock out anyone. Sure, Apple will ask for license fees, but there is no indication whatsoever that Apple would refuse to license this patent. But second and more important, I think you have a very wrong understanding of what is meant by "patent troll".
There are three main reasons why things get patented: By inventors (individuals and companies) who try to create valuable inventions, which can then be sold to someone who is interested in it. By companies, who collect patents as a defence against other companies (if company A ever sues company B for patent infringement, then B examines their patent portfolio for infringements of A, and they are bound to find something), and the third category is patent trolls; companies who never produce anything of any use to anyone, but get patents with the sole purpose of blackmailing others.
What Apple is trying to patent here is mostly intended for use by Apple, and that by definition means Apple is not a patent troll. What a patent troll would try to do is look at these gestures, describe the whole thing in the most impenetrable way possible so that no patent examiner figures out that it describes what an iPhone already does, get a patent, and sue Apple.
Yes but is it intellectual property? I mean is "the pinch" to zoom in/out is intellectual property? Or is this just the natural progression of human/machine interface. I would guess most engineers or engineering groups when given a flat surface as a machine input would naturally gravitate towards such gestures within the first day or week. The question is: Is it obvious? But not obvious now, when you've read the patent, but obvious before you heard about the patent or saw an implementation by Apple.
forsooth, I as well have a stack of guns, and numerous bad days. The reason i don't shoot people is because i'd rather have a bad day where i live, Vs. a bad day in a federal prison, which comes with a lot more surprise butsecks in the showers. not down with that, so i don't shoot people. Are you serious? The reason why you don't shoot people is that you don't want to go to prison?
If that is the only reason then you are not human and should be shot immediately.
ISTM that the BBC should cohost servers at the big ISPs' data centres. Users would stream data from the servers at their ISP. Network traffic from a server in the data centre to the same ISP's customers should be really cheap (free?) as there's no 'Internet' traffic, so it wouldn't be an issue. The only network traffic outside the ISP would be for the cohosted servers to get the data from the BBC. The blog that was linked to in the article explains why this is pointless.
Most of the actual cost for British ISPs is the cost of BT Wholesale, which costs about £17,000 per month for 155 MBit/second capacity _to end users_. That works out at about £17,000 for around 30,000 GB data delivered, or about 55 pence per GB. That is where the cost is, and that wouldn't be affected by co-hosting content. But for the transfer from BBC to ISP, there is already a direct connection which is a lot, lot cheaper so there would be no significant savings.
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Both of these factors are not there with software. Nobody writes down one million little C functions and then picks out the one that works. Your comparison with h.264 doesn't cut it either. h.264 contains an awful lot of work, and the people creating it did an excellent job. However, none of that should be patentable. The _ideas_ in h.264 are all quite straightforward and simple, and _ideas_ are what gets patented. The real hard work that gives h.264 its value cannot be patented. And as we have seen with MP3, you combine all these ideas, put all the work in, cover it with about 200 patents, and ten years later some troll comes crawling out of the woodwork with two patents and wants hundreds of millions.
That was an extremely annoying case. A patent troll being awarded much more than ten times the money for two measly patents that the MP3 people got for licensing a package of 200 patents.
The way things are going now, Atkinson would have a patent on restricting drawing operations to an arbitrary area, which would include clipping, alpha blending, flood fill, everything. With a good patent lawyer, Bill Atkinson would have a complete stranglehold on the whole industry.
By the way, this case showed that not even having valid patents for your own inventions can protect you, if someone else has a valid patent on the same invention.
Software is protected by copyright. You can't steal someone else's software. And the things that are patented, they don't take time, money and effort to create. What takes time, money and effort is the implementation. And the sad trend today is: Come up with a little idea. Write it down in the vaguest terms possible and get a patent. Then wait for someone to turn up with a successful product, make sure your vaguely written patent matches something they've done, and sue.
Now if I do something stupid: Instead of redrawing the icon to where the mouse cursor is, I move it one pixel closer to the mouse cursor each time I redraw. Which is stupid. Now redrawing 2000 times per second would make it follow the cursor much quicker. And this new feature slows your computer down. But only because I wrote stupid code. Or if you copy a file, and you update a progress bar after every kilobyte of data copied, which is just as stupid. The file copying is suddenly limited by the speed of the graphics card, and with Apple's change done in 2002 it now copies 60K per second only, because the code is too stupid.
In very, very rare cases both Firefox and WebKit do that kind of stupid thing. What they both should really do is fix the stupid code, instead they both use a workaround to disable a very useful feature.
It probably goes something like this:
The guy who wrote the unpublished function is just down the hall, overhears the problem you are having and offers a suggestion. But the company doesn't want to support that function for the next ten years so they don't publish it. But it solves the problem so into Safari it goes. In this case, the situation is somewhat different: Safari developer says: "Safari slowed down because of something in WebKit". WebKit developer down the hall says: "No problem, follow the publicly available documentation and add these two lines to the plist file, and Safari will be quick." Safari developer says: "Fine, it works. But when I thought about it: There are these dozens of applications that use WebKit, and each one will slow down if they don't add these two lines of code". WebKit developer thinks about it. Goes down the hall, and asks the Quartz developers. And they tell him an undocumented method that will make WebKit fast for everyone who uses it (most help files are displayed using WebKit, for example), so everyone using WebKit is happy; that is Safari and dozens of other products.
Firefox can be made fast using just the same documented method. If the Firefox team created a library that they offer to other applications to use, they would have to tell them to use the same two lines of code. So the effect is not an unfair advantage of Safari over Firefox, it is Apple helping WebKit users who are too stupid to find the documented method to be fast.
Try pulling your head out of Steve's ass long enough to make an objective assessment before you post next time. Either you didn't read TFA, or you didn't understand it (which is quite possible, because it is a performance trap that you need to be aware of).
MacOS X usually uses "display throttling": A very useful technique to safe power. If your monitor can only display 60 frames per second, then it is absolutely pointless to draw more than 60 fps, because nobody can ever see the frames in between. That's why MacOS X will only update the screen 60 times per second, unless you somehow tell it idfferently.
For most things, that is absolutely fine. In this case, someone tries to scroll a frame up one pixel at a time. Because of display throttling, this will scroll only 60 pixels per second. Without display throttling, it might scroll say 300 pixels per second. On the other hand, Firefox could produce exactly the same effect by scrolling five pixels at a time. When scrolling 300 times per second, the user can actually only see every fifth frame, so the display would be absolutely one hundred percent the same. So if Firefox wants to make that scrolling twice as fast as Safari, no problem, no undocumented APIs needed, just scroll 10 piexels at a time.
And remember that as the article said, the Firefox team found _one_ way to disable display throttling that is documented, and one that is undocumented. Both achieve the same thing. So what is the complaint? And one thing that is hard to judge: Has anyone asked a question on the Apple developer mailing lists, which would be a sensible thing to do? If you read through the comments to TFA, posting a question on the Carbon dev mailing list would have got the answer. People working on WebKit commented to the article, I don't think they would have kept anything secret if someone from FireFox had asked them.
For example, Apple has a huge market share in the market of portable music players. However, when you decide which player to buy, it doesn't matter one bit what players everyone else is using. You can get music from your CDs to play on every player, you can buy music online for every player. You may not be able to copy music from your friends' iPods to your player, but that would be illegal anyway. So that weighs heavily against Apple having a monopoly.
On the other hand, when we talk about word processors, lots of people might send you documents written using a word processor that has high market share, and you would want a word processor that can read these documents. If each word processor could only read its own documents, then you would want the same word processor as everyone else. You would buy that word processor not because of its quality, but because of its market share. If I produce a better word processor, I can still not sell it, because I don't have a market share yet. That's why it is much more likely that a word processor can be a monopoly. Or an operating system.
Windows would lose its monopoly status if customers can make their purchase decision based on price and quality, without regarding the market power that Microsoft has. Let's say Apple tells PCWorld that they can't sell Macs anymore (I don't know if they sell them anyway). That would be a bit less profit for PCWorld, but they would have more shelf space for other products. Now let's say Microsoft tells Dell that they can't sell computers with Windows anymore. Dell would be bankrupt. That is monopoly power.
Exactly the same software that you use do download music with FairPlay DRM allows you to burn the music to CDs, from which you can re-import it either using the same software in MP3 format, or in one of several lossless formats. Or you can put that CD into a multitude of different computers, running software from a multitude of different manufacturers, that will let you re-import the music in any format imaginable.
I thought about that for a while when I read about some mapping company being sold for a few billion dollars.
The USA has a total of about four million miles of road. How would you go about mapping it all, and at what cost? Take a car, a driver and a passenger, the passenger having a notebook with GPS. And the notebook needs some pretty clever software. As the driver drives along, the passenger keeps track of everything that is going on - his job is to type in the name of the road, suitability for what kind of traffic, obstacles, and where you can turn. You'd probably want a separate input device for special functions, like road to the left, road to the right, or for "missed something" (the driver probably can't just stop anytime). So the software keeps building up a database, keeps track of things that are missing (if you typed in "there is a left turn here" then you'll have to follow that turn at some time).
With all overhead, you should be able to build a road map at about 10 miles per hour (less in New York, but more on country roads that stretch for miles). That is 400,000 hours. Lets say you can do 2000 hours a year, that is 200 cars driving around for a year. 400 people doing the work. If the job pays $60,000 a year, that is $24,000,000 in wages. You'd drive a total of say 12 million miles; at 100,000 miles per car that is 120 cars destroyed. Say $20,000 per car, that is $6 mil. $30 million, double it for everything I forgot, that is about $60 million to get complete road maps of the USA from scratch.
Prosecution: "Your honour, the defendant repeatedly said in public that he was going to kill his wife, shoot her, cut her throat, poison her. What more evidence do you want that he murdered her?" Judge: "Maybe something like a dead body? His wife is sitting besides him, breathing quite normally, and I heard her snoring, so I won't find the defendant guilty".
On the other hand, if you open a market stall with 100 original CDs, a CD burner, and lots of empty CDRs, and offer to make copies for money, that is not copyright infringement until the moment when you actually make a copy. No customers, no copy made, no copyright infringement.
There are three main reasons why things get patented: By inventors (individuals and companies) who try to create valuable inventions, which can then be sold to someone who is interested in it. By companies, who collect patents as a defence against other companies (if company A ever sues company B for patent infringement, then B examines their patent portfolio for infringements of A, and they are bound to find something), and the third category is patent trolls; companies who never produce anything of any use to anyone, but get patents with the sole purpose of blackmailing others.
What Apple is trying to patent here is mostly intended for use by Apple, and that by definition means Apple is not a patent troll. What a patent troll would try to do is look at these gestures, describe the whole thing in the most impenetrable way possible so that no patent examiner figures out that it describes what an iPhone already does, get a patent, and sue Apple.
If that is the only reason then you are not human and should be shot immediately.
Most of the actual cost for British ISPs is the cost of BT Wholesale, which costs about £17,000 per month for 155 MBit/second capacity _to end users_. That works out at about £17,000 for around 30,000 GB data delivered, or about 55 pence per GB. That is where the cost is, and that wouldn't be affected by co-hosting content. But for the transfer from BBC to ISP, there is already a direct connection which is a lot, lot cheaper so there would be no significant savings.