Posts by Marcus Aurelius
359 posts • joined Thursday 10th September 2009 14:57 GMT
Re: One thing about the US judicial system -
Judge Koh is not particularly patent friendly.
However, I get the impression she's been runover by a legal bus by this case. She seemed at various points to want both Samsung and Apple to settle. Also she didn't order an injunction against some Samsung products till her opinion was overruled by a higher court.
Simples
Anyone who licenses SEPs may not levy a patent infringement claim against any company which is the holder of a Standards Essential Patent.
GCHQ on CV
Most organisations, including secure organisations, will confirm that you worked there for the period specified, and some may go even further and state that your work performance was satisfactory.
Obviously they won't divulge any details of what you worked on, and your CV had better not state anything that may be covered by the Official Secrets Act......
Space Debris?
High speed balloons and fast lumps of debris which happen to be orbiting around are surely likely to be a problem, n'est pas?
Umm.. isn't he Australian citizen? Surely the US would need to approach Australia for extradition to US.....
Incorrect, part of the European Arrest Warrant procedure is that permission to extradite to a third country from the country that issued the warrant (Sweden) must be granted by the country that he/she was extradited from (the UK)
Not forgetting
Make it so, Number One.
Judges unlikely to overturn 2 juries.
If a second jury comes out with similar figures, a judge is unlikely to overrule it.
I don't think there's a case where a judge has cut down a damages award after a retrial. I can only think of the Jammie Thomas case where successive judges have pruned awards on matters of law.
Posted in Samsung's Galaxy Tab 7.7 gets aired
Hey stooopid!
The small print says *scaled* 1080p videos at 30fps..
Oracle have little to lose
By going for a retrial - as one presumes SAP will be re-admitting criminal offences before a US jury, and therefore Oracle will be getting at least what the judge thinks in any event. Gambling a few million for a much larger return is good odds.
I can outline Oracles closing speech now:
Ladies and Gentlemen, SAP thinks that they should only have to pay a nominal amount for their systematic grand theft. I hope you the jury show these scumbags that theft is never profitable and stick it to them for the $1.7B that our expert recommends, and not the pissy $400mill that their expert thinks they should get away with. You complain that companies who steal get away with it, now is your chance to make it right....
Ok here goes.
At least this pad has error logging.
Was the version of iOS on this model a branch or root release?
Posted in RAM prices set to 'free fall'
I won't mention
How much I paid for the extra RAM to upgrade my Acorn Atom to a whopping 13k (extra 1k achieved by some nifty soldering....)
The problem is
with depositing your $1 in a financial institution is that the institution or its descendants have to survive for 2,147 years.
Can anyone name a bank founded in the first century BC or before that is still operating today?
No? Anyone? Medici? Bueller?
Posted in UK cops charge alleged Anonymous hacker
And the moral of the story is
If you're going to fire a weapon at someone, make sure that someone else can be blamed and you have plausible deniability......
muhahahaha
Danger Will Robinson
Since the one thing that the Dutch court ruled on in favour of Apple was that Android 2.3 infringes on their patent, won't they have to upgrade to Honeycomb before they can put it in the UK...
just askin....
Drug quality
May be an issue in some countries, but it wouldn't be beyond the wit and wisdom of mankind for the US to recognise countries which have acceptable standards. Maybe some African and East Asian countries are off the list, but I'd expect that most of Europe and *cough* Canada would have acceptable drug control regimes....
Novels
...are valid patent stoppers, so the Enders game reference may be valid
e.g. Waterbeds and Screen Savers: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
The future baby, the future!!
The only good thing about the OuchPad was WebOS. Why ruin that with Android?
Android is hardly a perfectly reasonable operating system, and unlike WebOS has a future as others have pointed out. If HP is getting out of WebOS who is going to release apps for it, fix bugs etc etc.
25 mins is enough
..why do you need to go on for hours?
Golfers buggies take long pauses between short drives in order to hit the balls, so they're not going at it continuously for 4 hours....
I could go on, but Sarah Bee isn't around anymore to make a snarky comment about the innuendo... :-(
Yes but
Google already released their own phone, so spending 13B to fabricate some more would be waste of money perhaps. IIRC correctly Motorolas cellphone division lost money over the last few years, so I hope that Larry and Sergei do have a vision of where this purchase is going to go in the future
The patents probably have much wider scope than just the current cellphone squabbles though. There is Googles WebM technology that might be made safer by having their own patent armoury.
Hedy Lamarr
Requested a patent circa 1942, so it would have expired in 1962, well before mobile phones hit the road.
Of course, she should've created the MOASP (Mother Of All Submarine Patents) and played the patent office so it only issued 30 years later, when she'd really stand a chance of making money....
Wasting police time
The message was posted at a time when every man and his dog were using social networks and emails to organise the riots, so I don't really regard the sentences as unfair. The fact that coppers turned up as a result of his actions shows that significant police effort had to be diverted at a time when every force was trying to send every policeman able to stand upright to deal with the problems in the major cities is a clear indication of the reason for the severity of the sentence.
"I f**king hate Cheshire police" and similar pages don't come into it; they're expressions of opinion, not incitement to violence.
Florian knows how many beans make five??
Two plus two...
@Steven Roper
While ignorance of the law is no excuse, the fact that the BBC is a professional media organisation should mean it has a duty of care to respect copyrights, and penalties against a world spanning organisation should be at a level to force compliance.
I'm not sure that Aus$250,000 is the right level (whatever that is in real money), but it should certainly be at a level that buys more than a couple of nights out to discourage casual use.
This is a diversion from me, as I'm normally arguing that the duration of copyright is far too long. But I've no objection to 20 or 30 years as incentive to get material into the public domain.
@thomas4:rioting in Scotland because
That's because they sent all their police to London!
MySpace
I suspect that whilst they've posted a loss over the book value of MySpace and the actual value he obtained for it, I suspect that over the years MySpace has garnered enough money to earn its keep, even as its market share was declining.
Delayed ignition
Why not simply drop Vulture 2 off the balloon on command. Your balloon will float up, Vulture 2 will drop a sufficient distance to clear the balloon and then fire its motor, and you can use the control surfaces to get Vulture 2 flying at the right attitude....
If you drop it off the balloon, you don't need a large distance between balloon and payload, and you don't need a counterweight.
Now about the choice of helium over hydrogen.....
Quite subtle cunning plan
He's not denying someone hacked a phone, just that he was compliant with the law in not publishing a story which he knew was obtained from phone hacking.
It appears that a common news industry trick would be to get the information through phone hacking, then tell the victim that they knew what had happened, and "invite" them to give their side of the story. Of course, once the victim told everything to the reporter they didn't need the illegally obtained details any more as they had corroboration of the story right out of the horses mouth, and could therefore publish away.....
Something about the whole episode
..seems very fishy.
Talking of food, she does seem tasty too, anyone know how to get a date with her?
Wireless back haul
Why do you need a wired back haul?
Given the propensity for most office buildings to have an artificial ceiling, you could quite happily have a network in the roof operating over light links
In favour of hydrogen
If hydrogen explodes, it explodes upwards. Unless you plan to be standing on top of the balloon when it explodes, you have no problem.
Hydrogen is mucho cheaper
In addition, if you were really clever, you could have the hydrogen gradually empty from the balloon into the rocket tank with rising altitude and use if extra flight time.
Water shouldn't be square
Has strangely square shaped corners on their canals. If it were really able to do atom level accuracy, I'd expect my rivers and lakes to have round corners.
Hindenburg
IIRC, it wasn't the hydrogen so much as the flammable skin and other materials which made the aircraft crispy. Hydrogen burns and goes upwards rapidly
Incidentally the biggest airship disaster wasn't the Hindenburg; it was the Akron, a helium filled vessel....
Thanks for this article
You reminded me to cancel my Virgin account
Did Bart get you to write that??
'Steal our headlines and you steal arseholes'
Posted in MPs slam government's 'obscene' IT spend
£3,500
I'm betting this is the cost for a PC configured with the software that $CivilServant needs to get on with their job, not simply the cost of a PC in a similar state to that of one you would order from Dell or pick up in Tesco
Simples
Strap on some thrusters and send it on its way to a Mars orbit.
I grant it may take a few years to get there and as a result of its travel may need some repairs by the first crew to arrive.
However, by the time we have the technology to get there, at least we'd have a basic space station to dock at prior to descent to the surface.
Plan
Mass killing of the unemployed.
I thought that was often the whole point of 19th century armies; put your surplus odds and sods in the army/ navy and send them off to fight a foreign war, and reward the (very) few who came back, preferably using your newly conquered territory as the reward.
Hmm, sounds like a plan; if we could get all the unemployed youth and over 60s into the Territorial Army and send them to Afghanistan maybe we would be on to something here...
@YACC
IIRC, the Himalayas are going up, not down, so you'll have to wait more than a few years
@matt
We're in agreement that the charge should be based on the damage done, but the US seems to want to replace the clapped out old banger that was damaged with a brand new Ferrari.
That wouldn't work in any claim for damages and it shouldn't work here either
The US protesteth too much
Whilst an argument can be made that the guy should pay for the cost of fixing any damage he caused to systems, the cost of "putting things completely right" is something that should be born by the organisation.
Its a cost they should have incurred before the incident, and should be incurring on an ongoing basis in any event; NASA is a organisation which has information of economic and military value and its only reasonable to expect the information on its systems to be kept secure.
I'd suspect a charge of about $20,000 would be much more appropriate to conduct an audit of the affected systems and repair any damage caused. $200k is one nought too many and the US claim is two zeros too many.
I have 6"
Everyone accuses me of taking half measures
Am I the only one with some sympathy?
Yes, but for example, he would have needed a warrant to search News International and get all their emails etc., and at the time I doubt he had enough evidence to show reasonable cause to search and disrupt such a large politically charged target.
Quite honestly, I suspect he had better things to do than have half the Met wading through emails. Like keeping policemen on the street reducing violent crime maybe
One thing this case will do
Is that the Assange case will be a test of how far the EAW can go, and the level of evidence that is required to extradite someone.
There will probably be debate after the case is heard as to whether we are comfortable with the result.
Why crazy??
All CEOs get caught saying some strange things, but I would suspect that Page and Brin are less versed where politics and business merge. That was one of the reasons why Schmidt was appointed in the first place; its a given that, despite his Novell/ Apple history, he is less versed in the technology and probably is not a visionary like Page and Brin, but I'm sure his real world experience is invaluable.
@Antione: You are doing it wrong.
You've indirectly stated the problem with human rights issues. It's how 100% of the population get treated that matters. The 1% who legitimately protest are the people who need protecting.
In any event if 99% of the people are happy with a government, then it should have no problems facing a challenge in free and fair elections, should it?
That's not to say the so called 'Free and Democratic' west does not have its issues.
Actually China has made giant strides and certainly has improved its treatment of individuals on the back of its material gains, and I agree that is not recognised enough, but that is not to say that the world outside should not continually push for more improvement.
I looked and my eyes hurt
Their website seems to have emerged from an anomaly wormhole to 20 years ago.
Maybe a better title
Pillar collapsing?
Fiat Lux
I would have thought the first tweet would have some more memorable wording; its a bit bland. How about:
"Fiat lux! The word of God now spreads as fast as light - I am pleased to announce the launch of news.va. I hope it will be Pope-ular!"
Any other suggestions?
Posted in MySpace sacks more
Myspace redux?
Having said how awful MySpace is currently, a good argument could be made for using it as a baseline to create a genuine rival to Facebook.
FaceBook obviously has issues and if MySpace converted itself into something with respect for the issues which Facebook fails on, then it could have a market space for itself.
