The pending patents are for hardware, not software. They cannot apply to a box of software people purchase.
Okay, everyone seems to be very ignorant here, and the article isn't explaining this, so I guess I have to give a damn history lesson:
The US government requires that you put notification of patent use on things you sell. (Either your own patent, or something you've licensed from someone else.)
That is fine for issued patents, but what about pending patents? Remember, you can use something for up to a year before filing a patent on it, and you do have some amount of protection when patents are pending.
Ergo, you should have to put pending patent notifications, so people can look those up, too, and not waste their time building something that's going to be in violation of a patent in two months.
Well, the problem then arose. You see, actual patents are easy to look up. Patent lawyers could have copies of the entire set, you could go to a law courthouse in state capital, etc.
Pending patents, OTOH, are real bitch to find. Only the patent office has those. So some enterprising people who couldn't, or didn't bother, to get patents, just went around putting 'patent pending' on everything, resulting in other people unable to figure out what, exactly, was patented. Or they could keep resubmitted a rejected patent, and it remain 'pending'.
Hence, at some point, falsely claiming to have patents pending, or actually having one pending, but unrelated to what you put it on, was made criminal and you can be fined for it.
Those laws don't really make any sense anymore, but are still there.
No one is attempting to enforce any patents, no one is attempting to strike down any patents.
Yet. There are three ways it can play out:
>>>But seriously where does this end? Will we see the death of Microsoft's
Possibly but Microsoft will still win:
- EMBRACE (amazon's standard)
- EXTEND (azw with new features which will be MS proprietary & only readable from Windows)
- EXTINGUISH (because amazon kindles will no longer be able to read the new azw2 format that MS now controls, people will buy the Microsoft Zune Reader instead - Kindles will disappear)
If you don't know what I'm talking about just read wikipedia's article about Microsoft during the 1990s.
TFA isn't particularly enlightning, but the news is indeed slashdot worthy but raises many questions.
While not currently aimed at solar panel technology
Why not?
their research has uncovered a way to turn optical radiation into electrical current that could lead to self-powering molecular circuits
Battery-free gizmos? It doesn't say, but it seems like the photons wouldn't have to be optical wavelengths. However, how much current does this tech produce? "we could conceivably manufacture a 1A, 1V sample the diameter of a human hair and an inch long"
WOW, that's a lot of power from a tinty surface. 1 amp at one volt is one watt; a device using this tech the size of a phone battery could run an air conditioner if there were any way to keep the thing from melting.
At the end of TFA it links the study.
Well, I'd put it this way. The Nazis, intellectually speaking, weren't anything.
Tyrannies of that type use ideology, but aren't about ideology. Trying to take their "ideologies" seriously as ideologies only leads to confusion, because they weren't interested in consistency, much less truth. They used language purely for its utility.
Take their idea of "Jewish science". You can't take that notion seriously, because it's all a fantasy they cooked up to target people they were afraid of. So they just lump them in together. It's telling that Himmler wanted to label Heisenberg as a "White Jew". "Jew" doesn't mean "person of historically Jewish descent" or "person who adheres to the Jewish law". It's just the verbal equivalent of a punch in the face.
The same goes for Hitler's views about atheists. Atheists tend to be free thinkers, and therefore likely to oppose the regime. So you take two despised groups and you manufacture a bigger "threat" by glomming them together.
Scapegoating is so critical to tyranny that where there aren't ready made hatreds, the tyrant invents groups to be hated. Stalin invented the "kulik", or rich peasant, as the scapegoat for his failed agricultural policies. They kuliks weren't rich by any means, but if your family were starving and your neighbor's had food, that gave you a satisfying, concrete target for your rage right within reach.
As far as the "Christianity" is concerned, it's about as meaningful as their notion of "Jew". If they'd been living in a predominantly Buddhist society, they'd be filling their propaganda with Buddhist trappings. If they'd been living in a Jewish society, then they'd avail themselves of Jewish symbols and scapegoat Christians and Muslims.
You can connect what the tyrant wants to what he says in this way: The tyrant wants power. To obtain and hold onto it, he needs a compliant people. To make the people compliant, he arouses fear, anger and hatred in them. To arouse those emotions he uses words, not to tell people anything, but to goad them.
Hatred and fear are for the politician like the nose ring a farmer puts on a bull. It allows him to safely lead a big, dumb dangerous animal where he wants it to go. This works for both right wing tyrants and left wing tyrants like Stalin. Remember that next time you are tempted to latch on to some popular political hatred.
Just remove the dialer and you're set, Google! You're the paragon of innovation, you'll find a way to, you know, call people without actually dialling them!
Of course, I haven't read TFA, but is that possible? I mean, have Google not integrated the app into the normal contacts list in any way? That would seem to be the best thing, if you could add a 'Google Voice' field to the contact database with the calling details, then just select that 'address' from the list when you want to call somebody via GV and have the call automatically routed through the 'Google Voice' caller.. does Apple have an API that would support all that?
It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one. -- Phil White
