I think we need to cover what makes patents bad. One of the things that make software patents bad (only one of them) is the fact you can't be certain whether you infringe them, even when you have the patent right in front of you. This is due to ambiguities in the patent. You simply cannot know which way claim construction is going to go.

If you aim is not to infringe a patent, you must avoid the most broad interpretation the patent has, since you never know how that is going to be interpreted.

Back to our design patent. The bezel is clearly marked with a dotted line. To the best of my understanding, that means it is not a part of the patent. The same goes for the earphones jack location and the charging socket. Moving any of those around not will cause you to not infringe the patent. Probably. I think. To the best of my limited understanding.

Basilbrush is trying to claim that the aspect ratio, clearly part of the solid lines, is part of the patent. Just as clearly, however, Apple did not think so. That means that whether he (she?) is right or wrong is irrelevant. When you are trying to avoid infringement, you had !@$#%!@# better assume a different aspect ratio will not save you.

Which brings us back to the bezel. At trial, Apple has a clear interest to show the patent as being as narrow as possible, while still including whatever it is Samsung has done. Make the patent seem too broad, and the jury might think it is invalid. So it is entirely possible that Apple bringing up the bezel was a strategic move.

Of course, they are safe to bring it up as, at the point, they already knew what Samsung did and did not do. It is entirely possible^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlikely that, given other circumstances, Apple would have claimed that the bezel means nothing at all, but the color has to be different, or that the bezel and the color are both irrelevant, but having a logo would have changed everything. Apple's strategy during the trial is dictated by Samsung already past actions.

Discussing what a patent covers, however, pertains to future actions and future litigation. Combining all the different, often conflicting, ways to read this patent yields just one strategy to avoid infringement: don't use rounded corners.

So whether Basilbrush is right or not, the patent covers "hand held device with rounded corners" (the hand is marked with solid lines, so I think it is safe to say it is mandatory). Anything else is a risk.

Shachar

Then why did Apple think they had a chance to win? Why did the German judge, when confronted with Apple changing Samsung's tablet aspect ratio, not think they were falsifying evidence? Why didn't Samsung defense center around the aspect ratio?

It seems to me that a lot of people who know a lot more about the field than me (you haven't stated what your qualifications are, if any) do not agree with you.

Shachar

And I answer again:

In the most practical way. If you issue a device that has a different aspect ratio, you might still get sued (as Samsung has).

More generally, you need to be a patent lawyer in order to answer, in general, whether things like aspect ratio are part of the specific claims of a design patent. I am not a lawyer. Obviously, Apple's lawyers thought it is not.

If you know differently (maybe you are a patent lawyer), please do speak up. If not, please avoid re-asking the same question merely because you do not like the answer.

Shachar

In the practical way. Samsung were sued for violating this patent despite having a different aspect ratio. Obviously, Apple doesn't think the aspect ratio in any way limits the applicability of this patent.

The aspect ratio was so different that Apple felt the need to photoshop evidence to make the devices look more alike.

Shachar

Let me see.....

GP linked to the patent. The patent covers everything shown in the diagram that isn't excluded by means of being drawn in a dotted line. If you check the diagram, the only thing not dotted are the rounded corners and the curve on the back (which just means the "rounded corners" are 3D).

So, no. This design patent is solely about rounded corners.

Shachar

Windows, including the most up to date one, still have a 16 bit personality able to run DOS programs. This means there is something there that is able to catch int 21 and process it, as well as allow programs to direct interrupts.

While it is true that cmd.exe (as well as the black screen dumb terminal that it usually runs in) are not DOS, DOS is certainly still in there, somewhere.

Which is not to say that I think the "vulnerability" angle has any merit. Just that your statement isn't entirely true.

Shachar

Not necessarily.

In a study, patents were given placebo, and told what it was. They got specific instructions that these are just sugar pills, and that it doesn't really matter whether they take it or not. The pills were still as effective as placebo.

I am wondering why that research did not make more waves than it did, as it clearly solves placebo's greatest problem as treatment.

Shachar

As long as the research is valid and the conclusions correctly presented (which, in this case, they do not seem to have been), I don't care for the motive.

Shachar

How will stop voting improve the situation?

Shachar

A) The point under discussion was security on the way out, not on the way in. Since you were just passing through, perhaps airport security was given a heads up to look for something specific to your flight? You did say you were coming from Amsterdam, after all. Arriving into KL from Hong Kong, my flight had no additional screening, and immigration procedures into and out of Malaysia are the easiest I have ever dealt with in any country (you don't fill in any paperwork, they take it all off of your passport matched up with flight manifests). For reference, I am at about 1.8M air miles (not including all the free trips I took) and in the process of filling up my 4th extended passport (where they add an additional 24 pages). Regardless, concourse security at KLIA was the laxest I have ever experienced post-9/11 anywhere in the world I have traveled.

B) You must not have flown into KL International airport, there are zero mountains within 30 kilometers of the airport (and those are big hills, more than mountains) and zero mountains on any approach path that doesn't try to land at 90 degrees from the airport (typically an unhealthy approach to any runway). Or maybe you have a different concept of what is a mountain from me.

C) Those hard landings are not uncommon when pilots allow the ALS to land the plane with even mild wind shear present. Or poor pilots blame the ALS, at least.

D) Drug trafficking means possession with the intent to sell. Mere possession of small quantities of heroin or marijuana is rarely considered trafficking, even in Malaysia.

Since you can't do it anymore in reality, find a flight simulator that models the old Hong Kong airport runway approaches, or find YouTube videos that show airplanes passing at close to the same levels as high rise building while performing 40-60 degree turns to line up with the runway (there used to be a rooftop restaurant famous for plane watchers) on the top of mountains, then having to dive down rapidly to not overshoot the runway (a low fuel, passenger loaded 747 at 225 tonnes needs roughly 1675 meters of runway to land by the book IIRC, and the longest runway at Kai Tak was 1664 meters and those 747s were landing all day long), frequently while crabbing heavily to deal with heavy cross-winds. I can say I miss that experience... now. Ex-Navy pilots said it was the closest thing to trying to land a 747 on an aircraft carrier with a cross wind that they could imagine. Wikipedia has a good explanation of various approaches.

Even if it's legal to install the CA, it is almost certainly not legal to intercept the traffic (wiretapping laws etc).

So, probably illegal, but IANAL.

Shachar

The only problem with the thought of losing portions of the planes controls in stages, the first two or three would have had to have quickly knocked out the transponders, the pilots radio (separate from the transponders) and the backup radio (separate from the transponders and the primary radio) before affecting anything else on the plane that would have caused the pilots to message someone on the ground that bad things were happening. Transponders disappearing usually gets a call from someone on the ground, which the pilots would respond to if they could. Needing to switch to a backup radio will have the pilots letting someone on the ground know in short order. If you assume they lost electrical system power due to total engine failure (which would merit a fairly rapid SOS call as a result), that still wouldn't prevent the ram air turbine from generating the power needed to send a distress call.

It isn't unreasonable to start from an assumption of catastrophic failure of the airframe and start your search on that basis while investigating other possibilities in parallel. It could also be due to a pilot or co-pilot deciding they wanted to take the plane down, however, since the transponder can be disabled from the cockpit (Think Egypt Air MS990, though that was never declared officially to be a pilot suicide), but then the plane would have quickly shown up as a transponder-less blip on multiple radar systems, since that air space is quite well covered along the flight path and to both the south and west. To the north east, it should have been picked up at Con Son, unless it really was under control to head back south east towards Riau Islands. Chances are good, whatever direction it went, including straight down, either the Malaysian or Vietnamese govts. will eventually announce the radar tracks they watched it on, given that the last transponder point had the flight only ~250 km from the closest Malaysian airport (not to mention Malaysian Navy ships out on normal patrols) and about 1/2 of that from a Vietnamese naval base which it would have flown directly over if it had continued on path.

Hmm, just checked Google News for an update. Reported in the last 30 minutes, the Malaysian military is saying the plane appeared to turn back south according to radar.

Granted, it has been a while since I worked for the part of Motorola that became Freescale, but I am fairly certain there were rules against the maximum number of employees that could take any one flight. I think it was 2 for executives and 6 or 8 for regular employees. Situations like this, rare as they are, was the reason. I wonder if Freescale still has those rules and ignored them, or didn't copy them over. Any current employees have insight?

I hope the families receive meaningful information as to what and why this happened, and don't have to spend a year or longer wondering (at least for the what, why usually takes a lot longer with airline crashes).

The 777 is one of the safest commercial planes in the aviation history, with only one accident with fatalities prior to this. Having just flown on a 777 (Cathay Pacific) out of Kuala Lumpur less than 30 days ago, however, I will say that their airport security was very lax. When I set off the metal detector and was wanded, the security person stopped at the first thing that might have set it off (I had left a metal-bodied pen in my shirt pocket) and didn't go on to find I also forgot to take out my cell phone and earphones from a different pocket (cargo pants). That was just for entry to the main concourse, though. To actually get on the plane, Cathay Pacific required a secondary screening that was much more rigorous from what I observed of how they dealt with other people (I remembered to put away my pen and phone that time). Malaysia Air did not do a secondary screening for a domestic flight when I boarded in Sandakan a few days earlier, but the concourse screening was also more intensive.

No, that is not what everyone on slashdot are saying.

What we are saying is:

• Terrorism is extremely rare.
• People who brings a water bottle on board because they want to drink it are extremely common

So, to falsify the common slashdot knowledge, you'd have to show all of the following:

1. The plane was downed by a terrorist attack
2. The terrorists were not the passengers boarding with false passport (else traditional airport security was supposed to locate them),

3. and..

4. The terrorist were using some sophisticated water based bomb assembled on board, or smuggled stuff in their underwear.

Assuming 1 is true and the rest is false, pre-9/11 airport security was all it was supposed to take to prevent this plane from going down.

Shachar

Letsee here. The Kurzweil model is suggesting that we can get to smart machines by way of brute force. Not necessarily the only way, but one that's hard to argue against as it's just extending today's neural net simulators to faster hardware. Using the open source NEST model, a supercomputer in Japan, the K computer, simulated a second's worth of "brain" activity in 40 minutes. That was a network 1% the size of human brain. So you'd need at least 240,000 times the CPU power to do this at 100% in realtime. Except maybe a few more zeros, since growing a neural network isn't linear, even if you're able to split off subsection for different work, as the brain seems to do. Sometimes.

So 2029 is 15 years away. If we take the erroneous but popular idea that Moore's Law is both a real law and directly about CPU performance (neither of which is true), that's a doubling of performance every 18 months. So by 2029, we only have computers 1024x faster than today's. But by 2045, computers will be a million times faster, at least based on these bad assumptions. So maybe we have a supercomputer than can run a human brain sized neural net in realtime. That get us Skynet by brute force, but not Commander Data. That's another 20 years off.

Of course, I started low... anyone ran run NEST. But it's by far not the most aggressive model. IBM built a more efficient model, modeling a whole artificial brain the complexity of the human brain on a Blue Gene/Sequoia Q supercomputer. It ran 1053x slower than realtime.... which suggests a realtime version might be possible around 2029. IBM actually say it might be as early as 2023, as they're building chips that implement their "neurosynaptic cores" in hardware. The model has over 2 billion neurosynaptic cores, and it's very intentionally designed to be a brain, though not a strict emulation of a human brain. There are dozens of projects around the world doing similar things. One team in Europe has a realtime honeybee scale brain running, and hopes to have a rat scale brain done this year. Another team has a non-realtime model similar to a cat's brain... can hatz cheezeburger?

So it sure looks possible to have Skynet by 2029. Self-contained thinking mobile machines, probably not for a decade or two beyond. And that's assuming no technological roadblocks in scaling our hardware. But also no huge leap away from the brute force approach. And no hardware design help from IBM's realtime brain of 2023. But of course, it won't even graduate college before 2030, assuming a few upgrades along the way. And a few years after that, we may not even understand the improved brain it's getting us to build for it...