That's very interesting. My emulators aren't game emulators, or at least, not per se -- they're machine emulators. For example, one is an emulation of a 1970's era 6809 system with disk operating system and so on. Only one of the companies involved was still in business at the time I wrote the emulator, and I do have permission from them to include their software. It has everything from assemblers to c compilers to basic to forth to whatever you can think of from that era, pretty much.

Still, it's a big pushup, for a small potential audience, to go thru with a chance Apple will say "no." And it isn't like I don't have other things on my plate, either.

Just got a nice thank you from the company, too. :)

No, I stuck it on the page the article linked to as well right after I posted it here.

What's annoying to me is you can't run emulators. I'd port a couple I've written ASAP if you could. Apple's just a wee bit too paranoid there if you ask me. Which, of course, you didn't. :)

...and if you're on a carousel or doing a spin on ice skates, all bets are off. Damn thing *really* gets difficult to hold.

I wrote, and my company shipped, a free icon/text configurable speech generation system for the Amiga that does essentially what the iPad app in question here does at least two years before the date of the patent in question (the complaint dates the patents 1995 and 1997 -- Talkboard hails from 1993 and before, though I can only document it to 1993 -- that's the copyright date in the archive.) The application is called "Talkboard" and is still available from our company's historical archive.

Talkboard presented a layered interface pretty much just like the one in the iPad app, It used a synthesized voice and provided for unusual phonetic construction so as to obtain the best clarity (the Amiga's text-to-speech could be.... quirky.) You could load and save phrase banks, and one phrase bank could partially replace another or completely replace another. Single words or short phrases or entire complex sentences could be stored for 1-click or multiple click retrieval. The phrase could be represented by any shorthand that was convenient. It came with presets, but was really intended to be customized by the end user - what a kid has to say and an adult has to say tend to not be the same things in most cases. It could also be driven from ARexx, a system-wide scripting facility, and could dynamically change definitions based upon whatever criteria you needed it to.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing unique, new or even interesting in the two patent claims.

Hopefully that's of use to the EFF or the defending party.

And you're surprised that your family, friends and people who know and care about you are to be found on the site with real names and not the one with pseudonyms?

What? Wait, did I say I was surprised by that, or imply it? [checks] No, I didn't say, or imply, any such thing.

Perhaps you'd like to try again. Many people misremember what they're responding to from time to time.

No, I'm not telling you that isn't me. The way you can tell I wasn't telling you that was -- wait for it -- I didn't tell you that.

What I told you, and will repeat here, is that the facts you quoted are significantly wrong. Looking at the record you refer to rather than at your post, the date is wrong - by years; the claim of conviction is flat-out incorrect; the stated offense is also wrong, as was your recasting of it.

Your misuse of bad data, and your incorrect recasting of it, caused your post to rise above its original lame attempt to derail my post and brought it well into proving my exact point in the GP.

Facebook's real name policy makes it a much more pleasant place to hang out than here.

No doubt. The classic "on the Intertubez, every Anon. Coward is superman." And there are other benefits - particularly commercial ones for Facebook itself, and the concomitant benefit for its customers, the companies who mine your information in order to optimize sales. However, these benefits do not, in my estimation, outweigh the harm that can be done by these same policies as I outlined above.

Now if there was a tech discussion site which had real names and a proper friend/ignore mechanism, that would beat Slashdot hands down.

Would it? I've seen quite a few technical revelations here that would not have been made in a non-anonymous context. I guess I have to go with, I don't actually need to know your name. In fact, if you're actually a friend of mine, or family, I probably already know your name. It's Facebook that wants/needs to know your name. And Google. Since you appear to be comfortable with that, I certainly respect your position -- but it really doesn't affect mine.

But you are "spoilt" for Facebook, where everyone else is... aren't you. And this is the problem. There is considerably less benefit to engaging in a discussion on a site where there are just a few people, none of whom you know or really care about you, as compared to where your family, friends, job, local government, and a lot of sites comment sections now reside, isn't there?

Don't you think it's at least a little disingenuous to suggest that having a discussion on, say, Kuro5hin.org, has serious parity with the same discussion, but as it would take place on Facebook?