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Eolas To Sue Apple, Google, and 21 Others 252

vinodis and several other readers sent along the news that Eolas is suing 23 companies including Apple and Google for patent infringement. The company won $585M from Microsoft in a drawn-out, 9-year battle that the companies settled in 2007; in the course of it the USPTO upheld the "906" patent several times. Now, Eolas is also in possession of a newly-issued patent that they claim covers the use of any browser plugin with AJAX. Let's see how far this lawsuit gets before the Supreme Court plays its wildcard in the Bilski case, which we have been discussing for a while now.

Comment Re:What about the native americans? (Score 1) 675

Not entirely, as the empirical requirement discounts personal experience. For example, the only way I know that I am a conscious entity is because I experience it. There's no empirical test for consciousness, and as a result the only way I "know" that people around me experience it like I do is implication. They seem to behave and respond in the same way I do, therefore I assume they are experiencing the same thing.

Say I observe something unexpected, like I meet an alien. The alien tells me he's the only one here, and they won't be back because earth sucks and they hate it. The he leaves. Now I *know* this happened because I experienced it, but if I told you about it you'd think I was crazy. (Just as an aside - I've never really met any aliens) So while my personal experiences can't be used to prove something to you, they are how I acertain the truthfulness of most things I know. The same is true of everyone. Things that don't correlate with our personal experience, we tend to disregard. Science is a useful way of applying some rules that allow us to show that something we think is true works most/all of the time, but it doesn't apply to the full spectrum of human experience (eg: consciousness example above) and it ultimately can't identify something to be the truth - just the best model based on our current ability to observe. The Ptolemaic System is a classic example of that.

So what am I saying? I'm saying that religion (or more appropriately, faith) is a personal thing, is not untrue simply because it doesn't fit within natural science, and while you're free to select your own belief system you shouldn't belittle others for having their own. There's an infinate number of absurdities out there, which includes the one you believe, and at least one of them will be true.

Feed Hollywood Still Hasn't Figured Out That You Can't Win At The Takedown Whack-A-Mo (techdirt.com)

Brian Deagon writes in to point us to an article he's written up for Investor's Business Daily about Hollywood's latest attempts to deal with movies being available for unauthorized download at various online sites. Basically, the gist of the article is that movie studios are now starting to face what the recording industry faced a few years back. What's amazing though, is that they don't seem to have learned a single lesson from what happened back then. Specifically, they haven't realized that every time you smack down one site that's sharing videos, you've pretty much guaranteed that five others will pop up -- and many of them will be harder to track and harder to shut down than the original sites. If anything, that's the lesson that came out of the recording industry's attack on Napster -- but apparently the movie industry is going to have to discover that on its own as well. The article quotes various consultants and industry analysts suggesting that Hollywood needs to learn to embrace these trends, but so far, it seems like all their doing is focusing so much on anti-piracy efforts that it makes it impossible to actually deliver a good product to customers.

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