I don't agree.

No one is making you go to that specific college for 4 years. If you all of a sudden say in your last year of college, "this place sucks, they didn't teach me anything in the past 4 years!" you have absolutely no argument that you deserve your money back. You CHOSE to go to that college.

By your 2nd year, you are usually in at least a few upper level classes (300 and 400 level), so it is not like you can say "Well, I waited 4 years just to see how the upper level classes were, and they sucked". You would probably already know this by your 2nd year.

Furthermore, colleges are usually accredited. Not that that means much, but it means that the department at least went through some process that deems their coursework satisfactory.

Most colleges (at least my college) requires that you maintain some GPA (I think here it is 2.0?) otherwise you get put on probation and kicked out. So if you skipped class and did terrible on your exams, you would get kicked out pretty quickly.

Maybe I just have really weird standards (which might be the case), but I think it was really crappy of Gizmodo to release the name of the person who lost the phone. If Gray Powell gets fired from Apple (as far as I know, he hasn't yet), good luck finding a job with the "I lost a super important company prototype" stigma attached to your name...

I am not sure why anyone would consider this morally wrong? Is there something about the operation that I am not aware of? How are they defining "morally wrong"?

Notice that I didn't jump to a conclusion.

I said if X -> P.

My entire comment was a hypothetical scenario. I said If it gave them rights to object oriented systems, THEN .

Also, I did not base my entire post on the title. As I said in my other reply, I did not read the patents (because to be honest, I don't really care), however, I did look at the diagrams that were part of the patent application.

See: http://cache-04.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/03/500x_5519867wtmk.jpg

I am not a "new thing". I have been reading this site for years (before I was in college, so around 5 years?) but never felt the need to comment.

Look at this diagram (this is a different patent than the one I mentioned in my initial post): http://cache-04.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/03/500x_5519867wtmk.jpg

Cheers for this. You are right, I don't live or breathe patents (thank God), and I probably am interpreting it wrong. I really just looked at the diagrams and the descriptions, and although they seem clear to me (I have done a lot of software diagrams when I took Object-Oriented Programming in college), I don't know how they relate to the hardware aspect. In conclusion, I agree with you, and I am probably wrong. My initial post was my "holy shit" response, before I actually thought it through.

True. Good call, I did not think about this.

I didn't read the patent (honestly, I don't care enough to read it), but I did look at the diagrams. The "Object-Oriented Graphic System" does have some hardware diagrams, but it also seems like they have some high-level software abstraction diagrams. How does Apple know that HTC is creating devices that work in the EXACT same way?

"The ‘599 Patent, entitled "Object-Oriented Graphic System"

Seriously?

If anyone else here is a software developer, you know how crazy this is.

If this patent simply gives Apple the rights to the abstract idea of object-oriented graphic systems, that is INSANE. This is basically the equivalent of Apple suing the creator of C++. Almost every single graphic system is object-oriented. I don't know if it is even possible to not have an object-oriented graphics system.

"Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods"

Apple should sue the creators of Java as well for implementing action listeners.

[sarcasm] Seriously, I am scared to use object oriented programming because I might get sued by Apple. Time to uninstall g++. [end sarcasm]

"Google’s algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google. These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up." So let me get this straight... When you make a product (in this case a search engine), you should not aim to make it the best product possible because it will be harder for other companies to catch up and steal your revenue/profit? Seriously? To me, it sounds like MS is saying, "No one uses our search engine because Google provides better search results and that is wrong."