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Burst Sues Apple for iTunes, iPod, Quicktime Patents

C

Choppaface

macrumors 65816
Jan 22, 2002
1,187
0
SFBA
Apple has already paid Burst a bundle I believe, so they're prolly going to lose this one. Burst is a few guys up in Santa Rosa, CA, who are quite wealthy now so they're not going anywhere, Apple's gonna have to shed some bucks on this one.

sockerguy5 said:
I have a degree in Computer Engineering from one of the top universities in the country and spend 8 hours a day reading technical documents about computer architecture that aren't available to the general public. If you think you can do better, the patent office has job openings.
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So if you have this degree, and I expect you've probably got better than a Bachelor's, why aren't you making an effort to use your technical expertise for social good? (At least that's how it appears from "our" view) What IS the inside story then about these patent wars that we aren't seeing? What kind of consideration do you give to the fact that sometimes patents protect a company's agenda rather than an inventor's right? That patents you grant might steal a small software developer's chance at making it or could unduly complicate or threaten the technical careers of thousands of developers? If you are not using you degree to better your community then you are not using your degree responsibly. Right now there are quite a few that don't see how patents are bettering the community.
 
Z

zelman

macrumors member
Jan 6, 2004
93
22
Isn't the transmission of data "faster than real time" 50% the fault of the recipient?
 
R

Roller

macrumors 68030
Jun 25, 2003
2,876
2,005
Sort of sad - and telling - that so much of Burst's Web page is devoted to their lawsuits. They have a right and an obligation to defend their intellectual property, but this seems to be their main focus.
 
S

ShavenYak

macrumors member
Jan 11, 2005
73
0
gnasher729 said:
McDonald's was actually convicted for causing massive injuries to an elderly woman. She sued McDonald's to get the $25,000 back that she paid in hospital bills. When the court found out that McDonald's had been told about SEVEN HUNDRED times that their practices were putting their customers in danger, when it was found that they had on several occasions paid out unknown amounts of money in settlements in different cases, and continued their dangerous practices because they enabled them to make higher profits, things became a bit more expensive. And very rightfully so.
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In fact, McDonald's chose to serve the coffee dangerously hot because they had done a research study that found that the hotter the coffee is, the less acute the drinker's sense of taste. They determined that the money saved by being able to buy cheaper coffee beans for their taste-impaired customers was more than their estimates of potential losses due to customer lawsuits.

Funny thing, that - when a court finds that a company has already factored the cost of the lawsuit into doing business, they're more likely to award the damages. Also, most courts frown on companies who behave as if the only problem with burning your customers is that you might have to pay their medical bills.

McDonald's valued their profits above the safety of their customers, and it came back to 'burn' them instead. Justice was served (with a smile, and an order of fries).
 
Gasu E.

Gasu E.

macrumors 603
Mar 20, 2004
5,032
3,150
Not far from Boston, MA.
Fiveos22 said:
Cool, I wish I was going to be a lawyer. They always seem to have business taking care of things like this.
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There once was a small town that had just one lawyer, and he never had much to do. Then another lawyer moved to town and there was plenty of work for everybody.
 
Gasu E.

Gasu E.

macrumors 603
Mar 20, 2004
5,032
3,150
Not far from Boston, MA.
neomancer said:
Actually neither thing happens. This is how it works:
The relativistic energy needed to move an object at certain speed is given by

E=(mo c^2) / sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)

mo is called the "rest mass" of the object v is its speed and c is the speed of light. (I'm using ^2 to denoted "squared" and sqrt to mean "square root").

As the spped of the object approaches the speed of light the term v^2/c^2 gets closer to 1, which in turn means that sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) gets closer to zero. As this happens the energy gets bigger and bigger.

To understand this do this mental exercise: suppose (mo c^2)=1, and for certain v sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)=0.1. The energy will be E=1/0.01=10. Lets increase the speed so that sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)=0.01, the energy will be E=1/0.001=100. As you can see, increasing v will increase E.

When v is really close to c (say v=0.99999 c <--- 0.99999 the speed of light), v^2/c^2 = (0.99999)^2=0.99998 which means that sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) =sqrt(1-0.99998)=sqrt(0.00002)=0.00001. That means the energy is E=100000. Eventually v is so close to c that E tends to infinity. It doesn't get there though because when v=c --> sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)=0, and you know what one of the lost commandments (there were 20 instead of 10) says: "Thou shall never divide by zero!"

What does it all mean? Well it means that to move a mass at the speed of light you need an infinite amount of energy !! Which means that nothing, except electromagnetic waves (of which light forms part), can move at (or above) the speed of light.

Now some people write the energy equation as E = m c^2 (Einstein's famous equation), where m = mo / sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). This "mass" changes dramatically as the speed v increases (just as E). When v=c the "mass" m is infinite. Let me point out that this is no the actual rest mass of the object is just a mathematical abstraction. In any case, E = m c^2 only stipulates that energy and mass are part of the same thing it doesn't mean that the mass of the object will be converted to energy at the speed of light.
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OK, but what is the "mass" of an object with rest mass m0 when the object is traveling at .99999 x c?
 
iPie

iPie

macrumors regular
Feb 21, 2006
132
0
Milan, Italy
Burst Makes Little Jobs Cry

I don't know who is right on this one, but if you read the full article, it's kind of hard to weigh in on behalf of MSFT and AAPL.

Maybe (for a change) Lang can make Jobs cry - I would really appreciate that!

I haven't been to happy about Apple lately, and this just kind of confirms my fears that AAPL is just another clone...
 
N

neomancer

macrumors newbie
Apr 18, 2006
8
1
Gasu E. said:
OK, but what is the "mass" of an object with rest mass m0 when the object is traveling at .99999 x c?
Click to expand...
As I wrote, there are two "type" of masses. One is the "invariant mass" or "rest mass" mo. This mass is the same no matther how fast the object is moving. Most physicist (including myself) prefer the use of this mass because it make life easier when dealing with higher quantum theory. The other mass is called "Relativistic mass". This "mass" increases (10000 times the rest mass in our example) when the speed of the object increses.
For further information check:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/mass.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rest_mass

Enjoy ....
 
A

ajbrehm

macrumors 6502
Aug 14, 2002
341
0
Zurich, Switzerland
Capitalism, Socialism, and Fascism

You don't have to be. Software patents are a government-granted monopoly designed to prevent competition and restrict the free market. That's fascism (national socialism), not capitalism.

uh, obviously you've never taken a history of capitalism class. the intent behind patents--believe it or not--is actually to encourage innovation, which is the the real driving force of capitalism.
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You are both wrong.

Software patents are indeed government-granted monopolies designed to prevent competition. But fascism has nothing to do with it.

The intent behind patents is to trade a time-limited government-granted monopoly for another invention to become publicly available. The beneficiary of the patent system is supposed to be society. It's applied socialism, not capitalism.
 
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