Glad I wasn't the only one who picked up on that. Usually I'd go with incompetence due to Hanlon's Razor, but given this is coming from a lawyer from a huge corporation, I'd say it's deliberate.
Patents are public documents. The intent of the system is that you have a monopoly on something for a set time, but after that, anybody can make it based on those documents alone.
So it doesn't matter if it's in the iPhone or not; it's still patent infringement.
Presumably Apple's argument was "Samsung saw the iPhone and its success and decided to copy" and not "Samsung is infringing on patent XYZ". The difference between those two arguments probably means a lot in a jury trial. Particularly in this case that already has a history of jurors misleading themselves based on emotional or factually incorrect arguments[1].
But copying the iPhone isn't illegal by itself. It's only illegal if they violated a patent in the process. So why is it necessary to even look at the iPhone? Shouldn't the question be whether Samsung's phones violated Apple's patents?
The question should be that but they were arguing for the jury, which if the last verdict is any indication will tend to have a tenuous grasp of what they are deciding on. On the last trial the jury delivered an inconsistent verdict in record time, which it then had to amend, and then the jurors started giving interviews where they basically admitted they went along with the foreman's opinion because he was a patent holder. Even though he totally misrepresented patent law and argued that the prior art wasn't valid because it was from a different type of hardware.
This is one of my big problems with the jury system. Perhaps there should be a hybrid system where a judge (or other disinterested, yet informed, third party) participates in order to ensure that the facts are not distorted.
I think that's actually what happens in the US. The judge will give particularly detailed instructions (the original trial had a 109 page manual) and the verdict is actually a structured response (which is why they were able to give an inconsistent verdict). The system tries to do this properly but then the jurors are swayed by the emotional arguments and there's not much you can do about it. In this case maybe forcing them to deliberate on individual arguments would help. From the interviews they basically backtracked from "we think they're guilty" to "how do I fill out this damn form", negating the value of the structure that was in place.
If Apple is saying "you violated patent XYZ by copying the iPhone" but the iPhone doesn't implement anything to do with patent XYZ, it might be hard to convince a jury that any actual patent infringement happened. Of course reading some of the comments here, few people seem to understand this, so it might be easy to convince a jury.
Making them particularly important. I'm sure Samsung wouldn't mind a finding of "yes you infringed a few patents but nothing that's actually on the iPhone". How valuable can a patent be if Apple doesn't even use it themselves in their competing product?
They make several separate claims. The claim that they couldn't have copied Apple is a counter to claims made by Apple that they saw it necessary to copy the iPhone to compete. Separately they claim that they're not infringing on the patents, and that Google invented the technology in question first.
I find these sort of arguments amusing. Engineers are routinely told to never read patents (because this policy is seen to mitigate the risk that any potential future infringement will be considered willful infringement).
When engineers are told that they should not read patents under any circumstances, you know the entire system is trash and the premise of it laughable.
You might want to embed this inside a larger language. That wouldn't necessarily preclude using a Turing Complete language, but you wouldn't want it to be a complicated one.
Seems like ESR is still fighting the Open Source vs Free Software battle of the late 90s. It hasn't dawned on him yet that everyone else thinks that there's little purpose in cannibalizing the movement over minor philosophical differences.
Not really. Even RMS only mentions the distinction in passing. The fight has simply gone out of this one for everyone who isn't ESR, probably because the late 90s was the last time he was relevant.
The OP probably needed to clarify. English having a simple alphabet gave the US a leg up on personal computing compared to the KJC countries. It's only one contributing factor, though.
This story has played out before. Last time, it was Object Oriented databases. What happens each time is that the traditional RDBMS's pick up a few of the features, and then we keep using them until the next contender comes along.
US GDP in 2012 was $15.68 trillion. You're saying the US government gave away more than a year's worth of productive output? You'll excuse me if I say citation fucking needed.
They lent the money, they didn't "give it" to the banks. The difference is that the Fed got the money back, whereas buying $2tn of debt would result in the Fed having to create $2tn.
Loaning someone money without interest is the same as giving them the market rate of interest, which in the case of the banks after the housing bubble bust was somewhere around a billion percent a minute, because all of the banks were insolvent and completely uncreditworthy.
To make it even more obviously a gift, a good bit of it was used to buy treasuries. If I loan you $100 at 0% interest, and you loan it back to me for $5 a day, aren't I just giving you $5 a day?
I think what he was actually getting at is the Discount Window. These are often very short term loans, perhaps a matter of minutes, made to cover a short term liquidity drop. If you add it all up over a year, it could very well add up to several trillions without adding those trillions to the GDP.
It all gets paid back with interest, though. None of this is anything new.
I never liked that particular interpretation. It was too obvious and had been done better elsewhere.
I preferred an alternative explanation, where The One actually comes in two parts, a program in the matrix, and a human in the real world with a direct neuro link to that program. Neo's powers are expressed in the real world because he still has a direct link to the machines.
actually the three level explanation includes this facet through the little Indian girl - Sati.
Remember when she makes a sunset for Neo at the end? And the story by Morpheus about the legend of "someone who could make the matrix as he wanted. born into the matrix". Obviously only a program can be born "into the matrix".
I think Sati was really the One and inserting Neo's code into the Source rebooted it, effectively deleting her. This did NOT happen thanks to Neo not choosing the Source (and tge Oracle's tricks).
I like that, it would be similar to Lain... but, I always thought about another possible interpretation: what we call "the real world" is actually pretty similar (if not equal) to a machine. If the Matrix is a simulation of the real world, then why Neo wouldn't be able to hack the rules outside of the Matrix as he did inside of it? Maybe the glitches or errors of the Matrix are actually physically possible (obviously not in classical mechanics).
If that's the case, then, the Matrix is a good thing since it would let us understand in more depth the reality.
This explanation is less elegant because it requires different laws of physics in the matrix real world than our world. "a direct neuro link to the machines" doesn't do anything to explain why neo has telekinetic abilities in the "real" world.
Neo only uses his powers against machines, shutting down the sentinels at the end of Reloaded, blowing stuff up on the way into the Machine City, and in being able to see Smith's alter-ego in the real world. None of that is incompatible with having a wireless transceiver in his brain.
The movie clearly is trying to give the impression that he is using telekinetic powers, not hacking into the robots and causing them to act as if he is using telekinetic powers.
His powers don't work on the flesh-and-blood Bane/Smith. He can't swipe the knife away from Trinity's neck at a distance. He can't easily beat Bane/Smith in a fistfight. The best he gets is to see Smith's machine form after being blinded.
All of his powers shown in the real world are against machines, never flesh-and-blood humans.
There's nothing to contradict it, either; not all the plot points have to be served up on a nice dinner plate. If it fits nicer than the matrix-within-a-matrix theories, then might as well go with that.
I've tended towards criticism from the opposite direction (which can also apply to The Matrix). Its philosophical underpinnings have been done by other works of fiction to greater depth, but those stories tend to be impenetrable for most people, much more so than either Inception or The Matrix were. See Ghost in the Shell or Neuromancer, for example. Or even Nolan's own Memento.
Putting it in a more easily-digestible form is a useful thing to do, which tends to blunt this line of criticism. There are some philosophy professors who really appreciate these movies, because they provided nice reference points that their students already know about, making it much easier to teach certain concepts.
Memento is really the best lens through which to view Inception. The former was the more metaphysically mind-fucky, intellectually and emotionally jarring experience. The latter is the more visually spectacular, but shallower variation on a similar theme.
For what it's worth, I enjoyed the idea of Inception a great deal. Part of me really wants to love the movie. But it's hard for me to love it when I've seen Memento do the same thing so much more deftly, with such a smaller budget, given a lot more constraints. Memento is Nolan the filmmaker, and Inception is Nolan the movie director. I enjoy both, and I'm not saying Inception is without its originalities or its merits. But I can't call it a masterpiece; it's disjointed and incoherent in a way that smacks of excess.
I dig your analogy, but I am not sure it's 100% warranted in this case, given that Nolan made both movies. It would be one thing if the Wachowskis both wrote Neuromancer and made The Matrix. But they didn't. They made The Matrix as an action movie that just happened to have some metaphysical underpinnings. They didn't make a philosophical piece that happened to have great action sequences. The movie is pretty clear about where it stands on that spectrum, and most fans who are honest with themselves about why they like the movie will admit they like it for the fight scenes. (As a mental test, replace the computer-simulation plot device with any similar construct: dreams, alternate dimensions, etc. -- and everything else about the movie holds up just fine.)
With Inception, I can't tell where Nolan stands. Is it a thought piece with cool special effects, or a special-effects piece with deep thoughts? As much as we might rush to categorize it as the former, I'm not so sure. Trying to be the latter gets in the way of the former. Nolan tries to have his cake and eat it, too, and he's not entirely successful at either. What results is a beautiful, haunting, provocative, but flawed movie.
Memento was literally a mystery film, and unless you kind of know which context clues to look for you're not really going to figure out what's going on until the end. Inception had a lot of mystery to it in terms of what's real and what's not, but in the end the mysterious portion of it is not really the point of the movie. We're not really presented with the question of what's real as the core mystery to be solved. The fact that Nolan doesn't actually reveal anything at the end aside from the context clues mentioned in the video and in the article posted at the top of the comments and his remarks after that "it doesn't really matter whether or not Cobb is in a dream" lead me to believe a lot of it is more of a character study of that man rather than an overarching sci-fi type world. The journey is not really to decide whether or not Cobb is living in the dream world but more so whether he is at peace either way.
I do agree with your general assertion that Momento is a more coherent film and I think that is largely due to the scope and scale of those respective films' budgets.
On one level, yes. But Memento is a philosophical inquiry as much as it's a literal mystery.
"his remarks after that "it doesn't really matter whether or not Cobb is in a dream" lead me to believe a lot of it is more of a character study"
I think the same point is generally true about Memento.
[Massive spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen Memento and might be curious]
The "big reveal" in Memento isn't so much the unraveling of the mystery. It's that the mystery itself is a red herring. Leonard chooses his own reality, regardless of whether or not it's the factual truth, and regardless of whether or not he's caught in an infinite loop of his own creation. The same can be said of Cobb's choice at the end of Inception, running out to embrace his kids (and this particular version of reality) without checking on the spinning top. At the conclusion of both films, the protagonists basically surrender to subjectivity. They realize, consciously or not, that it's the only rational choice they have. They can never know the real truth, so they construct or embrace the truth that suits their needs.
This is what I meant when I said that both films are explorations of the same theme. That theme is basically our agency and choice in the subjectivity of our reality. It's about how we create the worlds we inhabit, literally (in the case of Cobb's "architecture" of dreams) or figuratively (in the case of Cobb's and Leonard's choices w/r/t reality).
Just imagine someone makes a new movie where Lenny, Cobb and Neo are merged into one character in/out of a matrix, a dream and a story with a loss of hippocampal LTP.
Great insight! I think my main gripe with the movie is that it kind of gets caught up in its own net of contrived mechanics -- for example, here are some of them:
Equally there are philosophy professors who don't appreciate it. One class that I was a member of was warned that our professor had not seen The Matrix and, given the number of essays that referred to it, never wanted to see it or read about it ever again.
I appreciate that sentiment. The Matrix is certainly interesting, but it's one of those things high schoolers use as a jumping off point and it is very trite and cliche. It's a lot like Ayn Rand actually, it's not that it's objectively worthless, but it's Twinkie pop philosophy that people are exhausted grading papers of.
