Very interesting, thank you. Could you talk about what the liability is if you buy from someone who is (unbeknownst to you) infringing, and what your responsibility is if the seller turned out not to have a license?
What if the component you bought has already made it into your products?
The rule is that you can be liable if you make, use, sell, or import the infringing device. In theory, end users are also liable. Individuals as end users usually are accused - no upside. Businesses as end users sometimes get sued.
you are as confused as Apple legal. Apple's true problem when Samsung "crossed a line" isn't copying: it's brand confusion. The moment Samsung decided that they would sell units by being literally confused for an Apple device that one already knows closely is when they started accruing damages they should now pay Apple in order to make the situation equitable.
This is like Wendy's deciding: "Fuck being third. From now on our logo will be a minimalist W, but upside down, and yellow, and we will not be happy with its form until customers start streaming in at the same rate they do to a McDonald's."
Everyone who brings in prior art is missing an issue. When I first saw an iPad, I wasn't like: "Oh, a Star Trek pad!" But I did look at an iPad and say, oh, an iPad: it was a Samsung designed to confuse the customer into thinking that it was one, by infringing on iPad's design very closely.
Let's be honest. It would have been easy for Samsung to take all the design cues it wanted from Apple while adding enough of their own design so as not to cause confusion. But they chose not to do that. They chose to be confused for an iPad.
Even the lawyers on the case mistake one for the other. But they think that this "confusion" is just an effect of the infringement damage. It's not: it's the source of the infringement damage.
The problem is that for a lot of people there is only one smartphone. So if a phone has a large screen it is an iPhone, makes it kind of hard to design a smartphone that doesn't look like... a smartphone.
Just as for many an "iphone compatible car" is the same as "it has a 3.5mm socket".
For those that honestly are confused I guess they should be really happy about LCD TVs, otherwise they might have ended up with a microwave oven in their living room (yes, it is that ridiculous).
(wait a minute, glass surface, four corners, Electrolux should be afraid)
meh. for me the iconic style of LCD/TV is the Samsung style. No one copied it too closely for me ever to be confused and think a TV was a samsung. In fact, this is true for Audis and BMW's that kind of look like an iconic Mercedes, and so on. There are lots of products that take design cues, none of them have ever actually confused me. Except Samsung's iPhones (less so recently) and Samsung's iPads (very much still.)
I'm talking about "at a glance" or the briefest moment of confusion, as a highly informed consumer. Never happened with anything else. Doesn't happen with Samsung's current phones.
the only way to explain the sudden and highly pronounced drop-off between 29 and 30 not only here but on the year-by-year graph linked a few days ago (from a single cycle) is that PG considers exactly 30 to be "over the hill" but not 29, and, therefore, being 30 is a very heavy marginal disadvantage versus being 29 when trying to gain acceptance to YC.
There is no way there is really that much of a difference in applicant quality and quantity at that margin: it has to be YC's selection bias.
The guy is onto something big. If you think about it, all tech ideas can be grouped into one of three categories:
1. Someone is doing exactly this.
Response: "How is this different from (someone already doing it)? Even if it's better, what keeps the biggest guys from doing the same thing?"
2.a. Nobody has done this.
Response: "There are a lot of very smart engineers out there. Wouldn't one of them be doing this if it worked? Even if you get it to work, what keeps them from just executing on the same thing, better."
2.b. People have tried and failed.
"A lot of people have tried this. They failed. What makes you think you will succeed?"
--
Now let's work through some concrete examples. First, take Google. When it launched as a search engine in Stanford, there were loads of other search engines. This puts it firmly in category "1". There was nothing Google could do that another company couldn't.
Next let's take eBay. When it launched as "a perfect market" based on auctions, nobody had done that. Firmly 2.a. category.
Finally let's take Dropbox. A lot of people had this idea. They failed. Firmly 2.b. category.
Basically, there is not an idea that I could name that doesn't fall into one of these three categories. You can dismiss everything.
I am personally working on a massive project that involves fundamental innovation and falls firmly in 2.a. It is really hard. Progress is very slow. As a break I've started a bit of a side project. This one falls firmly in 2.b. In the nineties and even before, this second project got loads of attention, huge amounts of research (I can find publications up the wazoo) and never took off. People tried to do it and failed.
What separates me from the opinion just expressed by David Sacks is: Fuck you, David Sacks. That's what.
lol @ "At least the NoSQL folks tend to be HONEST about their products not replacing the traditional RDBMS approach...."
More like, technically true, but contrary to the whole reason for doing what they're doing.
Nobody puts a lot of work into something "honestly" not intending to replace the thing it's replacing.
They say this to appease the people who point out that it doesn't do all the same things.
If I built a better alternative to a common item, you could bet your bottom dollar i would be very "honest" about it not replacing that common item. The last thing that statement would be is "honest." It's appeasement.
I dunno. It might depend on which NoSQL folks we are talking about. Certainly the array-native database folks are not even close to the relational use case.
I also think the best way to look at NoSQL is that it is just a further development on Stonebreaker's bottom-left quadrant database division--- object databases.
The more I get into it, the more I am astounded with the power of PostgreSQL to take over all these workloads on the low-end and more.
But in this case at least you are using PostgreSQL outside of anything even remotely purely relational. It is at least object-relational, and often key-value-id (like hstore) or document store (JSON or XML).
The power of PostgreSQL occurs from the power to ignore the relational model and take other approaches when it is helpful.
I think Nietzsche meant that either you are talking about objective known facts and there is no discussion, facts just are (or not); or, in the most common case, you are talking about subjective ideas, feelings, opinions, etc, and these are just other names for taste.
So both are right, we should not be discussing taste and we are deemed to only discuss about taste.
I'll let some other HNmate complement with a Steve Jobs quote, if they wish.
I did have one idea. I don't know if it would work. I've often wished that Reddit had an "adult table", which is NOT a separate place, but a separate DIMENSION of comments in the SAME thread.
Let me explain. Currently everything has one score. So, give it a second score that also starts at 0. Instead of score "1 point" it would score "1 point (1 point at adult table)."
Then the adults at the adult table would immediately downvote anything that isn't adult (this only concerns its score at the adult table) and can upvote highly reasoned but nuanced posts, and so forth. However, there are not so many at the latter table. So, the former table might go from -2 to +100 maybe the second score has most comments untouched (at 1), with a few downvoted, and a few upvoted.
This way, you could have a children's table (current reddit) with its thousahds of votes, and good comments languishing at 0, and the adult table, where the same 0 normal score comments can have high votes at the adult table, and so forth.
So, here on hackernews, you could have a "serious" or a "founder's" table. And you could have a snarky table for people that just like having everything picked apart - where, "correctly" (per policy) we (the serious table) would vote the snarky comments down.
So, to illustrate. Here is a snarky comment "Oh, I see. So it's like a coupon system where you insert yourself into a transaction and book the whole transaction as revenue, deducting the actual 'rest of the transaction' as cost. So even though you lose on every transaction, you make it up in volume! Hey, it worked for groupon, right? :)"
This starts at 0, 0 for the snarky and serious table respectively. The serious table immediately gives it a downvote, so it is now at 0, -1, and then another, 0, -2, and soon it's hidden here: 0, -3. Meanwhile the people shifting through the trash say, "hey, ZING!!" and promote it, it gets to 5, -3, then 10, -3 then - if this place degenerates into reddit, hundreds of points, -3 respectively.
The serious or adult table is not impacted. It's not even visible. Meanwhile the snarky guys can have their children's talk.
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(here is the rest of my comment. I shifted the above to the top for more visibilty.)
like many others I had a "rude introduction" to hackernews, not from real connections in the startup world (which I have) but from low-quality forums. In my case I regret even the choice of username, and would change it if I could (maybe indicated to show that it's new). I wouldn't now shirk away from using my real name or a close alias - something I never do online.
So, in my case what would have mitigated my behavior is seeing where my traffic was coming from and treating accordingly. I certainly wasn't typing it into the browser URL bar. Secondly, you could have a prominent button "New to hackernews? Learn about this community, which is a more serious one than most online communities: a lot of personal connection is on the line". Then explain why, and what we get out of behaving the way we do.
Finally, as of now I can either upvote or downvote a nasty comment. There is no right answer. But you can change this in a minute. If defining the correct way to vote as "downvote any negative comment not leavened by positivity - we need all the positive thinking we can get", then I would start voting correctly. It's like Wikipedia. I don't add what I know - I add what I can prove with a reference. I don't delete uncited folklore because it's not a good read - I do so because that's the correct action.
So, policies (as is the case with Wikipedia) help immensely.
I had an idea, similar to your suggestion, to vote on the link and the discussion separately. Although my idea would not separate children from adults (an idea I like very much), it would allow good links to rise without endorsing snarky and low-quality commentary on the link. Likewise, readers would feel more free to upvote quality discussion without necessarily endorsing the subject.
It is too bad that more than a couple voting toggles would be too cumbersome; otherwise both ideas could co-exist as four sets of up and down arrows.
