Aggrieved firm should sue US patent office

..Are fundamentally a function of Maximum Transition temperature. NOT just current density.

The article woefully omits that first fact. <*sigh*> A link to more materials science based reporting would have been appreciated

James

New Orleans web coverage: Looting or finding?

"Two separate pictures on Yahoo have two separate captions which pose a very striking question over the difference between "looting" and "finding"."

I watched Fox news in the states (9-2-05) and a black guy that Bill O'Reilly was interviewing told Bill about these 2 photos . Bill denied this and said that he thought these (photos) really did not exist.

I knew the photos existed after seeing them on your site ! (saw them before I saw the interview) I think you need to send these pics to Bill's web site or fox news to prove Bill does NOT always know what he's talking about!

Hmmm theINQ more accurate than Fox News/O'reilly..hehehe good one !

This is irresponsible journalism.

There are other ways you could have written this article, and you chose to make it a racial issue. You could have simply asked the question whether or not it should be considered looting when you are in survival mode in a disaster area.

Surely, by the time the proprietors got back, the bread would be moldy anyway. But you didn't. Instead you made these two snapshots within a series of events witnessed by the photographer about race.

Perhaps one photographer witnessed the subject in photo 1 looting the store, while the photographer who snapped the second photo saw the two people grab the floating bread.

In any case, you must have mis-read the caption in the second photo, which states "after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store". Surely you understand the difference between picking up something "from" a grocery store and picking up something "in" a grocery store.

There is enough racial tension in the world. Please don't exacerbate it by false impressions.

LarryDinAZ2

Patent Plaice

Mike, er Ed,

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) itself issues and promotes its own 'unique multidigit jump codes' (also known in some snobby circles as "Patent Numbers", puhleeze...) that can be entered into its on-line search page and will allow the webbly viewer to jump directly to the web page containing the patent text itself.

Obviously the Internet Media company should add the USPTO to the list of defendants. It would certainly be just deserts for all the 'Sideways Swinging' and other nonsense patents that have been issued in recent years! Give 'em hell I say.

Regards,
Jeffy

AMD's X86-64 site goes missing

I'm not with AMD, but I am a customer.

Know what a hassle it can be to have to retrieve a domain name registered by someone else, so I renewed it for them.

Hopefully, they'll be kind enough to reimburse me for the fees.

Site's not back up (yet) - but I expect NetSol will release the hold soon.

Hope so at least.

Best regards,
Name supplied

Zen patent used by Apple iPod, Creative claims

RE: SINGAPORE sound giant Creative Technology.... The Zen patent, number 6,928,433, governs.... Sim Wong Hoo, CEO of Creative, said.... Whether Creative will try and enforce....

The patent covers technology that enables hierarchical navigation of songs in a music player.

My reaction to the granting of this patent was similar to the reaction at http://weblog.infoworld.com/smbit/archives/2005/08/creative_gets_a.html

Back in 1985 I devised a GUI that enables hierarchical navigation of items in a restaurant menu and automates ordering in a restaurant or bar context. It's the GUI that has been copied countless times in POS software and is prevalent in virtually every country of the world today. One major difference is that the 20 year old GUI I created was graphical and the Creative UI is not graphical. Another difference is that Creative lets you pick a song while mine lets you order a Prime Rib dinner, medium rare, rice pilaf, vegetables on the side, a Mai Tai with Captain Morgan's and Tira Misu for dessert.

That didn't stop the patent office for granting a patent to someone else for this same GUI 15 years later, either, and it hasn't stopped the patent office from granting the Creative patent. It should take a lawyer familiar with patent law and GUI software about fifteen minutes to dismantle any such patents in court. It's probably a standard textbook chapter in law school patent litigation 101, too.

Gene Mosher

Eva Glass stalks Mageek

Eva,

If you caught MaGeek actually agreeing with anyone, he must have really been in his cups. You can always claim that it wasn't your day to watch him.

BTW, mint flavored chewing gum serves to lessen the effects of a hangover (except for the beer belly hanging over a belt buckle - a hazard of the trade, I'm told).

Charles Greene

People start wearing hard drives round their neck

Whilst it may surprise you to see someone wearing a miniature hard drive around their neck, this morning I actually saw a "chav" sporting what is presumably the latest must have cyber jewellery (at least in East Reading).

No word of a lie (I believe that's the correct term), in a bold “Look what I've got yeah” kind of statement, the guy had a PSP dangling down between the open sides of his bright red shiny tracksuit, while he was out walking his dog.

Wearing hard drives? That's so last week.