Apple, Broadcom allowed to press Ctrl-Z on billion-dollar Wi-Fi patent payout to Caltech Apple and Broadcom won a new trial to recalculate damages arising from a six-year-old legal battle over Wi-Fi patents developed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Friday upheld the 2020 verdict that Apple and Broadcom infringed two Caltech patents. But it …
It depends on whether “Ctrl-Z” in the headline was meant to represent “undo” or “end of file”. The former function is indeed ⌘Z, Cmd-Z, on macOS. (Perhaps only we greybeards recall the latter function from the operating systems that ran on our coal-powered iron.) The ASCII character that corresponds to Ctrl-Z is “substitute” (U+001A), but Unicode recommends replacing the “substitute” character with the “replacement character” (U+FFFD, �).
The “four-leaf-clover thingie” is technically a “place of interest sign” (U+2318, ⌘) — the symbol originally came from Scandinavian maps. There are two “sunken swan” candidates: one is the “alternative key symbol” (U+2387, ⎇), and the other is the “option key” (U+2325, ⌥) — Macs typically use an Option key as PCs use an Alt key. The analogous symbol for the Ctrl key is the “helm symbol” (U+2388, ⎈).
don't forget "suspend foreground task" in bash. Last I checked a Mac has bash for its default shell.
(I guess that uses Command+Z like Linux or FreeBSD uses Ctrl+Z)
but from the context of the article I'd think they meant "undo"
Yes, bash is the default shell on Macs, but a simple stty command can change the “susp” character from ⎈Z to another character. I don’t know which operating system Thomas Claburn uses on a daily basis, but given the “Ctrl-Z” in the article’s headline, odds are that it’s Windows; and if he’s been in the industry for some time, he might remember ⎈Z as an end-of-file character for DOS text files.
They get sued for Yet Another Shitty Thing(TM), argue the holy hell out of it to drag it out as long & costly as possible, then appeal the judge's findings to make it cost even more, until either the prosecution is bankrupt, dead, or gives up in disgust.
Just once I would like to see the appeals court decide the original damages weren't enough, triple it for Apple being douchebags, Apple appeal the appeal to the Supreme Court, the SC refuse to hear it & let the appealed verdict stand, thus leaving Apple on the hook for over a trillion dollars.
Apple will try to appeal the appeal appeal, the SC will refuse to hear it again, & tell Apple to pay up, STFU, and GTFO.
Apple will appeal the a-a-appeal, the SC will get pissed, triple the already trippled damages on the grounds that Apple is being a festering shitstain, and threaten Apple with contempt of court charges if the fine isn't paid.
Apple will appeal the appeals, the SC will turn to the bailiff, & calmly order the Apple lawyers to be placed under arrest as Vexacious Litigants.
At which point Apple won't be able to file a lawsuit on their own, will have Olympian amounts of difficulty convincing anyone else to file a suit on their behalf, and law firms across the nation will start treating them as the toxic scum that they are.
"Yes you deserve representation, but *we* don't have to be your representatives. You may have to ask the public defender's office to assign someone to you. It won't be us. Now go away, we have a reputation to maintain."
*CackleCough*
Damn my fantasies. I just wish some vengeful god would reach down, aim a finger at Apple, & erase them from existence & eternity.
*Sigh*
I'll go get my Dried Frog Pills...
What a load of bull dung this is.
In 2021, it was widely reported that Apple earns >US$1 per day. PER DAY.
Before "the great move to the east", many talented engineers came out of the halls of CALTECH, MIT, etc. These same engineers and thinkers help invented and developed a lot of products we use today. Most importantly some of these CALTECH and/or MIT alumni are currently employed at Apple &/or Broadcom.
Tim Cook said in a speech delivered during the MIT Commencement in 2017 that "Technology must be infused with decency and kindness".
The law has sided with CALTECH. It has been decided that Apple and Broadcom has "ripped off" two CALTECH's patents without even paying them a cent.
Tim, don't just "talk-the-talk". Infuse some kind of decency and kindness and pay up.
At the end of the day, neither you, Apple or the rest of the world will know what great things will benefit if-and-when Apple will pay the full amount (of the penalty).
> Whenever a large judgement is 'suddenly' overturned...
And ditto the judge etc in the Court(s) which were overturned.
Also: assessed by psychiatrists both for sanity and for partisan-bias/activism, eg presenting as a political or virtue-display activist.
Example of both the latter: in a recentish high-profile criminal case in Australia, the Court of first instance formally reversed the burden of proof then exacerbated it: inverting it from the Prosecution needing to prove the accusation Beyond Reasonable Doubt, to the Defence needing to prove that every part of the accusation was completely impossible in any even theoretical way. She formally instructed the jury to make their decision on this basis. So they convicted.
The first Court of Appeal formally approved of her decision to invert the 1,000yr+ basis of criminal law and upheld the conviction.
As an indication of probability levels vs theoretical possibilities: a critical requirement of one charge was that everyone walking backwards&forwards in a large, long, high-traffic public corridor at a peak-time, all suddenly went simultaneously blind for a couple of minutes without noticing or thinking to mention it or bumping into anything or each other.
Fortunately for the concept of Law, the final Court of Appeal actually considered the concept of Law, and of real-life reality, and so punted the conviction into touch. With --for a legal judgement-- some withering assessments of the previous Courts' competence.
However, I have seen precisely nothing official done re formally re-assessing the 4 (IIRC) junior Courts' judges' fitness for their roles.
This is pocket change for these companies. The people at Caltech created the technology. I use it all the time—and so does everybody else.
The devices these companies sell would be nearly worthless without the IP that made them possible. Why not let the companies that make HUGE money from these inventions pay this tiny fraction of their value to the people and institutions that made them.
If we want cool tech we have to pay the inventors who create this stuff. Starving these people and institutions stifles innovation.
Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, Apple made US$366 BILLION dollars in profit. That is more than US$1 billion dollar a day in profits.
Why not let the companies that make HUGE money from these inventions pay this tiny fraction of their value to the people and institutions that made them.
ElReg already have several articles in the past about maintainers of Open Source codes who receive nothing from big companies who make obscene profits from the product.
And here we are trying to dissuade big western companies for doing business with companies from South East Asia because of intellectual property theft.
They get public funding from the American taxpayer for this research and the money from tuition etc etc. They also haven't sought to come to any agreement with the IEEE on it's inclusion in WiFi standards despite getting the patent back in 2013.
They're a publicly funded patent troll.
LDPC codes have been around since the 60's and they come up with a high throughput version of an already quick algorithm...I am wonder how much they actually invented here. Given the lose standards of the USPTO which highly favors granting patents over checking for substance I wouldn't be surprised to find out it wasn't that much.
The people who actually didn't the work won't get sh*t, cause they had to assign the patent to the university.
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