point09micron

Hold on.... How do you unintentionally remake a game?

"It's video game legislation -- through the backdoor."

I see what you did there.

Mushrooms reproduce asexually.

"Weird! Intriguing. But this is coming from a guy that watched 'drumline' a couple of times (once on a flight, couple of times on HBO). Love me some perididdles. Yeah you might have to google that if you don't know wtf that is."


If you want to google something, it helps to know how to spell it. "Paradiddle". And as a marching and concert percussionist for over 12 years, I'm telling you now that Drumline was a fucking joke.

Oh snap Apple is getting into portable gaming. If their track record is any indication, I might be able to play Quake II on my iPhone within the next 4 years!

They are supposed to be enforcing the law, and that is what they are doing. I normally like what McCauley has to say, but this is ridiculous.

It's perfectly reasonable to enforce the laws, but this isn't a Homeland Security issue, nor an Immigration or Customs issue. FBI maybe. Department of Commerce definitely.

Did you know you can get a refill on any drink and it's free?

For the record, Nintendo does not currently "have a patent", nor is there a "patent that describes" anything, nor a "patent filed in March." The proper terminology is an "application for patent."

Just throwing that out there.

To Iridium:

IBM almost certainly patented anything relevant from your project. They're actually one of the most frequent filers. Contrary to your statements, most large companies file patent applications to prevent lawsuits, not so they can sue other people.

As far as the idea of the "original filer" holding the rights to the patent, that's exactly what the situation is. The VAST majority are filed by corporations, and paid for by them. It's actually a very expensive process, costing several thousand dollars just in the prosecution of the case (the examination process), and thousands more in annual fees during the lifetime of the patent. The average Joe Nobody could never afford to patent anything. Also, while patents are filed in the name of the inventor(s) and owned by the company in the US, the company itself can be listed as the inventor everywhere else in the world.

The US system is generally better than the other patent offices (i.e. Japanese, European, etc.) in that we use a "first-to-invent" system that allows patents to be challenged if someone can provide documentation that they had the invention before the patent owner. Everywhere else runs on a "first-to-file" system that doesn't provide the same recourse.

There's a lot of misonceptions about the Patent Office in this thread. You can't patent just anything (i.e. people talking about patenting "air" and "breathing").

You have to provide a lot of documentation about how the invention works, and provide a listing of specific features you want legal protection of. It's not a simple matter of "patenting the iPhone". There are more likely to be several, if not dozens, of patents for any specific device. In the case of the iPhone, the touchscreen interface, the touchscreen device itself, specific features of the telephone operation, specific features of the encryption schemes used, etc. would all be separate patent applications.

As I posted on kotaku earlier today, there's a key difference between the patent in question and the Cell processor. The claims of this patent specify that "any one of the processors can operate as the master". The Cell has a dedicated master, and the 8 SPUs have a completely different design, so they're unable to function as the master.