Rock Band is not like playing an instrument or being in a band. It is like dancing with some karaoke thrown in. It's a rhythm game, that's all. The charts are whack a mole in time to music. If you like dancing - if you enjoy matching something you do with your body with the rhythm of the music - you might like it. If you like karaoke too, your are more likely to like it.

Some folks just can't dance or keep time. Including plenty of professional musicians.

I venture a guess that Phill can't dance.

There are great songs, but also a boatload of songs that I have never heard before. C-sides so to speak. This is not a problem except on the vocal tour, which mixes the C-sides in with real songs. I was going to use it to unlock the whole list. That was a challenge (singing songs I'd never heard before), until I discovered the beginner mode, which is insensitive to pitch and very loose. So last night I started having the game sing to itself (mic next to speaker) . Works fine, so I'll unlock the whole thing tonight I guess by making the game wank while I read a book. Now there's something you can't do in Rock Band.

Off topic posts are no more common in Asian countries than anywhere else, and have no relationship to some company being in trouble. I don't understand your point. No-one named "Samsung" has made a post here - these posts are mostly (albeit inferentially at best) about Ubuntu. You make no sense.

Fred is right. Lesson 1: Invalidity doesn't usually work. Courts and juries defer to the patent office (who granted it). Lesson 2: Non-infringement does work. If the judge needs to let you off the hook, he will simply redefine the patent to exclude you. Lesson 3: Activision, by bothering to mention the (desperate) 3 year laches thing in public, pretty much is running scared. The broad claims are in the back end of the patent, e.g., claim 25. Activision will argue "musical instrument" in the patent has an "ordinary meaning" - it generates the musical sounds itself, not like a controller. Unfortunately, real life has counter examples - like electronic drum pads, etc. Gibson will point to a zillion examples and say a musical instrument is anything that ends up making music. It will be up in the air in view of col. 5, lines 11-15, of the patent, risky risky. Activision will argue "pre-recorded video track" excludes the real-time, responsive animations of the cheesy avatars. Unfortunately, there's a lot of motion capture there and it does show up on your TV, so both "pre-recorded" and "video" are pretty much there. Gibson will say it is in fact a pre-recorded video track. That's about it. "Activision and Gibson have settled on mutually agreeable terms. All suits against retailers have been dropped. Activision and Gibson are excited about the future, yada, yada, yada.". Possible result - Gibson exclusive to the extent of no Fender instruments or almost none on Guitar Hero, which could be Gibson's whole strategy, really. Every cool kid wants a Gibson 'cause that's the only guitar in the Guitar Hero IV, V, etc.

p.diddy, you're not bad. But as you admits, you're not experienced.

You do clearly tend to really, really drink the Koolaid. So, just to be clear: KSR is not necessarily right, beneficial, or useful to society or business or anyone else, the Supremes have no particular insight on technology and innovation policy, don't understand how things work, and usually screw up things worse than they help it (you're right on the 20 years), the Fed. Cir. is a remarkably activist appeals court filled with strange and irrational agendas that is even better at screwing things up than the Supremes. The disclosure for exclusivity bargain is an ideal - but not always a reality. Disclosures usually suck. Etc.

More to the point, there is no objective evidence that a patent system is any use at all. At the same time, there is no evidence it is useless. We just plain don't know whether it does more harm than good or more good than harm in theory; we don't know whether our particular implementation does more harm than good or more good than harm; and we don't know whether alternative incentivization (open source, public awards of cash, whatever) would be better or worse for promoting the advance of the arts and sciences. So there is no use pronouncing that patents are good or bad. You have no data - no-one does.

What patents are, however, is real, just like income tax, cancer, prostitution, and gambling. Get used to it. They are a real business and legal risk that competent business management is expected to handle offensively and defensively. They are a real basis for a business model based on, depending how you look at it, legal extortion or admirable protection of intangible private property.

The dumbest comment on here though, is the implication that someone who is going to take a business action (suing 25 companies for infringement) is somehow obligated to do it early. Why would they? Who does that serve? Lawsuits COST. Three patent suits against this many companies, seven patents, foreign defendants, goodbye $1M a month. You don't do it until there are no better alternatives. Just like it wasn't SanDisk's obligation to pursue them earlier than the risk-reward warranted, it wasn't their obligation to quit before the risk-reward warranted.

Let me just put this in before someone else does "I just got a patent on suing people for patent infringement. Yuk yuk yuk."

Agreed? There is nothing to agree to.

1. You're obviously not learning very much. The first thing you should learn is that any patent decision from the supremes takes 10-20 years to propogate and understand. Only god knows what KSR will do.
2. If you are against software or telecom patents because you believe they stifle innovation, fine, just say so. I'll point out, however, that no-one knows one way or the other, so while your position might be right, it is a "faith-based" position. IP policy effects one way or the other are just not testable. Economic models are always hypersimplified bollocks. It could very easily turn out that 50 years from now, the world looks back and says the GPL stifled innovation because it directed skilled programmers' efforts into areas that were cool to engineers, but not useful for society. No one knows. Go write a science fiction book.
3. Otherwise, you haven't looked at the patent claims, just plain don't know how to, and don't know what it is about. You have no grounds for an opinion of any kind. Go home.

1. The Abstract is (traditionally, and in 1991, although not so much now) there for the purpose of classifying the patent as prior art, not what the patent claims as its territory.

2. Bottom line #1 is the claims. In this patent the Summary is pretty informative too.

3. Bottom line #2 is the file history. Recent ones publicly available at the U.S. Patent Office's "PAIR" online http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair.

4. Not this one, too old (would have to be ordered from a service to view).

5. Looking up Dr. Chang (Princeton), this was a real product. By 1985 his company sold a $220K 9 processor machine called the IP-1, quote "The IP-1 has between 1 and 33 proprietary MOS technology CPUs which have access to a common memory through an interconnection switch. The combination of cross-bar switch and a multi-access memory (developed from work on the Goodyear Aerospace Staran system) avoids the bottleneck associated with bus-based systems." The company now makes PLCs.

6. Since the IP-1 was disclosed, and there was an interview in the case, my guess (just a guess without the file history) as to the reason this one was allowed as a patent would be "what is different from the IP-1". Knowing that, one could spculate about whether it was new and not obvious in 1988 (not 1991 - 1988 is the earliest filing date). Otherwise, pointless.

The patent office is sometimes a rubber stamp. It is also sometimes a full blitz defense. Most of the time, it's just a stupid comment and delay generator.

The Federal Circuit, bitch-slapped in KSR, tries their hardest to provide clear rules and to introduce certainty. However, with the number of flakes and hacks on board, they usually bring fundamentally insensible certainty. Often, there are three or four varieties of certainty, depending on the panel.

The Supreme Court, on the other hand, is a somebody else's problem generator. While KSR has stolen some reasonable thinking about why a different obviousness standard is probably a good idea, it doesn't help us get to one and basically is going to create 5-10 years of random trial and appeal decisions, patent office confusion, and general gibberish.

The bottom line will be, as usual, not the quality of the patent, but the quality of the representation.

It's not Prey. Prey is Frankenstein, adds nothing to that story, Crichton hasn't done anything but screw up his technology for years. It's this: http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/fast-cheap.pdf, part 5, plus mesh networks.

Patent enforcement by one party (absent anti-competitive agreements) is completely immune from antitrust, absent one of sham litigation (PRE, Handgards) or truly obnoxious deception of the patent office (Walker Process) . Verizon can do this until the cows come home. No antitrust. Ever.

Why else do you think Microsoft has shifted to patents?