Apple wins patent for detecting when headset is plugged in...

I completely agree with you!
Back in 90' I regarded Apple as a company much higher than Microsoft, but now I fell oposite.
Looking at current corporate/patent culture and changes they influence down over countries I can see beginning of proper syndicate era coming soon. Basicaly if your war chest is deep enough you can patent everything and fight it in courts (which can be bribed as everyone else).
Really sad state of affairs.

 

Incredibly silly.

 

I've said it before, they are Microsoft++. If you look at the behaviour of the US government towards Google it's quite easy to see they are much better at buying politicians as well ... yeah Apple got slapped down on the ebook thing, but that was just a little too blatant.

 

None of these patents are actually inventions, they're just obvious ideas or simply design features that have been in use for any number of years. These papers are in other words worth less than the paper they're written on - in a logical, reasonable universe anyway. In this one, they're unfortunately worth just as much as apple manages to sue someone out of for "violating" them...

Headphone detection had better been patented by apple well before 2004, because that's when Intel released their HD audio spec, which features plug detection. In any case I'd be surprised if such a patent actually has merit, as my now ancient stereo system from the mid-1980s has headphone "detection" via a mechanical switch in the jack - causing sound to divert from the speakers to the headphones when a plug is inserted. Undoubtedly there's prior art even further back than that.

If there ever was any doubt that the US patent system is broken and wide open for abuse by huge corps...well... This is just a few more examples of a VERY long list, and most of it NOT by apple (or samsung for that matter). The majority is a heap of bullshit the size of the moon, by any number of actors - including but not exclusive to non-acting entities, aka patent trolls - that stretch back for years.

 

Translucency?
This rhymes with "no decency".
This is wholly about an idea (using translucency for an icon) as the feature itself is nothing worth writing about.

It made me think of the XOR cursor patent which trolled companies in the late 80's. a XOR cursor is using the obvious mathematical property that (A XOR B) XOR B = A, so that you can draw a mouse or text cursor over a few pixels on your display then "redraw" it to make it go away.
It's as silly as patenting a linked list or a while loop.

But hell, amazingly this crippled Commodore so much, it killed the Amiga CD-32, a console forbidden from the US market.. This is unbelievable. I think the Amiga was ill-fated anyway, with the DX/2 66 with VLB card under DOS 6.x replacing it, but their console could have been cheap and fun.
http://xcssa.org/pipermail/xcssa/2005-February/002587.html