Nintendo Wii: Banned in the USA?
By Matt Peckham, PC World
No, I'm not kidding, it's not a gratuitous headline hit-grabber, Nintendo is in fact facing a serious ban on several of the controllers for the Wii as well as GameCube after it lost its legal bid to scuttle a $21 million patent-infringement verdict.
Microsoft was also on the hook at one point, but settled before trial. Nintendo went to trial and lost, and on June 26, District Judge Ron Clark (U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas) denied Nintendo's claim that the $21 million payment to Anascape was excessive. Clark also threw out Nintendo's bid for a new trial. He is supposed to issue his ban today.
Blame Anascape Ltd. Or blame Nintendo. Or just blame luckless entropy if you think it's all just some great big coincidence.
What's Anascape? Some firm in Texas without a searchable Web page, for one. Also the owner of patents 5,999,084 ("variable conductance sensor"), 6,102,802 ("game controller with analog pressure sensor"), 6,135,886 ("variable conductance sensor with elastomeric dome cap"), 6,208,271 ("remote controller with analog button"), 6,222,525 ("image controller with sheet connected sensors"), 6,343,991 ("game control with analog pressure sensor"), 6,344,791 ("variable sensor with tactile feedback"), 6,347,997 ("analog controls housed with electronic displays"), 6,351,20 ("variable conductance sensory"), 6,400,303 ("remote controller with analog pressure sensor"), 6,563,415 ("analog sensor with snap through tactile feedback"), and finally, 6,906,700 ("3D controller with vibration").
Did you really just read through all of that? I'm sorry.
But glancing at a few of those, you can kind of see where the issue(s) might be, whether you come down on the side of "to heck with all this silly anticipatory patent law" or all the way over on the other end with a hearty "to heck with Nintendo flouting all that silly anticipatory patent law." Or something.
Here's the skinny on what it actually affects:
The GameCube or WaveBird controllers, which Nintendo no longer makes.
The Wii Classic Controller (Nintendo's Charlie Scibetta says the company will still be able to sell it pending Nintendo's appeal).
Here's what it doesn't:
The Wii Remote (unless paired with the Wii Classic Controller)
The Wii Nunchuk
How will Nintendo get out of this one? They'll have to either post a bond or put royalties in an escrow account to avoid a sale halt, according to Anascape's lawyer Doug Cawley. Nintendo of course plans to appeal the verdict, claiming it didn't use Anascape's technology.
Would someone just get on with it and put us out of our misery by patenting the universe already?
well.....looking at the patents, it seems pretty cut and dry. those fuckers have the rights to pretty much all motion sensor technology for hand-held evices.
To me it seems like they're just squatting on the technology. So they made a patent. Good for them, did they make any effort to do anything with them?
My patent law is really rusty, but I remember a tiny bit. You can only patent something that is nonintuitive. You cannot patent something that somebody else could just as easily come up with. For example, I cannot patent a peanut butter sandwich. Even if I somehow came to the conclusion of making a sandwich with peanut butter without ever being in the outside world, it's a simple idea that someone else can come up with. It's a bad example, but try to take it at face value.
You should patent something if you intend to use it, distribute it, whatever, and want to make sure that no one else steals your idea in the meantime.
I'm not positive, but this might be the same company I heard about years ago, back when the Wii was the "Revolution". Some upstart nonames had claimed they had patents to what the Wii was doing.
What this all screams to me is that creating motion sensor controllers is not nonintuitive. Given the degree of escalation in the gaming industry, it was going to happen eventually. These people apparently had a good idea it would happen, and they patented it and did nothing with it.
This is all just speculation. I could be completely wrong. But sometimes two different entities can have a very similar idea. If this small company is pissed that Nintendo is using their patents, then they should have done something with them, like, years ago, when they had the chance.
Has the video game industry dug up its very own blood diamond?
According to a report by activist site Toward Freedom, for the past decade the search for a rare metal necessary in the manufacturing of Sony's Playstation 2 game console has fueled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
At the center of the conflict is the unrefined metallic ore, coltan. After processing, coltan turns into a powder called tantalum, which is used extensively in a wealth of western electronic devices including cell phones, computers and, of course, game consoles.
Allegedly, the demand for coltan prompted Rwandan military groups and western mining companies to plunder hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal, often by forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines.
"Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," said Ex-British Parliament Member Oona King.
So where's the connection to Sony? According to Toward Freedom, during the 2000 launch of the PS2, the electronics giant was having trouble meeting consumer demand. To pump out more units, Sony required a significant increase in the production of electric capacitors, which are primarily made with tantalum. This helped drive the world price of the powder from $49/pound to a whopping $275/pound, resulting in the frenzied scouring of the Congolese hills known for being ripe with coltan.
Sony has since sworn off using tantalum acquired from the Congo, claiming that current builds of the PS2, PSP and PS3 consoles are sourced from a variety of mines in several different countries.
But according to researcher David Barouski, they're hardly off the hook.
"SONY's PlayStation 2 launch...was a big part of the huge increase in demand for coltan that began in early 1999," he explained. "SONY and other companies like it, have the benefit of plausible deniability, because the coltan ore trades hands so many times from when it is mined to when SONY gets a processed product, that a company often has no idea where the original coltan ore came from, and frankly don't care to know. But statistical analysis shows it to be nearly inconceivable that SONY made all its PlayStations without using Congolese coltan."
Currently, the Playstation 2 is the best-selling video game console of all-time, having sold through over 140 million units.
(CNN) -- Shigeo Tokuda looks like your average retiree, wearing a classy gray suit and distinguished glasses. But there is nothing average about this 73-year-old when he steps in front of the camera. Shigeo Tokuda is a porn star
From women in their 20's to their 70's, Tokuda romances them all (sometimes more than one at a time). Tokuda is a genuine leading man in the genre of elderly porn, starring in more than 200 adult videos. Tokuda (that's his porn name) is so successful, he is a brand.
"I retired and didn't have anything to do," says Tokuda, a former 9 to 5 travel agent. "This is my second life. I don't know how long I can keep living, but I want to enjoy the rest of it."
Tokuda certainly looks like he's enjoying life, saying he's healthier now than he's been in years. So are sales of his DVD's, primarily among middle-aged and elderly buyers.
"In his generation, Tokuda is a superstar," says Gaichi Kono, an adult video director who has worked with Tokuda. Watch how Shigeo Tokuda has launched a second career »
"He encourages older people to think, I can do this because that old man can do this."
Ruby Productions produces Tokuda's movies and specializes in elderly porn videos. It's a genre they helped pioneer by accident.
Ryuichi Kadowaki, president of Ruby Productions, says they started producing adult videos with people in their 30's to good sales. They creeped up to 40 year old actors and they sold even better. Kadowaki says they went up to actors in their 50's, then 60's, and now they're producing an entire line of adult videos with actors in their 70's.
And their star, says Ruby, is Tokuda. "To be honest, I don't understand why people are buying these videos," he says. "I think our older customers must feel a sense of security by watching videos with an actor who is in the same generation."
Ruby says it's targeting the elderly audience and considering selling videos in retirement homes. Ruby also says it's just completed a deal to release some of Tokuda's movies in the U.S.
Japan does have a higher percentage of people over the age of 65 than any country in the world. Ruby Productions says it's just meeting a demand of an aging Japanese society.
Tokuda says his friends are envious, because he's in a job where he's valued, something many seniors lack. "Seniors get depressed because they don't have anything to do. They go crazy," says Tokuda.
Tokuda hopes to work until he's 80 or even older. Giving it his all, he says, until the end.
Bah, that's nothing. I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that a 102 year old pornstar called Rose exists. There are some things you can't unsee.
A man who the police say entered a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tenn., on Sunday and shot eight people, killing two, was motivated by a hatred for liberals and gay people, Chief Sterling P. Owen IV of the Knoxville Police Department said Monday.
“It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement,” Chief Owen said of the suspect, Jim D. Adkisson, 58. “We have recovered a four-page letter in which he describes his feelings and the reason that he claims he committed these offenses.”
According to a search warrant for Mr. Adkisson’s house filed by the police, during interrogation Mr. Adkisson admitted to the shooting and said “he had targeted the church because of its liberal leanings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country.”
Mr. Adkisson was not a member of the church and congregants said they did not recognize him, but two people said his former wife had once attended the church, Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist.
Mr. Adkisson was arrested at the scene and has been charged with one count of first-degree murder. More charges are expected, and Chief Owen said the police were treating the shooting as a hate crime.
The authorities and witnesses said the gunman, carrying a guitar case that concealed a 12-gauge shotgun, entered the church just as a children’s performance of “Annie Jr.” started.
Standing near the door of the sanctuary, he opened fire. Chief Owen said the man had fired only three blasts, but had 73 more rounds of ammunition with him. Mr. Adkisson’s letter indicated that he expected to be shot and killed by the police when they arrived, Chief Owen said, but church members tackled and subdued him.
“He certainly intended to take a lot of casualties,” Chief Owen said at a news conference Monday morning.
The Unitarian Universalist church has Protestant roots but embraces diverse opinions and creeds. “The theology is now considered beyond Christian,” said Janet Hayes, a spokeswoman for the Unitarian Universalist Association. The Knoxville church’s Web site says, “All religions, in every age and culture, possess not only intrinsic merit, but also potential value for those who have learned the art of listening.”
The church has been public in its embrace of liberal causes, advertising events like a summer sex education event for teenagers organized by Planned Parenthood and meetings of groups like Parents, Friends and Families of Lesbians and Gays. Since the 1950s, its Web site says, the church has worked for “desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women’s rights and gay rights,” and has taken on environmental causes.
Several church members, still shaken from the shooting, declined to comment extensively on the church’s liberal views. “It does clarify just what type of hate crime this was,” said Mark Harmon, a Knox County commissioner and member of the church. “Regardless of motivations, when someone comes into your house of worship and shoots a shotgun indiscriminately it’s an earth-shattering act of hatred.”
Karen Massey, a neighbor of Mr. Adkisson’s in Powell, Tenn., said he had been a considerate friend. “We hate what he’s done,” she said. “He just snapped. He didn’t give us any indication.”
Ms. Massey said Mr. Adkisson had been raised in a strict Christian home, was openly antigay and had complained to her about his childhood religion. “He said if you read the whole Bible, everything in it contradicts itself.”
Chief Owen said Mr. Adkisson had recently been notified that his monthly food stamp allotment would be reduced or discontinued.
Chief Owen said investigators had found only two records of criminal activity for Mr. Adkisson, both charges of driving while intoxicated. But in 2000, his former wife, Liza Alexander, asked for an order of protection against him, saying he had threatened to “blow my brains out and then blow his own brains out.”
The dead were identified as Linda Kraeger, 61, a visitor from another church, and Gregory McKendry Jr., 60, an usher who some witnesses said had used his body to shield others from the gunman.
The only thing weird with the article there is how it specifically mentions that his food stamp allotment was being reduced or discontinued. I understand it may have been a bit frustrating, but I don't see how it was important in any way.
That being said, good for those people for taking him down sooner than he expected, though he shouldn't have expected a very high body count.
Also I don't think killing a few people would help stop a country wide effort, the guy was clearly insane, but he proves it even more with his enormous expectations.
Ya, we are around that area right now (road trip), and my aunt really wanted to know the woman’s name, because on the news they would only talk about the man.
To say that the run-up to the Oympics (whee, 9 days left, rah rah) has been a stomach-churning, mind-numbing roller-coaster ride of twists and turns and ups and downs would be an unforgivable understatement, on par with asserting that the Chinese outfits for the 2008 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony is only…slightly clashing.
The latest nauseating corkscrew of an embarrassment to the Chinese-run Olympic Games has been the popular outrage amongst Chinese citizens that buffet meals served to foreign reporters and media will only cost one measly USD (~6.8 RMB). To add insult to injury for the Chinese, not only is it all-you-can eat (because Westerners love to eat, just look at those gargantuan Americans), it’s also a smorgasbord of culinary delight rumored to be prepared by China’s top chefs! Great, so that’s three whammies in a row. Cheap, plentiful, and prepared by the finest…oh, and the fourth, reserved only for foreign devils.
Yeah, I’d be kinda upset too.
One of the mass e-mail forwards references a recent story of a mother who stole meat for her child, asking emphatically:
“CCP, you used the Chinese people’s money to put on the Olympics, why not let the meat-stealing mother bring her child to eat the Olympic 1 USD buffet? Just 1USD, all the Chinese commoners can enjoy! But why only let foreigners enjoy and not let the Chinese people enjoy?”
To be sure, 1 USD buffet meals is a downright steal for the vast majority of foreigners…and an outright affront to the vast majority of Chinese who spend 1 USD each day and get far less.
But, our dear Chinese can take solace in knowing that the Chinese government has not completely betrayed them once they take a gander of how ridiculously expensive internet access will be for those same Olympic reporters and media personnel. US$1,131 for one month of broadband DSL service…that, contrary to what everyone originally thought China promised, will still be censored. Wow, I only pay 130 RMB (19 USD) a month…for censored internet…suckers.
One, perhaps unsurprising, Chinese comment in response to Western complaints about this reads:
你们他妈的脑子进水了吧,都想来白吃白喝白住,还他妈白用,去死吧
Has water entered your mother*ucking brains? You all want to come eat without paying, drink without paying, stay without paying, and use the internet without paying? Go kill yourselves.
Well, that certainly helps put the Chinese resentment in perspective. This one provides a humorous counter-balance.
So maybe the government got it backwards. That whole “food before freedom” argument works with the poor Chinese masses…but not so much for the now well-fed Western Olympic journalists
(CNN) -- As horrified travelers watched, a Greyhound Canada bus passenger repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated a young man who was sitting and sleeping beside him, a witness said Thursday.
"There was a bloodcurdling scream. I was just reading my book, and all of a sudden, I heard it," Garnet Caton, who was sitting in front of the two men, said of the Wednesday night incident west of Portage la Prairie in Manitoba.
"It was like something between a dog howling and a baby crying, I guess you could say," Caton said. "I don't think it will leave me for a while."
Passengers exited the bus, and a trucker who stopped provided wrenches and crowbars to several of them so they could keep the suspect on the bus until police came, witnesses told Canadian TV.
The suspect was seized with the help of negotiators, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Steve Colwell said. Video Watch Colwell discuss the case »
He said no formal charges had been filed, and he declined to identify either the man in custody or the victim, who were among 34 passengers.
The was no immediate indication of what prompted the attack, Colwell said. He said he didn't know how many times the victim was stabbed. Witnesses described the weapon as a large butcher-type knife.
Caton told The Associated Press that the victim appeared to be about 19 years old and had gotten on the bus in Edmonton.
Colwell praised the "extraordinary" level-headedness and bravery of the bus driver and passengers.
"What you saw and what you experienced would shake the most seasoned police officer. And yet I'm told that each of you acted swiftly, calmly and bravely," Colwell said. "As a result, no one else was injured."
The police received a call reporting the attack at 8:30 p.m. By the time they arrived at the scene, everyone except the knife-wielder and his victim had left the bus, Colwell said. The incident ended about 1:30 a.m.
The bus was traveling along the Trans-Canada Highway from Edmonton, Alberta, to Winnipeg, Manitoba, and was about 45 minutes from its destination when the attack occurred, Greyhound spokeswoman Abby Wambaugh said in Dallas, Texas.
Caton said the victim was sleeping with his head leaning against the window when the attack happened. Caton said he shouted at the other passengers, many of whom also were sleeping, to leave. Video Watch Caton describe what he saw »
"Everybody got off the bus. Me and a trucker that stopped and the Greyhound driver ran up to the door to maybe see if the guy was still alive or we could help or something like that," Caton said.
"And when we all got up, we saw that the guy was cutting off the guy's head. ... When he saw us, he came back to the front of the bus, told the driver to shut the door. He pressed the button and the door shut, but it didn't shut in time, and the guy was able to get his knife out and take a swipe at us," Caton said.
Caton told the AP that the attacker didn't sit near the victim when he first got on the bus, about an hour before the attack.
"He sat in the front at first; everything was normal," Caton said. "We went to the next stop, and he got off and had a smoke with another young lady there. When he got on the bus again, he came to the back near where I was sitting. He put his bags in the overhead compartment. He didn't say a word to anybody. He seemed totally normal."
Half an hour later, the attack began, Caton told the AP. "There was no rage or anything. He was like a robot, stabbing the guy."
The incident occurred on the first of two Greyhound Canada buses that were traveling together, Wambaugh said. The bus was carrying 37 passengers. As many passengers as possible among those not directly involved in the incident were transferred to the second bus, she said.
Others were taken to a hotel in Brandon, where they were met by Greyhound managers and police, Wambaugh said.
Once they are released, Greyhound will take them by bus to Winnipeg, and "we will do whatever is required to help them, and that includes counseling," she added.
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Wambaugh declined to comment further.
"I don't want to compromise the investigation," she said.
That must have been difficult too. My European history teacher in high school told us that it was surprisingly difficult to behead someone, because the spinal cord is very tough. It takes several good whacks with something sharp.
Comments
Tiny tiny news article.
cute.
My patent law is really rusty, but I remember a tiny bit. You can only patent something that is nonintuitive. You cannot patent something that somebody else could just as easily come up with. For example, I cannot patent a peanut butter sandwich. Even if I somehow came to the conclusion of making a sandwich with peanut butter without ever being in the outside world, it's a simple idea that someone else can come up with. It's a bad example, but try to take it at face value.
You should patent something if you intend to use it, distribute it, whatever, and want to make sure that no one else steals your idea in the meantime.
I'm not positive, but this might be the same company I heard about years ago, back when the Wii was the "Revolution". Some upstart nonames had claimed they had patents to what the Wii was doing.
What this all screams to me is that creating motion sensor controllers is not nonintuitive. Given the degree of escalation in the gaming industry, it was going to happen eventually. These people apparently had a good idea it would happen, and they patented it and did nothing with it.
This is all just speculation. I could be completely wrong. But sometimes two different entities can have a very similar idea. If this small company is pissed that Nintendo is using their patents, then they should have done something with them, like, years ago, when they had the chance.
To me, they're just a bunch of squatters.
The problem is people pay too much attention to different markets in order to get money, if they just stopped caring...
But then again, without Coltan, how would it have built Summer Glau?
...so glad my girlfriend doesn't speak English, or she'd be pissed about that.
That being said, good for those people for taking him down sooner than he expected, though he shouldn't have expected a very high body count.
Also I don't think killing a few people would help stop a country wide effort, the guy was clearly insane, but he proves it even more with his enormous expectations.
He just really, REALLY hated gay people. Jerk-off.
=[
Horror.....
EDIT: unless that dude was a zombie.