Apple, Samsung lawyers spar in court over patents

Apple attorney Harold McElhinny (C) delivers his opening statement in a high profile
trial between Samsung and Apple in San Jose, California July 31, 2012. – Reuters

SAN JOSE: Lawyers for Apple and Samsung debated the differences between copying and honest competition as opening arguments were held Tuesday in a huge patent trial involving the two tech giants.
Harold McElhinny, a lawyer for Apple in the blockbuster patent trial under way in San Jose, California, told the jury Samsung began copying the US firm as soon as the iPhone was publicly unveiled in January 2007.
“At the same time (Apple co-founder Steve) Jobs introduced the iPhone, he warned his competitors that he had filed for patent protection on more than 200 new inventions in the iPhone,” McElhinny said in his opening argument.
“Samsung could come up with its own designs, it could beat Apple fairly in the marketplace. Or it could copy Apple… it’s easier to copy than to innovate.”The lawyer said Samsung copied specific features, including a “bounce-back”feature in the scrolling process and a design with a black-on-black face.
“At the highest corporate levels, Samsung decided to copy every element of the iPhone,” he said.
“This was not accidental. Samsung’s copying was intentional.”He argued that Samsung made dozens of changes as Apple updated its products “so that the end result was identical to Apple products.”
Samsung lawyer Charles Verhoeven countered Apple’s opening with his own version of cell phone history, citing several large-screen phones that pre-dated the iPhone.
The South Korean firm is no “copyist” or “Johnny-come-lately,” said Verhoeven, but a major technology company that does its own innovation. He said internal Apple documents show that designers themselves were inspired by designs from competitors, including Sony.
The iPhone was an “inspiring” product to many – but that there was nothing wrong with that, said Verhoeven. “Is that infringement? No, that’s competition,” he said.
The lawyer said Samsung’s design can be easily distinguished from Apple’s, even by an ordinary observer.
He said Samsung will show its own patents for high-speed data streaming, sending email, and multitasking to back its counter-claims against Apple, which the jury will also consider.
The comments came as jurors began hearing the biggest US patent trial in decades, with billions at stake for the tech giants.
As testimony began, Apple industrial designer Christopher Stringer, the inventor on many Apple patents, took the stand to testify about the creative process behind the iPhone.
“We came out with something that was breathtaking,” said Stringer. “It was a revolution. The challenges in terms of producing that product were enormous.”Stringer said when phones like Samsung’s were released, it was “offensive”to his artistic sensibilities. “We’ve been ripped off, it’s plain to see – by Samsung in particular,” said Stringer.
Asked why there was no Apple logo on the front of the iPhone, Stringer said it didn’t need it. “When you make a startling and beautiful design, you don’t need to,” he answered. “It becomes an icon.”Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing Philip Schiller was to be on the stand when the trial resumes Friday.
Just ahead of arguments, US District Judge Lucy Koh allowed one of the 10 jurors to be dismissed after the woman said she was confused about whether she was getting paid.
“The stress of this case is causing anxiety. She’s having panic attacks,” the judge said.
“We understand this case would be a severe economic hardship on

you.”Both sides agreed to the move which reduces the number of jurors hearing the case to nine, but does not impact the trial.
Apple is seeking more than $2.5 billion in a case accusing the South Korean firm of infringing on designs and other patents from the iPhone and iPad maker.
This is one of several cases in courts around the world involving the two big electronics giants in the hottest part of the tech sector, tablet computers and smartphones.
While the results so far have been mixed in courts in Europe and Australia, Samsung is clearly on the defensive in the US case.

Koh, who will preside in the jury case, has issued two temporary injunctions against US sales of Samsung’s 10-inch Galaxy tablet and the Galaxy Nexus smartphone developed with Google.
Samsung could face big risks: If Apple wins, it would automatically get a permanent injunction on sales of Samsung devices. And if Samsung makes only minor changes, Apple could ask for the South Korean firm to be held in contempt.
The case has huge financial implications for both firms and the burgeoning industry for mobile devices.
A survey by research firm IDC showed Samsung shipped 50.2 million smartphones globally in the April-June period, while Apple sold 26 million iPhones. IDC said Samsung held 32.6 percent of the market to 16.9 percent for Apple.
Samsung is the leading maker of smartphones using Google’s Android operating system, which has become the most popular platform despite complaints from Apple that it has infringed on its patents.

French summer camp workers sacked over Ramazan fast

PARIS: France’s main Muslim body on Tuesday angrily condemned a town council’s decision to sack four summer camp workers for fasting during Ramazan as “arbitrary and discriminatory.”
The four workers, who had been employed temporarily by the town of Genevilliers in the Paris suburbs to help run a sports camp in southwestern France, were dismissed on July 20, the first day of Ramazan, after being told they were endangering children’s safety by not eating or drinking between dawn and dusk.
They are now planning to contest their dismissal through France’s labour courts and the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) said Tuesday it was considering suing Genevilliers council for discrimination.
In a statement, the Communist mayor of Genevilliers defended the decision to suspend the employees on health and safety grounds after an official who visited the camp noticed that they were not eating or drinking at lunchtime.
“They did not respect the terms of their contract in a way that could have endangered the physical safety of the children they were responsible for,” the statement said.
“This lack of nourishment and hydration could have resulted in these employees not being in full possession of the means required to ensure activities at the camp were correctly and safely run, as well as the physical safety of the children in their charge.”
Nicole Varet, an aide to the mayor, said the decision to dismiss the four employees had been influenced by an incident three years ago in which a fasting camp worker had been taken ill whilst driving, resulting in an accident in which a child was seriously injured.
But Mohand Yanat, a lawyer representing the four sacked workers, told AFP the safety argument was a smokescreen for anti-Muslim prejudice.
“How can you judge the capacity of someone to do their job on the basis of their religious practice?” he asked.
Abdallah Zekri, a spokesman for the CFCM, echoed his remarks. “Religious freedom is a fundamental right and you cannot in any circumstances ban someone from practising their religion,” he said.
One of the four workers, who was only prepared to be identified by his first name, Samir, said he hoped the action they are planning to take over the “unfair and unacceptable” treatment they had received would make life easier for other Muslims.
“We are thinking about going to court to get clear answers to our questions,” he told AFP. “Do people have the right not to eat during the day? Are doctors who observe Ramazan putting their patients lives in danger.”

Monster blackout fuels calls for India power reforms

NEW DELHI: India’s government faced calls for urgent reform of the power sector Tuesday, after a monster blackout triggered the collapse of the entire northern grid, affecting more than 300 million people.
Leading the high-decibel reform choir were business lobby groups who said Monday’s outage — the worst to hit the country in a decade — underlined the government’s inability to address India’s perennial electricity shortfall.
“The increasing gap between electricity supply and demand has long been a matter of concern,” said Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry.
The CII, Banerjee said, has “consistently highlighted” the need for urgent steps to improve supplies of coal to thermal power plants and reforming state distribution utilities.
“This latest outage is just an urgent reminder for addressing these issues as a priority,” he added.
While the cause of the blackout has yet to be confirmed, Indian newspapers joined numerous experts in pointing the finger of suspicion at energy-hungry states overdrawing their allotted quantity of power.
The northern grid went completely down for six hours on Monday morning, stranding hundreds of trains, triggering transport chaos in cities and leaving a region that houses 28 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population without power.
With India running a peak-hour electricity deficit of 12 per cent, power cuts are a daily necessity, and states frequently seek to mitigate the problem by exceeding what is meant to be a carefully controlled power quota.
Although there are financial penalties for overdrawing from the grid, it is still a cheaper option than buying power on the open market for cash-starved state electricity boards.
A member of a three-man team set up by the power ministry to investigate Monday’s outage said most states were impervious to official warnings about overdrawing.
“These states have lost all fear. They overdraw from the grid to avoid paying costly power from the market,” the panel member, who declined to be identified, told the Business Standard newspaper.
Vivek Pandit, the director of energy, defence and aerospace at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said such “gross grid indiscipline” could only be remedied with drastic penalties.
“Some states are holding the whole grid to ransom and they should be taken off the grid for a day to stop them feeling they can just act with impunity,” Pandit said.
Alok Brara, publisher of the industry magazine Powerline, said the reluctance of state utilities to purchase power from national energy trading exchanges reflected deep structural problems in both supply and pricing.
“For every 100 units they buy, they will lose 30 to theft. Another 40 will be earmarked for sale to agricultural consumers at highly subsidised prices, leaving just 30 units to sell at a remunerative rate,” Brara said.
“So the argument for them is the more they buy, the more money they lose,” he added.
Apart from an overall increase in power generation investment, analysts and business lobby groups say the most pressing need at state level is to rationalise tariffs and crackdown on widespread power theft.
“Over the years, people have just got used to taking free electricity,” said Pandit.
“They pay telephone bills because they know that otherwise they’ll be cut off. The same doesn’t go for electricity bills.”
Several newspaper editorials on Tuesday pushed for reforms allowing competition in all areas of the power industry — generation, transmission and distribution — and freeing up pricing to make consumers more responsible for the electricity they use.
“India’s basic energy shortage is compounded by the policy of selling electricity to consumers at politically correct prices,” the Hindustan Times said.
“As it stands India’s energy pricing … is hopelessly caught in competitive populism,” the newspaper said.

Hybrid ”ultrabooks” blur line between tablets, laptops

A Gigabyte vendor answers questions about the new line of Ultrabooks on the opening day of the Computex exhibition at the Taipei World Trade Center in Taipei, Taiwan

TAIPEI: Slide it, flip it or snap it on and off. The way keyboards are connected to touch screens on the latest generation of computing devices is making it tough to differentiate a tablet from notebook or an ultrabook.
Microsoft Corp, which has long been the dominant force in PCs but has fallen far behind in the tablet race, is set to unveil its Windows 8 operating system later this year, designed to run on super-thin laptops called ultrabooks and tablets powered by Intel Corp’s chips.
The impending launch has prompted PC vendors to come up with a rash of hybrid designs, featuring touch screens and myriad configurations of moving or detachable keyboards.
“In future, it’ll be a blur in the definition of an ultrabook and a tablet because of convertibles with either detachable or sliding keyboards,” said Tracy Tsai, a Taipei-based analyst at research firm Gartner.
At Computex Taipei, the world’s second largest computer show, visitors flocked to the booths trying out every twist and turn that converts an ultrabook into a tablet.
Lenovo Group Ltd’s IdeaPad Yoga and Asustek Computer Inc’s Taichi have screens that bend all the way back. Samsung Electronics’ Hybrid becomes an ultrabook when the tablet clips onto a keyboard with magnetic hinges.
One tablet-ultrabook convertible that garnered attention was Asustek’s Taichi, whose dual-sided screens can run different applications at the same time.
“There’s a lot of use cases on tablets and tablet convertibles that people might approach with lots of fun, content consumption type of activity, but want to pop into it and use a productivity application and a desktop mode,” said Chris Walker, Intel’s director of microprocessor product marketing.
“The great thing is people don’t have to make that choice.”
But will they fly?
Despite all the fanfare surrounding these hybrids from Microsoft, Intel and PC vendors banking on these gadgets to make up for lost time in the tablet sector, there remains some nervousness in the industry and uncertainty among consumers about whether they will take off in a big way.
“Most of us have a laptop for work and an Android or Apple tablet now, so whether I’ll buy one of these hybrids will depend on the performance and price,” said one Computex attendee in his 30s.
Prices for these touch-based ultrabook convertibles will not be announced until Windows 8 is formally released, widely expected to be in the fourth quarter.
But the hybrids are already prompting some analysts to ponder whether they should be classified as tablets or laptop PCs.
“A way to settle the argument is by the size of the gadget. Anything that is 10 inches or smaller should be categorised as a tablet, while those that are 11 inches or bigger should be called an ultrabook,” said Ricky Liu, an analyst with KGI Securities.
Intel executives said they saw ultrabooks and its convertibles as laptops, while some PC vendors grouped such hybrids under tablets.
“Anything with a detachable keyboard is a tablet,” said an Asustek executive as she clicked the Transformer screen back onto the keyboard at the company’s booth at Computex.

Daughter to follow Houston into showbiz

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Whitney Houston’s daughter said Sunday she plans to follow her mother into show business, while the drug-troubled star’s sister-in-law admitted her untimely death could have been predicted.

Smartphone diabetes device launched

A new device launched in the UK will enable diabetics to manage their condition with a smartphone.
The £48 hi-tech glucose monitor, being rolled out at Boots stores, attaches to the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. It allows sufferers to check their blood sugar levels at any time using their phone or MP3 player.
The device, iBGStar, comes with a free Diabetes Manager App that makes it possible.

Cameron to explore Earth’s deepest ocean trench

WASHINGTON (AFP) - “Titanic” director James Cameron will try in the coming weeks to dive to the deepest place on Earth, further than any other human has on a solo mission, to return with specimens and images. Cameron would seek to accomplish his feat aboard a submersible “as futuristic as anything in his movies,” 

Human stem cells 'help blind rats'

Stem cells taken from the back of a human eye have restored some vision to blind rats, according to researchers. They say the findings could help treat blindness, caused by glaucoma, if similar results can be repeated in humans. The study, published in the journal Stem Cells Translational Medicine, used the cells to form new nerves in the eye.

These hooked up with the existing nerves, restoring sight. Glaucoma can lead to blindness and is caused by a build-up of pressure within the eye. This kills retinal ganglion cells, the nerves which take information from the retina and pass it onto the brain.

Researchers at University College London and Moorfields Eye Hospital believe they have regenerated the retinal ganglion cells using human stem cells. With permission from families, cell samples were taken from eyes which had been donated for cornea transplants.

It is a significant step towards our ultimate goal of finding a cure for glaucoma and other related conditions”

Dr Astrid LimbUniversity College London

Very rare cells in the eye, Muller glia stem cells, were collected. These were grown in the laboratory and converted into retinal ganglion cells.

These cells were then transplanted into the eyes of rats without retinal ganglion cells. Before the transplant the rats were blind. Afterwards, electrodes attached to the rats' heads showed that their brains were responding to low levels of light.

One of the researchers Dr Astrid Limb said the new cells were not joining up with the optic nerve as they would normally. Instead they appeared to be "bridging" with other nerves in the retina, which could pass the message on.

She said: "Although this research is still a long way from the clinic, it is a significant step towards our ultimate goal of finding a cure for glaucoma and other related conditions."

Prof Peng Khaw, the director of the National Institute for Health Research centre at Moorfields, said: "These results are very exciting.

"We see patients with glaucoma whose lives would be transformed with an improvement of only a small percentage of nerve cell function.

"The results of these experiments suggest that this may be possible in the future using cells we all have in our own eyes to achieve this."

The study was funded by the Medical Research Council. Its head of regenerative medicine, Dr Rob Buckle, said: "Repair of the eye is an area that is now at the forefront of this field, and this study highlights a new route for delivering the promise of regenerative medicine to treat disabling conditions such as glaucoma."

Scientists see rise in tornado-creating conditions

According to some climate scientists, such earlier-than-normal outbreaks of tornadoes, which typically peak in the spring, will become the norm as the planet warms. – File Photo

NEW YORK: When at least 80 tornadoes rampaged across the United States, from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, last Friday, it was more than is typically observed during the entire month of March, tracking firm AccuWeather.com reported on Monday.
According to some climate scientists, such earlier-than-normal outbreaks of tornadoes, which typically peak in the spring, will become the norm as the planet warms.
“As spring moves up a week or two, tornado season will start in February instead of waiting for April,” said climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Whether climate change will also affect the frequency or severity of tornadoes, however, remains very much an open question, and one that has received surprisingly little study.
“There are only a handful of papers, even to this day,” said atmospheric scientist Robert Trapp of Purdue University, who led a pioneering 2007 study of tornadoes and climate change.
“Some of us think we should be paying more attention to it,” said atmospheric physicist Anthony Del Genio of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of NASA.
The scientific challenge is this: the two conditions necessary to spawn a twister are expected to be affected in opposite ways. A warmer climate will likely boost the intensity of thunderstorms but could dampen wind shear, the increase of wind speed at higher altitudes, researchers say.
Tomorrow’s thunderstorms will pack a bigger wallop, but may strike less frequently than they have historically, explained Del Genio.
“As we go to a warmer atmosphere, storms – which transfer energy from one region to another – somehow figure out how to do that more efficiently,” he said. As a result, thunderstorms transfer more energy per outbreak, and so have to make such transfers less often.
In a 2011 paper, Del Genio calculated that, “especially in the central and eastern United States, we can expect a few more days per month with conditions favorable to severe thunderstorm occurrence” by the latter part of this century if the global climate grows warmer.
Indeed, the world has been experiencing more violent storms since 1970, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in its most recent assessment.
Extending Tornadoes Path
Purdue’s Trapp and colleagues got a similar result in their 2007 study, which they confirmed in research published in 2009 and 2011. “The number of days when conditions exist to form tornadoes is expected to increase” as the world warms, he said.
In addition, they found, regions near the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts not normally associated with tornadoes will experience tornado-making weather more frequently. They projected a doubling in the number of days with such conditions in Atlanta and New York City, for instance.
More powerful thunderstorms would be expected to produce more tornadoes, but wind shear could prove a mitigating factor.
Because climate change is not uniform, Del Genio wrote in the 2011 paper, “in the lower troposphere, the temperature difference between low and high latitudes decreases as the planet warms, creating less wind shear.”
Other scientists are not so sure, and they see a surge in tornadoes last year as ominous. April 2011 was the most active tornado month on record, with 753, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), compared to the previous record of 267 in April 1974.
“I have no doubt that there will be many times when wind shear is plenty strong to create a tornado,” said Trenberth.
That is what Trapp’s team concluded in their 2007 study.
“Over most of the United States,” they wrote, the increase in the power of thunderstorms will “more than compensate for the relative decreases in shear.”
As a result, “the environment would still be considered favorable for severe convection” of the kind that creates tornadoes.
From March to May the projected increase in severe storms is “largest over a ‘tornado-alley’-like region extending northward from Texas,” Trapp found. From June through August, the eastern half of the country is projected to experience such an increase.
If there are more days in the future when wind shear is too weak to produce a tornado from a thunderstorm, said Trenberth, then “the frequency of tornadoes may decrease but the average intensity might increase. You could have a doozy of an outbreak, and then they could go away for a while.”
On average, about 800 tornados are reported annually in the United States. About 70 per cent are “weak,” finds NOAA, with winds less than 110 mph (177 kph) . Just under 29 per cent are “strong,” with winds between 110 and 205 mph (177 and 329 kph) . Only 2 per cent of all tornadoes are what NOAA characterizes as “violent,” with winds in excess of 205 mph (329 kph) , but they account for 70 per cent of all twister deaths.

Mitt Romney wins Super Tuesday but major questions remain

Mitt Romney eked out a win in Ohio over Rick Santorum which, when coupled with victories for the former Massachusetts governor in Vermont, Massachusetts, Virginia and Idaho, ensured that he would remain the frontrunner for the Republican nomination heading out of Super Tuesday.

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and his wife Ann greet supporters as they arrive at their Super Tuesday primary night rally in Boston, Tuesday, March 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

And yet, although Romney cemented his delegate lead with those victories — NBC has projected he will win roughly half of the 437 delegates up for grabs tonight — there were signs everywhere you looked that Romney still hadn’t closed the deal among large swaths of the Republican electorate.

To wit:

* While polling in the runup to the Ohio vote showed the race a dead heat, the momentum was all on the side of Romney. (Check out this chart if you don’t believe us.) That the race in the Buckeye State was so close was a surprise.

* In Tennessee, the Romney-aligned Restore Our Future super PAC spent $1 million on television ads. And there was some chatter that Romney might pull the upset and leapfrog Santorum for first place. But, the final results — Santorum won by nine points — wasn’t close at all.

* In Virginia, only Romney and Texas Rep. Ron Paul were on the ballot. And yet, Paul got 41 percent of the vote — by far his strongest showing in either the 2008 or 2012 race to date. While Romney won 43 out of a possible 46 delegates in the Commonwealth, the vote for Paul suggested that there is a considerable anti-Romney faction in a state likely to be very competitive in the fall general election.

Where does that leave us? In a very similar place to where we were before Super Tuesday actually.

On paper, Romney is still the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee. He has a considerable delegate lead that may be close to insurmountable over the long haul. He is still the best funded and best organized candidate in the field. He has won — in New Hampshire, Florida, Michigan and Ohio — when he absolutely needed to.

And yet, it’s clear that major doubts remain. He has yet to convince conservatives that he is one of them and, at this point, it’s hard to imagine he ever will. He lacks any positive message to persuade large numbers of undecided Republican voters. He suffers from a passion gap as compared to Santorum and even, in his own odd way, Gingrich.

The calendar for the remainder of the month also doesn’t work in Romney’s favor. Kansas, a socially conservative state, holds caucuses on Saturday. Then Alabama and Mississippi — two southern states unlikely to be friendly to Romney — as well as Hawaii vote on March 13. Illinois, which should be a good state for Romney, votes on March 20. Louisiana, another tough state for Romney, cast ballots on March 24.

That calendar coupled with tonight’s results will keep Santorum and Gingrich in the race for the foreseeable future.

Viewed as broadly as possible, Romney is still likely to be the Republican nominee barring some sort of major change in the governing dynamic of the race. But, he will be forced to endure a series of electoral indignities over the coming weeks and maybe even months before he will wrap things up.

That’s good news for President Obama because it means he will have ample time to try to sew up — or at least strengthen himself among — the ideological middle, which is where the 2012 election will be decided.

Romney allies had hopes Super Tuesday would symbolically wrap up the nomination for their candidate and, in so doing, answer the questions — Is he conservative enough? Can he win working-class voters? — that have swirled around him since he entered the 2012 race.

Instead, the results mean that those questions will grow louder or, at the very least, stick around for a few more weeks. The Romney forces will, rightly, point to the delegate count as the ultimate answer to any and all questions.

But make no mistake: This was not how the Romney team imagined their march to the Republican nomination playing out.