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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Despicable. That's really the only polite word I have for both Apple's actions, and the current state of our patent system.

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Despicable. That's really the only polite word I have for both Apple's actions

What word do you have for things that are actually despicable?

Like actually hurting or killing people?

Or doing things that don't just involve selling telephones?

It's hurting people if millions go to waste. People lose jobs, worry about money, can't pay medical bills and so on.

It's hurting people if millions go to waste. People lose jobs, worry about money, can't pay medical bills and so on.

You're totally right. Despicable. Just like Stalin. We can only hope that we discover Apple's diabolical plan, and the location of the plutonium, before it's too late.

Give me a break.

Stop arguing on HN and go help those starving children in Africa.

Stop arguing on HN and go help those starving children in Africa

Oh gee, I sure would - but how will I find Africa now that I can't buy a Galaxy Nexus with it's enhanced turn-by-turn navigation and barometric elevation sensor?

Oh yeah, I forgot. Man, that's despicable.

Yes. Ironically it's even less "firstworldproblems" than you might otherwise think, because a lot of the jobs lost etc go to people who are very much not first world.

Wow. What is wrong with everyone here? Let's look at what despicable means.

(from Dictionary.com)

Despicable : deserving to be despised

Hooker Chemical poured tons of hazardous waste into the ground - waste that they knew would cause health problems - and then sold the site to the City of Niagara Falls to be developed into subdivisions. That's pretty despicable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal

In China, in 2008, a factory making baby formula sold thinned-out product to make a quick buck. It's estimated that about 54000 children under the age of 3 became sick from drinking the formula. That's really quite despicable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

Does anyone here really despise Apple? More than Google? Or Samsung? Or any other faceless, unaccountable corporation? Really? Because there's going to be a 1 or 2 week period during this trial where you might not be able to buy some shiny new telephone? What the fuck is wrong with you?

People downvote you, including myself, because you're disrupting a thread by discussing the semantics of the word 'despised' in an impolite manner than brings nothing to the story.

Being right or wrong has little bearing on what is a rude and unnecessary derail.

Come again? What could be more self-indulgent and irrelevant than posting to the root of a thread announcing your opinion that a company that makes shiny gadgets is "despicable"? And you're down-voting me for pointing that out? What?

Building tools is what makes us human. If I believed in sacraments, that would be one. And we're seeing the early stages of a proxy war, crippled appliance culture against toolmakers, which could push civilization off course. It's hard to see atrocities confined to 0.001% of our species in the same light.

Compare Android to Windows Phone, Android tablets to the Surface, and the Lumia to the Galaxy Nexus.

Google and their partners could have taken the high road and created their own take on what a touch screen phone OS is, but instead they took the low road and did a wholesale look and feel copy and paste job of iOS to get scale.

Copying look and feel isn't actual wrongdoing, but it's certainly not the high road.

Now Apple is taking the low road and trying to smack the fuck down Google legally, instead of taking the high road and competing on its own merits.

Both companies have taken the low road, and both companies are culpable here- no one comes out looking good in this story.

I really don't want to get into a stupid religious war about whether Android is a blatant copy of iOS or not. Let's grant, just for the sake of brevity, that Android is an identical copy of iOS.

There's still a world of difference between that and using government violence to ban a competitor from business.

If we're comparing current iterations. Android now looks nothing like ios and in actuality ios is looking more like android. Adding polish and bigger icons for touch to existing ui was all Apple did. Objectively look back at early Blackberry and Nokia phones. Where they they completely innovated on was multitouch and getting rid of the stylus.

"Yeah, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

I didn't mean to discount their accomplishments as I do think they made huge strides in the pushing of manufacturing of mobile components along with pushing the competition. But the look of grid icons, and pim applications has relatively remained unchanged.

They're only pissed off because Android sells at a lower margin and a lower price point and therefore has more volume and marketshare.

If they actually cared about the similarities, they would have picked a fight earlier on.

They only pick a fight now as the successor is competitive enough to win some cash off, so it's less risky.

I have no respect for anyone who does this. Fuck them.

This is exactly the problem. All the arguments about copying are just a smoke screen for an attack on a successful competitor.

Unfortunately for Apple these suits put the Android vendors in the role of the underdog and people tend to root for the underdog.

Yeah. Look at the notifications. Android blatantly copied it from the IPhone. #sarcasm

>>but instead they took the low road and did a wholesale look and feel copy and paste job of iOS to get scale.<<

You take this as a fact instead of a subjective opinion of few that it really is. I've never seen anyone mistake an Android for an iPhone. The user-experience is entirely different and different people like both for different reasons. Also I don't think copying "look and feel" is how you build scale... maybe a cheaper, poorer quality alternative that sells on the down-low in some guerrilla market.. but definitely not a viable competitor that scales faster than the originator of that "look and feel"

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