Filed under: Tablet PCs

Earlier this month, Mr. Khalil Zaidan of Portland, Oregon, sued Acer, Gateway, Toshiba, HP, IBM, and Fujitsu for violating his 1996 patent “Hinge Assembly for Electronic Devices.” A closer reading of the patent indicates that Zaidan seems to have patented the basic principle behind a tablet PC, allowing a computer to perform “rotational adjustment.” Still, the case — filed in United States District Court, Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division — seems like a pretty easy way to milk these big companies for some cash, given that tablet PCs have been around well before November 2006. Nevertheless, while Zaidan is asking the court for damages on patent infringement be decided in a jury trial, we’re betting that this gets settled out-of-court pretty quick. We’re pretty sure that if Zaidan could actually build a Commodore 64-esque tablet (that’s what his diagram is supposed to represent, right?), he could just make money from that instead of going through all this legal nonsense.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Things are looking up for EchoStar. After getting slammed hard yesterday with $90 million in initial damages and a permanent injunction that requires them to disable all DVR functionality for users in 30 days, EchoStar has managed to get a stay on TiVo‘s injunction while the court battle rages on. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals did the honors today, halting the Thursday injunction by a Texas Court, and while the current stay is temporary (they don’t say for how long), EchoStar is hoping for a longer-term stay, and are fighting for an eventual overturn of the Texas decision. Doesn’t seem like we’re close to the finish line here yet, so we suppose DISH Network users can go on with their regularly scheduled time-shifted lives for the time being.

[Via HD Beat]

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Filed under: Digital Cameras

Texas Governor Rick Perry has just announced a plan to leverage the eyeballs of millions of voyeuristic web surfers into a de facto army of unpaid border guards, by allowing the general public to watch live streams from video cameras trained on the Mexican border and call a toll-free number to report illegal crossings. Although the governor did not go into details on how many cameras would be installed nor how far apart they would be positioned, he did estimate the cost of the program at around five million dollars, which would buy almost 3,000 high-def HDR-HC3 camcorders even if Sony decided not to give the state a bulk discount. Leaving the whole immigration issue aside, what really stands out about this project is that it could possibly set a precedent for inner-city officials to open up their surveillance cameras to John Q. Public  -- so instead of some authoritarian regime monitoring every citizen's activities, "Big Brother" will actually become all of us.

[Via BBC News]