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Comment by kergonath | Hacker News Reader

> Unsurprisingly the real reason is “Apple was granted a patent on this over a decade ago and no one is risking an Apple patent infringement lawsuit over laptop speakers”.

It is not exclusive. I cannot believe that there is only one way of doing something like this. They just need to care enough to put some R&D money into this.

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Sure, but as I've noted elsewhere if it goes to court it ends up in the hands of a jury. Let's just say that 12 random jurors off the street aren't exactly the HN crowd. In fact, I doubt a single HN user would ever make it on a jury for anything technical unless they lied or deliberately mislead counsel during juror questioning.

"Juror number 7, what is your occupation?"

"I'm a software developer..."

"We move to dismiss this juror".

In this case it could probably be argued for cause due to prejudice which means they can do it all day.

A big part of the calculus here is banking on that.

Out of curiosity, why would they not want to select someone who's a subject-matter expert? Is it regulatory capture or is there a more innocent reason?

People with expert knowledge on the jury bring additional information into the jury room that isn't presented in the court proceedings.

...

Years ago, when I was on the jury for a OWI case one of the questions to the jury was "do you speak Spanish." I don't, I answered "no." I don't speak and haven't studied any languages derived from Spanish.

Part of the case was about a defendant from Puerto Rico who wasn't responding to an officer who was a native Spanish speaker claiming that he couldn't understand that dialect. Note that this wasn't relevant to the case - it was trying to explain why the defendant wasn't responding to the officer.

The question of Spanish didn't come up in jury deliberations.

After the case, I noted that while I didn't speak Spanish, I did understand French and could read ancient latin and greek... and took linguistics... and my mother was fluent in Spanish and understood several dialects (and used that fluency in a professional capacity) including Puerto Rican (where she had lived for several years). The differences between the PR Spanish and Mexican Spanish are things like the word for the fruit "orange" is a "china" ( http://speakinglatino.com//wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Cartil... )... but we're getting to things like is it a water fountain? or drinking fountain? No - it's a bubbler ( https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9010e8/what_do_you... ).

This got a scowl from the public defender because I had beyond common knowledge that that line of questions of the officer about if he spoke PR Spanish was trying to catch him in something that he could come back to later (which he didn't).

If the case had been decided on that he didn't understand the instructions of a different dialect (rather than he couldn't stand up, slurred his speech and had a strong oder of malt on his breath (note this was another bit that the public defender tried to bring into question as the officer said he smelled of alcohol which doesn't have a smell itself) my understanding of linguistics and language may have been grounds for disqualification and a mistrial.

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Subject matter expert evidence should be presented - not something that someone has more than a layman's understanding of being brought into the jury room (as that could also be wrong).

Exactly. Attorneys from each side generally want to control the narrative/merits of their case as much as possible. When you're a subject matter expect juror they already have one juror who is less susceptible to their argument. When that SME gets in the jury deliberation room and is free to (essentially) present whatever they want/think/know with no monitoring, countering, argument, etc that's a "very bad thing" in the eyes of the attorneys. I have to imagine jurors are also much more likely to trust a fellow juror at face value than the attorneys and expert witness testimony that has an obvious slant to their side. A big part of their case usually comes down to "who's expert does the jury trust more".

Interesting with your "bubbler map" - in my childhood I moved from "outside the green in that map" to "inside the green in that map". Dialects are fascinating - the first time I heard bubbler to refer to a water/drinking fountain I had no idea what they were talking about. However, the inverse wasn't true - I said water/drinking fountain and they knew exactly what I was talking about.

The bubbler map is one of those most pronounced examples of a dialect in Wisconsin.

There's a radio program (incidentally from Wisconsin) on some NPR stations - A Way With Words. Upon looking it up, I'm pleased that it's still going.

https://www.waywordradio.org/

On the flip side of "I'm pleased its still going" is "way too many search results"

(think... search... ah ha! There's an episode I remember that had the book in question https://www.waywordradio.org/johnny-on-the-spot/ )

Dictionary of American Regional English - https://dare.wisc.edu

There are some maps that make Indiana look like polkadots for certain words. ... And remembering again...

https://www.daredictionary.com/search?rcode=region.IN

https://www.waywordradio.org/regional-term-pitch-in/ (in particular https://soundcloud.com/waywordradio/1322-callersabrina-pitch... )

Are parents disputes decided by a jury in the US? I know we have a different system in Germany and don't have juries to begin with, but patent disputes are generally handled by specific courts here and, given how specific and technical these cases can be, I wouldn't trust twelve random people to decide them.

You're really spelling out how toxic and evil the american patent system is.

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