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the only product Apple arguably could have been accused of having a monopoly on was portable music players, where there were plenty of competitors in the market.

Of course - with Apple there is no monopoly at 70%+ of a market, but if Google gets 65% of a market, then it has a monopoly!

Google search U.S. market share: 65.6% Nov 2011 [bloomberg.com]
Google search global market share: 69.7% q2 2010
iPad U.S. tablet market share: 82% May 2011
iTunes U.S. digital music market share: 66.2% q3 2010
iPod U.S. mp3 player market share: 76% July 2010

you can't even suggest that Google has a monopoly on web search around here without getting pounded with downmods.

monopoly
The exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service.
The exclusive possession, control, or exercise of something: "men don't have a monopoly on unrequited love".

Google has lower market share in search than many Apple products do in their respective categories (figures latest I can find for each product):

Google search U.S. market share: 65.6% Nov 2011
Google search global market share: 69.7% q2 2010
iPad U.S. tablet market share: 82% May 2011
iTunes U.S. digital music market share: 66.2% q3 2010
iPod U.S. mp3 player market share: 76% July 2010

It seems to me that Google does not have a monopoly in search; it would be a funny monopoly that had 30% to 35% of the market controlled by its competitors. But if you insist that they do, then you should also say that Apple has various monopolies in its respective markets, and should similarly be subject to anti-trust scrutiny.

FTA: "They didn’t know it at the time, but a fuel line had become clogged. The blockage “was most likely caused by a small piece of cloth inadvertently left in the line during the manufacturing process,” according to the Government Accountability Office." (bolding mine). So no, we don't know that a dirty rag caused a two billion dollar satellite to fail. We think a fuel line became clogged, and some government bean-counter pulled the dirty-rag hypothesis straight out of their derriere so they could sign off on this one and go home.

The GAO was probably basing its conclusion on statements from Lockheed itself. According to this it was Lockheed that concluded the problem was some cleaning material left in the line.

"It should not have happened,” Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space Programs Richard McKinney said. “It was a quality mistake and we took steps to make sure it does not happen again,” he said. “It was obviously a very serious error.”

“It appears that there was a blockage in one of the fuel lines,” McKinney said. Lockheed thinks “it was caused by some cleaning material that was used in a line that was not properly vacated when they went through production.”

For reference, we flew several Global Hawk doing disaster relief missions over the reactor. We also flew over Haiti and California wildfires. However, it doesn't shoot missiles, so OSD will gut the program and let it die an expensive death over the next 2 years.

Based upon what was understood about the risks they built what they could

They assumed the risks so their site would be viable, and they put protections in place which were not too expensive to run the reactor economically. This was a very large tsunami, yes - but the site was not where the waves were highest. A smaller quake could have occurred at a worse location, and the site would have been hit even harder.

The Fukushima plant assumed a max wave height of 5.5 meters. That's less than historically reported wave height. The Onagawa nuclear power plant was 75 km closer to the epicenter, but it was built at 15 meters above sea level.

According to this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-25/tsunami-risk-well-known-to-nuclear-engineers-regulators-who-failed-to-act.html - Three [tsunamis] in the past three decades had waves of more than 10 meters. So they actually regularly get tsunami waves higher than the max assumption made for that site.

You assume that our government is adequately maintaining the roads. That's not only not obvious to me, but our Glorious President did, back in 2009, pretend to make a huge push for public works projects.

No real discussion of why these projects weren't being done before. Seems like we fail to keep the roads up, unless they are near something important.

The link you provided cites as it source the EIA which is the very site that I linked in my post. I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Nickel-and-dime me all you like, the story is still gloomy. Here's more. The US consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day -- almost a quarter of the world total. We spend roughly $522B each year on petroleum. More than half of our petroleum (58%) is imported. We send about $300B abroad each year to support this nasty habit. And the price is volatile! If the price per barrel stays at its current value which is over $100 per bbl, then we will be spending $700B and sending $400B abroad every year. That's a lot of treasure -- and I haven't factored in any costs for our wars which are arguably caused by our desire to insure oil supplies. Personally, I would like to see that $400B spent here at home.

As for my original point -- that we are sending a lot of money to some dodgy regimes -- here is some more detail. We import 5 million barrels per day from OPEC. We import 1.465 million barrels per day from Saudi Arabia alone. The average cost per barrel for crude oil is $74.71 per barrel. *Every single day*, that comes out to:
$109,450,150 USD to Saudi Arabia ($40B/yr)
$56,704,890 USD to Venezuela ($21B/yr)
$39,521,590 to Nigeria ($14B/yr)
$30,108,130 to Iraq ($11B/yr)
Iran - none (my bad).

That paltry 16% of our oil imports from the Persian Gulf means we are sending $48B (16% of imports which are 58% of total 522B) to the Persian Gulf every year.

In fact a few years back(not sure if this is still in effect), Iran essentially asked Japan to pay in yen(which of course in hindsight seems incredibly wise, as the yen has almost doubled in value since then), one of the first really big oil contracts to be denominated in a currency other than dollars. Should be an interesting diplomacy game to see if Washington is even able to convince Japan to restrict Iranian oil imports....

Regardless, this is the stupidity of Bush's cowboy diplomacy and Obama's kowtowing to Republicans coming home to roost. We are certainly going to be paying a lot for letting the man-child try to impress daddy and play war general.

So at one level I can see your resentment. Its not fair to subsidize the irresponsible. My question is that when you see someone overweight coming out of a car in a handicapped parking place, do you even for one microsecond consider that their malady might be the reason for their obesity.

Of course I do. Hence my ending parenthetical about being unable to distinguish between self-inflicted disability and otherwise.

You have to admit though, that in the space of obese people, you are the exceptional case. For every obese person that has gone through what you did, there are plenty more who inflicted it on themselves. This is not an insult to you in any possible way, it's just a fact.

Ultimately it takes a doctor to say a person needs it or not, though most doctors will lean towards the needs and want of the patient, a good doctor would almost certain say to a simply obese patient, get your fat ass to the furthest parking space and walk... its good for you.

That's a joke right? I wish I could have such faith in doctors, in reality here there are scandals after scandals of doctors that will affirm (under oath) that individuals are sick for the purpose of getting them State benifits/pensions/disability. Some of them give out placards and disability letters for a fee. Sometimes, you find individuals who have a doctor's affirmation that they are disabled taking part in bodybuilding competitions!

In fact, as a legitimately disabled person, I reckon you should be more outraged about those doctors than the rest of us, since they are diluting your benefits!

[1] http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-27/new-york-rail-workers-sought-1-billion-for-fake-disabilities-u-s-says
[2] http://articles.boston.com/2011-08-06/news/29859246_1_pension-scandal-pension-abuse-tax-free-pension

TL;DR version: a doctor's note means nothing except a compliant doctor.

Don't be so quick to judge, unless you've walked a mile on my crutches.

I don't think I judged. If it came off that way, I apologize and clarify that it was not my intent.

Just this month the WTO upheld a 2009 US anti-dumping tariff on imported Chinese tires.

The US solar panel association split a couple of months ago, with US-only companies leaving the original org because its Chinese owned or controlled member corps were preventing the org from getting the US government to oppose China's dumping. The new org has already got the US government working on fighting the dumping.

Dumping happens. This is what it looks like. And this is what it looks like when the US government actually defends the country from foreign competitors attacking us unfairly.

~

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-17/house-intelligence-panel-probing-chinese-phone-companies-in-u-s-.html

US district court is NOW saying Iran did 9/11

I'm seriously surprised they are leaving Pakistan for the dessert... Could that be because India is friends with Iran as of late?

Actually more of a case of "We need to convince the public to let loose the dogs of war AGAIN" because a US district court is NOW saying Iran did 9/11 which of course is a codeword for "Here are the brown people we are gonna murder while robbing your coffers this week!". Gotta give 'em credit, they have their lapdogs in the courts and MSM well trained by now and they are gonna milk that false flag for every dime they can.

I personally think they know the lie of infinite growth that the west's economies was built on is coming to an end and that we've hit or are about to hit pretty much peak everything and they are gonna grab as much as they can before they grab that last chopper out of Saigon while the country burns.

If there are any Iranians reading this? As an American allow me to say I'm sorry for the millions of your people that are about to die to fuel the greed of Zionists, the "Jesus won't come back if there ain't Jews in Zion!" religious nutbars that support them, and finally our corrupt government that will be taking massive kickbacks and using it as an excuse to make us even more of a police state. Please don't blame the American people as we have no more control over the war machine than you do over the mullahs and all we can do is watch the slaughter done in our name while being given a "Coke VS Pepsi" choice of one rich whore or the other. Sorry.

Really? I thought the reason we are hated is the country has been taken over with war mongers and profiteers that will milk a false flag for everything its worth like how we are now saying Iran did 9/11 which I have to give them credit, first bin Laden, then Iraq and now Iran, they are milking the living hell out of that single "terrorist attack" to enact the neo-con design Wolfowitz came up with back in the 90s.

Of the countries he listed for conquest all that is left is Iran and Syria and it looks like the CIA will astroturf Syria like they did Libya with the Qatar soldiers (oh and while Al Qaeda helped naturally) so you really have to give the US war machine credit, they recycle their bullshit!

the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That's it.

I believe this as much as that Google uses dodgy tax evasion tricks to make the world a better place, or perhaps help the economy...

It’s one thing to say that the Federal Reserve is an independent institution. It’s another thing to say that it can keep us all in the dark.

Actually, the Canadian dollar is worth 3% more than the US dollar.

Nope. You're reading the table backwards. One dollar US buys you 1.03 Canadian today. So the CAD is worth 3% less than the USD. See Bloomberg for example.

Really? I know Microsoft Bashing is a sport here on /. and all, but it just blows my mind that we let MS do as they will but Google needs to be checked out. Hm.

Google has like 64% (google market share), with competitors Bing and Yahoo (now powered by Bing), and some others.

Microsoft has a 91% market share ( windows market share) with competitors Linux (FOSS) and Mac OSX (only available on Apple hardware, Apple openly sues you for building hackintoshes).

And yet GOOGLE is the one who needs investigating? Really?

Oh wait, I forgot, Microsoft is all buddy-buddy with congressmen.

I'm afraid you are spouting pure shite - no aircraft would be certified by either the FAA or the EASA if your stance was correct

That's speculation, not a factual argument. Do you set the rules for the FAA? Is the FAA infallible? (I'll stick with them since I'm more familiar with them than the EASA.)

"There is a reason that there are so many independent power generation systems onboard a modern (1970s onwards) aircraft, and there is a reason that those systems are checked and certified - there has been zero incidents where an aircraft has completely and utterly lost power during any stage of flight."

No shit, Sherlock. Where did I state otherwise? I mentioned myself that you are SOL either way, if your power goes completely out, including the ram turbo. I guess you missed that part?

I "am *very* familiar with the Airbus control systems, and your assertion that the trim wheel is useless unless in stable horizontal flight just screams that you know fuck all about what you are talking about. You can use the trim wheel to fully control the airframe in all circumstances where you would have to do so with the elevators, because the forces you have to exert during direct mechanical linkages to the elevators would break your arms on a large civil airplane and involve leverage forces that you could not exert from the tiny control columns on modern aircraft."

Really? I won't argue with you about it, but if so, then it's unlike the trimwheel in just about every other aircraft I have ever heard about, in all of which the trimwheel controls either separate small trim surfaces, or the entire surface but only in a very small range. (Hint: that's where the name "trim" came from.) The situations I am talking about were like the one that happened some years back, in which failure of an ADIRU caused the control systems to put the plane in a 30-degree nosedive. Good luck disabling the computers and pulling out of that in time, if you aren't at altitude. You'd better be at altitude if you lost all power including the generator anyway, otherwise you'd never get the turbo deployed, and that trimwheel is all you'd have for pitch.

"I'd love you to show us any cases of an Airbus crash that was attributed to computer failure - you won't find one. And I dare you to trot out the Habsheim A320 crash..."

Glad you said "attributed to" rather than proven, since the causes are often not proven.

Let's start off with Air France flight 447, which as I stated previously, had transmitted earlier that its ADIRU was malfunctioning. The only unusual thing here was that it was a 330.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/air-france-crash-pits-pilot-brains-against-computers-taking-over-cockpits.html

The autopilot was not functioning at the time of the crash of 447 (probably due to that failed ADIRU). Guess what? That's a computer failure. Although I admit that does not prove that it was the proximate cause of the crash. It certainly DOES mean that the crash has "been attributed" to computer failure.

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280090068/Air-France-Airbus-crash-system-pitot-sensors-a-factor

But ADIRU failures, while they can't be said to be "common", are not exactly what you would call extremely rare on the Airbus, either. See the FAA ruling further down. There was one failure in a Quantas flight a few years ago, in which 51 people were injured due to the computer malfunction caused by a failed ADIRU. Not a crash, though... not that time. But don't take my word for it:

I assume that is some kind of canned reply—first because me having a "fanboi" would require gender reassignment surgery, and second because I pointed out that the opinion I was giving was admittedly framed by the potentially rosy-tinted glasses of tech journalism.

However, if you absolutely must rake the mud some more, here is a summary of HTC's position. Searching for "google sues apple" yields no results, and "ibm sues apple" only returns results relating to a case where an executive chip designer chose to move to Apple.

In light of the above, I kindly invite you to shut the fuck up.

The story just rehashes the press release by AT&T.

And by the time the story got to Slashdot, others have already written decent stories about it - those would have made much better links.

The business perspective .

The regular news

And the tech perspective

Couldn't be much worse than S&P and Moody's evaluation of subprime (aka supershit let the 99% die) AAA rated debt.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/subprime-mortgage-bonds-getting-aaa-rating-s-p-denies-to-u-s-treasuries.html

I'd agree with you except for the part about having a message.

What I garnered from the more cognizant participants was they wanted one thing: economic justice.

I still can't figure out what they were protesting other than the fact that some people have a shitload more money than other people. As for those rich people getting their money in ethically challenged ways...

Yeah, so I think the real upsetting aspect of "some people have a shitload more money than other people" is how that came to be. I mean, just watching the Daily Show I see it all the time like my hard working father is now jobless and has to drive across three states to work and lives out of an RV away from his wife and home while the fed hands out $13 billion in just free cash to banks? Are you serious? That's not economic justice! Our government bought up tons of shitty toxic assets from dumbshit investors to 'save' them yet no one tried to 'save' the jobs of the working class by just dumping billions of dollars into the rest of America. And when are those investments sold back to the original investors who made the stupid mistake to buy them? When do those people that made imprudent investment decisions get their comeuppance? Or is it only people that just tried to hold on to their jobs that have to pay for that fuck up?

well that's not particularly new, nor is it ever going to change.

You know I think people are okay when you can present them some convincing argument why the 1% deserve the Lion's share of the wealth. But when you paint them as bitching hippies who don't know what they want, you are really part of the problem. I don't want corporations to have more rights than individuals. Reinstate the Glass-Stegall Act to regulate speculation and stop corporations from internationally shifting funds in order to avoid paying the same damn income taxes I pay!

To just say "Aw, the 1% are just harder workers than you and deserve these rewards" is more ignorant than the protesters who don't know what they want.

Evidences that it's different? NO? I didn't think so.

Evidence? Anyone who has spent 10 minutes caring about this issue knows there are significant differences. Let me save you a few keystrokes on Google and start with much deeper wells, moving from vertical wells to horizontal ones, and greatly increasing the amount of fluids used and waste generated.

Irrelevant i any case, there is no evidence fracking impacts any water supply.

You're a bit behind the times I'm afraid. Again, let me save you a trip to Google:

This information might have been out there for you years ago had Cheney not inserted his Haliburton exemption in his energy bill back in 2005.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-30/world-shouldn-t-wait-for-u-s-resolution-on-climate-agreement-japan-says.html

Canada may have been the first to formally withdraw but Japan started the ball rolling by refusing to extend the Kyoto Accord.

Not to mention that Jobs was very vocal about his intentions to sue Android into the ground before he died. Hell, the day he announced the iPhone in 2007 he announced that Apple had applied for over 200 patents on the phone and was ready to enforce them. He tried to do the same thing with the Macintosh look-and-feel lawsuits back in the day but failed. It's clear that he went through great effort make sure Apple had a stronger legal position this time around.

This is absolutely his idea. Anyone trying to pin it the transition to Cook is delusional.

Your post is a collection of lies.

Fukushima Dai-ichi unit 1 was granted a 10 year license extension just prior to the incident
http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/fukushima_reactorext
The earthquake did not damage the plant
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-02/tepco-says-earthquake-didn-t-damage-critical-units-at-fukushima-reactor.html
Fuel rods were not removed, they could not have been. They are still in there, molten down.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-24/tepco-confirms-meltdown-of-no-2-3-reactors-at-fukushima-1-.html
The tsunami was not unprecedented, bigger tsunami wave run-ups have occurred on Japan's eastern seaboard in the past 100 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Sanriku_earthquake
During the incident, the people at the plant did not work selflessly and continually to help prevent the incident from escalating further, but rather evacuated on multiple occasions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/latest-nuclear-plant-explosion-in-japan-raises-radiation-fears/2011/03/15/ABwTmha_story.html?wpisrc=nl_natlalert

Your post is a collection of lies.

Fukushima Dai-ichi unit 1 was granted a 10 year license extension just prior to the incident
http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/fukushima_reactorext
The earthquake did not damage the plant
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-02/tepco-says-earthquake-didn-t-damage-critical-units-at-fukushima-reactor.html
Fuel rods were not removed, they could not have been. They are still in there, molten down.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-24/tepco-confirms-meltdown-of-no-2-3-reactors-at-fukushima-1-.html
The tsunami was not unprecedented, bigger tsunami wave run-ups have occurred on Japan's eastern seaboard in the past 100 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Sanriku_earthquake
During the incident, the people at the plant did not work selflessly and continually to help prevent the incident from escalating further, but rather evacuated on multiple occasions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/latest-nuclear-plant-explosion-in-japan-raises-radiation-fears/2011/03/15/ABwTmha_story.html?wpisrc=nl_natlalert

Fukushima:
1. had its operating license extended to 2021 5 weeks before.
2. had ignored earthquake warnings.
3. had ignored historical precedent and repeated warnings of the risk of tsunamis.

It was and extremely avoidable sequence of events that the reactors should have been designed to withstand.

During the incident, the poor operators on the ground did the best they could, while their bosses ordered them not to.

Fukushima:
1. had its operating license extended to 2021 5 weeks before.
2. had ignored earthquake warnings.
3. had ignored historical precedent and repeated warnings of the risk of tsunamis.

It was and extremely avoidable sequence of events that the reactors should have been designed to withstand.

During the incident, the poor operators on the ground did the best they could, while their bosses ordered them not to.

China has more than enough coal for that. Australia's coal will be in trouble once China can build nuke plants cheaply.

Well, maybe... but then again... maybe not (note that 62% of China's coal imports is on coking coal, the rest of it being for steaming).
Australian iron ore miners will be OK, the uranium miners - maybe better.

Okay, I'll rephrase his question: Will we be irradiated by a plant run by PHBs?

Yes.

But it's okay, because radioactive strontium in your bones is your happy atom friend.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-05/rim-weighed-down-by-tablet-albatross-in-ipad-dominated-world.html

...and this brings us to the OTHER thing wrong with TV, which is ads.

According to this artucle, advertising to one viewer during one show costs between two and four cents. There are, what, maybe ten commercials per half-hour. Thus, broadcasters should be able to sell me a show for between twenty and forty cents, and INCREASE their profits because now they don't have to pay ad salesmen and all the other nonsense surrounding ads.

So far, I don't know of any broadcaster offering me prime-time content for twenty cents. If any ever does, I'll put the pennies on the table; but if they want me to pay ten times MORE than that, then I decline their unethical offer and choose to get my entertainment ethically, by downloading it for free.

This is similar to the recent reversal of the Apple-Samsung injunction in Australia - there, the court said that an injunction was unwarranted

G'day, dingo! I herd yer like reversing, so I put a reversal on your reversal so yer can reverse while yer bloomin' well reversing.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-02/apple-wins-extension-on-samsung-tablet-ban.html

That's just one week for the appeal. The injunction is still off the table. And since Samsung will get to sell in America, the Australian high court will consider that Apple's lost marketplace monopoly theory is already shot, so they won't reverse.

This is similar to the recent reversal of the Apple-Samsung injunction in Australia - there, the court said that an injunction was unwarranted

G'day, dingo! I herd yer like reversing, so I put a reversal on your reversal so yer can reverse while yer bloomin' well reversing.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-02/apple-wins-extension-on-samsung-tablet-ban.html

Agree with the rest 100%, certainly it's how it should be. But sometimes it seems the law and common sense nod when they pass each other on opposite sides of the street.

Considering how Google launders its money via European countries to gain 2.4% tax rate, that might be quite costly. And that also means giving up tons of business, revenue, users and future monopoly status on search.

Google, the owner of the world's most popular search engine, uses a strategy that has gained favor among such companies as Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The method takes advantage of Irish tax law to legally shuttle profits into and out of subsidiaries there, largely escaping the country's 12.5 percent income tax.

...with renewable sources of energy. What happened? Solar collector killed your dog or something?

Tossing those "after only 30 or 40 years of development" statements doesn't make you sound insightful but spiteful.
Yes! Technology takes time to develop and improve! Whodathunkit!?

Again. Look at the map. Read the map. Notice all the hydro, geothermal, and biomass - those are backups.
And I can't keep repeating myself over and over trying to explain how all those problems you list are already solved or are in the process of being solved - like the political situation.

And there is oil enough to last centuries. Problem is it will become more and more expensive to produce.
There is no danger of "energy crisis" or people starving to death for the lack of power to run the food making machines.
There is a prospect of everyone not independently rich having to change their lifestyle though.
You don't really need to own two or more cars, or take a car driving to the shop two blocks down, or eat prepackaged, precooked food, or use all those single-use-then-throw-away plastic materials.

As for "new, unproven technology" - so was nuclear. Still is, up to a point. Also, commercial HVDC predates nuclear reactors.
And nuclear does NOT limit country's dependence on foreign nations' stability - political, economic or as was the case with Japan recently - geological.
EU gets only about 3% of its uranium from its own sources.

NOT getting off of the foreing oil, uranium and gas tit is "playing with the devil" for EU.

As for Howard C. Hayden...
With all due respect, a man who equates South Pole with Antarctica is either deliberately trying to make a strawman, ignorant to the point that someone should take a look into how he got those diplomas and titles he holds, OR far too passionate about the topic he is arguing to be reasonable to any degree.
Either case, there is too much noise in his signal to be of any practical use to anyone but the people who want to debunk either him or science in general.

Or by March 2012, tops.

Personally, I'd rather take the estimates of people doing their best to fix the problem...

Plant managers at Nidec Corp. (6594), which makes motors for disk drives and also has a factory at Rajana, decided not to wait for the water to subside at its seven flooded factories. According to company spokesman Masashiro Nagayasu, they cut a hole in the roof of the Rajana factory, sent divers into the toxin-laden waters to unbolt some heavy equipment, and lifted it onto waiting boats. Some of the equipment is now being used in Nidec factories in China and the Philippines.

...than of CEOs like Seagate's Stephen Luczo who are gleefully rubbing their hands together at the price hike, predicting a year-long shortage of hard-drives.

"People are going to appreciate the complexity of this business," he says.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/solar-may-be-cheaper-than-fossil-power-in-five-years-ge-says.html

Is that why Google has stopped work on the solar power tower design with heliostats?

Until the batteries catch fire.

Yeah - batteries catching fire after a crash is serious problem! I'm glad my petrol car doesn't have a large amount of flammable liquid on board that could catch fire after a crash...

Until the batteries catch fire.

You mean like the deep solar minimum of 2008/2009?

Yeah, kinda like that. 2008 2009 2010

And this seems like a very easy thing to computise. You digitize the shredded documents. You run a program that looks for similarities around the edges. You stick likely candidates together and either ask for human confirmation or run a text recognition algorithm to see if the result makes sense.

This sort of approach has been used before, as far back as 1969, as described in this excerpt from an issue Popular Mechanics:

The job of reassembling 30,000 pieces of an Egyptian temple at Karnak is being given an assist by an IBM computer... The pieces are coded and photographed, and the photos matched with the help of the computer.

More recently, software developed at Tel Aviv University is being used to piece together thousands of hand-written document fragments.

They actually announced the factory back in January. One would assume construction started around then, allowing them to meet a 2012 production deadline.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-03/qualcomm-to-invest-about-1-billion-in-taiwan-display-plant-ministry-says.html

Those self-same traders and journalists do use tablets and mini phones for other things - notes to self, drill down into something without disturbing the overview. At home, I just use yet another larger monitor for that. I need no eye candy - I want my opsys to load my app, and get the hell out of the way and not waste resources or my time -- I don't play with computers (much), I work on them. I figure anytime you see the opsys/desktop, you're wasting time and resources - I'm using every resource I can to do something productive, not just fish around in the bling to cure some boredom.

These new guis, for one size fits all, really suck compared to the old, reliable stuff I can have auto-hide and waste nothing for what I do. Yeah, I even use CLI a little - not much, as it wastes screen itself for a terminal window more often than not, and it's hard to remember all the incantations...nice in a pinch for specialized work, but not for most of what I do.

From the non-paywall version of the article. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-08/barnes-noble-urges-u-s-regulators-to-probe-microsoft-on-mobile-patents.html

Without providing figures, Barnes & Noble said Microsoft was demanding the same amount in patent fees that it would charge users of its Windows Phone operating system.

I can't blame them for crying foul, the patents themselves are a minor portion of MS' total IP related to Windows Mobile and yet they're expecting to charge B&N the same price as if they were licensing Windows Mobile. That's not a matter of being unable to afford the patents, that's a matter of not being able to afford to license an OS that they're not going to use.

This isn't fundamentally any different than MS making it really hard to buy laptops without their OS.

A trial on Microsoft’s patent claims against Barnes & Noble is scheduled for February in Washington.

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-08/barnes-noble-urges-u-s-regulators-to-probe-microsoft-on-mobile-patents.html

At least we'll finally see what patents Microsoft has been using to strong arm manufacturers of Android based phones into patent licensing. The must-sign-a-nda-or-we-wont-tell-what-you're-infringing-on tactic they've been using on everyone feels really underhanded to me, and I'm no Microsoft hater.

I figure there actually has to be something substantial in those patents to merit virtually all the big names in Android phones agreeing to license them at the amount MIcrosoft has been asking.

I think the larger story isn't a troubled individual program, it's a federal government that outsources and contracts almost *everything* these days. Having grown up around military bases, I find the level of contracting with anything military to be very troubling these days. I remember back in the 80's when bases began contracting out things like food services. Okay, that seemed pretty reasonable. But I recently went back to an old base that I had once been stationed at back in the day and being shocked by how far this has really gone. Not only were food services, the PX, laundries, etc. run by civilians--but so was base *security*. Instead of MP's greeting me at the gate, it was a bunch of rent-a-cops. I'm not even sure the base *has* MP's anymore (never saw any of them). It would seem a handful of contractors and merc firms do pretty much everything now for the government.

Thanks to the lobbying money of the Lockheed Martins, Northrop Grummans, and Blackwaters (or whatever the fuck they're calling themselves these days), we have overpriced weapons/aircraft programs that function as little more than cash funnels, U.S. embassies guarded not by Marines but by mercs, and a NASA that can't even build a rocket anymore without a Lockheed or Boeing to do all the work for them.

So why should Lockheed Martin care if the F-35 goes over budget, or the MEADS system turns out to be a money sink, etc. etc. ? It's not like a Congress that they *own* is ever going to call them to task for it. And they'll get a hundred *new* contracts to replace them. So why should it surprise anyone to see stories like this pop up again and again on /.?