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At the time the mac air came out, few people noticed that the case would taper to a thin edge, creating the *impression* that it was thin, when it was actually much thicker.

Toshiba had a laptop that was thinner (in terms of actual thickness, not fake apparent thickness along the edges), and the Toshiba had a real ethernet port, and the Toshiba had an integral dvd player shoehorned in.

The Toshiba was much more impressive from an engineering standpoint, but of course no one cared.

It was the Portege R500:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

And Toshiba kept coming out with thinner laptops than the mac air:

http://www.mactrast.com/2011/0...

http://www.dailytech.com/Toshi...

Yeah, I know, DFTT

> People use closed source software knowing full well that the product may be discontinued, or it may go unmaintained at some point. The risks are well known and understood.

The software being open or closed is irrelevant to the discussion.

> All we need to do is look at GitHub, SourceForge, or Apache to see that most open source projects do in fact end up dead. Of course, open source advocates don't admit to this.

[[Citation]]

The _difference_ is when Vendor A goes out of business you are _completely_ fucked for future updates. Good lucking fixing bugs in a closed source program.

When an OSS project stops being maintained the source is _still_ there. You have the _option_ of hiring a competent programmer to fix bugs in it -- with closed source there is no option.

The _real_ problem is that you picked an OSS project that wasn't popular enough. What The Fuck were you doing when you _evaluated_ the software in the first place??? The _first_ thing you do when picking ANY software from a business POV regardless if it is closed, or open, is to evaluate:

a) the _community,_
b) _support_, and
c) a BACKUP plan. That is, what was your _migration strategy_ for WHEN "this software is no longer available?" What's that? You didn't _think_ of THAT scenario? Blaming OSS for your own short-sighted stupidity is a moronic attempt at trying to pass the buck for your incompetence.

> myth is probably that open source software is somehow "better".
> Open source products are just as buggy as closed source software products are.

As opposed to the FACTs that closed source is buggy-as-shit ???

In fact, the most recent report (2013) found open source software written in C and C++ to have a lower defect density than proprietary code. The average defect density across projects of all sizes was 0.59 for open source, and 0.72 for proprietary software.

It is hard the get an accurate bug count with closed source because closed source is too embarrassed to tell the truth but here are some stats:

* Windows 2000 had 63,000 bugs,
* Windows 7 had 2,000 bugs,
* Windows 10 1,300 bugs

No one pretends OSS is some silver bullet. But it has numerous advantages that closed source will NEVER have (by definition.) Every disadvantage that OSS has is _also_ the exact same closed source.

You can't put a price on freedom.

Mod parent -1 troll.

But there is one company much bigger than Apple when talking about video and that is of course Netflix. Whatever Netflix decides, companies will have to follow.

I suspect that decision has already been made... indications are Netflix is going with h.265.

I would cheerfully pay 10 times for these stupid electronic gizmos if it means I get back the standard of living that once made America the envy of the world.

Sure, who wouldn't? The problem is, it doesn't mean that at all. If the gizmos are assembled by robots in America and the money goes back to China or even better, gets hidden away in whatever country is the tax haven of the week, then the end result is actually worse than if the doodads had been made in another country because we have to eat all of the pollution. And as it turns out, Foxconn has a bad record even for a Chinese company.

Letting Foxconn build an automated factory in the USA, employing construction workers for a year or two and then only a mere handful of minimum-wage employees whose job is to clear jams from machines, is not going to bring back your grandfather's standard of living. That was based on being the last guys to enter WWII, after the rest of the world had the shit bombed out of it — and then bombing it some more. Producing all that stuff and then letting companies like Lockheed and Boeing keep whatever materials were "left over" at the end of the war to make stuff with (e.g. Lockheed not only made airplanes, but also AlClad travel trailers — we've got a 1962 Streamline "Duchess" here) is how we created that prosperity. Not to mention selling the Nazis fuel and the Japanese Aluminum during the early parts of the war, or the company Prescott Bush ran during the war whose purpose was to funnel funds to Hitler's S.S. — the seed capital behind the Bush family fortune was based on Nazi profiteering.

TL;DR: American prosperity was based on Nazi victories.

Yes but it's still better to have the construction and the factory here.

Better how? You have to assume they're only planning this because Trump plans to gut the EPA and make it profitable for them to operate here while polluting the living shit out of this country like they've been doing to China. We get one year of construction jobs in exchange for minimum four years of heavy industrial pollution serious enough to be noticed even in China? On what planet does that sound like a good idea? Planet Trump's Cock?

I'd say it won't be long before they switch to H.265.

Netflix has done some H.265 streaming already but H.265 is a dead end as far as web video is concerned. The pathway forward is to use VP9 now and then switch to AV1 from the Alliance for Open Media when it's ready. Netflix is a member of the AOM.

I guess "Windows isn't done unless Lotus won't run" by your logic is completely reasonable behavior, it WAS their OS...right?

Or maybe if you'd stop waving your little Intel flag as hard as your squeeing fangirl ass can you'd know they didn't "not optimize" for other chips, they purposely designed their compiler to put out broken code on other chips so badly in fact that you could take a Via CPU (the only CPU that allows you to change the CPUID in software) and by simply changing the CPUID from "Centaur Hauls" to "Genuine Intel" you magically got a 30% performance boost...wow, the power of of CPUID huh?

Of course what it really was was a classic case of "Windows isn't done unless Lotus won't run" and this kind of behavior is typical of Intel, hence why they had to shell out 1.4 billion for market rigging and anti competitive behavior in the EU just 2 years ago. Would you like a quote from the judgement?

"The Commission demonstrated to the requisite legal standard that Intel attempted to conceal the anti-competitive nature of its practices and implemented a long term comprehensive strategy to foreclose AMD from the strategically most important sales channels. ... The General Court considers that none of the arguments raised by Intel supports the conclusion that the fine imposed is disproportionate. On the contrary, it must be considered that that fine is appropriate in the light of the facts of the case.

In other words the exact same shit MSFT got busted for and frankly they should get no less than what MSFT did, 10 years of being monitored by the courts to keep them from pulling shit like this again.

Look at the Global Warming predictions from 20 years ago. They are way over the mark. Please by all means post your dire predictions, but shut up when you're wrong. http://www.dailytech.com/After...

I remember when Windows Vista came out Microsoft tried to lock down the kernel, but got sued by the above mentioned security vendors. This is what happens when you put your trust in third party vendors.

http://www.dailytech.com/Micro...

I will pledge never to give them another dime.

Enjoy your piece of shit Samesung equipment.

aww, sour grapes much?

"...Bush signs bill which grants the Volt a $7,500 tax credit...The entire 10-year tax package for plug-in electric/hybrid vehicles is worth $1 billion. " Back in 2008 I believe...

GM lost the will, culture, and now the competency to innovate. Keep holding on to the past though. You'll look great driving around in your Chevy Dolt.

Maybe the cameras general appearance has already been revealed publicly? As shown on these two sites: http://www.dailytech.com/Feder... http://www-math.mit.edu/~rstan... In which case criminals already may know what to look for.

Apple has been accused of doing this sort of things many, many many many many times. Even before OS X ("macOS") and iOS, I also remember all kinds of features back in System 7/8/9 that started off as 3rd party extensions/programs but were pretty much fucked when Apple added something nearly identical.

I'm trying to think of a few examples where overnight a web site would be like "well, a clone of our app is basically in the new release of OS X...so we're out of business now." Can anyone with a better memory offer some examples?

http://www.dailytech.com/Scien...
this stuff?

http://www.dailytech.com/Scien...

Your fallacy is you keep forgetting that copyright is for a LIMITED time.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Originally it was 17 years. Now the duration is a retarded author's lifetime + 70 years.

Holding popular culture "hostage" for the sake of greed is immature.

The fundamental problem is copyright kills creativity, yet copyright is ignored in the fashion industry.

>> Q. How many friends can I loan my DVD / BluRay to before it becomes piracy?
> All of them. It only becomes piracy if they make a copy of it.

False.

1. If copyright is still ACTIVE then the answer is: All.
2. If copyright has EXPIRED then the answer is: None.
3. You're forgetting that in some places in the world, such as Canada, Germany, etc. you can loan your _original_ to a friend, and they CAN _legally_ make a copy, and return the original partially due to a) a levy tax on blank media, and b) due to a legal loophole:

With physical media like tapes or CDs the "owner" is the person in possession of the original copy. This definition made it legit, at least in Canada, to borrow original materiel, copy it, and then return.

Thankfully coercion for the criminal tax is ignored sometimes.

> It ain't fucking rocket science, dude.

No, shit Sherlock. However, Copyright Law is NOT black and white, when the law keeps changing:

* MPAA says making a backup copy is illegal. That is, you can NO longer legally archive your original DVD's which is retarded.

* When even lending your CD to a friend is illegal (WTF!?), the whole system has become corrupt.

You are under no obligation to follow bad laws.

It doesn't matter if they can get these pie in the sky sci-fi daydreams to work, they just need to sell it to the people who set their budget. Or just not bother to tell them about it.

Nothing.

All iOS web browsers use the WebKit API and don't actually render themselves. Others cheat by rendering on remote servers and showing you the result only, but it's not allowed to contain its own rendering engine.

This is how Chrome on iPad operates - it's not Chrome at all.

Well, you're sort of right. But there have been exceptions to the Rule. In 2010, not only did Apple allow Opera to offer a NON-WebKit iOS Browser (Opera Mini, which later switched to WebKit), although it used Remote Rendering to circumvent the WebKit requirement, but more importantly, in 2014, Apple Released the WkWebView API for iOS 8, which brought the Apple's Nitro Javascript Engine to third-party Browser Development for iOS.

So, these days, third-party Browsers on iOS actually have a fighting chance to be on-par (or maybe even a little better), performance-wise, to Mobile Safari.

You can't pin items to the main list directly above the start menu, like you could in 95, 98, Me, 2k, NT, XP and 7.

Like so. Notice how the user has grouped similar items together.

This image seems to be of the technical preview of 10, but you can't have it like this any more.

This is the final Start Menu in 10.

You can't get rid of Places, the contents of the Most Used are completely beyond your control: you can't manually add items or reorder them, so if you had a palette of tools you had arranged in a nice order in any other Windows, you can't have that any more.

You can pin icons to the right pane by dragging it out and selecting Pin to Start Menu on them, but they have seriously ugly Modern/Metro boxes behind them. The All Programs (now called "All apps" because Metro apps and programs obviously don't require any kind of distinction RIGHT.) has a similar cascading to the Windows 7 Start menu but the icons all have the block coloured square background behind them, which makes some icons difficult to identify, the spacing between items is greatly increased which makes managing large Start Menus difficult.

In 95 you could completely customise the font used to display the start menu items and their size, and thus have a very dense menu if you wished.
In XP and 7 you could at least add and reorder them as you wished.

http://images.dailytech.com/ni...

tell it to this guy

"Generous" is not a word associated with Apple in my experience....

That's because you're not a celebrity.

If you're an obscenely rich and famous celebrity, and your agent agrees that you will show off your Apple products to your fans, or if you're a famous reporter and your newspaper didn't make the mistake of printing iPhone-related bad news, you'll get invited to Apple's parties and you'll receive receive many of Apple's gadgets for free.

...What can Facebook or other companies do to help these journalists report on corruption in a safe manner?...

For starters, they need to want to do something to help. Just because someone happens to post on a Facebook webpage, does that put the onus on Facebook automatically to protect that journalist? Probably not.

.
So it then comes down to Facebook actively wanting to provide such a mechanism for journalists.

Will Facebook want to do that?

Probably not, as Facebook appears to be more interested in tracking people than providing posting sanctuaries for journalists.

Yes, if you leave out the number '500,000' it sounds silly, doesn't it.

And the only reason the number of exploits from untrusted sources is 0 on non-jailbroken iOS is because you simply can't install from untrusted sources.

Since you seem to want to compare Apples to Androids, though, here is one that infected 100k+ iOS devices, no jailbreak or untrusted sources required. And another affecting 75k+ jailbroken iOS devices. I stopped searching after finding those two (which took a whole 30 seconds); that it was so easy to find those two tells me there's a lot more to be found if I wanted to invest another half-minute in it.

Let's see, 500k of 900 million Android devices, that's an infection rate of about 5.6%. I'll admit, that's not great, but let's see how iOS fares before we got all uppity, okay? I can't find "in use" numbers, only that Apple has sold over 800k; I know they're not all in use, so I'll do a quick calculation based on market share. Worldwide market share, that is, since the 500k number you're touting is worldwide. So, Android's 81.5% market share means that 1% of the market is a hair over 11 million devices; iOS holds 14.8% of the market, or 163.5 million devices. 175k infected, out of 163.5 million devices, that's a 10.7% infection rate.

So yes, sure, let's assume that other malware exists for iOS, sure there are almost 3x as many infected Android devices, but an iOS device appears to be almost 2x as likely to be infected. Factor in that other malware certainly does exist (every jailbreak is an exploit and many jailbreak utilities have been bundled with malware; little reported but anyone involved in the scene knows, always get your jailbreak tools direct from the author, but even that is no guarantee). In short, the 175k number I used is smaller than it should be, making the 10.7% infection rate I came up with a fair bit smaller than the real infection rate, as well.

As a user of a single phone and a single tablet, running the less-likely-infected platform means I'm less likely to be infected. Period. That said, I greatly prefer iOS over Android on a tablet and absolutely love my iPad. I don't do anything mission critical on either device, so my exposure is limited in any case, but I'm a little more lax with my more secure Android phone than I am with my less secure iPad.

It doesn't at all sound like the result of bad philosophies colliding, thus breeding bad behavior from a massive number of customers.

Correct. It really doesn't. unless you consider freedom a bad philosophy. Of course, with freedom comes responsibility, as in you are responsible for what happens when you misuse the freedom to install crap on your phone. Seriously, rather than volunteering to have our own freedoms stripped from us because we refuse to connect our actions with the consequences they bring, why don't we all just behave like the adults that we are and own out own liabilities? Android lets you do that, while iOS does not.

Oh, just wanted to mention since I'm somehow a douche for your laziness, you replied a full hour after the link you asked for was presented.

You're not a douche because I loaded the page long before that link was posted (not laziness, BTW), you're a douche for a whole slew of other reasons, many of which also apply to myself. So I didn't refresh the page before posting. We all do that, your point? Welcome to Slashdot.

Fandroids are especially vulnerable to SEP.

They also wouldn't own an iPad and two MacBook Pros. I guess you aimed your anti-Fandroid ray at the wrong guy.

You might consider these cases as possible examples of being a bit hostile...

http://www.cnet.com/news/debun...
http://www.dailytech.com/Googl...
http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/...
http://www.mail-archive.com/cr...

and to the lesser extent where Linus posts stuff like ...

one reason I refuse to bother with the whole security circus is that I think it glorifies - and thus encourages - the wrong behavior. It makes "heroes" out of security people, as if the people who don't just fix normal bugs aren't as important.

or

I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

Unlike internal combustion engines, electric brushless motors can last pretty much forever. Drivetrain wear is probably the #1 reason cars depreciate in value. If there's no wear, there's no depreciation.

ahem, about that.

Three drive train replacements in 30k in an ICE vehicle would qualify it under probably every states lemon laws.

This will NEVER replace a real transmission for anything but a model plastic model...

Never say never.

3D printed jet engine from Monash University, Australia:
http://www.dailytech.com/Austr...

Google's Nest, best known for its innovated smart Nest thermostats and Nest Protect smoke detectors

Yeah those smoke detectors were definitely "innovated":

According to Nest, the Nest Wave function -- which allows users to turn their alarm off by simply waving their hand -- could be activated accidentally, thus potentially endangering lives if a real fire were to occur.

Ask the Chinese factory workers at Foxconn how they feel about being replaced by robots that can work longer hours for even less than they are making? It's already started and the company wants to replace all 1 million workers with 1 million robots.

Well just because I hope you're only ignorant

http://www.dailytech.com/After...

So yes I would like models that predict the future instead of being backfitted to the past.

I would also really like to see the range of predictions demonstrate meaningful knowledge of the phenomenon. (low ranges of a few centimeters to high ranges of 10s of meters sea rise isn't exacty inspiring)

If you want to see failed climate predictions, google for them they pop up by the bucketful and go back to the 70s.

"The licensing quest is largely a byproduct of Microsoft's unique position -- or perhaps more bluntly put, failure in the market" ref.

This is an awesome development! That Karpeles is so hate-able.

  Has anyone watched "The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin" scene where Karpeles apologizes for losing everyone's money? It's hilarious. He says, in Japanese (paraphrasing here), "There was inadequate security, and we lost everyone's bitcoins. I am very sorry about that," and he bows down at the waist, and stays there (awkwardly) for an eternity! It's the funniest thing to see this pudgy Frenchman speaking Japanese and awkwardly performing these Japanese rituals.
Here's a picture: http://www.dailytech.com/Mt+Go...

Re " .... tell about me?"
Its a bit like the people who use cryptography or have an interest privacy services?
People Lacking Facebook Accounts Viewed As Suspicious (August 8, 2012)
http://www.dailytech.com/Peopl...
Beware, Tech Abandoners. People Without Facebook Accounts Are 'Suspicious.' (8/06/2012)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ka...
It really depends on who is doing the tracking and the number of hops to friends and shared likes?

frankly, I think it's awesome and support the nose-thumbing at these european cuntries full of cunts that love to rant about how much better everything in europe is but for the life of them can't product planes that don't regularly fall out of the sky, simply do not have San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Redmond, or Dallas; and have no idea how to produce entertainment. Actually, I take that back. When I was Firenze/Venice/Rome the soaps had the most awkward, poorly illuminating camera angles. On the bright side the news was covering the garbage workers who were striking and letting trash pile up all over, which was plenty entertainment in between the marionettes and concerts.

Turns out the Mississippi AG was just the "attack dog" for the MPAA: http://www.dailytech.com/Missi...

The base iPad Mini 2 lists at $299 and was as low as $229 during recent sales; the N1 is launching at $249.

That's probably why the author of the article talked about the base iPad Mini 3, not the iPad Mini 2.

The new Nokia N1 tablet, apparently. At just $250 with 32GB of storage — as opposed to the iPad Mini 3’s base price of $400 for the 16GB model — the Nokia N1 is definitely priced to sell.

And yes, from Apple's own comparison page, there doesn't seem to be any difference between the iPad Mini 2 and the iPad Mini 3. But to be fair to Nokia, its specs are superior to the iPad Mini 2 and 3.

And also, the Android tablets are the ones that initially embraced the 7 inch to 8 inch sizes, so one could say that Apple is the one that cloned those tablets from Asus, Samsung, HTC, and LG. But then again, a specs side-by-side comparison of Nokia's new tablet wouldn't look as good against the newer Android tablets made other manufacturers. Not to mention, the word "iPad" still has the most mind share, where it comes to people talking about tablets in general.

There where no dire predictions made decades ago about present time.

I beg to differ. This is Hansen alone: http://themigrantmind.blogspot...

There have been tons of dire predictions, from "+2 degree global temperature" to "sea level rising by a foot" to "the polar ice caps melting by 2013" (to be fair, that one was Gore). Global warming advocates have been overpredicting for years: http://images.dailytech.com/ni...

No article about a sitting President of the US is published without the aim of either helping or hurting his image and objectives. If the article puts positive light on him, then it was meant to help him and it is therefor perfectly legitimate for his opponents (like myself) to harp at the failures.

It's akin to saying someone is very skilled and more creative at using toilet paper -- and then bemoan that they're a pretty poor plumber.

That may be a valid analogy, but you should've used it years ago (2008) — when the slickness of Obama's "use of social media" was lauded (and perceived!) as the indicator of his technological savvy — something for the GOP to "catch-up" on. OMG, he uses Blackberry!..

http://www.dailytech.com/EXCLU...

Wrong. Apple are outdone on that front by Samsung, MS... You really should check your facts before showing the rest of /. how wrong you are. Some of us actually RTFA, read relevant info, and post knowingly. Hater.

Seems you need to take your own advice.

You should know that the $14 billion is for all Samsung Electronics products, everything from TV's to speakers to DVD players to car audio. It also covers things like sports team sponsorships (local and national). Of that $14 billion, only $401 Million was spent on phone advertising, Apple spent $333 Million in the same period whilst Samsung sells more phones, more models and across more segments. So on a phone to advertising dollar ratio, Apple spends a lot more.

Beyond all this, your article that you clearly didn't read demonstrated that this paid off for Samsung. Sure they tried to get an inflammatory "Apple pleasing" headline in but utterly failed as the content proved that Samsung's splurge on advertising worked. Also that article is 2 years old. The data is from 2012.

Besides, the GP was talking about hype, not advertising dollars. Apple whips the fanboys, like yourself into a huge frenzy over almost anything. The fact you need to cling onto little things like advertising spending shows how detached from reality you are.

So you really should check your own facts before showing /. how wrong you are.

Hater.

See my sig.

Wrong. Apple are outdone on that front by Samsung, MS... You really should check your facts before showing the rest of /. how wrong you are. Some of us actually RTFA, read relevant info, and post knowingly. Hater.

Why is posting questions "troll" except to people who don't like the obvious answers?

http://www.thenewamerican.com/...

http://www.dailytech.com/After...

http://ktwop.com/2014/08/02/pr...

But hey, keep making predictions sure to go wrong!

If I were a Mayor of a city that AT&T serves; I would respond by saying that this will mean the city will need to start rolling out it's own gigabit network now.

AT&T can't complain that the city is competing with them, if AT&T isn't providing the service in the first place.

Of course. Which is why they (among others) support blocking municipal broadband networks.

Things that people with short memories will have forgotten by now since they happened all of three years ago. Detailed summaries of his doing can still be found on Groklaw though.

You see, mr. Mueller is not just *any* publicist. He's a publicist who is, basically, for hire by large companies to provide a congenial account of their doings and their position. In short: he is a lobbyist. His (former) clients seem to include SCO (the company who tried to claim crippling copyrights on Linux and engaged in an intense campaign of legal blackmail aimed at companies using Linux) and one of his current clients seems to be Oracle (the company that reied to shut down Android by claiming copyright on Java library API's).

As summarised by the following posts:

http://www.groklaw.net/article...

http://www.dailytech.com/Top+A...

http://techrights.org/2010/08/...

My only question to him would be: who is on your current client list?

Well, who is currently in court with Microsoft about these patents ?:
Samsung
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Who is not on the OIN-list ?:
Samsung.
http://www.openinventionnetwor...

I do see HTC, but also no Huawei, ZTE, Acer, Viewsonic, Quanta or Compal *

I also see Google (thus Motorola ?), but I don't think Microsoft has a deal with them.

* they have a list here:
http://www.dailytech.com/Of+La...

Slashdot users may recall news from 2008 "Let’s Monitor All P2P" (April 17, 2008)
http://www.dailytech.com/Senat...
"Agents then track the offender on a “daily” basis, identifying them by their IP address and, in some cases, a “unique serial number” sourced from offender’s computer."
"Investigators have recorded almost 1.3 million of the unique serial numbers thus far, with about half of them residing in the United States – and that number is steadily increasing each month due to “extensive capturing” conducted since October 2005."

We don't have to wait for "one day", it happens quite often right now. I can recall at least a dozen cases off the top of my head where footage from dash cams, personal phones/computers/cameras & CCTV systems was deleted, obscured, modified or "failed to record". Unfortunately I can't recall a single case of an officer being meaningfully punished for destruction of evidence, at most a few were fired.

http://www.today.com/id/322668...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.dailytech.com/Cops+...

The law doesn't state you have freedom to use any means of transport available. You can be banned from airlines, trains, buses, and your rights technically aren't infringed because you can still walk

If the First Amendment were interpreted this way, you could be banned from using newspapers or radio for your speech — and it would not have been an infringement, because you can still talk to your friends...

drive your car

Nope, that still requires a "driver's license" — a government's permission to drive your own car on any road, to which the public has legal access. And the Executive government can withdraw that permission without bothering with the Judiciary.

or hitch a ride in a friend's vehicle.

Nope, can't do that either. Not legally.

This sounds like a case of the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing.

Why? Seems like exactly the opposite — DEA does know, Amtrak has the information, and DEA arranged for the information to be available to them at ease...

While neither collection method sounds constitutional to me I am not surprised.

I'm not surprised either, but I don't see, how this is unconstitutional. The Constitution has nothing on the right to travel and, if you ask a government official, you'll quickly realize, they consider traveling to be a privilege instead.

You can not buy an Amtrak ticket anonymously. And you can not give your ticket to anyone else. With air-tickets this fraud was put upon us (years before 9/11) with the argument, that the airline and the law-enforcement need to screen the passenger names against list of criminals — so they need to know all names in advance.

But most Amtrak tickets are purchased within hours before departure, AFAIK, so this argument would not hold.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Thomas Jefferson

We need the traveling to be explicitly declared a right, that only the Judiciary can suspend after a trial — rather than a mere privilege, that the Executive can withdraw on their whim (such as by adding you to a "no-fly" list) or, indeed, demanding to "see your papers" (and recording them for future use).

I can't see it happening any time soon, though. Bushitler-created TSA has only expanded under the Nobel Peace Prize Administration — and now insists on covering not just air-travel, but all mass transit. Driving a personal car has required a government permission for near a century, and being driven by someone else is increasingly difficult too.

With regards to this "Sony's blueprints" nonsense I assume you're referring to the following:

http://www.dailytech.com/Samsu...

Which is to say:

1) A Sony designer talked about the idea of devices that were free of buttons and ornamentation and had nice rounded corners. They didn't show any devices; they just talked about design ideas.
2) Someone in Apple read that article
3) Apple had one of their favoured freelance designers mock up what a device like that could be like, and put a Sony logo on it as a joke
4) Apple went on to produce a device superficially similar to the design their freelancer had created, which drew upon ideas described by somebody in an interview

Some are FRAND and some are not.. A number of M$ patents have expired, ergo Samsung's position is much stronger now. Additionally, M$ transferred a large number of patents to a 3rd party, so they don't have nearly as much to offer in a cross license agreement.