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The app still doesn't do basic stuff that the Skype app on Android does fine, like being able to receive calls when the app is not active. From what I read, this is a limitation of the platform. I really don't understand the glowing reviews for the Lumia 900 and the relentless praise for Windows Phone 7, in glowing reviews like this one: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/15/nokia-lumia-900-review-this-ones-a-no-brainer/

It seems people can't stop making excuses for WP7, just because it's different to iOS and Android. It doesn't support dual core processors and resolutions higher than 800x480, and now it looks like no current phone will get an upgrade to Windows Phone 8, which is even worse than Android fragmentation issues. And it sounds like a repeat the HTC HD2 story, the HD2 was never upgraded to Windows 7 despite having the hardware to support it. It comes with a childish and uncustomizable homescreen. The applications screen consists of one long scrolling list that becomes a pain once you have a few apps installed. It was clever when it came out, but as Joshua Topolsky said for WP7 it's time we stopped giving it a pass.

Are you just trolling or do you not know about Zynga's practices? Google them, they copy most of their game ideas, while filing suit against anyone who copies one of their game ideas. They're completely amoral, or worse.

The problem I see with this minimum is that it is far too extreme for the crime, in the same way a life sentence is unreasonable for jaywalking,

That's just the problem, no matter what, in some cases it is too extreme, and the judges hands are tied anyway. The sentence isn't being imposed by a judge on a case by case basis with access to the facts, as it should be.

Moving violations, which includes your seat belt example, aren't technically crimes, they're civil infractions (outside of egregious behavior, obviously, such as driving recklessly or intoxicated, which is why those behaviors usually end in an arrest).

The difference between someone pirating an album to listen to it and pirating an album to makes copies of it and sell them at a profit is enormous in terms of intent, and intent is a big part of the law. Clearly the latter deserves a harsher sentence than the former, but mandatory minimums would impose the same sentence on both, and that's not really fitting with the spirit of justice, in my opinion.

The most ridiculous thing about these sentences, especially as concerns all this IP bullshit these days, is that a person that literally walked into a Best Buy and stole a physical CD would have 1/10th of the financial penalties of someone downloading that same CD's music online. The arbitrary nature of the determination of these financial penalties themselves is ridiculous. I mean, how could anyone see a $1,900,000 judgement for downloading 24 songs solely for personal use as a reasonable judgement at all? These guys literally argued with a straight face that Limewire cost them $75 trillion in damages. This exceeds the CIA's estimation of the Gross World Product in 2010 by $5 trillion, so apparently Limewire cost the RIAA more money than there is on the entire planet. Even the judge in that case thought it was completely absurd.

Mandatory minimum sentences when we're dealing with a civil infraction is much different in my eyes than mandatory minimum sentences for an actual crime. Historically the power to sentence has been in the judge's hands, and I still see no compelling reason whatsoever that a judge should have that power taken away by a mandatory minimum sentence.

Actually, Android and iOS are in a virtual tie with Android at 47% and iOS at 43%. But, Android has been falling while iOS has been climbing.

And yet it's estimated that at current growth, there will be more Android devices than Windows devices by 2016 - making it the largest device OS in the World; far outweighing iOS or OSX or a merged conjunction such as iOSX, as it will no doubt be, by 2016.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/28/idc-by-2016-android-devices-to-outnumber-traditional-windows-pcs/

Not bad for an OS that no one wants, hey? Of course - 2016 is a long way off in tech terms but Android tablets are starting to sell and sell well.

By the way - http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/idc-apples-ipad-rules-tablet-sales-today-but-android-makers-will-overtake-it-by-2016/ - I would hardly say over 40% of tablets is finding it tough to spread (Apple is now at only 54.7%). The days of Android tablets languishing with no sales are long past - Android is fast approaching the 50% mark on tablets, too.

And yet it's estimated that at current growth, there will be more Android devices than Windows devices by 2016 - making it the largest device OS in the World; far outweighing iOS or OSX or a merged conjunction such as iOSX, as it will no doubt be, by 2016.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/28/idc-by-2016-android-devices-to-outnumber-traditional-windows-pcs/

Not bad for an OS that no one wants, hey? Of course - 2016 is a long way off in tech terms but Android tablets are starting to sell and sell well.

By the way - http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/14/idc-apples-ipad-rules-tablet-sales-today-but-android-makers-will-overtake-it-by-2016/ - I would hardly say over 40% of tablets is finding it tough to spread (Apple is now at only 54.7%). The days of Android tablets languishing with no sales are long past - Android is fast approaching the 50% mark on tablets, too.

No last quarter Apple made $13.06 Billon.

All of the rest of the android manufacturers are going out of business. In a year once Google starts taking massive losses from the failure of a phone company they bought, android will get the google wave treatment.

It's not as if the app is accessing information that isn't already publicly available. Newsflash, ladies: if you're checking in to every shop you visit on foursquare, your stalker (the real one, not the guy in the office building across the street looking for a date) already knows. No app needed.

Creepy to me would be, say, an app that is secretly installed on your phone, cannot be removed or turned off, that transmits all sorts of private usage data to clandestine third-party servers without the user's permission.

But you know what, $1B aint what it used to be. Call me when they get to $10B.

that's for sure.

Congrat Redhat! You're beating Microsoft.... in 1989

Microsoft reached a billion in 1990. And that's back when it was a different world, there were no (very few) hard drives, no (very few) "laptops", no smartphones, no (well, almost no) internet, and very few people owned a PC. Reaching a billion considering all those factors against them is amazing.

Now Microsoft is up to 70 billion

A billion is a great first step and something to be proud of, but I'd say it's still waaay too early to be saying "I TOLD U SO!" You've been out since 1994, reaching 1 billion after 18 years is... well, expected.

Android is #1, iOS is #2. You have to be very careful of weasel words from Apple supporters: they'll make claims like "Apple is the largest single mobile vendor!", but of course all of the Android vendors put together still outnumber Apple. So Android market share is larger than iOS.

Do the developers of GO have beards?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817707228

HDDs are kinda cheap. Keep one drive running and from time to time, run off a copy of the storage drive and slap a label with a date on a backup target drive. Do a daily task that checks the health of the HDD... automate it and send anything other than "green/healthy/pass" to yourself in email so you know when it's time to duplicate your main drive to retirement.

I love those HDD duplicators. They don't care about your OS and make perfect copies. They beep at you when they find bad sectors and stuff like that too.

I guess it doesn't really answer the original question, but using a HDD instead of an optical disk for backup just makes a lot of sense to me. Capacity isn't going to be a problem and neither is compatibility. Just keep stacking and rotating your backup hard drives. Use something like:

This -- http://danbeahm.blogspot.com/2010/02/bare-hard-drive-storage.html

or This -- http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/04/cardboard-hard-drive-storage-box/

In the one corner Apple, in the other such winners as HTC, Motorolla, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. CEO's always get fired if they back the wrong horse, but he picked the one with the right odds.

Can I place my bet on Microsoft please?

T-Mobile Sidekick Disaster: Danger's Servers Crashed, And They Don't Have A Backup

Microsoft Red-Faced After Massive Sidekick Data Loss

Or just google for Microsoft Sidekick/Danger

Your analogy falls apart in recent years though, when you look at the popularity of the iPad and iPhone.

Nonsense. Both are losing ground to more open Android devices.

Sigh. We've been through this a thousand times. But, in a likely vain attempt at showing what the truly relevant figures are, here we go again, once more into the breech...

Because, just like Samsung's "sales" figures for the Galaxy Tab, "sales" of Android devices doesn't tell the true picture. And that is, a significant percentage of the Android phones that have been sold are in the dustbin, because they broke and/or got replaced, but no one bothers to track those numbers.

Do people break/replace their iOS devices? Sure; but that's not the point. The only metric that really counts with mobile devices these days is "browser share". Because, that is the most accurate way for "the industry" to track devices that are actually in use.

This (see graph # 3) is a more accurate reflection of the relative popularity of iOS (for example) to the theives/also-rans, and shows iOS and Android neck and neck, with Apple slightly in the lead. But both pale in comparison to Nokia, which you conveniently leave out of your tirade.

Also, always keep in mind that Android is a "platform", where all the sales are lumped-together (and yet still don't beat out Apple), while Apple is a "company" (who produces only higher-end products, to boot).

Sounds like pretty clear case of a fragmentation issue.
From TFA:
'I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through,' one half of the husband and wife duo said. 'We spent thousands on various test hardware.

It isn't a case of poorly skilled devs either; this is backed up by other Game developers like Epic and id that are avoiding the platform as well:
Carmack(id):
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/15/john-carmack-ios-still-better-than-android-for-mobile-game-development/
"Android is far too fragmented to develop for, both from a hardware and software point of view. "
Sweeny(Epic):
http://actionatadistance.net/post/4386288135/sweeney-android-fragmentation
Says Sweeney, "When a consumer gets the phone and they wanna play a game that uses our technology, it's got to be a consistent experience, and we can't guarantee that [on Android]. That's what held us off of Android."

Fragmentation is a real issue. Less so when you developing a web type, text app with some 2d bitmaps, but when you are developing more complex games and you are trying squeeze performance from the platform, fragmentation has a significant negative effect.

Use the MCSE mantra:
1. Perform virus scan.
2. If that doesn't work, find a different program that will display a reassuring green graphic.
3. If that doesn't work, reboot.
4. If that doesn't work, reformat, reinstall.
5. If that doesn't work, GOTO 1.

Microsoft wouldn't know anything about data center running if it were chase aftering them at full speedo.

Google this: "Microsoft Sidekick / Danger"

http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/10/t-mobile-sidekick-disaster-microsofts-servers-crashed-and-they-dont-have-a-backup/

https://www.pcworld.com/article/173470/microsoft_redfaced_after_massive_sidekick_data_loss.html

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/11/microsofts_danger_sidekick_data_loss_casts_dark_on_cloud_computing.html

On a related note, Intel's first smartphone runs... Android. Apparently Intel has finally got the memo. I wish them luck.

Or rather, they don't consider that the subsidiary that sold the trademark to Apple's shell company had the authorisation to sell the Chinese rights, despite the parent being party to, and signing, the deal.

This is not the argument in the U.S. case, which appears to be based on whether Apple fraudulently obtained the trademark by using a fictitious company. I have no idea how the courts in California treat something like that - techcrunch.com says "If true, this is a fairly serious offense, and Apple’s ownership of the trademark could be overturned." source

In that context, cloud storage makes eminent sense because for the cloud service provider, providing reliable storage, or apps, or whatever, is their core competency.

And yet we still see failures from the biggest players like the EC2 crash, the Danger fiasco, iCloud failing or gmail outages. Go 'The Cloud'.

It is not your company's core competency. They will do it better than you. Period.

Yeah because we all know McDonalds' IT systems are managed by the guy flipping the burgers, they don't actually have qualified IT guys there. Seriously you haven't realized that it's just outsourcing the IT department? You think these 'cloud' providers are some other sort of entity that aren't just IT guys running an IT contracting business as opposed to internal division?

Somebody out there probably never heard of Twitter switching to https.

Market innovation, Megaupload wasn't busted because of piracy, they were busted because they wanted to go legit by offering artists a distribution platform with 90% profit *for the artists*. Some sources:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/24/was-megaupload-targeted-because-of-its-upcoming-megabox-digital-jukebox-service/
http://cgarmstrong.me/post/16405025252/megaupload
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120123busta
http://www.deltaworld.org/technology/Megaupload-had-planned-to-pay-artists-to-create-a-new-online-music-service/
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=megaupload+artists+90%25&t=lm

this is some crap Rollercoaster Tycoon-quality(in 2012!) games shop that got rich peddling its lousy wares off of Facebook's back. Zynga is a flea, and FB is the big dog - scratching Zynga off his balls with his muthafuckin' paws --

They were that, 5 years ago, but now Zynga is it's own thing, they don't need Facebook at all to survive. If Facebook vanished tomorrow Zynga would hardly notice. Zynga already has dozens of iPhone games and bought dozens of companies allowing Zynga to sell games on every platform.

In fact, Facebook relies on Zynga for 12% of it's revenue, taking a 30 percent cut from purchases of virtual goods within Zynga games.

Zuckerburg's salary of $500,000 is only effective through 2012. As of 2013, it will drop to $1. http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/mark-zuckerberg-will-have-a-1-salary-starting-in-2013/

>"by the time we have LTE Advanced on our phones, the radio chips will have had a generation or two of power reductions"

Don't be TOO sure. Sprint will be the first with LTE Advanced, and they are already starting to roll it out. They already have phones to go with it: http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/09/sprint-unveils-first-lte-phones-the-galaxy-nexus-and-the-lg-viper/

Maybe they are just LTE and not LTE Advanced? I don't know. Another article said they would use LTE for the data and CDMA for the voice until 2013, when they roll out "Advanced" and also start using VoLTE. So confusing :)

Now, this doesn't necessary mean you'll be doing a lot of contributions upstream to the open-source community, but you will be working with a lot of OSS components, and developing proprietary software that interacts with them.

Get a job with Rovio and you can use OSS without even giving credit to them!

I don't mean that as a sling at Rovio, honest. Read the article and you'll see they were pretty good about dealing with it.
But having more developers working in the industry who really do give a damn about OSS can only be a good thing. I noticed the credits of Ghost Trick have 3 pages of OSS licensing.
Keep at 'er.

They've pretty much cornered the advertising market with their dominate share of the search engine market and web applications.

Actually, that's pretty far from the truth. If you want the leader of online advertising, you want Facebook. There's some discrepancy in how the numbers pan out, but they all agree: Facebook beats Google fairly handily in the online advertising market.
http://www.allfacebook.com/report-facebook-leads-2011-online-display-ad-sales-2011-06
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/facebook-one-third-online-ads/

You actually missed the more troublesome buy in your list: that of flight data company ITA. Because of the way that airlines set up access to their flight and pricing information, it becomes difficult to figure out what you actually get when you search Google for fares.

While you're correct that Microsoft did that to secure their dominant position, it is also what every company does to get a competitive edge. The only time that the acquisitions becomes troublesome is when they are used to gain monopoly power in a market. The only time you could potentially argue that is with the acquisition of ITA. Interestingly, few people seem to worry about it.

https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=7933375107&sk=wall 1.3 million monthly users of the Facebook app on WP7 According to http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/17/facebook-android-iphone/ facebook for android has 85.4 million users montly, IOS has 99.1 million monthly users.

It doesn't matter. The business, "Megaupload", is gone, the guys running it have spent time in jail. Even if the FBI drops the charges, Megaupload is screwed.

More importantly, the business, "MegaBox" (one of the main reasons MegaUpload was targeted) is also dead, meaning the first real challenge to the RIAA is stillborn.

Just as planned, Mission accomplished, etc etc.

Mod parent funny. It's what they were going for.

And the response is "until it's not."

Kinda like this guy?

... Google, Apple...

They aren't allies.

Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were actually good friends for a while. Schmidt was even on Apple's board, until he had to leave when Google bought Android and it created a conflict of interest. That was one of the reasons Jobs was so mad about Android -- he felt like it was busting up his friendship.

Incidentally, if you want to help me test a hypothesis, try paying attention to the media coverage of this story to see how much the MPAA-owned media cover this story with Google as the principal antagonist/coordinator of the scheme and Apple as a secondary or unimportant player now that Google has gone to bat for us against SOPA, even though it was Steve Jobs who started the ball rolling on this whole no poach thing. Pay special attention to News Corp coverage (e.g. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) -- my hypothesis is that Murdoch has it in for Google now and is executing a campaign against them. Let's see if I'm right.

I remember very well. In the remote year of 2011 Zynga was accusing Vostu of cloning some of their game.

Also in 2009 Zynga was sued for Copyright infringement, this time the settlement was filled by Psycho Monkey, due to the game Mafia Wars.

It seems that there is something very supicious happening with Zynga.

Huh? There's been many articles already written about Zynga's business practices by ex employees. Zygna doesn't design games. They copy other successful games, rename them and market it under the Zynga name. They don't to even hide it. So I don't see why this is a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention for the last 5 years...

I remember very well. In the remote year of 2011 Zynga was accusing Vostu of cloning some of their game.

Also in 2009 Zynga was sued for Copyright infringement, this time the settlement was filled by Psycho Monkey, due to the game Mafia Wars.

It seems that there is something very supicious happening with Zynga.

Huh? There's been many articles already written about Zynga's business practices by ex employees. Zygna doesn't design games. They copy other successful games, rename them and market it under the Zynga name. They don't to even hide it. So I don't see why this is a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention for the last 5 years...

I remember very well. In the remote year of 2011 Zynga was accusing Vostu of cloning some of their game.

Also in 2009 Zynga was sued for Copyright infringement, this time the settlement was filled by Psycho Monkey, due to the game Mafia Wars.

It seems that there is something very supicious happening with Zynga.

I remember very well. In the remote year of 2011 Zynga was accusing Vostu of cloning some of their game.

Also in 2009 Zynga was sued for Copyright infringement, this time the settlement was filled by Psycho Monkey, due to the game Mafia Wars.

It seems that there is something very supicious happening with Zynga.

In reality Android ships more phones; slightly at that. Devices: Apple clearly wins.

Even before sales of Android enabled TVs, cars and tablets really start to take off: http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/android-700000/

If Asus could sort out their production pipeline the iPad 2 wouldn't even be the highest selling tablet these days.

Sure. If pigs could fly, they'd use Android.

In reality Android ships more phones; slightly at that. Devices: Apple clearly wins.

Even before sales of Android enabled TVs, cars and tablets really start to take off:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/android-700000/

If Asus could sort out their production pipeline the iPad 2 wouldn't even be the highest selling tablet these days.

As a WebOS fan, this makes me sad. Why would HP give up on such an incredibly profitable market after only investing $3.3billion http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/21/hps-failed-webos-experiment-cost-them-3-3-billion-but-whats-next/ ? The iOS and Andriod user experiences still have not passed WebOS smoothness, in my opinion, though the notification systems are catching up.

Although HP's management style of WebOS reminded me of: "They say you gotta spend money to make money. I don’t know what went wrong. We spent all our money." - Tom Haverford

Not Trolling. Not FUD.

Yes, it was idiotic, but it did happen.

http://www.dailytech.com/Report+Apple+Caught+Photoshopping+Galaxy+Tab+101+to+Look+Like+iPad+for+Lawsuit/article22459.htm

http://www.technobuffalo.com/companies/apple/apple-could-have-given-faulty-evidence-in-euro-samsung-case/

http://pauloflaherty.com/2011/08/16/was-apple-caught-fudging-the-facts/

http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/15/did-apple-alter-photos-of-the-samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1-in-its-inj/

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/15/apples-evidence-in-european-galaxy-tab-injunction-was-seriously-misleading-as-in-false/

do you need more?

None of the games I have runs properly under Wine - what you see on Steam are the A list. It's one of those YMMV things ...

Admittedly, there's less of an opportunity now than in the past, but I wasn't really targeting games with my comment - there's plenty of commercial software - including tons of custom in-house stuff that will need to be fixed when xp goes bye-bye - that could provide grist for the revenue mill. Just no distro is attacking it. If it's good enough for IBM to milk, it should be good enough for some distro somewhere ... especially since at least some of the techniques and skills gained could be used over and over.

The real question is, what is any distro offering that nobody else is offering? RedHat is offering a complete set of services and support that nobody else can match, so they're going to have to find their vocation elsewhere? Cloud? Don't block ads and you'll see so many different cloud services offering free trials, free service tiers, free or cheap come-ons, all sorts of other stuff. So that's out. Music stores? Nickel and dime at best (especially since they couldn't make their own - they had to buy their service from a 3rd party). Trying to intermediate themselves into becoming a content broker via UbuntuTV? Completely broken because they lack Android support, have no manufacturers who are in the least interested, and no tie-ins with smart phones or tablets to leverage off.

This is a problem all distros are facing - how do you stay relevant? How do you grow? How do you find a niche and exploit the heck out of it quick enough to become the dominant player before everyone and their cousin sets up shop on the same street corner? You can't do it by selling the same thing as everyone else.

Or maybe what we're seeing is that RedHat is the natural monopoly, and everyone else is there for the crumbs. I don't know, and I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, but I do know that you don't abandon loyal users to the wolves while you chase other markets, and that the constant vapor-ware announcements just wear people down.

Did they do the right thing with Banshee? It made them look cheap and desperate. Perception counts. It makes people wonder if they're really generating any profits from support or manufacturers or anything else.

It's a really complicated question as to what, if anything, any distro can do that won't immediately attract dozens of imitators like, well, like flies on turds. We see that every day, even with ideas that can't possibly work - people see it, figure "I'll do it to, after all, if they're doing it, it must be profitable", and the next thing you know, you have 500 different websites all offering the same thing, the media sees it, thinks "gee, this must be the next big thing, there are so many people in that space now", they hype the crap out of it, and a year later, it's "what ever happened to ..."

Maybe the originator could have made a go of it - but 500 all at once, nobody survives. But then you also have dumb ideas like color.com spending $350k for a domain name that doesn't tell you what they do, and $41 million seems to be a lot to make an app that basically lets stalkers track you in real time.

Same thing with linux - a great idea (and certainly provides a LOT more value than 100 color.coms ever will), but how is the average distro going to make any $$$ when anyone can just fork and make their own?

Does Google select their clients for the advertising service?

No, but Google does web not radio. There are a lot fewer "publishers" (in advertising parlance, a "publisher" is the owner of a medium into which ads are inserted) in FM radio than on the web. So with advertisers competing for fewer publishers, advertising services have to be pickier. The article claimed that not even Google could get enough "inventory" (by which I'm guessing airtime) from radio stations' holding companies to place its clients' ads.

Well, in addition to filtering out the illegal ads?

Say I write a song and record it and only later it turns out to be similar to an older song that I had completely forgotten about at the time. Is my ad now an illegal ad?

And it is. iBooks uses ePub, which is HTML5.

"Books are not technically in the EPUB format, but they borrow from it (likely EPUB 3). Certain interactive elements of the books require the files to be done in the slightly different iBooks format", Apple says.
Techcrunch coverage

<p><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <msup><mi>x</mi><mn>2</mn></msup></math></p>

Does the authoring app give you a way to cut and paste this into your book? If so, is Apple's ibook reading software capable of rendering the book correctly? They say they already have some math and physics textbooks for sale in the ibook store, but I don't know whether they're done using mathml or some kludgy workaround like bitmapped images (which is what you have to do in epub 2).

>>Personally, I would prefer DRM-free PDFs or interactive and cross platform HTML 5 "books" that didn't mandate a platform.

>The ePub format is cross-platform HTML5. The .ibooks files that this tool exports are ePubs with a mime type of "application/x-ibooks+zip".

This link says:

Books are not technically in the EPUB format, but they borrow from it (likely EPUB 3). Certain interactive elements of the books require the files to be done in the slightly different iBooks format, Apple says.

This leaves the situation very unclear.

I assume there is DRM. DRM is not part of the epub spec, but can be added on top. So the first question on my mind would be whether a book in this format bought from Apple will be DRM-unlockable on non-Apple readers.

The next issue is whether or not these added "interactive elements" are proprietary, and whether they break compatibility with readers that implement the straight epub 3 standard.

And finally, there is the question of how they're going to handle epub 3 features that are not yet implemented in any readers, including Apple's. TFA says that the initial lineup of books, which are supposed to be available already today, will include math and physics textbooks. Epub 3 has mathml, but no reader, including any of Apple's, implements this yet. So will Apple push out a software update to iPads that will add mathml support? It would be interesting if a slashdotter who owns an iPad could buy one of these books and report back on how the math is done and whether it renders properly on an iPad.

What is potentially a little sinister here is that Apple, which formerly had hitched its wagon to the open epub standard, could now be heading down the proprietary road taken by amazon. Amazon has been trying to negotiate exclusive deals with publishers to sell e-books; obviously their dream is to achieve lock-in, so that their customers become their captives. Barnes and Noble is responding by refusing to sell paper books by publishers, such as DC Comics, who won't let them sell the electronic version. If apple starts to emulate their behavior, then we're going to have a really nasty situation, where you'd have to own one handheld reader in order to read Harry Potter, and a different company's reader for Sue Grafton.

Your refrigerator is probably not a general purpose computer, neither is your watch (unless you own this watch). Linux on the iPad runs, but is currently pretty limited.

The vast majority of consumers aren't going to run alternative operating systems, but it should not be banned. It's bad when Apple does it. It's bad when Motorola does it. It's bad when Microsoft does it.

Back in the late 1990s when Microsoft strong-armed PC OEMs into not selling BeOS, Microsoft would have loved to have made this requirement on PCs. They could have killed Linux before it was a serious competitor. Android never would have been developed. Maybe iOS never would have been either (Apple uses a fair amount of open source software).

And it also seems like the most important products don't even show up there

Just as expected, you just linked to an article by an Apple fanboy. Apple Television? What's that? Didn't this product already come out five or ten years ago?

Not to mention that this was Microsoft's last appearance at CES and that trade shows in general are on the decline. It just makes me wonder if CES is still worth it.

It's probably not worth it for Microsoft. Microsoft is clearly not getting the Marketshare it was hoping to get against Android (even with the help of Nokia).

and that trade shows in general are on the decline.

That statement is true enough. Just take a look at the last MacWorld. Not getting the iPhone 5 was a let down for everyone who went to it.

Is CES still relevant? Look at the past three, the Best of CES 2011 winner was the Motorola Xoom, 2010 was the Panasonic 3D plasma TV, and 2009 was the Palm Pre. It seems like it's more about giving tech writers neat gadgets to write about with no guarantee that any of it will ship, or if it does, that it will be successful. And it also seems like the most important products don't even show up there. Not to mention that this was Microsoft's last appearance at CES and that trade shows in general are on the decline. It just makes me wonder if CES is still worth it.

Problem is they all bask in this zero effort activism and then will ignore it when SOPA has a name change and is passed attached to the "its bad to smash puppies and kittens with a club" Act of 2012

This is, I think the plan B that the guys who pushed SOPA were counting on. This seems to be going wrong; Reddit have started to campaign against politicians who are staying neutral (which mostly means, following the money but keeping quite about it). This is beginning to get some traction and a number of them are coming out and declaring against SOPA and PIPA. With this kind of trend, not just this particular bill, but it's proponents and any future versions can become toxic.

Importantly, though, other politicians aren't declaring. These guys make great targets. This is a really good chance to flex a bit of political muscle and make sure that where those politicians have an opponent who has declared against both pieces of legislation, that candidate has full support. Politicians who are voted out do not get political "donations". Groups which manage to make that happen get remembered and left alone at all times in future from the point where they have proven an ability to do that at will.

What's now needed:

• A list of politicians who have not declared against PIPA and/or SOPA to campaign against.
• An ordered list of donors to those politicians as secondary targets.
• A list of opponents to support.

Does anyone have a place to get that information? This can make the difference between a campaign which achieves nothing and one which is remembered with horror in the minds of the politicians who supported SOPA.

Now, what could we reasonably ask for that people like the sponsors of SOPA wouldn't like? here's a shopping list of ideas, some of which I don't even agree with myself, but which might give people inspiration.

• break up News International and Time Warner as dangerously large anti-free market threats to free speech.
• copyright terms reduced to 5 years or the lifetime of the author + 2 years; whichever is shorter.
• reinstate the need give a copy of a work to a "copyright library" for copyright protection of any work delivered in more than 5000 separate sales
• a product may be protected with either copyright or patent protection; not both.
• DRM not allowed on TV broadcasts
• copyright not valid on DRM protected works.
• no more than one TV station or newspaper per company (not both)
• no TV station to cover more than one state
• source code for all proprietary software to be put into escrow on release
• massive strengthening of US anti-monopoly legislation and anti-monopoly law enforcement
• automatic loss of IP protection for any company attempting to enforce anti-grey import laws anywhere in the world
• automatic patent licenses for open standards and all other standards treated as illegal cartels

If these clauses start turning up as amendments to future copyright bills, suddenly political action will become much less popular with the groups which currently support SOPA and/or PIPA.

Update 2 of this article states Google has taken some responsibility:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/13/facing-another-pr-disaster-google-accused-of-fraudulently-undermining-a-kenyan-startup/

More details still need to emerge.