So not only will they sell new computers without a Windows install disc, they won't even install it on a disk drive, it will be preinstalled in RAM and all you have to do is turn it on.
Although it is kind of an interesting idea to consider a computer where there is no distinction between mass storage and RAM, where RAM is rewritable but permanent.
You could even leave programs in a running state but just stop executing them on the CPU. You could install new software in an already-running and configured state (how's that for a backup?).
Maybe the phone-specific idea is that you want more, low-power cores for handling low-CPU background tasks (fetch email, etc) which would let you have fewer high-power cores for interactive tasks without some of the bogging that happens on phones when there's active background activity.
Sure, there was more in play than in most situations and Krebs has some actual credibility as a security consultant so a story (with evidence) about being setup is great exculpatory evidence.
But most people wouldn't be able to track a frame-up like this and would be left helpless victims of SWAT tactics and prosecutorial hostility.
The problem with Netflix is in many cases you don't have access to current season TV shows, and streaming has a pretty crappy movie selection (don't blink, the movie you want may be available for a limited time and then you'll miss it...) DVDs are great, but now you're waiting. Two at a time is OK, but two movies isn't much for a long holiday weekend.
And then there's offline viewing -- why can't I watch Netflix instant offline? Surely there's some DRM they could apply similar to rentals from Amazon and Apple.
But the criminal setup only works if the police response to it is over-the-top, and with drugs it always is. The police aren't responsible for this "prank" but they are responsible.
If I was your neighbor and I called the police suspecting you got a suspicious package that didn't involve drugs, it might warrant a squad driving by to check out the house and possibly stopping to talk to me (who made the call) to get more information. They might knock on your door and say "Yeah, your neighbor was concerned..." just to get an idea if I was on the level or not.
If I was your neighbor and called the police and said "Yeah, I think he's dealing drugs and just got a shipment." you may end up getting your house raided by a high-risk entry team, including having them toss the contents and detain you. If you're white, have a good lawyer, no criminal history and pass a piss test the D.A. *might* buy your story that those drugs aren't yours. Otherwise you're facing a possible Federal felony drug beef, sitting in Federal detention for months waiting for trial and bankrupting yourself to prove your innocence.
The overreaction and police state tactics certainly are the cops fault.
I would bet that the people who were really scammed were the businesses that bought it. They paid Cisco prices for non-Cisco gear.
And I wonder how many purchasers were in on this, getting cash kickbacks for signing invoices for Cisco gear and getting hot/fake hardware.
I would bet that more of that goes on than you might think. There's so much hardware that nobody ever sees, it seems like it would be so easy to fill those remote wiring closets and field offices with counterfeit equipment, sign an invoice for the real thing and pick up some "rebate money" from the company for my continued good business.
Of course I don't think they would all suddenly go legit.
But counterfeiting depends on pricing goods artificially higher than the market price for an item of similar utility. Apple restricts the accessory market with an expensive and costly certification process, thereby artificially raising the price of the accessories beyond the market price for equivalent goods.
If the process was cheaper (which implies easier), there would be a lower price and consumers would be less tempted by low-priced knockoffs.
The same is true of handbags, watches and any other thing that get counterfeited. If a real Louis Vuitton handbag cost only $10 more than a normal leather handbag, nobody would counterfeit them because everyone would buy the real thing.
Making accessories easier rather than harder doesn't stop counterfeiters, but it undermines their incentive to counterfeit.
I think lack of political eligibility is just another component of compliant. They can't vote, so they don't "count" as voters and can't participate politically.
Generally, though, when it comes to broader immigration I think the goal is less culture shaping and more along the lines of trying to tip the balance of the electorate "their" way.
To me this is one of those forehead slappers. If you want to minimize cheap knockoffs, make your certification process cheaper and more straightforward.
Obviously Apple is going the other way, trying to use technology/encryption to force vendors into their certification and licensing process with the idea that they can control this market and make money off it, too.
Of course this has failed, and knock-offs are starting to proliferate, and it's hard to know if what Apple really cares about is the rare and unlikely chance of serious shock or if it wants to curtail products from unlicensed vendors.
I often wonder of H1Bs aren't really about money savings. Too many people with direct experience using H1Bs complain about poor communication, more people to do the job, poor quality that needs re-doing to make it a complete apples-for-apples cost savings.
I wonder if sometimes what they really like is a more obedient and compliant workforce. Many H1Bs come from the third world where cultures are stratified and unquestioned deference to your "betters" is baked-in. India is a great example -- while a "democratic" country, India has centuries of being caste-based and deference to higher casts or acceptance of lesser treatment because of lower caste membership is the norm.
Traditionally IT has had a high wages and with those high wages come high expectations for participation in decision making, a lack of deference to management and pushback against issues of work-life balance (long hours, weekends, etc).
Add this into the fact that H1Bs are thousands of miles from home, and you have a workforce that takes what they're given and does what they're told without pushback -- the shitty hours, the crappy treatment, low(er) wages, they just don't care. And a lot of it isn't just because the alternative is some slum in Bangalore.
Management wants an IT workforce like its factory workforce -- low paid, low expectations and easily pushed around. H1Bs give them that and at least on paper they're cheaper, too.
I think there are a lot of dog trainers who are "positive reinforcement only" and probably ties into some kinds of animal welfare philosophy somehow.
We went to dog training at the local humane society with our 10 month old rescue (half pit bull, half great dane, 95 lbs now at 2 years) and the focus was 100% on positive reinforcement.
We found that for some behaviors it was just not effective -- ie, barking out the window at passers by. It worked well for some things like sit, stay, and come, but for behaviors that the dog did you didn't want them to do it didn't accomplish anything.
We hired an in-home trainer recommended by friends and she recommended some simple "punitive" steps we could take -- grabbing the scruff and muzzle during an unwanted behavior and saying NO and if repeated, kenneling the dog and not letting him out until he stopped barking. She also recommended a pinch collar which did a lot to control pulling and lunging, although you still can't put a squirrel in front of this dog without some lunging.
We found that the punitive behavior was MUCH more effective at controlling unwanted behavior than trying to teach an alternative behavior when the dog was so strongly motivated to do something we didn't want.
I never got to the shock collar stage, although I have been tempted a couple of times. As the dog has grown older some of the annoying behavior has tapered and I think our training helped dampen a lot of unwanted behavior.
I have to believe there's a rump business left at Dell selling to the business market, at least that portion of the market not served by IBM global services and other similar companies.
I work in SMB IT and I see Dell 4:1 over HP (it used to be closer to 1:1, but HP has been retarded for the last 5 years) and there are few competitors besides HP for that business.
It starts me thinking that maybe HP and Dell should merge. They would be the last US full-line PC company, selling notebooks to servers. HP has a higher end enterprise business Dell will never have and HP has some SMB SAN and server business that HP has lost over the years.
As a combined company they would own the business market in the US. Lenovo could compete on laptops, but that's it, and it would probably make Intel and Microsoft shit themselves.
At the end of the day, there's a lot about a "good" story that's universal, but there's an awful lot about a "good" story that's culture-bound or culture-based. A lot of drama is emotional and idiomatic -- it simply doesn't translate, and if you can translate it, it doesn't mean anything.
It's easy to say "it's the subtitles" that prevent Americans from watching more foreign films, but ask a lot of ordinary people and they will say they are "boring" or "hard to understand" -- the cultural idioms, the expectations, the unspoken understandings that drive these stories just don't make sense to most Americans, even though there's a lot of shared cultural understandings and a lot of Americans are well educated by global standards. Even British films and TV shows get remade to make them "more American" despite there being almost no language gap and no subtitles involved.
With that in mind its easy to understand that if you are trying to make a movie that can be viewed by someone in Kenya, Australia, China and South America you need to streamline as much as possible. This leads to lots of shooting and FX and very little story.
Kill off all of the consumer business and focus solely on the business market (presumably excluding the very large enterprise market where Dell can't complete with traditional consulting companies like Accenture or highly integrated solution providers like IBM)?
It seems like the consumer market is what is collapsing more so than the business market. Tablets may replace or string out the lifecycle of consumer PCs, but they're an adjunct if used at all in businesses.
Dell has made some moves towards enterprise IT (Equallogic, Compellant) but its products lack integration and awareness and in some ways compete against each other (Equallogic SAN modularity makes a strong claim for extensive scalability, risking overlap with the Compellant product at the lower end).
There seems to be some future for a company who can supply an IT solution (switching, storage, cpu, services) at the mid-large market space. Plus, there's money to be made even at the SMB level, too, since not everything they do can be "clouded" nor are many interested in hazy cloud commitments.
Lining up billions in financing is no trivial activity and having that money ready to invest costs money. From the details, it's hard to know if Silver Lake pays the cost to keep that money on tap and this is part of covering those costs or if this is purely a reward for lining up several billion dollars.
My guess is it leans heavily towards the reward side with investors being promised returns equal to cash elsewhere in the market until the deal goes through.
Knowing this and creating the doubt and delays was probably as much of Icahn's game as wanting to take the company over. If the Silver Lake bid falls through it may sink Dell's stock, allowing Icahn's bid to look a lot better and possibly even gain some of the Silver Lake investors.
I hate to get flagged by the NSA for some kind of conspiracy charge, but it's not a very complicated tactical challenge to figure out how to use a car to damage at the airport without using the valet service.
If you're just looking for a place to have an explosion, every airport I've ever been to allows you to drive right up to the terminal building. Even better is that these areas are designed on purpose to allow for large vehicles to drive up there, unlike the parking area valets use.
So maximum damage is likely to come from a rogue minibus (the kind that handle shuttles to rental cars or hotels) or a large passenger van at the front of the terminal, not in the valet area.
The idea that the valet would be useful for damage is probably only unique to some airports where the valet parking area is in an underground lot underneath some sensitive area, although I think most of those places have so much steel reinforced concrete that a car just can't carry enough hidden explosives to do any damage.
Now, the valet may be an excellent place to park a car with something secret and non-explosive, like cash or drugs. It allows the car to sit fairly securely for days and for someone to come in and claim the car with little more than a valet ticket and gain plausible deniability by having a boarding pass for a flight that just landed (obviously they didn't park the car).
I wonder how electric cars compare to gasoline/diesel powered cars in terms of total energy consumption when you factor in the materials.
An example would be a Prius vs. Corolla. It seems to me that a lot more energy -- and other environmental impact -- goes into making a Prius due to the battery (lithium mining and battery manufacturing), more elaborate computers/controls (everything to do with chipmaking) electric motors (rare earth mining and processing).
I've always wondered if they could make it a requirement of patent infringement that the entity claiming infringement has to prove that the patent is a component of a product they make or can substantively prove they are going to make within two years?
Or make patents a two step process -- patent application and product verification. You get granted a provisional patent but have to come back and demonstrate the use of the patent in an actual commercial product. Failure to do the second step means no patent.
The idea behind patents is to promote USEFUL innovation -- ie, in the creation of products for the marketplace. Not for creating monopolies or extracting money from people for products the holder has never or will never make.
I've gotten 3 weather alerts already. Living in Minneapolis I question the value of sending Flash Flood alerts; I think the number of people who are at risk from Flash Flooding in their homes is pretty small in this state (it may be larger in coastal or river delta areas).
Was it an AT&T update that did this? There's definitely software support for it in IOS as I can see where to turn it on/off in my iPhone settings.
I don't know but I think even the cellular capable iPads don't have enough hardware to do voice calls, but no matter, even if they do (and I suspect they do) they lack the software for voice calling, and I'm sure that's true of most tablets generally unless they were specially meant to be Phablets.
Probably a majority of pre WWII Fords still running sport a Chevy engine these days.
I can't imagine too many 1930s Ford owners wanting to run a Chevy engine over the Ford flathead V8 that likely came with the car. That would kind of be like going through the effort to keep a Sun running by swapping out the Sparc CPU with an Intel CPU.
I would generally agree that there are a lot of places where small block Chevy engines turn up, although the same has been true of a lot of Ford V8s, especially the 351 and 302, and the 427 ended up in a lot of non-car places, like boats (I can only imagine what it must sound like to be on a Chris Craft Commander with dual 427s).
Instead of trying to decide on "one" device for a phone and debating whether the tablet-like screen size is more valuable than phone-sized portability and ergonomics, the debate should be about why I can't get my "cell" phone number to work on more than one device.
I can (sort of) see why cellular networks may not "work" with two or more devices with the same number, but with VoIP this really ought not be a limitation for secondary and tertiary devices.
If AT&T could make my phone work on whatever device I had (iPhone, iPad(s), even PC) then it wouldn't matter what size device I had. If I wanted easy portability and good ergonomics, I'd take my iPhone. If I wanted a bigger screen but mostly good portability, I'd take my iPad mini and possibly a bluetooth headset or headphones for taking calls. And so on.
Basically, screen size doesn't have to be a permanent choice, it can be a "What works best today?" choice.
I don't see where this hurts anybody -- I certainly wouldn't buy an iPad over an iPhone and an iPad because I could make calls on my iPad, and it's not like cell phone companies aren't looking for Yet Another Thing to charge you for.
I think this makes sense, but I think you have to do it in a way that protects inventors who aren't product manufacturers or even full-scale businesses. This is probably a problem only in unusual cases.
But generally speaking, I think that patents that go unused (save, within 5 years of patent issuance) should be voided and considered part of the public realm.
It seems counter to the purpose of a patent to use it only as a legal cudgel and not as a practical tool for actually protecting a business producing the patented thing.
....and I really, really DO NOT want him to react to animals on the television. It's bad enough when he reacts to some dogs out the window, I'm afraid he'd destroy my television if he saw a squirrel, duck or rabbit on TV.
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So not only will they sell new computers without a Windows install disc, they won't even install it on a disk drive, it will be preinstalled in RAM and all you have to do is turn it on.
Although it is kind of an interesting idea to consider a computer where there is no distinction between mass storage and RAM, where RAM is rewritable but permanent.
You could even leave programs in a running state but just stop executing them on the CPU. You could install new software in an already-running and configured state (how's that for a backup?).
Maybe the phone-specific idea is that you want more, low-power cores for handling low-CPU background tasks (fetch email, etc) which would let you have fewer high-power cores for interactive tasks without some of the bogging that happens on phones when there's active background activity.
Sure, there was more in play than in most situations and Krebs has some actual credibility as a security consultant so a story (with evidence) about being setup is great exculpatory evidence.
But most people wouldn't be able to track a frame-up like this and would be left helpless victims of SWAT tactics and prosecutorial hostility.
The problem with Netflix is in many cases you don't have access to current season TV shows, and streaming has a pretty crappy movie selection (don't blink, the movie you want may be available for a limited time and then you'll miss it...) DVDs are great, but now you're waiting. Two at a time is OK, but two movies isn't much for a long holiday weekend.
And then there's offline viewing -- why can't I watch Netflix instant offline? Surely there's some DRM they could apply similar to rentals from Amazon and Apple.
But the criminal setup only works if the police response to it is over-the-top, and with drugs it always is. The police aren't responsible for this "prank" but they are responsible.
If I was your neighbor and I called the police suspecting you got a suspicious package that didn't involve drugs, it might warrant a squad driving by to check out the house and possibly stopping to talk to me (who made the call) to get more information. They might knock on your door and say "Yeah, your neighbor was concerned..." just to get an idea if I was on the level or not.
If I was your neighbor and called the police and said "Yeah, I think he's dealing drugs and just got a shipment." you may end up getting your house raided by a high-risk entry team, including having them toss the contents and detain you. If you're white, have a good lawyer, no criminal history and pass a piss test the D.A. *might* buy your story that those drugs aren't yours. Otherwise you're facing a possible Federal felony drug beef, sitting in Federal detention for months waiting for trial and bankrupting yourself to prove your innocence.
The overreaction and police state tactics certainly are the cops fault.
I would bet that the people who were really scammed were the businesses that bought it. They paid Cisco prices for non-Cisco gear.
And I wonder how many purchasers were in on this, getting cash kickbacks for signing invoices for Cisco gear and getting hot/fake hardware.
I would bet that more of that goes on than you might think. There's so much hardware that nobody ever sees, it seems like it would be so easy to fill those remote wiring closets and field offices with counterfeit equipment, sign an invoice for the real thing and pick up some "rebate money" from the company for my continued good business.
I think the scam opportunities are endless.
Of course I don't think they would all suddenly go legit.
But counterfeiting depends on pricing goods artificially higher than the market price for an item of similar utility. Apple restricts the accessory market with an expensive and costly certification process, thereby artificially raising the price of the accessories beyond the market price for equivalent goods.
If the process was cheaper (which implies easier), there would be a lower price and consumers would be less tempted by low-priced knockoffs.
The same is true of handbags, watches and any other thing that get counterfeited. If a real Louis Vuitton handbag cost only $10 more than a normal leather handbag, nobody would counterfeit them because everyone would buy the real thing.
Making accessories easier rather than harder doesn't stop counterfeiters, but it undermines their incentive to counterfeit.
I think lack of political eligibility is just another component of compliant. They can't vote, so they don't "count" as voters and can't participate politically.
Generally, though, when it comes to broader immigration I think the goal is less culture shaping and more along the lines of trying to tip the balance of the electorate "their" way.
To me this is one of those forehead slappers. If you want to minimize cheap knockoffs, make your certification process cheaper and more straightforward.
Obviously Apple is going the other way, trying to use technology/encryption to force vendors into their certification and licensing process with the idea that they can control this market and make money off it, too.
Of course this has failed, and knock-offs are starting to proliferate, and it's hard to know if what Apple really cares about is the rare and unlikely chance of serious shock or if it wants to curtail products from unlicensed vendors.
I often wonder of H1Bs aren't really about money savings. Too many people with direct experience using H1Bs complain about poor communication, more people to do the job, poor quality that needs re-doing to make it a complete apples-for-apples cost savings.
I wonder if sometimes what they really like is a more obedient and compliant workforce. Many H1Bs come from the third world where cultures are stratified and unquestioned deference to your "betters" is baked-in. India is a great example -- while a "democratic" country, India has centuries of being caste-based and deference to higher casts or acceptance of lesser treatment because of lower caste membership is the norm.
Traditionally IT has had a high wages and with those high wages come high expectations for participation in decision making, a lack of deference to management and pushback against issues of work-life balance (long hours, weekends, etc).
Add this into the fact that H1Bs are thousands of miles from home, and you have a workforce that takes what they're given and does what they're told without pushback -- the shitty hours, the crappy treatment, low(er) wages, they just don't care. And a lot of it isn't just because the alternative is some slum in Bangalore.
Management wants an IT workforce like its factory workforce -- low paid, low expectations and easily pushed around. H1Bs give them that and at least on paper they're cheaper, too.
I think there are a lot of dog trainers who are "positive reinforcement only" and probably ties into some kinds of animal welfare philosophy somehow.
We went to dog training at the local humane society with our 10 month old rescue (half pit bull, half great dane, 95 lbs now at 2 years) and the focus was 100% on positive reinforcement.
We found that for some behaviors it was just not effective -- ie, barking out the window at passers by. It worked well for some things like sit, stay, and come, but for behaviors that the dog did you didn't want them to do it didn't accomplish anything.
We hired an in-home trainer recommended by friends and she recommended some simple "punitive" steps we could take -- grabbing the scruff and muzzle during an unwanted behavior and saying NO and if repeated, kenneling the dog and not letting him out until he stopped barking. She also recommended a pinch collar which did a lot to control pulling and lunging, although you still can't put a squirrel in front of this dog without some lunging.
We found that the punitive behavior was MUCH more effective at controlling unwanted behavior than trying to teach an alternative behavior when the dog was so strongly motivated to do something we didn't want.
I never got to the shock collar stage, although I have been tempted a couple of times. As the dog has grown older some of the annoying behavior has tapered and I think our training helped dampen a lot of unwanted behavior.
I have to believe there's a rump business left at Dell selling to the business market, at least that portion of the market not served by IBM global services and other similar companies.
I work in SMB IT and I see Dell 4:1 over HP (it used to be closer to 1:1, but HP has been retarded for the last 5 years) and there are few competitors besides HP for that business.
It starts me thinking that maybe HP and Dell should merge. They would be the last US full-line PC company, selling notebooks to servers. HP has a higher end enterprise business Dell will never have and HP has some SMB SAN and server business that HP has lost over the years.
As a combined company they would own the business market in the US. Lenovo could compete on laptops, but that's it, and it would probably make Intel and Microsoft shit themselves.
At the end of the day, there's a lot about a "good" story that's universal, but there's an awful lot about a "good" story that's culture-bound or culture-based. A lot of drama is emotional and idiomatic -- it simply doesn't translate, and if you can translate it, it doesn't mean anything.
It's easy to say "it's the subtitles" that prevent Americans from watching more foreign films, but ask a lot of ordinary people and they will say they are "boring" or "hard to understand" -- the cultural idioms, the expectations, the unspoken understandings that drive these stories just don't make sense to most Americans, even though there's a lot of shared cultural understandings and a lot of Americans are well educated by global standards. Even British films and TV shows get remade to make them "more American" despite there being almost no language gap and no subtitles involved.
With that in mind its easy to understand that if you are trying to make a movie that can be viewed by someone in Kenya, Australia, China and South America you need to streamline as much as possible. This leads to lots of shooting and FX and very little story.
What exactly is the future of Dell, anyway?
Kill off all of the consumer business and focus solely on the business market (presumably excluding the very large enterprise market where Dell can't complete with traditional consulting companies like Accenture or highly integrated solution providers like IBM)?
It seems like the consumer market is what is collapsing more so than the business market. Tablets may replace or string out the lifecycle of consumer PCs, but they're an adjunct if used at all in businesses.
Dell has made some moves towards enterprise IT (Equallogic, Compellant) but its products lack integration and awareness and in some ways compete against each other (Equallogic SAN modularity makes a strong claim for extensive scalability, risking overlap with the Compellant product at the lower end).
There seems to be some future for a company who can supply an IT solution (switching, storage, cpu, services) at the mid-large market space. Plus, there's money to be made even at the SMB level, too, since not everything they do can be "clouded" nor are many interested in hazy cloud commitments.
Parent post should be scored above zero.
Lining up billions in financing is no trivial activity and having that money ready to invest costs money. From the details, it's hard to know if Silver Lake pays the cost to keep that money on tap and this is part of covering those costs or if this is purely a reward for lining up several billion dollars.
My guess is it leans heavily towards the reward side with investors being promised returns equal to cash elsewhere in the market until the deal goes through.
Knowing this and creating the doubt and delays was probably as much of Icahn's game as wanting to take the company over. If the Silver Lake bid falls through it may sink Dell's stock, allowing Icahn's bid to look a lot better and possibly even gain some of the Silver Lake investors.
I hate to get flagged by the NSA for some kind of conspiracy charge, but it's not a very complicated tactical challenge to figure out how to use a car to damage at the airport without using the valet service.
If you're just looking for a place to have an explosion, every airport I've ever been to allows you to drive right up to the terminal building. Even better is that these areas are designed on purpose to allow for large vehicles to drive up there, unlike the parking area valets use.
So maximum damage is likely to come from a rogue minibus (the kind that handle shuttles to rental cars or hotels) or a large passenger van at the front of the terminal, not in the valet area.
The idea that the valet would be useful for damage is probably only unique to some airports where the valet parking area is in an underground lot underneath some sensitive area, although I think most of those places have so much steel reinforced concrete that a car just can't carry enough hidden explosives to do any damage.
Now, the valet may be an excellent place to park a car with something secret and non-explosive, like cash or drugs. It allows the car to sit fairly securely for days and for someone to come in and claim the car with little more than a valet ticket and gain plausible deniability by having a boarding pass for a flight that just landed (obviously they didn't park the car).
http://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-constitution-free-zone-map
Rochester isn't on this map, but I'm sure its in there...
I wonder how electric cars compare to gasoline/diesel powered cars in terms of total energy consumption when you factor in the materials.
An example would be a Prius vs. Corolla. It seems to me that a lot more energy -- and other environmental impact -- goes into making a Prius due to the battery (lithium mining and battery manufacturing), more elaborate computers/controls (everything to do with chipmaking) electric motors (rare earth mining and processing).
I've always wondered if they could make it a requirement of patent infringement that the entity claiming infringement has to prove that the patent is a component of a product they make or can substantively prove they are going to make within two years?
Or make patents a two step process -- patent application and product verification. You get granted a provisional patent but have to come back and demonstrate the use of the patent in an actual commercial product. Failure to do the second step means no patent.
The idea behind patents is to promote USEFUL innovation -- ie, in the creation of products for the marketplace. Not for creating monopolies or extracting money from people for products the holder has never or will never make.
I've gotten 3 weather alerts already. Living in Minneapolis I question the value of sending Flash Flood alerts; I think the number of people who are at risk from Flash Flooding in their homes is pretty small in this state (it may be larger in coastal or river delta areas).
Was it an AT&T update that did this? There's definitely software support for it in IOS as I can see where to turn it on/off in my iPhone settings.
Well, if the device has phone capability.
I don't know but I think even the cellular capable iPads don't have enough hardware to do voice calls, but no matter, even if they do (and I suspect they do) they lack the software for voice calling, and I'm sure that's true of most tablets generally unless they were specially meant to be Phablets.
Probably a majority of pre WWII Fords still running sport a Chevy engine these days.
I can't imagine too many 1930s Ford owners wanting to run a Chevy engine over the Ford flathead V8 that likely came with the car. That would kind of be like going through the effort to keep a Sun running by swapping out the Sparc CPU with an Intel CPU.
I would generally agree that there are a lot of places where small block Chevy engines turn up, although the same has been true of a lot of Ford V8s, especially the 351 and 302, and the 427 ended up in a lot of non-car places, like boats (I can only imagine what it must sound like to be on a Chris Craft Commander with dual 427s).
Instead of trying to decide on "one" device for a phone and debating whether the tablet-like screen size is more valuable than phone-sized portability and ergonomics, the debate should be about why I can't get my "cell" phone number to work on more than one device.
I can (sort of) see why cellular networks may not "work" with two or more devices with the same number, but with VoIP this really ought not be a limitation for secondary and tertiary devices.
If AT&T could make my phone work on whatever device I had (iPhone, iPad(s), even PC) then it wouldn't matter what size device I had. If I wanted easy portability and good ergonomics, I'd take my iPhone. If I wanted a bigger screen but mostly good portability, I'd take my iPad mini and possibly a bluetooth headset or headphones for taking calls. And so on.
Basically, screen size doesn't have to be a permanent choice, it can be a "What works best today?" choice.
I don't see where this hurts anybody -- I certainly wouldn't buy an iPad over an iPhone and an iPad because I could make calls on my iPad, and it's not like cell phone companies aren't looking for Yet Another Thing to charge you for.
I think this makes sense, but I think you have to do it in a way that protects inventors who aren't product manufacturers or even full-scale businesses. This is probably a problem only in unusual cases.
But generally speaking, I think that patents that go unused (save, within 5 years of patent issuance) should be voided and considered part of the public realm.
It seems counter to the purpose of a patent to use it only as a legal cudgel and not as a practical tool for actually protecting a business producing the patented thing.
....and I really, really DO NOT want him to react to animals on the television. It's bad enough when he reacts to some dogs out the window, I'm afraid he'd destroy my television if he saw a squirrel, duck or rabbit on TV.