i just create a playlist in itunes, sync to my iphone, connect to my car's USB and let it play. every few weeks i will change the playlists on my iphone for something fresh. takes me all of a minute to do that
Yes, that's kinda the point I was making - mounting a drive and copying files is not a substitute for syncing playlists.
I prefer to leave a cheapo memory stick plugged into my car's USB than continually plug and unplug my phone. Also, I actually have an Android phone which uses the much vaunted "mount as a disk" technique and didn't come with any syncing software.
Let me mount the device as a drive... The advantage of generic technologies is that Apple doesn't need to support them
Yeah - to get my music onto a memory stick for my car, Android phone and non-iDevice MP3 players I just knocked up a little script to read my MP3 files, extract the track numbers from the IS3 data and generate sequentially-numbered filenames (so tracks played in order), generate.pls files, build the new directory structure using symlinks and call rsync to copy the files to the device.
...but, even though that's not exactly rocket science, I don't see the average iDevice user doing it that way. What they want is to be able to sync their music with their device - and standard desktop filing systems (PC, Mac or Linux) don't offer that functionality (you'd think they'd have incorporated rsync-like functionality into the GUI by now).
The other relevant "generic" technology is DNLA (c.f. iTunes streaming & Airplay). One of these locks you in to devices that support Apple's proprietary protocols. The other one, in my experience, just plain doesn't work (actually, I have had it working between my Samsung telly and a PC running Samsung's DNLA server but that kinda defeats the object of "generic").
I don't have an iDevice and don't want one, but a couple days ago I had to load iTunes just to get a specific music release that wasn't available anywhere else.
Unless you are a professional music critic who needed to have that particular track for your work - no you didn't.
The correct procedure in that case is to vote with your feet, don't buy the music and, if possible, send feedback to the band saying that you want to choose where you buy your music from. There are other suppliers with a huge range of music available, so its not like you're going to be stuck listening to the same Radiohead album over and over. I do have an iDevice but the only thing I buy through iTunes are apps - a process which is already "PC free" and since iDevice apps will no more run on non-iDevices than Apple II software used to run on a Commodore PET, the lock-in is pretty moot. However, I want to be able to play media on non-iDevices without the loss of transcoding, so all my music and video comes from ripped CDs/DVDs or has been bought as MP3s from other sources.
OK fine, I'll check my email from 8-8:30AM and 12-12:30PM, my fellow board member will check his mail from 9-9:30AM and 1-1:30PM, and so on so we have at least two "round robins" per day.
Or just do it over the phone... and its less likely to get recorded somewhere. Or use a really fast bike courier. Or a pigeon. Or hold a good old-fangled restroom meeting.
I assume those would be just as illegal, because having different rules just because you're using email would be nuts. On the other hand, institutions have never seen a need to append recorded messages to phone calls or stamp disclaimers on outgoing mail, lest someone receive the message in error or think that the message was the official view of the institution, so maybe emails are different to any other form of communication.
(My favorite auto-footnote was the sage advice to think about the poor forests before printing this email which, oh-so-frequently, was just enough to make the message spread onto a second page if you did need to print it...)
WTF. That's not true. STOP means stop in the UK. GIVE WAY means yeild.
True, but actual STOP signs are very rare - I can't think of one that I pass regularly (other than on barriers and roadworks where they mean "stop and stay stopped until someone takes the stop sign away"). In the US, equal-priority "4-way stop" junctions are ubiquitous where, in the UK, we'd probably have a roundabout, traffic lights or give one road priority and use "Give Way" signs on the others.
We'd never have "right on red", we drive on the wrong side of the street over here.
I think that maybe, just maybe, the GP actually knew this and thought the audience would be able to translate it into "left-on-red" for UK use. AFAIK in the US it is based on the 37th amendment to the constitution which states that every American citizen shall have the right to scare the bejezus out of Limey tourists on crosswalks (who were looking the wrong way anyway).
Am I the only one who has to ask why these critical SCADA systems are set up in such a way that they would be vulnerable to networked viruses? Shouldn't they be isolated and theoretically only updated by USB or something where you could insure the source media was clean before use? (And yes I know even that is a rather naive belief)
Looking up SCADA on Wikipedia, a lot of those applications sound like they need remote access, but it is a no-brainer that they should be hiding on VPNs behind industrial-strength firewalls, with no unnecessary software or open ports.
However, given Windows XP's less-than-stellar security record combined with the apparent scarcity of hackers remotely blowing up factories, this is probably already the case.
Actually, Windows XP sounds a bit cutting-edge for this sort of application - how many are still running Windows 3.11?
As far as I recall, that thing was designed and produced by MOS technology (which was sadly a one-hit wonder).
Commodore, under Tramiel, bought MOS technology in 1976 when they were in danger of going titsup.com.
Plus, the PET, VIC20 and C64 from Commodore all used the 6502.
Of course, Trameil wasn't the only 6502 user, there was some outfit called Apple using it, plus OSI (my first computer was an OSI 'Superboard') and, in the UK the Acorn System 1, Atom and (later) the BBC Micro. I'm sure there were others. However, I think these postdated the Commodore takeover.
If I interpret TFA correctly, this is all based on Google's figures for Android revenue in a settlement offer Google made to Oracle...
I'm sure that Google bent over backwards to inflate that figure as much as possible by including every possible source of indirect income from ads, service sign up, user data collected, desktop users switching to Google Mail/Docs/Calendar to better sync with their phone etc. so that they could pay Oracle absolutely every penny they deserved. I can't think of any reason why they would try every legitimate tactic to make that figure as small as they possibly could. Can you?
Google produced Android as part of a long-term strategy to attract people to their online services. There's going to be a lot of "intangibles" there that are very difficult to account for.
I feel the same way. All the years I spent reading paper books, I never once thought "if only this thing had a built-in light."
If you google for "clip-on book light" you'll get enough hits to suggest that there is a demand for a way to illuminate a book in the dark without turning on the bedside lamp, and I guess Amazon sold a lot of those covers with the built-in light. Of course, building one into a book isn't sensible, because you'd need one built into every book. With an ebook reader, it makes sense. In other news, you probably never thought "if only this book had built-in WiFi, 3G, speakers, a headphone jack and a micro-USB socket" but I'd wager that at least one of those is on your "must-have" list for an e-reader.
Basically some useless bureaucratic hoops that the EU, but almost no one else in the world, sees fit to make manufacturers large and small jump through.
Really? Try selling an electronic product in the USA without complying with FCC regs about EM interference.
Back in the "good old days" of the 80s, before the CE requirements were imposed in the UK, you could forget listening to FM radio within 100' of your BBC Micro or Sinclair ZX81. Those products had to have their cases re-designed with extra shielding before they could pass FCC regs and be sold in the USA. Seemed silly at the time, but with the number of computing devices present in the modern home or office it would be chaos without some regulation.
The only reason there is a problem with the Pi is that the mass-media interest and huge pre-orders have spooked the electronic component suppliers who signed up to distribute it to "developers" (ISTR the launch slashdotted their online stores). The CE cert is their first line of defence against claims from parents that the Pi they bought for Little Johnny is interfering with their telly, or blew up when their cat walked past. If, back in the day, Apple had found Apple 1 kits selling like iPads do today, they'd have had similar worries.
We damn near had "global economic collapse" a couple of years back and the only "exhaustion of resources" involved was High Finance taking the piss until the world's piss reserves eventually ran out.
Fortunately, they're now all showing such contrition and self-sacrifice in their efforts to put right what went wrong that its unlikely to happen again for at least a year.
Can we please end the madness where people claim that since an OS is a variant of unix it can't get a virus?
Funny, because in this thread I currently see zero (0) fanbois desperately trying to defend Apple wailing "....but its not a virus, its a trojan, and its all Oracle's fault anyhow!" c.f. any number of haters saying "Ha Ha! Macs can so get viruses!!!". Methinks some people are just a bit too desperate to knock Apple.
Actually, although this one is technically a trojan, it sounds quite nasty in that it can apparently infect your mac even if you don't fall for the "enter administrator password" dialog. Presumably it still needs some sort of user interaction to work.
However, I do like the irony that having MS Office installed "inoculates" you against this trojan:-)
So you've got this absurd situation where Apple can prevent companies like Motorola using tech that is pretty essential to a modern smartphone, but Motorola is barred from doing the same -
Is "slide to unlock" really essential to a modern smartphone? Who said "multitouch" was the only possible way of designing a touch UI? If its "pretty essential" for a modern smartphone to look and work pretty much like an iPhone then maybe Apple have a point about people stealing their ideas. Or manufacturers could think up new ways of doing these things. ISTR Samsung and Moto have already designed around some of Apple's UI patents - and others may get rejected as overbroad or knocked down by prior art.
On the other hand, what is completely essential for a modern smartphone is to be able to connect to standard mobile phone networks. That involves doing things exactly the way the standards decree they should be done, and if the standards body has deemed that a particular patent is required for the standard (by imposing a FRAND agreement), good luck convincing the court that your implementation doesn't violate. Also, as you rightly say, those patents are probably rather better founded than the typical Apple software or design patent.
they can't profit from those standards because of FRAND
You keep using that word FRAND. I don't think that it means what you think that it means. If you have a patent that's used in a standard under FRAND you can collect a reasonable fee from anybody who uses that standard. That's a cash cow worth having. Whether Apple have tried to avoid paying a reasonable fee or whether Moto have been trying to screw Apple by asking for an unreasonable fee or trying to double-dip by charging them for using chipsets from third parties who have already licensed the patent will (hopefully) come out in a few years' time when the lawyers have made enough money.
Apple, meanwhile, is under no obligation to license its patents to anybody because they're not used in any standard (even if they're crappy software patents which deserve to be struck down).
FRAND worked great when the market was full of mature and reasonable companies willing to maintain a degree of healthy competition and work together where it was necessary,
Translated: when the market was owned by a nice little group of companies who's mutual patent cross-licensing thicket kept out any upstart competitors. leaving them to complacently produce smartphones with hideous, unintuitive UIs... until Apple came along with a smartphone that consumers actually wanted to buy.
My school age daughter forgot luggage on the plane last year.
Did it include a cell phone wired to an electronic toy with protruding wires? Probably not.
...because the professor wouldn't need to be a professor of rocket science to realise that such things might be seen as suspicious and take extra special care to ensure that they were never, ever left unattended - or avoid taking them on a plane in the first place.
Having to remove shoes, belts etc., get irradiated and buy overpriced bottles of water airside is a pain and totally disproportionate. Having to engage brain before flying with iffy-looking homebrew electronics projects is a sacrifice I am prepared to make.
Number of people nude Xrayed or sexually groped (on their breasts or crotch) or strip-searched or locked in glass jails for carrying breast milk or..... (this list could go on several pages).
I must admit that I'm thinking about the scene in Airplane where the security guys frisk the old lady (or was it a nun?) while the shifty looking guy with the comic-book bomb walks straight through. How could the makers of a 1980 comedy film be so prophetic?
Because, yes, in this case the real question is how the hell "a cell phone linked to a remote control car with wires protruding" got as far as the plane without the owner (or their responsible adult) being sent packing with the polite suggestion that they should try opening a newspaper at least once every decade and take some sort of responsibility for what sort of bizzarre objects they tried to carry on a plane?
Anyway, aren't all science projects supposed to be potato batteries, by law?
Given the time period (1980s), I'm guessing the GP was talking about the early Macintosh, not the Apple II series. Many of the classic Macs could only be opened up with a super-long-stemmed torx wrench and a special case cracker tool, and once you got inside, there was still no way to expand their RAM without a soldering iron (if at all).
Of course, with the original Macs, Apple had the excuse that once you opened it up you had an exposed CRT with all those nice high voltages - and nice fat caps to keep them lurking around long after the power was disconnected - so its probably a good idea to deter the average moron in the street from poking around. Anybody with the nous to do so could obtain/make the proper tools, but with sufficient effort to absolve Apple of any responsibility if they received a spot of inappropriate defibrillation...
Apart from the original Apple 1, Apple were on the front line of producing computers that could be bought and used by people who didn't have a soldering iron. (Not saying they were the first c.f. Commodore, Tandy, SOL etc. but ISTR they were near the front of the queue).
Most Londoners would like to join the new country of Southern Scotland as well please...they didn't vote for the current Government...
Nobody voted for the current government: they either voted for the Conservatives or the Lib Dems, not for a coalition which combines the social conscience of the Tories with the experience and fiscal prudence of the Lib Dems.
Can the rest of England join you please? The people left behind in London should be OK - what with all those nice velodromes and swimming pools they've been building - they could always plant potatoes in the long-jump pits. A few years ago I'd have said that we needed the money generated by the City, but these days they seem like more of a liability than an asset. Just make sure that the wall goes up while Parliament is sitting (preferably debating their next pay rise or expenses package, so they all turn up) so that you catch 'em all.
That's because they generally cover the product from 1 year after purchase until its 3-4 years old - the exact period during which it is least likely to fail.
Also, remember the golden rule: never pay to insure what you could afford to repair or replace. The really slimy thing about extended warranties is that, like all insurance, they distort the market for paid after-sales service, since it no longer depends on the willingness of customers to pay (and insurers don't give a damn as long as they can factor it into their premiums - in fact, the scarier the potential bills for the uninsured the better).
So I guess this raises the question of why Europeans bought Apple products despite those products breaking the law? Did they have faith in that their government would enforce the law, or did they simply not care that the law was being broken?
...because pretty much every electronics retailer in Europe has tried, or is still trying, the "talk down the statutory warranty to scare the punter into taking out an extended warranty" trick so people either (a) know about it and politely ignore it or (b) fall for it. Apple get the publicity because of their high profile. Refusing to deal with Apple because they tried this is about as proportionate as refusing to be driven by someone because they once got a ticket for doing 38 in a 30 zone.
It specifically says which LTE networks are supported. Is the new standard for ads now to be that only the largest print claims count?
Yes.
In much or Europe that's been the standard for a while. These cases aren't tried in court where the standard is "can a lawyer prove that the ad is technically correct" but are investigated by industry regulators such as the ASA in the UK, where:
The ASA will take into account the impression created by advertisements as well as specific claims. It will adjudicate on the basis of the likely effect on consumers, not the advertiser’s intentions.(Link)
So they may also take into account what the typical customer understands by "4G" which (whatever the ITU and T-Mobile USA say) is used in Europe almost exclusively to refer to forthcoming LTE or WiMax networks - whereas HSPA+ etc. are still called 3G - see e.g. Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulatory authority:
Initial deployments of 4G will deliver a 1.2 times improvement in spectrum efficiency over emerging, high end 3G configurations (i.e. 2x2 HSPA+ 64QAM release 8). Comparing against a typical, high end 3G device on the market in 2011, such as a HSUPA release 6 1x1 handset, gives a gain of 3.3 times.
...and that's the beef: some EU countries already have 4G (meaning LTE) networks, while others (e.g. the UK) are planning them within the lifetime of a nice new iPad, so seeing a product with "iPad with WiFi and 4G" on the box in large friendly letters does imply that you should expect some future proofing in terms of coverage and carrier choice, if not speed. Even if customers aren't crying into their beer because they've found out that their 3G is just as good as current US 4G, the practice of selling kit as "4G" - in countries where that doesn't mean what people think that it means - is well worth nipping in the bud before every manufacture jumps on the bandwagon and causes mass confusion.
Oh, and its not worth shouting "Aha!" and linking to bits of the Apple website, because Apple have already made changes to the specific wording and footnotes on their international sites this subject since this fuss started.
If you can get over the "bad government" knee-jerk, is this such a bad idea?
A static screen showing a clear schematic of the next significant turn, with distance and ETA, might actually be a lot more effective than a continuously moving map that may or may not be legible (I nearly went down a one-way street the other day because the voice instructions were ambiguous and the map was so cluttered with speed camera flags that you couldn't see the roads).
My GPS does have such a mode - the main reason I don't use it is because I want the pretty pretty lights. Maybe I'll give it a go (not that I use GPS much, anyway - you can't beat looking at a map before you start and remembering where you need to go). Even in "moving map" mode, good GPS's show a preview of the next junction or two, which I actually find more useful than the map, as it lets you know in advance what to look out for. When the turnings come thick and fast and this breaks down is, unfortunately, also the time at which you don't have a spare eyeball to look at the screen.
Why does everything come down to the distraction and not the driver. A good driver won't be distracted by a scrolling map, won't answer there phone on the highway and etc.......
Because the entire transport infrastructure of the western world, as well as large chunks of the economy, rely on every man and his dog driving a private car.
By all means introduce a system in which getting a driver's license is more akin to getting a pilot's license, but be prepared for General Motors shares to take a hit and a lot of out-of-town shopping malls to get boarded up. You might have to start paying cab drivers like professionals too if you require professional qualifications (apologies to cab drivers in London and other UK cities who have to pass "the knowledge" and, while not known for their patient and couteous driving, certainly don't need no stinking' GPS - took me a while to realise that when traveling outside the UK you need to take a map for the cab driver).
Slashdot Mirror
wow
i just create a playlist in itunes, sync to my iphone, connect to my car's USB and let it play. every few weeks i will change the playlists on my iphone for something fresh. takes me all of a minute to do that
Yes, that's kinda the point I was making - mounting a drive and copying files is not a substitute for syncing playlists.
I prefer to leave a cheapo memory stick plugged into my car's USB than continually plug and unplug my phone. Also, I actually have an Android phone which uses the much vaunted "mount as a disk" technique and didn't come with any syncing software.
Let me mount the device as a drive ... The advantage of generic technologies is that Apple doesn't need to support them
Yeah - to get my music onto a memory stick for my car, Android phone and non-iDevice MP3 players I just knocked up a little script to read my MP3 files, extract the track numbers from the IS3 data and generate sequentially-numbered filenames (so tracks played in order), generate .pls files, build the new directory structure using symlinks and call rsync to copy the files to the device.
...but, even though that's not exactly rocket science, I don't see the average iDevice user doing it that way. What they want is to be able to sync their music with their device - and standard desktop filing systems (PC, Mac or Linux) don't offer that functionality (you'd think they'd have incorporated rsync-like functionality into the GUI by now).
The other relevant "generic" technology is DNLA (c.f. iTunes streaming & Airplay). One of these locks you in to devices that support Apple's proprietary protocols. The other one, in my experience, just plain doesn't work (actually, I have had it working between my Samsung telly and a PC running Samsung's DNLA server but that kinda defeats the object of "generic").
I don't have an iDevice and don't want one, but a couple days ago I had to load iTunes just to get a specific music release that wasn't available anywhere else.
Unless you are a professional music critic who needed to have that particular track for your work - no you didn't.
The correct procedure in that case is to vote with your feet, don't buy the music and, if possible, send feedback to the band saying that you want to choose where you buy your music from. There are other suppliers with a huge range of music available, so its not like you're going to be stuck listening to the same Radiohead album over and over. I do have an iDevice but the only thing I buy through iTunes are apps - a process which is already "PC free" and since iDevice apps will no more run on non-iDevices than Apple II software used to run on a Commodore PET, the lock-in is pretty moot. However, I want to be able to play media on non-iDevices without the loss of transcoding, so all my music and video comes from ripped CDs/DVDs or has been bought as MP3s from other sources.
I'm sure if there was a way to capture the fragrance of throwing money out of the window
I think that Chanel, Dior, Boss et. al. nailed that years ago.
OK fine, I'll check my email from 8-8:30AM and 12-12:30PM, my fellow board member will check his mail from 9-9:30AM and 1-1:30PM, and so on so we have at least two "round robins" per day.
Or just do it over the phone... and its less likely to get recorded somewhere. Or use a really fast bike courier. Or a pigeon. Or hold a good old-fangled restroom meeting.
I assume those would be just as illegal, because having different rules just because you're using email would be nuts. On the other hand, institutions have never seen a need to append recorded messages to phone calls or stamp disclaimers on outgoing mail, lest someone receive the message in error or think that the message was the official view of the institution, so maybe emails are different to any other form of communication.
(My favorite auto-footnote was the sage advice to think about the poor forests before printing this email which, oh-so-frequently, was just enough to make the message spread onto a second page if you did need to print it...)
WTF. That's not true. STOP means stop in the UK. GIVE WAY means yeild.
True, but actual STOP signs are very rare - I can't think of one that I pass regularly (other than on barriers and roadworks where they mean "stop and stay stopped until someone takes the stop sign away"). In the US, equal-priority "4-way stop" junctions are ubiquitous where, in the UK, we'd probably have a roundabout, traffic lights or give one road priority and use "Give Way" signs on the others.
We'd never have "right on red", we drive on the wrong side of the street over here.
I think that maybe, just maybe, the GP actually knew this and thought the audience would be able to translate it into "left-on-red" for UK use. AFAIK in the US it is based on the 37th amendment to the constitution which states that every American citizen shall have the right to scare the bejezus out of Limey tourists on crosswalks (who were looking the wrong way anyway).
Am I the only one who has to ask why these critical SCADA systems are set up in such a way that they would be vulnerable to networked viruses? Shouldn't they be isolated and theoretically only updated by USB or something where you could insure the source media was clean before use? (And yes I know even that is a rather naive belief)
Looking up SCADA on Wikipedia, a lot of those applications sound like they need remote access, but it is a no-brainer that they should be hiding on VPNs behind industrial-strength firewalls, with no unnecessary software or open ports.
However, given Windows XP's less-than-stellar security record combined with the apparent scarcity of hackers remotely blowing up factories, this is probably already the case.
Actually, Windows XP sounds a bit cutting-edge for this sort of application - how many are still running Windows 3.11?
As far as I recall, that thing was designed and produced by MOS technology (which was sadly a one-hit wonder).
Commodore, under Tramiel, bought MOS technology in 1976 when they were in danger of going titsup.com.
Plus, the PET, VIC20 and C64 from Commodore all used the 6502.
Of course, Trameil wasn't the only 6502 user, there was some outfit called Apple using it, plus OSI (my first computer was an OSI 'Superboard') and, in the UK the Acorn System 1, Atom and (later) the BBC Micro. I'm sure there were others. However, I think these postdated the Commodore takeover.
If I interpret TFA correctly, this is all based on Google's figures for Android revenue in a settlement offer Google made to Oracle...
I'm sure that Google bent over backwards to inflate that figure as much as possible by including every possible source of indirect income from ads, service sign up, user data collected, desktop users switching to Google Mail/Docs/Calendar to better sync with their phone etc. so that they could pay Oracle absolutely every penny they deserved. I can't think of any reason why they would try every legitimate tactic to make that figure as small as they possibly could. Can you?
Google produced Android as part of a long-term strategy to attract people to their online services. There's going to be a lot of "intangibles" there that are very difficult to account for.
I feel the same way. All the years I spent reading paper books, I never once thought "if only this thing had a built-in light."
If you google for "clip-on book light" you'll get enough hits to suggest that there is a demand for a way to illuminate a book in the dark without turning on the bedside lamp, and I guess Amazon sold a lot of those covers with the built-in light. Of course, building one into a book isn't sensible, because you'd need one built into every book. With an ebook reader, it makes sense. In other news, you probably never thought "if only this book had built-in WiFi, 3G, speakers, a headphone jack and a micro-USB socket" but I'd wager that at least one of those is on your "must-have" list for an e-reader.
Basically some useless bureaucratic hoops that the EU, but almost no one else in the world, sees fit to make manufacturers large and small jump through.
Really? Try selling an electronic product in the USA without complying with FCC regs about EM interference.
Back in the "good old days" of the 80s, before the CE requirements were imposed in the UK, you could forget listening to FM radio within 100' of your BBC Micro or Sinclair ZX81. Those products had to have their cases re-designed with extra shielding before they could pass FCC regs and be sold in the USA. Seemed silly at the time, but with the number of computing devices present in the modern home or office it would be chaos without some regulation.
The only reason there is a problem with the Pi is that the mass-media interest and huge pre-orders have spooked the electronic component suppliers who signed up to distribute it to "developers" (ISTR the launch slashdotted their online stores). The CE cert is their first line of defence against claims from parents that the Pi they bought for Little Johnny is interfering with their telly, or blew up when their cat walked past. If, back in the day, Apple had found Apple 1 kits selling like iPads do today, they'd have had similar worries.
We damn near had "global economic collapse" a couple of years back and the only "exhaustion of resources" involved was High Finance taking the piss until the world's piss reserves eventually ran out.
Fortunately, they're now all showing such contrition and self-sacrifice in their efforts to put right what went wrong that its unlikely to happen again for at least a year.
I tried to read your post on my Mac, but all I could see was a picture of a snake and something about raptors.
Can we please end the madness where people claim that since an OS is a variant of unix it can't get a virus?
Funny, because in this thread I currently see zero (0) fanbois desperately trying to defend Apple wailing "....but its not a virus, its a trojan, and its all Oracle's fault anyhow!" c.f. any number of haters saying "Ha Ha! Macs can so get viruses!!!". Methinks some people are just a bit too desperate to knock Apple.
Actually, although this one is technically a trojan, it sounds quite nasty in that it can apparently infect your mac even if you don't fall for the "enter administrator password" dialog. Presumably it still needs some sort of user interaction to work.
However, I do like the irony that having MS Office installed "inoculates" you against this trojan :-)
So you've got this absurd situation where Apple can prevent companies like Motorola using tech that is pretty essential to a modern smartphone, but Motorola is barred from doing the same -
Is "slide to unlock" really essential to a modern smartphone? Who said "multitouch" was the only possible way of designing a touch UI? If its "pretty essential" for a modern smartphone to look and work pretty much like an iPhone then maybe Apple have a point about people stealing their ideas. Or manufacturers could think up new ways of doing these things. ISTR Samsung and Moto have already designed around some of Apple's UI patents - and others may get rejected as overbroad or knocked down by prior art.
On the other hand, what is completely essential for a modern smartphone is to be able to connect to standard mobile phone networks. That involves doing things exactly the way the standards decree they should be done, and if the standards body has deemed that a particular patent is required for the standard (by imposing a FRAND agreement), good luck convincing the court that your implementation doesn't violate. Also, as you rightly say, those patents are probably rather better founded than the typical Apple software or design patent.
they can't profit from those standards because of FRAND
You keep using that word FRAND. I don't think that it means what you think that it means. If you have a patent that's used in a standard under FRAND you can collect a reasonable fee from anybody who uses that standard. That's a cash cow worth having. Whether Apple have tried to avoid paying a reasonable fee or whether Moto have been trying to screw Apple by asking for an unreasonable fee or trying to double-dip by charging them for using chipsets from third parties who have already licensed the patent will (hopefully) come out in a few years' time when the lawyers have made enough money.
Apple, meanwhile, is under no obligation to license its patents to anybody because they're not used in any standard (even if they're crappy software patents which deserve to be struck down).
FRAND worked great when the market was full of mature and reasonable companies willing to maintain a degree of healthy competition and work together where it was necessary,
Translated: when the market was owned by a nice little group of companies who's mutual patent cross-licensing thicket kept out any upstart competitors. leaving them to complacently produce smartphones with hideous, unintuitive UIs... until Apple came along with a smartphone that consumers actually wanted to buy.
My school age daughter forgot luggage on the plane last year.
Did it include a cell phone wired to an electronic toy with protruding wires? Probably not.
...because the professor wouldn't need to be a professor of rocket science to realise that such things might be seen as suspicious and take extra special care to ensure that they were never, ever left unattended - or avoid taking them on a plane in the first place.
Having to remove shoes, belts etc., get irradiated and buy overpriced bottles of water airside is a pain and totally disproportionate. Having to engage brain before flying with iffy-looking homebrew electronics projects is a sacrifice I am prepared to make.
Number of people nude Xrayed or sexually groped (on their breasts or crotch) or strip-searched or locked in glass jails for carrying breast milk or ..... (this list could go on several pages).
I must admit that I'm thinking about the scene in Airplane where the security guys frisk the old lady (or was it a nun?) while the shifty looking guy with the comic-book bomb walks straight through. How could the makers of a 1980 comedy film be so prophetic?
Because, yes, in this case the real question is how the hell "a cell phone linked to a remote control car with wires protruding" got as far as the plane without the owner (or their responsible adult) being sent packing with the polite suggestion that they should try opening a newspaper at least once every decade and take some sort of responsibility for what sort of bizzarre objects they tried to carry on a plane?
Anyway, aren't all science projects supposed to be potato batteries, by law?
Given the time period (1980s), I'm guessing the GP was talking about the early Macintosh, not the Apple II series. Many of the classic Macs could only be opened up with a super-long-stemmed torx wrench and a special case cracker tool, and once you got inside, there was still no way to expand their RAM without a soldering iron (if at all).
Of course, with the original Macs, Apple had the excuse that once you opened it up you had an exposed CRT with all those nice high voltages - and nice fat caps to keep them lurking around long after the power was disconnected - so its probably a good idea to deter the average moron in the street from poking around. Anybody with the nous to do so could obtain/make the proper tools, but with sufficient effort to absolve Apple of any responsibility if they received a spot of inappropriate defibrillation...
Apart from the original Apple 1, Apple were on the front line of producing computers that could be bought and used by people who didn't have a soldering iron. (Not saying they were the first c.f. Commodore, Tandy, SOL etc. but ISTR they were near the front of the queue).
Most Londoners would like to join the new country of Southern Scotland as well please ...they didn't vote for the current Government ...
Nobody voted for the current government: they either voted for the Conservatives or the Lib Dems, not for a coalition which combines the social conscience of the Tories with the experience and fiscal prudence of the Lib Dems.
But us Scots wanting independence!!
Can the rest of England join you please? The people left behind in London should be OK - what with all those nice velodromes and swimming pools they've been building - they could always plant potatoes in the long-jump pits. A few years ago I'd have said that we needed the money generated by the City, but these days they seem like more of a liability than an asset. Just make sure that the wall goes up while Parliament is sitting (preferably debating their next pay rise or expenses package, so they all turn up) so that you catch 'em all.
All extended warranties are slimy.
That's because they generally cover the product from 1 year after purchase until its 3-4 years old - the exact period during which it is least likely to fail.
Also, remember the golden rule: never pay to insure what you could afford to repair or replace. The really slimy thing about extended warranties is that, like all insurance, they distort the market for paid after-sales service, since it no longer depends on the willingness of customers to pay (and insurers don't give a damn as long as they can factor it into their premiums - in fact, the scarier the potential bills for the uninsured the better).
So I guess this raises the question of why Europeans bought Apple products despite those products breaking the law? Did they have faith in that their government would enforce the law, or did they simply not care that the law was being broken?
...because pretty much every electronics retailer in Europe has tried, or is still trying, the "talk down the statutory warranty to scare the punter into taking out an extended warranty" trick so people either (a) know about it and politely ignore it or (b) fall for it. Apple get the publicity because of their high profile. Refusing to deal with Apple because they tried this is about as proportionate as refusing to be driven by someone because they once got a ticket for doing 38 in a 30 zone.
It specifically says which LTE networks are supported. Is the new standard for ads now to be that only the largest print claims count?
Yes. In much or Europe that's been the standard for a while. These cases aren't tried in court where the standard is "can a lawyer prove that the ad is technically correct" but are investigated by industry regulators such as the ASA in the UK, where:
So they may also take into account what the typical customer understands by "4G" which (whatever the ITU and T-Mobile USA say) is used in Europe almost exclusively to refer to forthcoming LTE or WiMax networks - whereas HSPA+ etc. are still called 3G - see e.g. Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulatory authority:
...and that's the beef: some EU countries already have 4G (meaning LTE) networks, while others (e.g. the UK) are planning them within the lifetime of a nice new iPad, so seeing a product with "iPad with WiFi and 4G" on the box in large friendly letters does imply that you should expect some future proofing in terms of coverage and carrier choice, if not speed. Even if customers aren't crying into their beer because they've found out that their 3G is just as good as current US 4G, the practice of selling kit as "4G" - in countries where that doesn't mean what people think that it means - is well worth nipping in the bud before every manufacture jumps on the bandwagon and causes mass confusion.
Oh, and its not worth shouting "Aha!" and linking to bits of the Apple website, because Apple have already made changes to the specific wording and footnotes on their international sites this subject since this fuss started.
If you can get over the "bad government" knee-jerk, is this such a bad idea?
A static screen showing a clear schematic of the next significant turn, with distance and ETA, might actually be a lot more effective than a continuously moving map that may or may not be legible (I nearly went down a one-way street the other day because the voice instructions were ambiguous and the map was so cluttered with speed camera flags that you couldn't see the roads).
My GPS does have such a mode - the main reason I don't use it is because I want the pretty pretty lights. Maybe I'll give it a go (not that I use GPS much, anyway - you can't beat looking at a map before you start and remembering where you need to go). Even in "moving map" mode, good GPS's show a preview of the next junction or two, which I actually find more useful than the map, as it lets you know in advance what to look out for. When the turnings come thick and fast and this breaks down is, unfortunately, also the time at which you don't have a spare eyeball to look at the screen.
Why does everything come down to the distraction and not the driver. A good driver won't be distracted by a scrolling map, won't answer there phone on the highway and etc.......
Because the entire transport infrastructure of the western world, as well as large chunks of the economy, rely on every man and his dog driving a private car.
By all means introduce a system in which getting a driver's license is more akin to getting a pilot's license, but be prepared for General Motors shares to take a hit and a lot of out-of-town shopping malls to get boarded up. You might have to start paying cab drivers like professionals too if you require professional qualifications (apologies to cab drivers in London and other UK cities who have to pass "the knowledge" and, while not known for their patient and couteous driving, certainly don't need no stinking' GPS - took me a while to realise that when traveling outside the UK you need to take a map for the cab driver).