I don't necessarily think that this is a huge legal issue

Actually, screw that (yes, I'm replying to my own post). It is a legal issue.

If Apple had been forthright about the technical issue -- and had been honest about the fact that they were designing a 'fixed' version of the phone -- then I think they would have been blameless. People would have been properly informed and thus could have made the correct decision in deciding whether or not to return the device.

But instead Apple lied. They lied because they knew if they downplayed the issue, a lot of people would take them at their word and hold onto phones that they knew were defective. Moreover, they didn't acknowledge that they were fixing the issue -- since they didn't really acknowledge the issue in the first place (remember when it was going to fixed via a software update?) So people didn't know that they could return the phone and buy a better one a few weeks/months later.

I think that really forms the core of their legal culpability. I wish that their damages exceeded the $$ they probably made by sticking people with those defective phones, but I really doubt that it does. No doubt the shareholders are toasting the ghost of Steve Jobs right now.

Of course, in reality, the antenna was only marginal in signal areas beyond that of the 3GS it replaced, so the majority of people never saw the issue. Antennas are susceptible to detuning; that's physics for you

Or for god's sake, this post completely misrepresents the issue. I notice you've posted essentially the same comments twice in this thread -- shill much?

For the record, the problem was not limited to marginal signal areas, unless you define 'marginal' as being any area not directly beneath a cell tower. And this isn't just a question of the antenna 'detuning' more (but similarly to) other phones. The unique design characteristic of the iPhone 4 was the decision to place two antennae on the exterior of the phone with no insulation over them. This made it possible to bridge the antennae and essentially swamp them both with noise. This wasn't something that happened 'some of the time'. It was pretty easy to repeat, and it happened in real usage.

Moreover Apple knew it was a serious problem. If you ignore the PR and look at Apple's technical actions, you see a company moving heaven and earth to rectify a catastrophic engineering screwup and repair the antenna as quickly as possible. The only evidence for the idea that 'this wasn't a big deal' came from Apple's public statements.

I don't necessarily think that this is a huge legal issue -- Apple eventually gave out cases so that people with defective phones could use them. And they offered full refunds. But from a customer-relations point of view it was sickening. They basically lied to their early adopters -- people who had enthusiastically lined up to purchase a defective phone -- and agreed to do nothing but send them a bandaid -- while quietly acknowledging the problem and re-engineering the phone so it wouldn't be broken for their next round of customers.

The second problem is the way that agricultural water subsidies work. Since farms can obtain water at vastly below-market rates (and can't resell it), there's little incentive to manage it carefully. Hence the pipeline infrastructure is incredible leaky. I don't recall the statistics offhand, but simply repairing the pipeline leaks could save as much water as is used by one or more large cities.

The proper solution is to either (a) allow these interests to resell their subsidized water for human consumption (not terribly appealing), or to (b) offer them cash subsidies for water used, rather than subsidizing the cost of the water itself. Either solution would create an incentive for agribusinesses to upgrade their delivery infrastructure, and would cut out an enormous amount of wastage.

Google has a habit of killing services it doesn't believe in. That's (moderately) ok for a service like Wave, or even Google Health. It's not so good for a cloud storage service, where long-term availability is very much a requirement.

You think Dodd would have been hired as a lobbyist (after explicitly saying he won't lobby) by MPAA/RIAA if he didn't play ball while back in Senate?

No, the only real solution is to take the power of regulating individual business activity, taxing income/payroll/corporations away from government and return the power to run businesses as they see fit to the people.

Christ, what a good post. You're clearly someone who clearly understands the power that corporations wield, and recognizes their willingness to use that power to advance their own interests -- at the expense of anyone else.

What a shame it all gets spoiled by that fountain of Libertarian fantasy bullshit at the end.

Copyright lobbying is basically a macrocosm of everything that's wrong with modern American corporations -- they have no conscience, they're hugely wealthy, and that wealth gives them enormous power. What you seem to miss is that rampant lobbying is a symptom of the problem, not the disease itself.

Do you really think that the MPAA's power is going to -- *poof* -- disappear, just because you've reduced the concentration of power in DC? (Leaving aside that you won't succeed at doing this, and that copyright power is enumerated in the Constitution.) Even if you did reduce DC's power, do you have any idea how much easier it would be to bribe state and local officials, many of whom aren't even paid?

Or if you're hard-core libertarian, and want to peel back government power altogether, then what the hell do you think is going to hold the corporations back? Think the (elected) courts are going to provide justice? Or do you have some fantasy that corporations are going to self-regulate because it's good for their reputation? I'd love to see that.

The simple fact is that many of our current problems could be solved if people stopped cursing the existence of government, and actually started demanding good government. And as long as people keep fantasizing about Libertarian Utopia, that isn't going to happen.

This is the danger of the whole "living Constitution" idea. If the Constitution is as pliable as putty, then it's really just a matter of whose hands the putty is in.

The problem with your idea is that we have a bunch of judges who are perfectly happy to rule, for example, that the 1st amendment only protects speech and words printed on large sheets of paper -- because the Founders couldn't possibly have envisioned the idea of words being transmitted via network cables and cached in RAID arrays.

This is absurd, and there are only two ways out of it. One is to accept that every minute technical or social challenge requires a quorum of the state legislatures, the Senate, and a constitution with 10,050 amendments. At which point the immutable Constitution becomes unusable and is abandoned in favor of some more workable form of government.

The other way is to accept that this is absurd, and that we're going to have to allow the Founders' ideas some room to breathe. And of course, once we do that, there's no clean way to draw the line.

I'm convinced that this is why the Founders gave us three branches of government, two of whom are elected (in some fashion) and in control of appointing the third. It's certainly not perfect, but it works a hell of a lot better than some alternatives.

In any case, if you want to try out Option 1 I'm fine with it -- provided you do it in the desert or on some tropical island somewhere. Option 2, the one so far practiced in the USA, isn't perfect. But we're all here, aren't we?

didn't realize that reversing IA-32 excutables was the modern meaning of cracking a code. I figured it would be difficult and possibly even rely on dictonary attack of a cryptographic hash, but IA-32 machine code?

For better or for worse, modern intelligence agencies are much more dependent on people who can RE software and develop exploits, than they are on pure cryptographers.

This is a consequence of the rolling disaster that is software security, combined with the fact that crypto folks have (mostly) gotten their act together.

This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.

I think the idea that LA is going to maintain its current sprawling vehicle-centric layout past, say, 2040 is a pipe dream.

Who's going to pay for the fuel?

Yep.. shareholders are stupid. Not Microsoft's fault they don't want to reward their success.

Alternatively, the flat stock price represents investors' lack of confidence that they will ever see any of those profits. Microsoft is perfectly capable of sinking all of their money into failed expansion strategies, then gradually becoming another Kodak and fading away.

The Tea Party was smart and taken over the republican party.

I would say that the Republican party took over the Tea party. I imagine that's why OWS is trying to be apolitical.

Whatever their politics, there's a huge political value in a group of angry, underemployed people showing their anger with the existing system. Pretty much every 'fair' or 'just' aspect of our economic system was put in place because the powerful didn't want to worry about angry mobs taking over the political system or confiscating their property.

Until the 1990s the wealthy were legitimately afraid that if they went too far in their self-dealing, they might give an edge to communists. That's why the US has a safety net, and it's why Europe (in particular) has an even bigger one. But since the Soviet Union collapsed there hasn't been anything to be afraid of. A bunch of hippies in a park may not seem scary, but you can bet it's getting their attention.

Err, actually WebOS was around in 2007 or 2008, it just wasn't officially on a device until 2009.

Who knows. Android was around in 2007 as well, but it looked nothing like the Android we know today. Had it shipped in that state, it would have failed catastrophically.

Maybe WebOS was all brushed up and ready to go, but it's telling that they couldn't push a device for nearly two years after the iPhone. That's half a device lifecycle.

Let's see, when Palm was first starting out, their competition was Apple in the form of the Apple Newton... I remember how the Newton flew off the shelves... oh wait... no they didn't... Palm PDAs were flying off the shelves.

Hmm, I always felt like Palm's first OS was just MacOS (pre-OSX) rebranded into a portable format. Everything from the fonts to the icons to the dialog boxes looked the same. I mean, you couldn't move the icons or resize the windows, but that was about it. It even felt like MacOS at the API level.

Palm's had two primary innovations, and then they surfed on momentum until they inevitably died. The first was Graffiti, which they dumped with the Treo. The second was the Treo itself, which 'innovated' by having a built-in phone.

Palm's problem is that they failed to innovate beyond this point, which made them vulnerable even to a POS like WinCE. Their fate was set by that time. The actual doom came from the iPhone OS, but they were done by that point.

Had they come up with the ideas for WebOS in 2005, everything might have been ok. But fundamentally, WebOS was mostly innovated off of the iPhone, which hadn't been invented yet, so I can't see how it could have happened even if they /had/ it together. Most likely they would have just put out a WinCE-clone and then subsequently gotten crushed by the iPhone.

Judging nuclear power's safety by a first generation reactor design that was built nearly 40 years ago, and that despite a M9 earthquake and 15m tsunami

I think the objection is that the reactor was still operating, despite the fact that it was 40 years old, past its design lifetime, and wasn't rated to handle an event that would occur with relatively high probability in the reactor's lifespan.

In other words, it's everything the previous posters have said: bad management by a for-profit company. It doesn't really matter how safe the technology can be if it's going to be mismanaged in the way that this plant was.