A patent troll is usually called that because they didn't produce anything using the patent in question aside from a lawsuit. Apple here is using patents they are actively using, and believe that are being infringed by Android. Considering Motorola is going for 2.5% of sale price of iPhones for use of standards patents covered by FRAND, this is at least a more reasonable figure. It's also quite possibly a means of leveraging a cross-licensing deal so neither side winds up paying the other a dime.

Ultimately, they're doing what most sane businesses would do. If you had a design you felt was innovative enough to patent and you spent a ton of R&D on, and you saw a company producing something that you believe is infringing on your ideas, would you just sit back and let them run with it? Or do you like doing free R&D for your competition?

Which also happen to generally be items associated with how tablets looked like prior to the iPad.

Funny enough, those also line up with a bunch of other tablets, which sell rather well, and for companies Apple isn't suing. Like: The Nook, the Kindle, the Kindle Fire, etc., etc.

So write an app for that. Apps can happily download data to the device independent of the App Store, within their own filesystem space. You just can't add anything to the system media libraries. Or play it streaming from something like Plex running on a local network media computer.

iOS5 detaches the computer requirement entirely. You setup/activate without iTunes and can sync with iCloud.

Let's see...
- Darwin Streaming Server
- mDNSResponder
- ALAC
- Calendar and Contacts Server
- libdispatch / Grand Central Dispatch
- etc.

http://www.macosforge.org/ is where the more generally useful items outside of OSX wind up. FreeBSD picked up the libdispatch items and ran with it.

Sandboxing applications is a common security model on Unix systems, so why is this a bad thing on desktop apps as well? The App Store apps already had restrictions on where you could put your executable. This just codifies other accesses into a model where the developer sets up the privileges the app requires instead of leaving it at the free-for-all it is now.

I guess you've had different Google voicemail messages than I've had. Certain spots they're dead on, but all too often they're simply hilarious. Accuracy isn't a word I would tend to associate with their transcription.

Alas, it's also suitable to modify his moral code when it's convenient.

And yet he's fine with planes...

I'd be surprised if North Dakota doesn't take in more federal funds than it pays out. California, I'd be surprised if it didn't pay out more than it took in. As such, odds are, the better statement would be: why should California pay for tornado warnings for North Dakota?

Seriously, however, this is a single nation. The larger, richer states help buoy up the smaller ones, which have their own contributions back, as those smaller ones also tend to be where the food is. Putting up fences between groups that are supposed to be on the same overall team is just continuing the crap Congress is doing.

So suggest it to the state of New York and/or New Jersey, as Mr. Ritchie was born and died there, respectively. NJ may be more amenable to it as Bell Labs was there as well, where much of his work was done. This sort of '____ Day' isn't unusual since it costs the state nothing more than printing a proclamation and it lets them toot their horn for doing nothing more than being where the person so honored lived/died.

Apple would also need to be a monopoly.

Last time I checked they weren't even a majority of either the desktop, laptop or smartphone markets. MP3 player, sure, but you don't have to buy from iTunes to get your music there.

I might understand it if G+ on the web had any use for sms or telephony... but it doesn't. It'd be a pretty easy check to not enable certain functionality and then it's no diff from the website. And if they're doing an iPod/iPad version anyway, they won't have those features available either.

Because the Google dev decided that they absolutely needed sms and telephony, and the app shouldn't work if those two items weren't there. At least they specified such in the proper way, so it'll at least tell you at install-time that you're SOL instead of bombing out randomly.

Checking the app's plist, it's iPhone only because Google's developer on it decided that it would require the following:
- gps (includes GSM/CDMA iPads)
- location-services (all devices since wifi can give you some form of a fix)
- sms (iPhone)
- telephony (iPhone)
- wifi (all devices)

As the only items which match all of it are iPhones, that's all it'll install on. Now why they decided it required telephone and sms, and didn't just gracefully downgrade when they're lacking, I have no idea. It's kind of sloppy.