Wow. The patent office really sucks these days. When I was in University in the 90's there was a whole department which was working on alternative input devices which did just that. It would take about 10 seconds to find prior art. I suppose lawyers need to eat too.

What is our problem? We come up with more and more complicated systems to do the same thing. Roads are built by the government because we want the cost shared. Usage should not be an issue. Drop the freaking gas tax and just up income taxes across the board. Any usage taxes are both completely regressive and only create loopholes and layers of burocracy. They basically say that the more you make, the bigger your rights are to public services and works which happen to have tolls.

If you want to be sure that you can at least access the data, why not have everyone chip in for a tiny account at Iron Mountain. Companies entrust their data with them, as for playback, that's a little tougher, but I would guess that mp3 for audio, jpg for images should be fine, video might be a little trickier.

Amen. All this thought of "alternative" engergy is bunk. As far as I know the "you can't create something from nothing" law of the universe still applies. I'm not sure why everyone thinks that new sources are the solution. We need to use less, simple.

Perhaps they'll change their tune. When Palm first started making PDA's their support was ridiculously good. Drop your Palm and break the screen? Call them, and they would send an empty box to you, and have it picked up same day. Had a new Palm in my hands within 2 days. Now, of course with phones it's different, and although I'm not particularly fond of my iPhone, I have to admit that I like the idea that if I have any problems I can waltz into a Apple store 24-7 (I'm in NYC), and have someone take a look at it. (On the other hand, last time I did that they couldn't figure out what was wrong).

I actually don't think the iPhone is a very good music player. The interface is terrible. With all that screen real estate you'd think they could have an interface that's the same as iTunes instead of a brain dead list of lists with no way to search.

As for API, Palm was the first to really support their developers. I wrote apps for the first Palm, and although their API has changed, as far as I know, they stay out of the way of their developers. Hopefully they follow Apple's ridiculous control freak/greedy path. Palm never tried to squeeze developers, that's why there were so many great apps on the Palm and one of the reasons why Palm took the market by storm when no one else was able to crack the PDA market.