No, the fact that he has been caught not disclosing his funding sources and been caught breaking ethical guidelines is what makes him corrupt.

Just a thought.

Disclosing your funding source is standard practice. Not doing so is very sketchy.

You can find that out by looking at their published work - it's standard practice to disclose your funding sources when publishing or presenting.

It depends - reputable scientists disclose all of their funding sources when publishing so you usually don't have to investigate it. Given the pretty major snafu with Willie getting caught and his clear position in opposition to a large published majority, it's not unreasonable to check into actual funding sources, not just those he and others like him have reported.

It's not uncommon to be funded by large industrial groups, even in areas that you would typically not expect - for example, BP funds a lot of non-fossil-fuel energy research at academic institutions which is totally fine, but if you receive money from them then you have to disclose it, regardless of what your results are.

Older antibiotics were cheaper to research and make. It's that simple.

Modern antibiotics are exceedingly difficult synthetic targets (if not entirely impossible, relying on semi-synthetic methods), and developing a new one is not trivial. It is expensive, time consuming and filled with hundreds of dead ends - some of which are not apparent as dead ends until significant money and time has been invested.

Compare a compound like amoxicillin (which has been around since the 70s) with some of the current contenders as new antibiotics like brilacidin or eravacycline to name just a couple. Most of the low hanging fruit in this area has been picked.

You're confusing a design patent with a hardware patent. An easy mistake to make.

Apple's "rounded corners" design patent is like Ford suing someone for making a car that looks like a Mustang - something that is also protected by a design patent.

What patent trolls do is sue because someone is making a car because they hold a broad patent on "a transportation system used by individuals or groups".

Design patents are very common and protect things like trade dress and distinguishing sets of features (for example, a Ford Mustang is a car, and cars are not a new invention, but the design patent that protects the Mustang is valid). The more traditional invention patent, however, protects that specific invention. For example, the patent that protects a specific unique widget prevents another company for making and selling that widget, but the design patent on the Ford Mustang doesn't prevent other companies from making different cars, just not ones that look like the Mustang).

Also, of note, that the summary doesn't mention that this company is also suing Samsung and Google over the same patents. It seems the "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" method has claimed victory in round 1.

Not necessarily sewn up - the fact that contactless terminals are everywhere in, for example, the UK means that when Apple Pay launches here (or any other similar NFC-based phone payment system) people will be able to start using it right away in most of their favourite shopping places.

I use contactless payment pretty much everywhere I shop where my transactions are routinely under £20 (the current contactless limit, rising to £30 soon) - pubs, grocery store, high street shops, gas stations, coffee shops, fast food etc.

All Apple or any other vendor (Google etc) has to do is turn it on for the UK and people will use it.

Right, but you're trying to change the argument - we all know that Microsoft's and Apple's policies on iOS and Win 8 are as they are and they get bashed for them all the time, but somehow it;s ok for Google to do this?

Sure you can change the search engine but *a vendor cannot set a different default out of the box if they want to also ship the Google Play store*. That is what this is about (among other things). Not whether you can change the default search engine as a user of the phone once you've bought it.

Oh, and just for completeness, on iOS: Settings > Safari > Search Engine > [pick one] (default is Google).

Don't let facts get in the way of a good Apple bash on slashdot.

No, but you can patent "functional".

I want to make an Android phone that ships with the Google Play store and has Bing as the default search engine.

Can I do that?

That's effectively what they want to do here, but Google doesn't want that. If you have Play then you have to have google as the default search.

But no, of course it's down to stupidity on Yandex's part. I forgot that google can do no wrong. Carry on.

It's a good thing that you don't put any banking info on your phone when you use Apple Pay then, isn't it?

It's almost like they thought of that when designing it!

The information on your phone is a one-way hash generated from a combination of factors - the phone's ID, a salt, your credit card number, etc. The phone only needs to see the number once to generate the key, but it doesn't store the actual number on the phone or use it during the payment process.

If you lose your phone you can log into iCloud and immediately invalidate the key, but there's no way that someone in possession of your phone can recover your banking information. The worst you'll have happen to you if you lose your phone is that someone will try to use it to buy something, but unless they know your PIN or have your fingerprint, they won't be able to do that either. The merchant also never knows your CC number, and nor does Apple, plus the way the system is set up, Apple also doesn't know what you are buying or where you're buying it from - the transaction is between your card issuer and the merchant, all the phone does is provide a key that authorises it.

If you assume the GP meant that Apple pay "when it can be hacked by someone standing next to you on the bus (as [sic] demo'd many times)" then where can we see these "many" demonstrations of the hacking of Apple Pay?

I think it's more likely that the GP is talking out of his arse. It's pretty common to see sweeping Apple-bash posts that have almost zero basis in reality on here that rely on groupthink to get positive moderation. For example - a sweeping assertion that Apple Pay is trivially hacked and that many demos of said hack exist. It's simply an outright falsehood.

Actually that's exactly what they're claiming.

"If you ship a phone with non-google services we'll cut off your access to Google services globally".

Whether this is actually true or not we don't know, but it's what they're alleging.

I'm sure they're working on it. They were unhappy with the inability to adequately (from the broadcast rights perspective) protect their content unless they used Flash.

Since Netflix also had this problem until recently, the issue has been solved and I'm sure we'll see the HTML5 player in the not-too-distant future.

It's an iso standard, but what he means is that you need a licence to distribute an AAC encoder/decoder (unless you distribute it as source code I believe).