Sorry about that... I think I was reading into your post what I wanted to read, since I had already read several posts above saying exactly what I thought you were saying. Doh. (Inserts foot in mouth =D).

WHAT? The real security issue is that a website could own your device. Who cares that jailbreakers were using this to do something they wanted to do to their own devices, it could just as easily have been malicious.

You said: Once they do that, these vulnerabilities will no longer have a beneficial side to them.

I'm sorry, but what the heck are you talking about? I can think of a ton of vulnerabilities that would have a "beneficial" side to them. Say, for instance, a website were to install a key logger and capture all your passwords, or credit card numbers, or whatever... This vulnerability is far worse than simply allowing people to jailbreak their phones. It gives some other entity remote code execution to your device and that is pretty much the worst sort of vulnerability and Apple is right to patch it as quickly as possible. Period.

So what you are saying is that Apple should leave the hole allowing a PDF to do remote code execution (which no PDF reader should allow), then they should harass all users every time they download a PDF to tell them it might have the ability to own their device (since they decided to leave the huge security hole) and all this just so that people who want to jailbreak their phones don't have to plug them into a computer via USB? You were kidding, right?

I have the opposite approach. Classes where powerpoint is used are almost always worthless and you might as well just download the slides and read them on your own time. Thoughtful use of a piece of chalk can explain complex and abstract ideas in depth at a pace that can easily be followed. I only take classes where powerpoint is not used, if I can get away with it (which isn't easy in my field).

I couldn't disagree more. Flashing things on the screen in PowerPoint allows the lecturer to go way to fast and makes the lectures almost useless. There is a reason why I always learned more in math lectures and the only way I learned from CS lecturers was to reread their powerpoint slides after the class. Take a piece of chalk to a chalkboard and you have to write at a speed that can be digested and understood by the attending students. Take a powerpoint and you find that you can easily breeze through way too much information in a single lecture.

The problem that it is trying to solve is finding particular points of interest along a street without having to click a move arrow a hundred times and reset your view as you do in StreetView. The idea is that this representation succinctly captures the data a user would need to perform certain types of manual search operations that are not currently handled by other systems. They also presented the technology required to produce that accordion view in such a way that relevant information remains visible as the user browses. It was a pretty cool paper. Maybe not earth shattering, but definitely cool.

How is this different from:

The OS starts up, the OS tells an application to launch and register its hooks into the OS, then the OS periodically gets interrupts and runs some code which may result in it messaging the application, the application then runs some of its own code which may or may not interface with OS code.

?

Basically my point is, if your code loading and running my code and then our two programs having some kind of dialog is the basis for inheriting something like the GPL license then any code running on a GPL licensed OS has the same problem. After all, at the end of the day, everything is just machine code that reads and writes bits from memory and performs operations using the chip.

Don't know, but that is somewhat irrelevant. The main point is that I see plenty of tech geeks buying Macs, so I think the argument that Macs are only for "not-hugely-geeky tech men" doesn't have basis in fact.

I had to price a dell tower vs. a mac pro (fairly well spec'd out, not the bottom of the line) about two years ago and for the same hardware the dell was $2000 more than the Mac, though it did have an extra year of warranty--so it can go either way depending on what you are buying.

Well, presumably, if he owned half the company, he would be entitled to half the profits. But IANAL nor do I know a whole lot about business. It just seems like this would have come up before now. If I owned half of FB, I'd be asking why I haven't seen any checks in the mail or been contacted about the direction of the company, or anything.

It is highly contrived because Apple isn't stupid and this being added to people's OSX software would be an epic fail. Only Apple Haters would see anything like that in this patent. I personally would stop using Apple products if this were added even though I'm a pretty rabid fanboy (a fact that I'm sure many smart marketers at Apple understand). And with the phone, they probably will add it to the phone to try to push down the cost of the smart phone plans--$40 bucks gets you a nice smartphone plan + ads, $100 gets you the normal no-ad smartphone plan. People will probably be willing to do it.

There are so many potential uses for this patent that it is patently stupid to take the most obviously heinous and most likely destructive-to-Apple-itself option and claim that is what the patent will be used for (that in effect is the definition of trolling). That is why the OP claims it is "highly contrived."

Oh, just to clarify, by "poorer grad students," I'm pointing out that we grad students have less money than professors and therefore are less able to afford Macs. I did not mean a comparison between various grad students' cash flow (we're all poor, as far as I can tell).

That's funny. I look around my CS department and most professors and a good portion of the poorer grad students have switched to Mac. I'm just saying. (Oh, and I'm typing this from a Win7 machine.)

Did you bother to RTFA? Or the root post you are replying to? It is clear that this is for things like internet kiosks at airports and not for your computer at home. Its an alternative to paying for internet access at a kiosk that a kiosk would have the ability (enforced by the OS) to give you the option to watch an ad rather than pay for more time. Nothing to see here, or complain about, move along. Oh, and next time read the article and the post you are replying to.

My question: why didn't this come out like, say, 5 years ago instead of a full 7 years after facebook's launch?

I agree with Anarke_Incarnate.

It depends on what you mean by "day to day." The colors are much better (the blacks are blacker and the whites are whiter) on the glossy screens and as I do lots of graphically intensive stuff as part of my day to day computer use, I definitely prefer it.

I also think the claim that glossy screens "make it impossible to work unless you are doing it in the dark," is a bit overstated. I use my laptop with no problem in well lit rooms regularly. The glossy screen is worse if you are outside or have a very bright window or lamp directly behind you and you are sitting in the dark, but a normal well lit room should not be a problem for a glossy screen, and I personally try not to allow any of my screens to get too much sunlight as I believe it isn't that good for them anyway.

When the screen is off it does show dust and/or fingerprints more than a matte finish, but the increased brightness of the screen makes up for it when the thing is on.