Their purchase of Motorola was indeed primarily for this. They needed to be able to defend Android, and Google itself didn't have sufficient mobile patents to have a decent chance at prevailing in a court against Apple. Google + Moto on the other hand, very much the reverse.

Google's choices were - buy Nokia, RIM, Motorola, or the Nortel patents. Of that lot, Motorola made by far the most strategic sense since they had an enormous trove of on point patents, were affordable, and were already an Android partner. At the time, their losing the Nortel patent auction looked bad, but when they snapped up Motorola shortly thereafter, it all made sense.

Would they have been better off winning Nortel patents for (say) $5bn than spending $13.5+ for Motorola? [I'm counting anticipated restructuring costs in with the purchase price] Maybe. But it's entirely possible that Apple, Microsoft, RIM, etc. would have pushed the bidding on Nortel patents well above $5bn. Also, a lot of the Nortel patents would have been neither applicable nor remotely useful to Google. For a patent defense, Motorola is a much better fit.

Does it suck that companies have to spend billions in this fashion to create a legal defense? Yes. If you're an ardent Apple fan, it sucks that Google gets to attack Apple just because they bought a bunch of patents; if you're an ardent Google fan, it sucks that Apple is attacking Android manufacturers in the first place. For the rest of us, firing engineers and hiring lawyers does not seem a winning plan for engineers or the economy-at-large. Nice for lawyers though.

Have you ever studied calculus? Are you familiar with the concept of the slope of a curve? What you are saying is mathematically incorrect if you actually look at the data.

You are actually (quite incorrectly, I will assume due to ignorance ) falsely asserting that the rate of temperature increase is increasing. Astonishing. I can only assume you are completely ignorant of basic mathematics, or are ignorant of the datasets.

It is true that this decreased rate of increase may be ultimately statistically insignificant over a century (or even a thirty) year trend. But that is not the core of what you are falsely asserting. To claim that it is not observable within the confines of the 11-year solar cycle is simply to destroy your credibility.

I invite you to peruse woodfortrees.org, where you can look for yourself. Look at the HADCRUT3 dataset, the one most commonly used by climate scientists. Choose global mean, or global mean variance adjusted as I have below.

Here, for example we see a 32-year plot. http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:12/from:1980/to:2012

You are certainly entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. Something odd appears to have happened, resulting in a nearly flat slope in a very warm world. Claim all you wish that in fact the trend is accelerating; the data do not bear this out. You are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.

Presumably you think Phil Jones was incorrect or even lying when he said to the BBC that there had been no statistically significant global warming in the last decade.

As to interpretation, I suspect warming will resume its upward trend and ultimately, in a 100 year trendline the events of the last 10-12 years may disappear, and simply become artifacts. Time will tell.

You could have argued this, and I'd have provisionally agreed with you. Instead you chose to assert something absolutely nonsensical, and, to compound your error, falsely and ignorantly accused me of being wrong. Good grief.

-Holmwood

Let's get this out of the way, what I believe. The world has warmed quite a bit in the last few decades. While the rate of warming seems to have gone down in the last decade, it remains very warm relative to earlier in the 20th century, and we are recording some unusually hot years globally speaking. We have not cooled in any meaningful statistical sense. Much of this warming is caused by human activity. GHG's remain a serious very long-term threat, though I am less sure that they remain a threat in shorter time frames, as I believe climate sensitivity is likely relatively low. Whether or not GHG's are a threat, I think we should move to halt new coal construction, push for nuclear/hydro for baseline, gas/hydro for meeting peak demand (drop-offs from renewables), and encourage development of solar and certain other renewables. My views on this are based on studying these issues since the 1980s.

Now. On to your statement. What is the actual evidence (as opposed to Officer Plod, and the scientists' own assertions) that this was a remote hack as opposed to a whistle-blower? I can certainly accept it was a hacker; I'd just like to see actual evidence rather than interested parties assertions. Let's face it, if you're a police officer and you've spent years investigating something fruitlessly, it's a lot more impressive to say you were trying to track a sophisticated hacker, than that you were looking for a whistle-blower.

Second, as for epistemic bubble, I would say the emails revealed that climate science was being practiced by some in a fashion very unlike science, and more akin to sociological research. I was stunned at how defensive and anti-science many of the researchers were: they did not seem to care about what the scientific truth was; they already knew it and simply wanted to defend their work by viciously attacking and smearing any who dared disagree with them. This brought to public light the fact that reconstructions were often statistically shoddy, the computer model released along with the code was dreadfully buggy as even the maintainer admitted. Examine the code for yourself, as I did.

Key to the scientific method is that we rigorously test results and hypotheses. If they cannot be independently confirmed then we move on. Those in climate gate were revealed to be actively resisting this process.

In fairness to climate scientists in general; only a small number seem to be that extreme; moreover, recent revelations have exposed some quite shoddy scientific publications in the fields of epidemiology and psychology. Moreover, I don't think anyone set out to behave in a fraudulent and corrupt fashion: I simply think some people confused activism with science.

Global warming is real; it is not a fraud. But the anti-science behavior of a small number of people should disturb us all. We cannot form good public policy on the basis of exaggerations, distortions or the rejection of sound scientific principles. That point applies certainly to oil industry attacks on AGW; it applies equally to AGW's most fervent believers in catastrophe.

-Holmwood

I'm on the conservative/libertarian side of things most (but not all) days, but the quote is real, assuming you accept the NY Times as a source.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/machine-politics-in-the-digital-age.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

The context is important; O'Dell wrote this as a Bush fundraiser in a fundraising letter, not in his role as Diebold president. That said, reverse it, if he'd been a Kerry/Obama backer and done the same; Republicans would be rightly very suspicious.

We've had issues with robocalls and funding irregularities in Canada, but not, as far as I am aware, any significant credible allegations of ballot or vote fraud.

In the last couple of elections, where I live, we've used paper ballots (filled out with a pen) sometimes coupled with optical scan. (The disabled can have someone assist them.) This provides a surprisingly useful audit trail. (e.g. consider a box filled with ballot papers all marked for one candidate, all with a very unusual pen colour. Don't laugh, it's happened in places like Texas).

Voters are enumerated, door-to-door by multi-party teams of volunteers. To vote you have to show photo id. Felons and prisoners are able to vote; we think it's unfair to deny politicians the vote. I strongly suspect the level of voter fraud and machine politics is substantially lower than the US; history generally seems to bear this out.

The Canadian system is far from perfect, though I'm inclined to think, like the banking system up here, it's somewhat superior to the current US system.

Pray tell what kind of quality you'd have to rip down to to get 100 movies onto 64gb of flash memory, some of which is already used by the OS and apps.

I think most people would rather keep their cheap, rather small, perfectly portable DVD wallets and not end up with abysmal quality

Seriously? You do understand NTSC DVDs are limited to 480p (less than that if you want uniform square pixels and are talking most movies these days)? We're talking something a real like 24 Hz, 405p for the video channel for a typical film. (Yes, the DVD may run at near 30Hz, but almost all films originate at 24).

You are unlikely to need more than stereo 128 kbit MP3 for mobile film audio. (Again, remember, we're comparing to an ICE). So we're talking about 90 minutes (typical film), 128kbit audio, that works out to 82 MiB for the audio channel.

64GiB (we're talking flash, not HDD) will give you 655 MiB average for each of 100 films. You don't need to install an OS or applications, we're talking data media here. That leave 573 MiB for the video channel.

From years of video work (no, not a euphemism for pirating movies; I studied video compression techniques in grad school, and did some professional CODEC work thereafter), a few hundred megs will give you barely adequate (soft) video with H.264 for a typical movie. 573-some will give you respectable video with MPEG-4 Part 2, and very nice mobile (or even very basic home theatre) performance for H.264, assuming your CODEC is good and carefully tuned. Again, I'm talking strictly the video channel here.

So, no, I'd rather carry around a flash drive or two than 100 DVD's. For the application the whole thread is discussing, the available memory per film would be just fine. You would genuinely prefer 100 DVDs scratched, smeared with peanut butter, and dropped randomly into your car at the worst possible moment to a USB key sitting in the glovebox? (We're talking about ICE applications, and, overwhelmingly that's for kids in the back seat. If you haven't seen what kids do to DVD's, I should invite you on a road trip...)

Is it what I'd encode my DVDs at for home theatre use? Nope. I'd want twice the space per DVD, so I'd only get about 50 per 64GB, but I'd be happy to see you try to tell the difference between those and the original encodes.

Your sarcasm was misplaced-

And, respectfully, your condescension towards the GP was misplaced. His point was reasonable and correct, and he's just fine in quality for mobile use. Even adequate (though not great) for basic home viewing.

-Holmwood

Except he's (more or less) right. James Ellis, at GCHQ (roughly the UK equivalent of NSA) had developed the basics of public key cryptography by the end of 1969. This was about 6 years ahead of Diffie Hellman and Merkle. In 1973, a GCHQ cryptographer, Clifford Cocks, realized that one-way functions would be an elegant way of achieving Ellis' insight. See http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm for example. This was some years ahead of RSA.

GCHQ and the NSA definitely would have exchanged this information. It's also quite possible that the US made some of these breakthroughs even earlier than the British; I've not paid much attention to anything NSA-related that has declassified in the last 5+ years.

It won't need to. The crypto check will simply be skipped by modifying the code in the client. Or altering the client code to always accept any response.

I've never really understood this attitude. I feel that one needs to be aware of security theatre, or security kabuki -- things that make you feel safer but don't actually make you safer. There are two possibilities for an attacker: an idiot, or, someone very capable.

While it's true that a non-broadcast SSID might stop an idiot, ditto for locking down MAC addresses, you can extract both of these (completely unencrypted) from the packet stream. Any modestly competent attacker can do this quite quickly.

But locking down MAC addresses and turning off SSID broadcasting increases the tedium of administration while making no real difference to a hacker. Like the TSA, it's security kabuki in my view.

In general, I don't find my security enhanced by assuming that the attacker is a clueless moron. If that were the case, then Windows 98 coupled with digital hashes checked against all files would be a secure OS.

The one argument I think you could come up with is that if you enable all security features in a disciplined manner then that's just good practice. Maybe. I still think it smacks of a bit of security theatre.

Jade Empire, Mass Effect 1, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 are four that don't seem to suffer from the specific problems cited above at the time I write this.(i.e. bad translation of controls). I don't much like the minigames in ME1, but that's not a console issue.

Fable was fine IIRC. Fahrenheit -- didn't like the control schema, but it was translated properly to PC IIRC.

That's your half dozen right there, and just off the top of my head. (Granted, a lot are from Bioware). The problem isn't universal; some developers and publishers seem to care about doing a decent port and some don't.

The Milestone's based on an ARM Cortex A8 running at 600 MHz. It's probably the slowest-clocked of the "new" superphones. (For Americans, it's a Motorola Droid for Europe and Canada with some small software and SKU differences).

The Dingoo A320, according to the font of all wisdom, Wikipedia, is underclocked to 336MHz.

Last I looked, ARM seemed to have a definite edge in memory bandwidth, and had instructions aimed at handling media-rich applications much better than MIPS. I could, of course, be out of date on that.

So at an educated guess, I wouldn't expect your Dingoo to be able to touch a modern superphone. (Maybe at best a quarter of the processing power assuming Neon optimizations?) Of course if the Dingoo's screen is low enough resolution, then that may not matter as much.

I agree the parent is a troll, but not a very good one. From the very second sentence of the linked post:

I had seen ports of Quake3 to the iphone and the N900 which have similar specifications

When you troll without even bothering to read two sentences of what's linked that's just... sad.

Moreover, the iPhone falls significantly short in one area: the N900 runs at 800x480, and the Milestone/Droid at 854x480. The iPhone is presumably pushing ~37% of the number of pixels. (Assuming the game is running at native resolution on all 3 platforms). If so, fairly impressive pixel-pushing for the other two platforms.