That's misleading. A lack of a fully saturated green on a monitor is a limitation with the phosphors or dyes it uses. But monochromatic light of around 515 nm is pure, fully saturated green. Fully saturated green stimulates both your M and L cones ("G" and "R" cones); that's the way your eye works.

You can achieve non-physical responses from your photoreceptors via oversaturation, drugs, or electrical stimulation. That's interesting, but it isn't "green" and it isn't a "true qualia". Thinking of that as "green" is simply because you think of the M cone as a "green" cone and the L cone as a "red" cone, but those are just arbitrary names.

Maybe iPad sales are cutting into netbooks, maybe not. But what makes people think Apple can keep this up?

The MacBook Air looked like the granddaddy of netbooks, it was shiny and hot; and a year or two after its release, its just another expensive, light, and slow laptop for Mac users with too much cash.

The same is likely going to happen with iPads. Apple pushed the thing out the door quickly, but low-cost tablets have been in the pipeline for a couple of years, and you're likely going to see $200-$300 tablets with better specs than the iPad and no software restrictions this year.

If the growth rate drops off and is replaced by growth in iPads, how in the world is that not a takeover?

What makes you think the two are related? If netbook and iPad users are completely separate populations, you can still see the same behavior: one market gets saturated after a few years of sales, and a completely different market takes off.

Double LCDs don't really work all that well, and even if you sandwich them perfectly, there is still parallax.

The active LED backlight, on the other hand, actually works quite well; there are artifacts, but they happen to match the limitations of the human visual system pretty well.

If they really do the active LED backlight system on a per-pixel basis, then it's called an OLED display; you don't need the LCD at all anymore.

The gamut of the human eye is is not well approximated by mixtures of RGB pixels, even if they are perfect and ideal. You can do better with four or more pixel types. Furthermore, a yellow pixel likely also gives you more brightness and contrast. Similar things are done with printers (that's why many printers have 8 inks) and even some cameras. So, no, it's not hype. How well their particular monitor works depends on how good a job they did on the implementation. As for seeing the advantages, yes, they can also show you that. Obviously, they can't make the gamut of your TV bigger, but they can make it smaller by the same amount that their TV's gamut is larger than yours.

On the other hand, your brain compensates for, and becomes accustomed to, a limited gamut. That means that after working with a limited gamut device for a while, you won't notice much anymore. But side-by-side, the difference is obvious.

It hasn't yet led to people being disappeared in the middle of the night for voicing an unpopular opinion

Well, but it has apparently led to people not voicing unpopular opinions and venting their feelings; you yourself have canceled posts.

Politics in many areas might be rather different if people weren't afraid to say what they really think and feel.

Anybody who has contributed to a piece of GPL software has standing to bring lawsuits against people who violate the GPL. Who has contributed the "majority" of the code is immaterial. I'm sorry this is inconvenient for Bruce Perens, but it can't reasonably work any different.

You can look that up yourself; the actual source of those technologies can be found mostly under those wikipedia entries.

I put the term "stolen" in quotes because that is the term Apple fanboys like to use when other companies adopt technologies that Apple has popularized; the actual term is "copying", and that's OK. It is particularly OK because most of what makes the iPhone what it is didn't even come from Apple.

Apple introduced the iPhone a ground-breaking device that allowed users access to the functionality of the already popular iPod on a revolutionary mobile phone and Internet device. [...] In contrast, Nokia made a different business decision and remained focused on traditional mobile wireless handsets with conventional user interfaces.

Nokia had smartphones and touch screen devices long before the iPhone even existed. Much of the iPhone is basically derived from the Palm Treo, the Danger Hiptop, Symbian, and the ideas of countless small developers and academics. Instead of acknowledging their enormous intellectual debt to all these other companies and developers, Apple is claiming to have done it all themselves.

The iPhone has been engineered with the usual Apple gimmicks and flair, but technically, it is not a ground-breaking device in any area. But, as is typical for Apple, first the rip everybody off, and then they claim that they are the aggrieved party. They tried the same thing with the GUI and window systems and lost badly. Apple is truly evil.

Are there any interesting patents Apple actually holds on phone technologies? Based on the list I saw earlier, there was nothing that was particularly interesting.

Maybe Nokia wants licenses for the multitouch patents. I think Nokia, Google, and Microsoft should just get together and have Apple's multi-touch patents invalidated since there is prior art.

A classic example of patents being used defensively by Apple to counter Nokia's offensive use.

You make it sound as if Apple is the aggrieved party here. But Apple has been pilfering other people's ideas and products liberally in order to create the iPhone. Apple's contributions have largely been in excellent packaging, but they have innovated fairly little. Nokia, on the other hand, has produce innovative phones with bad user interfaces. I think the "offender" here really is Apple, and Nokia deserves a cut of Apple's financial success, given the relative contributions of the two companies to the mobile phone market.

What's Apple supposed to do? Just eventually lose the patent case and pay up?

Most of what is responsible for the success of the iPhone--Mach, Objective-C, the GUI, MP3 players, multitouch, the app store, song recommendations, phone cameras--was invented elsewhere and simply copied ("stolen") by Apple. So, yes, maybe Apple should just lose the patent case and pay up; there's a good chance that they really do owe the money.

It could be a wonderful thing for both parties if presented properly. He recreated the entire game by himself thinking it wouldn't be plagiarism. However, just like a college essay, if you write down all the sentences yourself but the use of the words within these sentences are from other people's work, we consider it plagiarism.

Who cares whether it's "plagiarism"? Plagiarism isn't illegal, and in many contexts, it isn't even wrong. Plagiarism is an academic concept, not a legal or business concept. Ever major computer company has "plagiarized" in their products, i.e., taken ideas from others without acknowledging the source, and that's OK. In fact, this game case is probably not even plagiarism, since plagiarism means using material without acknowledging the source, and they may well have done so. On the other hand, a lot of legally infringing activity is not plagiarism at all, so not plagiarizing does not protect you from legal claims.

In business, what matters is copyrights, patents, trademarks, and contracts. The game could be taken down because Apple controls their app store and can do whatever they want. If Aquatica were sold outside the app store, the flOw developer would have had to go to court and claim copyright, patent, or trademark infringement.

Is that cloning or theft?

It's theft when there is a law against it. Did the game infringe copyrights, patents, trademarks, or did it break contracts? If so, it's "theft". If not, it's not "theft" in the usual legal sense, although it may still be plagiarism.

Given the similarity, I suspect that the Aquatica developer did commit copyright infringement, but that's really for a judge and jury to decide.

Sorry, but helping the clueless or unfortunate users from something that wasn't created, distributed, or sanctioned by Microsoft isn't a Microsoft Bailout even if the users are running MS Windows.

But it was created by Microsoft: Microsoft is selling software with inadequate security. And Microsoft is responsible even if the security problems are due to their users being "clueless": if they sell to clueless users, they have to create software that their users can use without getting into trouble. That's true for other products, and it should be true for Microsoft.

I'd normally be the first to agree, but isn't a large portion of malware used for criminal activity? Identity theft, botnets that engage in DDoS extortion attempts, spam relays, phishing, etc, etc. It seems to me that law enforcement (i.e: government) has a legitimate interest in reducing the number of malware infections that are out there.

So they should go to the source of the malware infections: Microsoft. Microsoft needs to be held responsible for selling software that is so susceptible to malware. They should not be allowed to disclaim responsibility in their contracts, and they certainly should not get financial support from the government.

If Microsoft were held responsible for the damage they are causing with sloppy and badly thought out security, market forces would already have taken care of the problem: either they would have been sued into non-existence, or they would fix their software.