Quite true, however it can prevent non-tech people (read managers, HR) from identifying the weak members of a group (or at least how weak they are) by allowing them to at least turn out code that (hopefully) works. The code could be ugly and prone to issues but for most non-techies once it works they are good with that.

Assuming the person hiring is unable to tell the difference means you will most likely get a 50-50 split of strong vs weak programmers hired (humor me). Now ask which one will cost more and see what happens to that split.

A single 140 character SM costs 10 cents here (Caribbean) on the low end, can get up to 40 cents without getting into roaming charges (6:1 exchange rate to US). Its also much more reliable than SMS by an extremely long margin (if a whatsapp has not gone through the sender knows it, if a SMS has not gone through not only does the sender not know when the message comes through it has the sender's timestamp which makes it look as if it had even to the receiver). I got some new years SMSes 2 days after.

A pretty much unlimited length whatsapp is free, plus you can send media (Pictures, audio, video) which works much, much better than MMS. Even if you pay the couple US bucks a year for whatsapp (I think its $2, don't quote me on that though), depending on how much you use text messaging you will at least break even in 1-2 months. My RC group uses it to send announcements for events, after a few broadcasts we would easily have paid for whatsapp subscriptions for the entire group.

I'll gladly concede Whatsapp is not perfect and has its annoying points (e.g. the device must have a SIM / phone number attached so most tablets are left out) but its still much, MUCH better than SMS ever will be.

$666,999?

Ying-yang number of the beast.

At which point the google search becomes the target of the lawsuit (as it now contains the link), which deflects the problem to google not resolve the underlying issue.

Just taking a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iOS_devices I am seeing that the oldest phone supporting the current IOS version is the 4s.

From what little I know of the apple ecosystem if such a bug was found on a iPhone 3 the effective response would be the same (you are on your own, we don't support that any more).

I agree Apple is better at this but not for any reason other than they have a much smaller list of devices to deal with.

Quite true which hints at what may be the real winner, maybe timer interrupts? Anything with a RTC has some sort of trigger for clock 'ticks' which generate these ticks wheter you use / care about them or not.

Try Modern Warfare 2's airport massacre scene and the controversy that erupted in the US / UK after.

All I can see from the article and comments is that as no standard exists for this type of interaction (the whole labels instead of folders thing) google chose to implement it their own way.

From the article the actual mail standards IMAP or "(shudder POP)", shouldn't be used as "you get a severely compromised experience". Instead google should reverse it's decision to drop active directory support for free users. This seems to be mainly driven by the fact that the mail standards can't handle your contacts or calendars and that they are not "instant" (saw something about PUSH notifications from the server that you got new mail), only folks I know that "need" to get e-mails that fast are businesses (if my family needs my attention that fast I get a call not an e-mail).

This also gets to the paid vs free users, author writes "Google had licensed EAS in 2009 because its enterprise customers demanded it." followed by "Outlook on Windows and on the Mac still has to connect to Gmail via IMAP, and there's no way (short of buying a third-party add-on or paying $50 a year for a Google Apps for Business account) to get all of your Gmail/Google Apps data into Outlook.". Maybe I'm overlooking something but this seems like simple business sense to me, why pay another company to cover your entire user base for a feature that a particular segment of your user base wants? If recieving your e-mail 5 minutes later will cost you that much then spending less than $5 a month sounds like a cheap sacrifice.

I don't particularly care for the current state of affairs, but I find it hard to blame google in this case. They should have gotten their modifications to IMAP standardized, Am I going to hold that against them? Not really, a standard takes allot of time to get finalized and at the end of the day they are a business that needs to keep running in the mean time. Also I find it odd that one one hand the author is bashing google about open standards yet pushing active directory's sync. I'll end with this question, instead of creating active directory sync why didn't microsoft extend IMAP and build a better standard that we could all use?

Given that we are talking about charging ports I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you also think standard electrical plugs should also have been left to the market and are consumer-unfriendly?

You've never been in a plane with kids I'm guessing...

Let one of them get bored / cranky and its like a nuclear reaction...

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I'm not following this argument, what difference does it make who helped invalidate the patent?

Now your competition knows what you are doing (whether they helped invalidate the patent or not) and especially if the patent is denied they can move to mess with your market by releasing a competing product:
- The patent application will show them how your proposed device works
- The fact that it was denied means you can't sue them for copying.

I think the market of Chinese knock offs showed how effective this tactic is, quality won't have to be sacrificed for a lower price than you on the basis of you have R&D costs to re-coup, they don't.

The end result I can see is companies will only file when they are quite certain that the patent will be issued, which should put an end to the "shotgun" approach we see now.

This is still a very important first step, at the very least if we can reduce the number of new patents at some point the old patents will expire (or be invalidated) and the pools will dry up.

First step of getting yourself out of a hole, stop digging.

Would it really matter if they hid the patent-invalidation activity behind shell companies?

If the end result is a patent that shoundn't be issued ending up not being issued do we really care if its some shell company or the parent?

Businesses will just become batter at tearing down the layers of shell companies to determine who the parent is, assuming they are remotely interested in that information.

Indeed, even if the hard drive contains state secrets could they just keep the hard drive but give you everything else? The donor can decide if to destroy or how they want the data erased (hopefully they can be convinced to just scrub it a whole lot and then give it to you anyway).

Much less wastage that way, eBay has 80GB velociraptors going for $20-30 bucks (yes I know this is overkill), will increase the price of your $50 PC to $80 but I think that's still reasonable.

As a side note to all of this, wouldn't / shouldn't such data be held on a central server and not on the local hard drives of the various office users? I would completely understand treating the server's hard drives differently (at least there should be far fewer of them), but I'm sure the normal user's hard drive isn't protected by raid or something similar (next power fluctuation = bye bye secret documents).