Protocols are always going to be wrapped into products if there is any money to be made. And everybody just wants something to work, nothing else, if it is beyond his field of expertise.

An open protocol can never be monetized, except for some support.

Amazing that I stopped following after BX.
And it seems it was just a few months ago...

... and it was written ages ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual

It runs on intuition.

It runs on EM radiation from your panel.

The patent office does not care about your patent. Never did, and never will.
It just cares about the patent application, its form and fees. It is up to the patent applicator to enforce the patent and ensure there wasn't prior art.

If there was, the spent money on the patent and the lawyers is a waste, but it does not come out of the patent office pockets. Actually, everybody makes money in a situation like this, except for the patent applicator.

You know what?

I still haven't found an app that can sync contacts and SMS between Symbian, Windows Mobile and/or the Sony Ericsson standard platform. A bit less that 10 years ago I could do all that on PalmOS - the app was called GSMtool - and Ericsson/Siemens phones through IR.

Something that you could try is making your own cloud. Try a VM with Funambol, some say it does work. Haven't tried it myself.

Just don't tell this to Sony.

Who knows how many micro explosions would we have to endure every day.

It probably is a good thing, but you are forgetting something.

Developers.

Palm told them to get lost. Broke all compatibility from Garnet to WebOS.

Getting them back now is a exceedingly tough job, after most of them switched platforms. No users and no developers will not be an easy task.

On the other hand, the bes calculators combined with some flair from the old Palm V or Clie lines would make a great product.

At that time SD was not yet standardised, only MMC card was. But, Sony wanted a memory card and a expansion bus, which wasn't even discussed on the SD front. At the time Sony was selling a camera and a bluetooth memory stick, SD was just beginning to take hold. CF was too big for PDAs and cameras.

Sony needed their own standard since other formats were not advanced enough. And they wanted to use it across the board - in all their products - so licensing costs were also an issue.

Australia IS a bigger target. Probably easier to hit.

Like most definitions today.

But think about it. What purpose does art serve?

Is art a tool? Is art a process? Is art entertainment?
I could be any of those, but generally, it isn't. Is is something that conveys artists emotions and state over a period of time. Art is an object of beauty, but it requires creative perception both by the artist and by the audience.

Do take this with a grain of salt, since IANAA.

Whoever thought this would end differently needs to have his head examined.

Twice.

At an Ofcom licensed specialist.

Art is very easy to define.

For something to be defined as art it has to have no purpose or function other than itself.

Oh, it is definitively my surfing habits.

But, that has no connection with the fact that leaving FF with open tabs alone for a week nearly doubles its memory footprint.
That also has no connection with the fact that on my 3GB RAM + 3GB swap Windoze XP machine Chrome constantly thrashes, and my memory usage without open browsers is less than 1 gig total.

Now, I do realise than my habit of running multiple browsers with around 50 tabs open is not a socially accepted behaviour, but constantly adding features without addressing old issues seems futile. FF 3.0 did show a big improvement in memory management, and even bigger in stability. Yet, I am still seeing issues from years ago with plugins and memory.

Considering my browsing habits, I still haven't found a bookmark / tab tool that saves context - history and opened child tabs, let alone the content of the tab as it was when saved. With something like that, I probably would have no need for 50 tabs, and would stop complaining. One can dream...