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.

Even worse, your companies don't lock customers in with long contracts the way ours do.

Actually, they do. And unlike the US, they get auto-renewed unless you cancel within a specific time window. So you can end up with another 2 year contract and no real benefit to show for it.

Fortunately, market forces are changing that; carriers are increasingly offering good no-contract plans and give you noticeable discounts (rather than overpriced phones) if you do sign up for longer contracts. And the reason is that it's really easy to switch carriers in Europe: not only is there number portability (numbers are required to be ported within one day), the phones are almost all compatible and carriers are required to unlock them, so the cost of going to a different carrier is almost zero.

These are cellular phones. The number of users sharing a cell goes down as the number of towers increases, so you need proportionally less bandwidth to serve the same number of users if you have more towers.

Building more towers is the solution to bandwidth problems with cell phones. That's the whole point of the technology.

It's not quite like that. Many European carriers do have "caps", but they are the kinder, gentler kind. For example, they give you 5Gbyte/month at full 7Mbps, and then drop down to 384kbps (still faster than I get in many places in the US with "3G"). In return, they don't care about how you use that data and even give you extra SIM cards to stick into your laptop if you like. Other carriers charge EU 2/day and have a 1-5Gbyte limit per day (meaning, you get 50-150Gbyte/month for EU 60), but these are true pay-as-you-go plans, making this a particularly good deal. Many carriers also prohibit VoIP in their TOS (but don't actually seem to enforce it).

US wireless Internet is way overpriced and underperforming compared to Europe. But European carriers still have some modest limits. If the US moved to European-style plans and European-style infrastructure, that would be a big improvement.

One of the fundamental problems in the US remains the fact that almost all the carriers have incompatible phone standards. Some carriers even have two incompatible standards themselves (due to acquisitions). That really kills competition.

If you provide a premade type or library class for fixed point, then two decimal places after the point isn't enough

Just like decimal coded numbers, you need a variable decimal point position. And you can get that easily.

All in all, decimal floating-point arithmetics just makes more sense.

No, it is absolutely useless. You want a bigint library and a small, simple fixed point library built on top of that. "Decimal floating point" is totally useless.

(basically you may start missing local cents after two operations already).

Decimal representations don't ensure that your numbers add up correctly either.

So, let's see:

eeeee = leopard
eeeee-oo = unseen predator
kuuu eeeee = timber! (or is that "kuuu eeeee-oo"?)

I don't see the syntax, just reuse of some phonetic inventory. For syntax, you'd need more elements, and they'd need to be combined in more varied combinations.

Big muscles used to be considered undesirable, since they were an indication of low social status. If it gets cheap and commonplace to get big muscles, they'll go out of fashion again. Their value as a signal is that they require dedication, time, and resources.

The role of a democratic government is precisely what the voting citizens define it to be. No more, and no less.

Not quite. If the citizens make decisions that make government undemocratic, then their decision is logically not part of the democratic process anymore (since the democratic process has ceased at that point).

I have to disagree with that. Malware problem is usually because of user stupidity. Like any other OS, you can run Windows securely if you don't do stupid things.

You're exhibiting typical programmer stupidity. Hard as it may be to believe, most people in this world don't give a damn about software, they just want to get their work done. They don't want to be pestered by annoying dialogs, and they certainly don't want to understand security just in order to browse the web or use their PC without virus infestations. If Windows can't support that kind of usage (and it can't), then that's a problem with Windows, not with the users.

But any (good) Linux sysadmin knows there been worms in Linux too and remote hacks are commonplace if the system isn't properly secured (and casual users just wont do that).

It's a lot harder for a casual Linux user to make a Linux system insecure by accident than for a casual Windows user to make a Windows system insecure. Windows really is badly designed from a security point of view.

So, you get unsatisfactory hybrids like Google Android, which uses some open-source components but locks third-party developers into a crippled Java sandbox.

Java isn't my preferred language, but I'm glad that my Android phone uses it. With Java, Android actually manages to enforce permissions decently, it keeps applications from screwing up or crashing too badly, and it allows a component architecture for Android that beats pretty much anything else out there. It's also pretty easy for people to get started in and there are plenty of apps.

Native programming on Android would be nice, and I suspect it will be coming sooner or later, but for now, this is fine. We can look at the iPhon app store and look at what apps in there really do require native programming and hence aren't available for Android, and it's very few.

There are several open source phone operating systems now that allow native programming: Symbian, Maemo, OpenMoko, and they don't work as well. And, frankly, I'd like a bit more non-native programming on my desktop as well.