Does Slashdot have any statistics to share on the percentage of troll posts / off topics and flamebaits by ACs vis-a-vis registered users ?

Agreed, that registered users may not be using real names. But, still Anonymous comments v/s registered comments will provide a good starting point. My gut feeling is that the statistics would have a higher number of ACs being abusive and malicious than the registered users.

From the same wikipedia link.

I am unable to find any reference that makes it mandatory for a design patent application to be accompanied with a working prototype in order to merit the protection. Anyways, as far as the design patent goes, the Star Trek tablet provides the some function, so it qualifies for a design patent.

Another example: A 1994 video demonstrated Roger Fidler's concept for an electronic newspaper tablet.
http://www.minnpost.com/business/2012/07/roger-fidler-man-who-came-tablet-steve-jobs

Guess what, the testimony of this guy will be used in the Apple-Samsung trial.

Design patent just covers drawings and nothing else. I dont know if it is essential to have a working prototype in order to patent a design (although I think it is not required).

Example: The design patent for the iPad
http://www.google.com/patents/USD504889

The only text in the entire design patent is this:

Effectively, this is exactly what the Star Trek TNG tablet was. An electronic device no different from the class of devices that iPad is a part of.

I am not sure if a digital photo frame can fit into the same class of devices because the patent just claims an electronic device. Technically a digital photo frame is also an electronic device.

And if you had bothered to read TFA

So, guess what, it was really ONE YEAR, based on a testimony of Apple's own designers. I believe there is no doubt that the Apple designer Nishibori has worked on a REAL product design.

This is what I claim. I never claimed that the first iPhone of 2007 was a copy of the SONY concept phone.

I am not even sure that the SONY concept phone is actually dated 2006. But, that is not the point. The basic point is the industry was anyways gravitating towards touch enabled phones. There had been many PDA phones (with no keyboard) before the first ever iPhone. So, at best Apple can only claim to have accelerated the era or touchscreen phones.

No company ever claimed sole ownership to qwerty / flip / candybar / slider phones by blocking products of competitors in the market. There could have been reasonable royalty arrangements where the customer choice was not limited. Apple's stance is that a rounded rectangular object with a glass top is owned by them. That is the difference.

Cant find an accurate date on these SONY phones (range 2006 to 2010), but the iPhone 4 looks extremely close to these.
http://www.cellphonebeat.com/sony-ericssons-cybershot-concept-phone.html
http://moblog.net/view/273678/new-sony-ericsson-concept-phone
And multiple phones in these pages (plus/minus a few pages)
http://www.concept-phones.com/tag/sony-ericsson-concept-phone/page/6/

It does not matter whether SONY actually released the particular product in the market or not. The bottom line is Apple's claim that they have come up with an "entirely original" idea that never existed before does not hold water. If anyone is going to design a new touch screen only phone / tablet, there is not much one can do. They cant Patent a rounded rectangle and assert it to prevent competition in the market and escape the microscopic examination of others.

Apple keeps parading the image of before / after iPhone cellphones, where it claims that all cellphones before iPhone were flip / qwerty and candybar and touchscreens did not exist at all (which is a lie). There were many PDA phones before the first ever iPhone in 2007. Even without the iPhone touchscreen phones would have come in the market.
http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_p910-846.php (one cant argue that size of this phone would have never shrunk with time and with advances in technology)

The Wired.com article is totally biased towards Apple.

An example is the SONY concept phone released in 2006.
http://www.cellphonebeat.com/sony-ericssons-cybershot-concept-phone.html

Going by Apple's logic, their version of "inspiration" is removing the slider from the SONY concept phone and making the front all touch (removing the silver buttons). With these two basic modifications, there is no difference between the SONY concept phone of 2006 and the iPhone 4 of 2010. I fail to see why does Apple have double standards when treating with the issue when Samsung / Motorola and HTC are concerned. (rather all popular Android manufacturers)

The industry was already gravitating towards touch screen phones in 2007. The technology was not ready earlier in terms of CPU power, price/performance ratio and OS maturity for touch only phones to be popular mainstream phones. Apple was the first to released a polished product, granted. But, Apple is behaving as if it owns all rights to a touch screen phone / tablet, which I find ridiculous.

Apparently, Apple disagrees. They believe that their patent is so broad that any action of touching the screen is infringing on their patent. Apple has gone on record to claim that a tap is a zero length slide. So, the problem is broad and vague patents are being granted and abused.

True !

There are a few statistics in the wild that explain the situation further.
Chitika Labs iPad stats
Marco.org iOS stats
Chitika Insights Android Stats

Till now, the devs only had to worry about iDevice + iOS-Version. Now, they also have to worry about iDevice-Version + iOS-Version. The market fragmentation argument claimed by Apple as a benefit against Android has just started getting nullified.

As Apple starts penetrating further into price-sensitive and high volume markets like India where there is no concept of contract lock-in, fragmentation may become more prominent. People tend to hold on to "working" devices for longer and device upgrades are not as frequent. There is no operator subsidy to encourage a device upgrade.

So, in summary, yes. Fragmentation "may" hit Apple and it cant be written off as only some Android specific problem now.

Please do not mod the GP to five. It is just spreading more FUD and the parent post is supporting without checking all the facts.

The summary on every page of the wikileaks releases say the following:

On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.

Also, everyone who claims to have bothered to visit the website, would know that Dow was just one of the clients.
List of clients is available here.
List of all releases by Wikileaks is available here.

I hope the parent post would have done some research before flaming others for making BS posts without visiting the wikileaks website.

So, Dow just bought the assets in the 50.5% buy from Union Carbide India Ltd. and all the remaining liabilities were renamed to Eveready Industried India Ltd?

Sure, EIIL also has to share the liabilities. But, Dow and UCC (the previous owners of UCIL) cant wash their hands off by saying that "we used to own that company at some point of time and now we dont."

A truck analogy. I jointly own a truck with my friend. While we both are travelling in a drunk state, we run over a bunch of pedestrians. After the accident, I sell off my part of ownership of the truck to someone else and leave the country. I start working for a different transportation company as their truck driver. The new company in the other country claims that the truck using which the murder happened has been re-painted and ownership of that truck lies with someone else. I claim that I no longer own the truck and hence I am no longer responsible for the death of pedestrians. Is that fair?

And, Union Carbide is a wholly owned subsidy of .......... ?

The company acquiring Union Carbide has also acquired all the liabilities along with the assets. Dow has pretty much everything to do with Union Carbide and the Bhopal disaster. If Dow did not want the "baggage" that came along with the Union Carbide purchase, they should have stayed away from it.

Possibility aside... it is appalling that the minister wants to pre-censor all the content generated by users. What he is suggesting is that all user generated content be reviewed before it goes online. This is just intolerance to opposing views.

Almost all social networking websites have a "report abuse" mechanism that is most probably checked by humans after some automated filtering. The point is why introduce censorship of any kind that can affect free speech in a democratic country.

I would have given him due credit if he had asked the websites to improve their abuse check mechanisms or asked for a faster resolution of reported posts / pages. But, his suggestion is to prevent any potentially objectionable post from going online. There is no way this can be justified in a free country.