It's quite likely that any patents Palm has are in part derived from -- guess who -- Apple, since Palm was essentially a spin-off from the Newton project. And Newton had icons on a grid before Palm even existed.

And Apple bought the company that first commercialized multi-touch gestures (Fingerworks), so they likely own the patents on that too.

seeing != stealing.

As noted in this thread and many, many, many, many times before: Apple paid Xerox for the rights in stock options. I'm sure they've gotten many times their R&D money back out of that deal, assuming they still have those stocks.

And how, exactly, did they do that? "Stealing" from BSD is like saying you're "stealing" from a box labelled "free stuff!"

If you find "stolen" code on http://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1072/, I'm sure they'd like to know about it.

Most protests don't start out with any idea other than "something's wrong here." It's only afterwards that we can see that they changed something; while it's happening it's pretty much just chaos.

And they do have a list of what's wrong: You have to look no further than the fact that they're occupying Wall St. instead of the National Mall. They're protesting the disproportionate financial imbalance between those who drove the economy into the ground without having to take responsibility for it, and those who are actually shouldering the burden of their actions.

As many people have already pointed out, this is very similar to the conditions which led to the French Revolution, so I wouldn't dismiss them too readily. After all, that was organized by a bunch of largely illiterate people who got tired of bearing the burden of a collapsing but insulated monarchy. It didn't end too well for the monarchy.

Yes, you're right to a degree. But there are thousands of talented engineers at hundreds of other firms that are making nowhere near the impact that Apple had. The CEO is the person who recognizes genius and puts it forward as the driving force of the company. So, yes, Apple would be nothing without their engineers, but the engineers would be nowhere without a CEO that recognizes their work and places it at the centre of their corporate strategy. I think that when most CEOs look for genius they go to their marketing department, while Apple turns to its engineering and design departments.

His name is on 300+ patents from Apple. Not all patents from Apple, which makes me think he actually did something substantial to earn those 300. He's often not listed first, but sometimes he is. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/steve-jobs-patents.html) Draw your own conclusions.

I'll bet these scientists, who have advanced degrees in this field and have been working on this problem for *years* are all reading your comment on Slashdot and collectively slapping their foreheads and saying "Of course! WHY didn't we think of that. That *must* be the problem."

Seriously? You think they didn't check that?

Because the law is an art, not a science?

The definition of "legal" is pliable. I'm sure MS doesn't think that what they're doing is illegal, and they probably wouldn't call it extortion but a judge or jury might think otherwise after hearing evidence and weighing contextual factors.

That's kinda the problem. If you can simply last long enough in a court room to see someone actually come to a judgement about it, then you might be in the right and MS is in the wrong. Trouble is, most individuals or even corporations don't have the kind of resources to wait that long, especially against giants like MS with huge war chests, so they just pay to settle and nothing gets decided.

Why would Apple build a brand new <a href="http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/01/apples-new-data-center-is-visible-at-last-from-space/">multimillion-dollar data facility</a>, only to farm out their biggest and most high-profile internet services to external parties?

You've obviously never done tech support before.

"You mean I drop my internet on this EXE? But I've been told that I should never open exe's on the internet."

"I edited the file like you said, but now my Firefox won't open."
"How did you do it?"
"Well, first I opened the file up in Word... That's a text editor, right?" ...ad nauseum.

No, he isn't God, but they've certainly got enough money to throw at this to make it stick. I would say they're off to a pretty good start too, wouldn't you? The key to establishing a platform is to make sure enough people buy it to make it self-sustainable. They now have millions of iOS devices out in the wild, so that keeps demand up.

Apple's misses have been somewhat minimized over the last few years. The last big "miss" they had was the G4 cube, and I wouldn't even really call that a miss -- just a bad call, but it really had no appreciable impact on their bottom line. The first iteration of the Apple TV was pretty lousy; the current gen, from all accounts, is selling pretty well. Their Mac division is growing year-over-year, their OS has proven it's flexible enough to make transitions between PPC, Intel, and now mobile chipsets. It's no Windows juggernaut, but it's pulling in pretty respectable numbers.

<blockquote>It just so happens that in arenas like MP3 players, phones and tablet computers, and online music stores, the options really sucked before Apple came along.</blockquote>

"All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?"

Can you name a "miss" that Apple has has within the last five years?

You mean like this? http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/imovie.html

I just attended a concert and a workshop where one of the performers was using two iPads as control surfaces for electro-acoustic music. To me, the iPad (currently) is more like "Web 1.0", where, for most people, it was a medium focused on consuming. If you don't think Apple is going to make this work in the consumer space, and guarantee its success, you don't know Apple.

The poster's wife sounds like a pretty light computer user, so I'm not sure if she's going to be hitting the extreme limits of the keyboard hardware.

What you call the "air intakes" on the left and right are actually the speakers. The exhaust ports on the MBP are in the hinge. I'm also sure that the MBP has a full-size keyboard. At least, I've never noticed any difference in the size. Not sure why you call this form over function - it seems like form and function to me. You always use an external keyboard, so *any* laptop keyboard is going to feel small.

What you call stupid, I call perfectly fine:
http://images.apple.com/macbookpro/images/design_trackpad20110224.jpg
- Backspace and delete are the same key, with the FN key modifying them. MBPs no longer have the different enter and return keys.
- "Should be" is subjective. For example, I can say my keyboard has an escape key where I there should be a cheeseburger.
- They're not swapped on OSX, they're exactly where they should be.
- Most keyboards have two sets of modifier keys, for left and right handed people. Again, personal preference.
- And what key would be "wasted"? "PrnScr"? Scroll Lock?
- Again, backspace and delete are the same key. Fn modifies them. Sometimes keys with two labels on them mean they serve two purposes.

Did you actually ever use one, or just hear friends of your buddies talking about a guy that they met in a pub complaining about his girlfriend that was using a Mac keyboard?

Wow. Slashdot really needs to fix this bug. It's pulling in comments from 1999! Everybody knows that Macs support multi-button mice now, and that their trackpads can be configured in one and two-button configurations. I mean, in this context it sounds like this poster has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. And that would just be absurd, right? So it must be a bug.

A theory is a belief, even if scientific. A scientific theory says, given all the known facts and observations, we believe this explanation to be true. Yes, it carries much more weight and credence than "I believe in something because a 6000 year-old book told me to," but it's still a "best guess" as to the true explanation of the facts.

Like it or not, we never really have a full picture of complex systems, like astrophysics, quantum mechanics, biological systems, and many other examples. The best we can usually hope for is a best guess of the explanation, based on observation, so that we can build on that knowledge and move forward. That best guess is also a belief, and from time to time, that belief is re-evaluated and either confirmed or invalidated for a new set of best guesses. That process and transformation doesn't make it *not* a belief, it just makes it one that we're not scared to change from time to time, unlike an absolute belief in a deity.

What part of what he said isn't true?