Patents don't later forever so unless some miracle happens where someone else makes the technology a success within 20 years then it's pointless. This is assuming Google keeps up with the increasing maintenance costs. It's not just an inflation increase either. The patent system makes it more costly as you work your way through the 20 year term. Assuming Google keeps all their patents for the full 20 years I can't imagine anyone is going to make something similar to driverless cars or google glass a success for at least 10 years. The problem with driverless cars, as an example, isn't just whether the customers are there or not but the cost and size of lidar. Nearly half the cost of Google's driverless car is the lidar unit on the top. That is one hurdle that doesn't look like anyone is close to being able to tackle.

You mean like BP being taken to court over mistakes that were likely caused by contractors? Sorry but people are only in his car based on trust in the Uber brand and the driver still works for Uber. They have some responsibility for hiring bad drivers. They've not done their job to protect their customers properly.

why is Uber astro-turfing slashdot? The site shouldn't be big enough to warrant such tactics.

It's the only logical option. We know the scams aren't legit so if you can't tell the difference then they're all scams.

You can't have anything you dislike removed. However if you're a lazy corporation or a corporation that relies on spying on people then it's in your interest to undermine the law and remove anything requested so the law looks stupid and you can avoid it all together. It doesn't take a genius to see what's happening.

It only benefits the retailers. They have silly requires like SS number and driving licence which I assume is for tracking you but I certainly don't trust that info who companies that have been in the news for questionable security. Plus by excluding credit cards consumers lose the protections they get from credit cards should their phone get lost and on top of being a clunky system of scanning bar codes what stops anyone from using it if they can guess my pass code? Android phones especially are easy to unlock if they're using the finger dragging symbol drawing. Not that iPhones are much harder given its only 4 numbers in most cases.

Most people don't need to do that and unless you're doing serious 3d modelling GIS data processing / interpretation or gaming most desktop apps do not need a core i7 and 16gb of memory. I have an old thinkpad (one of the last IBM labelled ones) and with an SSD and ubuntu is does everything I want except gaming (though it will play TF2 but gets hot at fuck) and it doesn't need all the memory or CPU to do the job. So while that's good that you can do that but for like 99% of people it's unnecessary.

That said you can do 3d modelling, video conversion and 3d gaming on an iPad so of course the hardware will be used to do those things though But most people don't want to do those things on a desktop let alone on an iPad and it doesn't change the fact there are a lot of tasks people want to do and can do on the iPad. Some of them it does better and some things desktops do better. Different tools for different jobs.

The hardware the original ipad had in it would be more of a problem than the software but unless you're obsessive about apps it still works as a device for reading books, surfing the net, watching videos, etc. I suspect the main reason the 1st iPad has a shorter support lifespan was because the hardware was a bit poor but even with that in mind and even if you are totally into apps the idea of having the buy every version of the iPad is entirely unnecessary. It received OS updates for just over 2 years and would have had app support at least until the 2013 which means you could have went from the 1st iPad to a 4th gen one (released end of 2012) and been fully supported which the exception of course where apps would require more power or memory.

For most people it is just a toy but that doesn't mean those who do more should go without. Everything you said applies to the vast majority of desktops too. You don't need to upgrade. My iPad air didn't magically turn to shit. It'll be a viable device for years to come.

I wouldn't even consider this a average trolling. You didn't try at all. Did you post from a samsung tablet which didn't give you enough battery life to write something better?

A lot of them are but they've always been that way. I think the bigger problem is simply accessibility to newsgroups. You have to know about them and possibly buy into a service. A lot of ISPs don't bother with servers or if they do you wouldn't know it unless you went hunting through their help pages. I'm not sure why ISPs care. I would have thought the bandwidth would be better (if they exclude pirating groups) so part of me would not be surprised if the likes of Google and other companies who make a living off tracking people and selling ads are encouraging ISPs to drop newsgroups. It is a far superior way to communicate I think simply because it's like email and the data is removed from the view (as it should be). No need to worry about a website being viewable in mobile browsers and desktops. Let the application deal with that. Its downside, if you want to call it that, is a company can't own it and monetise it. Even ISPs can't honestly find a way to add a further expense on top of it. Even if they did there would be so many other choices in providers.

Or newsgroups. Sell them as government-proof decentralised forums for a new age twist.

Just leave email alone. It works just fine which is why no company has been able to replace it with a proprietary alternative. I know googke is desperate to control email but it won't happen.

You're only allowed to speak out because they allow it. Huge chunks of the population technically don't have constitutional rights thanks to the constitution free zone around the border. Technically no one in Florida is covered by the constitution. The U.S. government just does a better job at making people think they're free.