Apple is a publicly owned company. The stated purpose of a publicly owned company is to increase share-holder value (i.e. make money). Apple wants to make money for its shareholders. They do that by making gadgets that people want to buy and keeping other companies from stealing their ideas. I don't think they ever claimed to be a not-for-profit company. Their goal is not that of giving the world the best possible set of gadgets regardless of profit. Their goal is to make money and to do so by coming up with better gadgets and keeping other companies from stealing their ideas. You imagine that the world was put here for your benefit. Bah! Grow up and look around. Apple doesn't give a crap about you and never will. Neither does Samsung. Neither does Google. Heck, Greenpeace probably doesn't even like you very much. :)

A direct copy of an iPhone is a lot like porn. You know it when you see it. Samsung, et. al. flat out copied the iPhone, and then the iPad. Nothing that came before it looked anything like it. Now everything looks just like it. The entire industry copied the crap out of Apple's new devices. The purpose of a patent system is to allow someone who creates something entirely "new" to profit fully from their ingenuity. That is it's full and complete purpose. If the system is very flawed, don't bash Apple for trying to use it as best they can to accomplish the goals of the patent system. Bash the very flawed patent system. If, on the other hand, you disagree with the purpose of a patent system, then you should move to a communist country where nobody benefits from their own ingenuity.

ahhhhmen to that brother...but by post 50, it gets pretty stale. The trick ( I have learned via hind-sight ) is to avoid getting trapped in the debt that the upper-middle class lifestyle engenders. Then you can much more easily move out of corporate "safety" into something more interesting and challenging on your own. I've been trying to get from where I was ( deep in debt ) to the above-described nirvana for about 5 years now while still cowering at a fortune 100 company as an "old guy" (aka Senior Staff Engineer/manager) Mostly though, just amen to the "life is complex" line that you started with!

Based on my experience...you are giving doctors WAY too much credit.

Seriously tired of all the rambling about freedom here. Have any of those who incessantly babble on about how some capitalist is "taking away their freedom" ever actually thought through the lack of logic in their statement? As if you have some god-given right to set policy within a sphere or activity that grew out of someone else's creative efforts. If you don't like Apple's walled garden, then stick your shovel in some different dirt! Nobody is forcing you to buy anything from Apple. Enough of this silly "I want something exactly like what that guy invented, but I want complete control over it!" Grow up. Apple's only relevance is that they put together a system of 'stuff' that a good many people like. You can buy in, or you can stay out. You can't come in and tell Steve how to run it. Invent your own. In the unlikely event that a few people like it and decide to buy into yours...I probably will abstain. Ain't freedom grand?

I would have to agree -- you are no Electrical Engineer.

Just a quick look around any high-tech company makes this pretty obvious.

I miss the old days when somebody could be wrong without being crazy, retarded or evil.

that point in time where the frustration/unhappiness curve for engineers/developers shoots to infinity. All development stops, ushering in a new stone age.

hooked up to the most convenient "search" box. I apple just puts in a mildly similar looking set of search results, and a colorful 'apppppple' logo above the page numbers, most people won't give it a second thought. Sure, slashdotters would notice, but Ma and Pa and the 90 percent of the population that is not the least bit techy could care less. They're just interested in the stuff they find in the sites that are found, not in who provides the search. I think it is kind of silly for Apple to go on giving all of that money away to Google every year. They could be making a fortune off of the advertising in their own search instead of giving it away to Google. Getting back to "most people", I think they will also continue to call it "googling" eventhough they are typing their search into an Apple search box. (just like we used to say "go make a xerox of this on the Kodak machine" when I worked at Kodak a million years ago -- though that was just for fun -- come to think of it, does Kodak still make copiers?)

All your freedom are belong to us. . . In reality, it is already too late to "fix" this by changing the slope of the curve with governmental restrictions on amount/types of energy use. The only viable solution, and the most likely to happen, is some form of Geoengineering. At some point, some large country, acting in its own self interest (or in the interest of a well-monied lobbyist) will unilaterally enact a Geoengineering "solution". This will mostly likely outrage and inconvenience some other country (or lobbyist or large company with internal resources capable of Geoengineering), setting off a chain reaction of competing attempts at geoengineering. The only viable solution to the coming geoengineering crisis is to put democracy on hold. . .

Apple is doing just fine all by itself just like it has from the start. The thing that has me bothered is that I've been driving Ford's all my life (Dad worked for Ford forever). Now that Ford has been infected with Microsoft I may have to get my cars from somebody else. ;(

Now they will have to start CGI animating the Golden Globe and Emmy shows too... Nobody wants to see a 60 year old grandmother accepting an award for a movie where she played hotness.

Having just committed the ultimate /. sin, I read the company info after posting. TFA erroneously combined the properties of two different products from the company with similar names. The product that is used on groundwater is intended only to grab and hold harmless the bad stuff, not for removing it from the ground.

groundwater |groundwôtr; -wätr| noun water held underground in the soil or in pores and crevices in rock. Me thinks this is a bogus article about a bogus "invention" by a bogus company. Water ON the ground is sometimes called "a flood", and sometimes called "a lake", depending upon whether or not the condition is chronic.