The first commercial LBS service in Japan was launched by DoCoMo, based on triangulation for pre-GPS handsets in July 2001, and by KDDI for the first mobile phones equipped with GPS in December 2001.

What was Xerox doing in the cellphone market around then? Nix.

...and of course Apple was violating, er, Apple's patent too, before Apple re-issued it.

According to the patent, it's a reissue filed in 2010 of an earlier patent application which was was filed in 1998 and issued in 2000.

Why reissue it? Because it's under new ownership?

The reissued patent cites earlier patents going right up to 2009, and Apple didn't get into location-based services (i.e. iPhone) until 2007, after the LG Prada appeared. Meanwhile this happened:

The first consumer LBS-capable mobile web device was the Palm VII, released in 1999. Two of the in-the-box applications made use of the ZIP code-level positioning information and share the title for first consumer LBS application: the Weather.com app from The Weather Channel, and the TrafficTouch app from Sony-Etak / Metro Traffic.

Since Palm had a LBS product out before the original patent was issued, and Xerox never really turned their patent into a product, how the f**k is this new patent enforceable?

The later seasons with Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy seemed weaker; maybe that's because it was still aimed at a young age group that I was growing out of, or maybe it's because by then I'd seen enough US Sci Fi movies and TV shows that Dr Who looked distinctly low-budget.

The new series' have much higher production values, and seem to be pitched at an older audience - my kids can enjoy it, but there's something there for adults too.
David Tennant made a better Doctor than Christopher Eccleston though.

Best candidate for Twelfth Doctor: Benedict Cumberbatch.

Subscribers have been paying for that for over two decades now.

This is one of the main reasons why I'm not going near Android yet: "all with only a single touch of your phone." is not hands-free.

When Android phones appear with true hands-free voice dialing (through a Bluetooth headset) and can run for 3-4 days on a single charge, I'll be interested.
Until then, I'm sticking with dumb-phones.

(Samsung phones like my S7220 don't have hands-free voice-dialing either, any of them as far as I can tell - the market-led engineering at Samsung dictates that smile detection and "fake calls" are more important - but I can go six days on a single charge *)

I don't expect to see that longevity on Android until 2012, if at all.

* But only because I have no friends

Luxury!

We had to type in our games by hand, in hexadecimal, for two whole hours. And fix the bugs introduced by printing errors in the magazine. Then after playing for five minutes, we'd switch off, and next time we'd have to type in the whole thing again.

You try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

Scary thing is: I still have the Yorkshire accent.

Also reported by the Daily Mail, the Belfast Telegraph, Daily Star, and a whole bunch of other sh*trags that can't be bothered to report real stories. Even Fox News got in on the act.

This "research" was revealed in a press release published by Chevrolet UK (that's GM's rebadged Daewoo division), who are desperate to get people to buy their cars without paying for a full-page ad.

Amusingly though, Fox News and The Independent (which are poles apart in editorial views) reported this without even mentioning the company behind the press release; this thwarts GM's efforts, but also suggests that they think this is real news about real research, and not just a cheap marketing stunt.

Agreed.

2GB RAM and 320GB disk is the spec I bought (admittedly in a generic Dell PC) three years ago, for £450. Now Apple would like me to pay £649 for much the same thing.

Yes, I know Apple hardware is better built (ignoring for a moment the more serious design mistakes) but that Apple price premium always keeps me away from their products - I consider it a tax on stupidity.

Many BMW models have an mpg gauge in the lower half of the rev-counter, so you can actually see a needle flicking across when you rev the engine.

That's more visible than trip-computers, which most people probably have set to display range or average speed and not mpg.

Has he forgotten about SVG ? Adobe still distributes a viewer for SVG, and there's native support in Firefox.

I think they're basically saying "We don't want open standards - we want only our standard".

I completely agree. Ink-jets work best (least worst) when they're in regular (if not continual) use. But regular use means you really get stung by the price of the inks.

Many people with ink-jets use them only occasionally, at most once or twice a week. So the ink dries up, and you have to use way too much just to get the ink flowing again.

(Where are mod points when you need 'em?)

Since I'm an old guy who was using PCs in the DOS era, I'm entitled to reminisce about how things were better in the old days:

In the mid 1980's, I was using a Citizen 120D, a 9-pin dot matrix printer (standard for So/Ho use at the time, real professionals were using 24-pin printers), and that cost around £150 in the UK ($180 in the US).
With inflation, that would be around £300 ($330) today.

Similarly, I had the luxury of using a DeskJet 500 in the late '80s. That was a $500 printer, but the thing lasted for nearly ten years. It was bulletproof.

For something like $100 back then, people in the UK could by a crappy thermal printer like the Alphacom 32

And that's when printers had their own ROMs so they knew how to print stuff without relying on drivers or Windows GDI. Before the cost-cutting started.

So I conclude that as printers have got cheaper, they've actually got worse. Any printer these days costing less than about $100 will be absolute crap, and for anything good, we should get used to the idea of spending $200 upwards for something that will probably outlast our PC.

Rant over. Get off my lawn, kids.