How long till something is like this available to law enforcement . They have already gotten away with putting gps trackers on people's car in their drive ways with no judicial over-site. The privacy and legal ramifications are going to be immense. Stewbee pointed out that the majority of the plans are on developers blog, since we got camera phones people don't hesitate to violate each others privacy, imagine what will happen with this.

This has gotten so out of hand, its like ALL the major tech companies have lost their collective fning mind. instead of creating new and better tech its turned into little kids fighting ( I know what you are, what am I) smh.

I read them too and I took them as a positive and complimentary of the device. Microsoft reaction to me is what leads me to look at the phone as probably not being so great. When a business acts that parinoid it doesn't promote confidence in the next product, Apple, RIM, and the bazillions of Android device makers are not worried about Uncle Balmer and his merry men.

My only problem is there are so many ways to write code to do the same thing. it also doesn't address the extend issue is that exist within the software industry, People like Amazon for instance, applied for a patent for a button that lets you buy an item in 1 click if you are a returning customer on their website. That a frivolous patent and there are many like it.

For software patents I would get behind that (even though I think software patents are silly overall... they really should have stuck with it under copyright) for hardware That would be could turn into a vastly expensive endeavor for a single or independent engineer. I not sure how to make the patent system fair in that case.

I completely understand. I have the same problem. I think that is the line between gamers and geeks (in or out the closet nerds lol). most gamers play to see all the things possible in the game where us geek types raised on star wars, star trek, comic books have a very strong sense of fairness and good and evil being more black an white. I had the hardest times in the military dealing with the politics of some of our missions when it was about "American Intrest" and not about the doing the right thing, I am the same way with video games, I find a lot of people are.

In mercenaries: playground of destruction you kill or subdue a civillian or reporter it counted against you in the game. It did not matter if it was on purpose or accidental , the game attitude was collateral damage is bad for business , which is true in the real world. In the real world it bad politically & morally (sp?)

what do they think they are preventing if student's and teachers are going to have an inappropriate relationship , not being facebook friends isn't going to prevent it. I think it smoke and mirror move to look like he actually doing the business of gov't. How about he sign a bill with a mandatory sentence for teachers having "relations" with students, smh.

I personally know many companies that are limiting their wireless roll out because of security concerns. The cloud is a great idea in concept, but I would never trust my most senstive date with a third party. between rouge cracker groups like Anonymous and luzsec, the issues google and facebook have had with employees snooping in people's messages just shows how a nightmare is waiting to happen. Some are going to say why would they bother with me, all you have to do is look like your related to one of their causes and you become a target. The cloud is great for small business and some mid size businessess but if your have a lot of sensitive stuff or bound by HIPPA it becomes a whole different can of worms (even github has a solution for business that can't use the cloud that is hugley popular). Short-sighted management views and IT department as cost center, A leader views it's IT staff like Paratroopers, The drop out the sky right were when you need them. An IT team can show you ways to save money with diffrent technologies, some will show you ways you can make money if you listen ( we showed our exec staff a way to they could bring in another 250k to the bottom line ). One thing I do expect to see is more IT generalist

exactly, they need to allow people to explicitly tag the item if they want it to a useful design feature

So its laser etched on this special disk, but will a good scratch kill the data readability. One careless nimrod can really make for a bad day. and where are these "data crystals" babylon 5 promised us .....and my light-weight Jet pack lol

the writting was on the wall, bad behavior, from Oracle....who would have "thunk" it. I really like the java language but I feel oracle is really hurting it's future, and with Ruby (on rails), Python (django) and .net/mono all nippiing at your heels is it really the best strategic move on their part.

What ever happen to fair use, software is not like chemistry or hardware enginerering were things are hard to repeat. How can you patent something after it is in wide use. Software patents are not about innovation but racketeering , its become a cash cow for microsoft brow beating HTC with a , its not surprising apple would the same. (aimed directly at google/android). its sad that being a spammer becoming a more honorable a professional that being a software developer with these horrid patents

1) What game developer doesn't EA seem to own. 2) I will give them the benefit of the doubt, they seem to have largely let bioware run itself, so i have hope for popCap. I still wonder why the sold the company.

This is going to get real interesting, W3C has always been about fair use in my opinion. I suspect this move is to "protect" something in the IPhone (check the air quotes lol) but hampering a nacent non-prorietary technology is not good for them or the community. Better for Apple to create "framework" that enhances HTML 5 as part of their sdk.