The advertising industry never intended to honor Do Not Track anyway.

It is the wrong choice that cross site tracking and data aggregation on users should be the default expectation, and this standard is the unholy result of advertising driven companies bending over backwards to try to make a compromise with the big advertisers - that never even intended to honor the choice of users who did manually try to opt out!

I remember the exact same discussion and arguments when pop-up blockers first appeared included in browsers, that it was wrong and harmful to web sites' economy that they were on by default, and that this did not reflect an active user choice.

The explanation is in an update at the end of the article. They have always just used the first 16 characters, and hashed that, and ignored any additional characters you enter. The only change here is that they don't anymore let you enter the additional characters that they ignored anyway.

This is still the case, and it is even worse than that. They are only allowed to use the old javascript engine built into iOS, not the faster JIT javascript engine (Nitro) that Safari have access to. So all "alternative" browsers on iOS are just reskinned, slower versions of Safari (except Opera Mini which offloads the work to remote Opera servers and basically just displays it).

You have most of Western Europe on two of those lists. Your argument is that Apple doesn't consider us their customer base. Got it.

My iPad2 does not charge if I plug the Apple connector cable into my standard USB charger. Has that changed?

Actually, it seems IE10-team has a pretty independent focus on user experience. On my Windows 8 test machine it has proactively several times recommended to remove addins from Microsoft to speed up performance (from Bing, from Windows Live, from Office!). I'm guessing those other MS divisions must be livid. I know we've loved to make fun of IE for quite some time, but it is a good thing that IE10 is shaping up quite nicely (we don't want to replace "made for IE6" with "made for webkit", and you can see what more is coming at http://html5labs.interoperabilitybridges.com/

The moment a number of users started to turn on DNT ad networks would find a reason to not honor it anyway. It seems DNT was a privacy standard built on the peculiar premise that it only works as long as it stays unknown to most users ('if few enough know about enabling DNT then maybe the ad networks will leave us that do alone').

I know that my Samsung SII do have line level analogue out through the micro usb port, so it is possible. And, the new connector spec they are releasing is to adress exactly the shortcomings of the old you are mentioning. What we are discussing here is that Apple too is in process of introducing a new connector spec, incompatible with everything currently out there. Why couldn't they then join the MHL/MicroUSB standard group, using the new version. I'm sure they would be able to get support for external controls in there if they wanted to.

Ok, I can let you know right away. Many phones have that today, including phones as old as Samsung Galaxy S2. MHL is a standard for exactly this, supported by multiple manufacturers (except Apple). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_High-Definition_Link

According to reports Apple is planning to strip out Firewire and video to get to the new smaller connector and lower pin count. Granted, this is not confirmed by Apple yet, but something has to go when the pins goes. And, as mentioned by others here - Apple's competitors are able to do this with MicroUSB ports, including analogue sound (on Samsungs at least, don't know about others).

Well, to put it this way, if it took him 136 hours to see that the Samsung design was similar to the Apple design (he was a design witness), maybe Samsung should call him to the stand :)

My SkyDrive does exactly this. Right-click on file, share - get a link (select to give view or edit rights, built in URL shortener). You can also make file public, share on Facebook or send directly as an email from within SkyDrive.

I'll add a non-AC to the mix. I've tried the Win8RC quite extensivly on a laptop (non-touch) and do see multiple benefits (speed - this thing is fast, multiscreen capabilities, battery life and a couple of other things - it really is a better Windows 7 than Windows 7. And it has been impressively rock stable). Then you have the metro start screen replacing the old start menu thrown into that picture. Yes, that is, well, jarring. . For me it is a question whether this new full screen start menu replacing the old pop-up start menu is a blocker against getting the other OS improvements, and for me the answer is no, the start menu is not where i spend my time. Pin the programs you use to the taskbar, use a couple of keyboard screenshots like WinKey-X (I've always done that, if you are allergic to shortcuts or want to make snarky comments about the need to do so, be my guest :) and you hardly ever will see or use metro at all, so the whole "tablet/phone touch interface vs mouse and keyboard desktop interface" discussion doesn't really seem relevant to me (to me! I have no issues with people seeing this as a blocker for them).

I don't understand this argument (I know it after much discussion was the compromise in the standard, but it is not a good one). Do not stalk me unless I allow you to should be the default expected behavior. That the built-in popup-blocker block popup ads by default doesn't give the website any right to claim that I didn't really actively choose to block popup ads so they are free to circumvent it.

It seems some people were hoping advertisers would respect their settings to opt-out, as long as not too many people knew about it and did it (because a significant number of users opting out would surely also "KILL the do-not-track project", stopping advertisers from respecting the setting, if they ever will). I just think this is a strange and unsustainable approach. Hopefully this will provoke a better approach.