You've created a lovely strawman and torn him down quite nicely. People do not "just decide" to get second- and third-trimester abortions; aborting a pregnancy after the first trimester is very dangerous to the mother, and third-trimester abortions are normally only done in situations where carrying the baby to term is almost certain to kill the mother.

Abortion as a means of birth control is not a choice I would ever personally advocate to a friend or partner, but it's also none of my business (or yours) what a woman chooses to do with her body. You don't like it, fine, but don't make disingenuous and fallacious arguments in support of your point while condemning the same in other people. That's hypocrisy of the worst kind.

p

Finally, someone who gets it. It only took 80 or so up-modded responses to the story before someone said exactly what I was thinking from the get-go: that Apple is patenting this to *prevent* anyone from pulling this crap on iPhone users. See also this story from last year in a similar vein:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/06/018240

p

Perhaps, but it also lacks any substance beyond "this happened", most likely because it's a rehash (possibly even a direct syndication) of a wire story that was put out on the wire by a newspaper, not a legal expert. Actually, the Trib had a better story on its *own* site than the article that got published here.

p

http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2009/hipcheck16-no-turk-182-anonymous-political-speech-sacred

is much better -- it's written by actual legal scholars and discusses what the specific "deeply disturbing" comments were. Sometimes the hometown major newspaper isn't actually the best place to get articles, Slashdot.

p

If you really want to be pedantic about it, "it has got" is not proper grammar either, and no one would ever say "it's one little problem" in place of "it has one little problem", so you still fail. Nice try, though.

p

Please. "Online music sales" and "music library manager software" are not, by any means, the same thing. Apple may have a de facto monopoly on the online music business, but iTunes is definitely not the only music library manager out there, and it isn't even the only one capable of playing files purchased via iTunes. Songbird and WinAmp (yes, that's still around) are two alternatives that come to mind, either of which could easily be made to support -- via proper and official means -- the syncing of iTunes's XML library file with a third-party device. Writing software to do it themselves is also an option for Palm, and one they're clearly capable of, as they've written sync software for ages.

The bottom line here is that Palm is being lazy, and now they're actively shooting themselves in the foot by intentionally violating the USB spec. If Apple wants to prevent devices that violate the USB spec from connecting to its computers, by all means, go ahead. Who knows what other parts of the USB spec Palm might be planning to selectively ignore in the future?

p

I know I'm a couple hours late to the party, but this is just sad...

My RSS reader shows changes in feeds. The original RSS summary for this article had "its" without the apostrophe -- correctly, as anyone with half a brain knows. The latest RSS feed, and the actual story page, show "it's". Hint: if you can't replace "it's" with "it is" in the sentence, it's (yes, really) wrong.

Oh, yeah, and this is a really cool photo and etc.

p

So RockMelt is a commercial Flock.

Yeah, ask Flock how that's working out for them. Better yet, ask a neutral third party how that's working out for Flock. I don't think there's any future in RockMelt if "social networking" is their browser business model.

p

Don't they already have my number in the missed calls log?

Not if the call came in when the phone was turned off or out of service range (for example, when the recipient is on an airplane). At least, I've yet to see a phone on T-Mobile or AT&T that can tell you what calls you missed while it was turned off. (AT&T's Visual Voicemail on the iPhone, at least, allows you to see who left a voicemail and what time it was, but I'm not sure how it handles callers who aren't already in your contact list. That obviously requires that the caller leave a voicemail, however.)

p

Uh, no, that would be United, not American.

I miss those ads, though. Those ads were great. When's the last time you saw an airline ad that wasn't for Southwest?

p

The police should list "lack of skill" as a cause, not speed.

The National Transportation Safety Board's aircraft accident investigations are an excellent model for this. The vast majority of aircraft accidents are caused, ultimately, by "pilot error", analogous to "lack of skill". I'm guessing the police don't have a year to spend investigating each and every accident, though. (That's the typical time period of an NTSB investigation, and obviously the NTSB has several orders of magnitude fewer accidents to investigate each year.)

p

Does this mean we can expect IBM to start suing anyone who uses HTML-formatted e-mail? Because I think that would probably be a good thing.

p

Er, that's exactly the *point*. Why do you think everyone "unbundled" those services? Because when the first airline did it, all of a sudden, everyone else offering flights from JFK to LAX got shoved down the list at Travelocity or Orbitz. Travelers are generally idiots and only think about what the face value of a ticket is, without considering what other costs may be attached to it that they're not seeing on the search results screen. The airlines know this and price accordingly. It's not rocket science.

p

So kind of like a dark sucker, then?

p