I don't see how fair and reasonable come in to this specific case. That has already been used to determine a price which is available to other customers. The non-discriminatory part of the obligation means Samsung (in this case) is required to offer that same price to Apple, i.e. not discriminate depending on the customer. If I understand what little I have read, Samsung refuses to accept that option from Apple so Apple has no deal to close until Samsung lives up to the FRAND obligation they agreed to in order to have their patents accepted as part of a public standard. I'm pretty sure this is also the case of Nokia's patents.

I'm not a fan of the patent system but I don't see how Samsung and Nokia are sympathetic actors when they are trying to weasel out of their FRAND obligations which largely provide the reason why their patents have worth. I am frankly baffled that people seem to assume that Apple is simply unwilling to pay a licensing fee for use of patents. What I believe Apple is refusing to do is be treated in a discriminatory fashion by companies with FRAND patents. How is that sinister?

Where did you get the idea that cross licensing is "the right thing"? I'm glad that at least one of the leviathans is not playing the cross licensing game. Making cross licensing the normal course of events means that only large established corporations get to play the game. If you don't have a vast portfolio of patents, regardless of whether they are valid or even useful, means that new and possibly innovative entrants face a daunting prospect.

If only the smaller, less politically connected (i.e. no history of making repeated large political contributions) companies are subject to damaging legal proceedings what are the chances for patent reform? But if Samsung and similar titans are similarly vexed, maybe the politicians they own will do something about the ruinous patent system.

One exception to this is if a patent is proposed as part of an industry standard that is required to comply with the industry standard (like LTE and other communications standards). In that case the owner of the patent agrees to FRAND licensing terms (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory).

That is at the core of some of these disputes. For instance Samsung holds some FRAND patents for LTE. They license it to some companies for a specific price. When dealing with Apple they refuse to offer the same terms but insist on cross licensing of Apple patents that are not FRAND encumbered. This violates the non-discriminatory part of their agreement. But if you are a huge company with access to expensive legal resources it hardly matters if you violate terms of your agreements. I suppose that is what lawyers are for. Of course in this case although Samsung is a huge business conglomerate, Apple is also a huge company with vast legal resources. So we get to watch a sumo match that is rolling out worldwide.

In a sense it is almost satisfying to watch huge corporations caught up in the "intellectual property" tar baby of their own devising. It offers a contrast to the usual bullying of smaller players which is probably the more common case though not as easily visible.

Good luck with that. Some years back Charlie Rose (I think it was him) had an episode of his program about privacy and encryption including all the usual suspects like EFF, RSA and geek celebrities. After all the conversation about what was available and how it should be used Charlie asked the individuals about their habits. None of them actually used encryption for their own email usage. None of them.

One reason for that result is the process of bit rot. After setting encryption for your current needs, my experience is that over time it breaks in one fashion or another. Updating yourself and those with whom you hope to communicate is the usual slog and you continue until bit rot again takes its toll. The best chance (technically rather than politically speaking) is the encryption option built in to IPv6. This could allow all that you do over the net to be completely opaque to anyone who wants to snoop (particularly massive signal intercept). This was designed and built before the thugs with guns and money (governments, corporations, etc) decided they needed to rein in the geeks. Its chances of deployment are rather slim. Despite heroes like Phil Zimmermann it seems like encryption will be used against rather than for the masses. One can always hope.

Someone really needs to mention that there is often an issue of FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) patents. Companies that hold patents that they want to have adopted by a standards organization will usually agree to FRAND licensing of those patents. However, it appears this system is fraying around the edges. Companies, like Nokia and Samsung, will offer terms to some companies and then when dealing with Apple insist on cross licensing with Apple's patents that are not encumbered by FRAND terms.

Personally, I'm not convinced that patents have ever been an optimal idea for society going back as far as James Watt's steam engine. But given the reality of the legal system that is in place, I think it is rather dishonest for many of these companies to act as though they are victims when they are attempting to ignore that they had agreed to license in a non-discriminatory fashion.

So if we are going to start down this road, I think companies holding FRAND patents who have clearly failed to honor the terms as they had agreed, should be stripped of those patents. Also, instead of extending patents to ever new areas (business method, software, design) those "innovations" should be rolled back in recognition of what disasters they have become.

Install VPN to "virtually relocate" to a country that has not been bought and paid for by the media cartel. I'm not clear on whether DNS lookups are in the VPN pipe but if it becomes an issue the next step is to configure it so those packets are handled. In general it has always been a bad idea that encryption has not been deployed to keep private matters private but instead depend on "the kindness of strangers". Of course, there is also tor which can always benefit from more people adding to its nodes.

Well, one part of the original AT&T culture was not maintained by the company calling itself AT&T today. The original AT&T funded Bell Labs, one of the most significant research labs of the twentieth century which did research worthy of multiple Nobel Prizes. Nothing like that from the current company calling itself AT&T.

"had Verizon not been left out of the iPhone sales fest early on" That's an odd way to characterize what happened. The folklore is that Apple tried to recruit Verizon but insisted that the iPhone not be screwed up by the carrier and Apple would manage all the apps. Verizon told Apple to take a hike and AT&T got exclusivity in return for accepting Apple's unprecedented demands. Way too many people don't recall that the cellphone market was utterly controlled by the carriers before the iPhone was launched and how shitty it was as a result. The carriers still have way too much power to mess up the user experience (monthly charge for what an app could do for a one time charge - tethering, for example) but it is still so much better today.

In case anyone else does care the differences include that the iPad2 is thinner, lighter, has better battery life, much faster 3D graphics, better CPU, and a mediocre camera. It is simply brutal to compete with Apple in the iPad market because Apple has been working on this product for almost a decade (the design patents are from 2005-2006). Imagine how angry the managers at Samsung in charge of chip fabrication and LCD displays must be. A lazy executive elsewhere in the giant Samsung corporation gets lazy/careless assuming Apple will look the other way because of business relations and simply clones the look of the iPad and instead Apple chooses to play hardball. Apple takes its component acquisition business elsewhere and files lawsuits. I'm sure Samsung will survive but the managers who decided to cut corners should be looking for new opportunities.

Now that's funny.

The thing you are missing is that comedy is not so easy. Something isn't a 'joke' or 'funny' just because you claim it is. If Apple had some quality control problems with the iPad there might be a joke there. They didn't. One is just left scratching his head wondering what the joke was supposed to be. That is why comedy is usually best left to professionals rather than nerds with an axe to grind.

Well, yes and no. They are both "actually" infinite but from a measure theory standpoint they are not equal. The interval from 0 to 1 has measure 1 and if you remove all the rational numbers from that set it still has measure 1. The removed set, the rationals from 0 to 1 has measure 0. So the uncountable set has measure 1 and the countably infinite set has measure 0. In that sense uncountably infinite sets can be usefully thought of as "bigger" than countably infinite sets. It has literally been decades since I took Royden's course on this topic so I apologize if I've missed anything important.

No, the rational numbers and the real numbers are both infinite, but there is no one-to-one, onto mapping between them. There is an injective mapping of the rationals into the reals. There is even a one-to-one, onto mapping of the rationals to the algebraic numbers (a superset of the rationals containing most of the irrationals you usually encounter). In other words countable infinity (integers, rationals, algebraic) are all "the same" and smaller than uncountable infinity (the reals).

This digression has about as much relevence to Apple as the prattling about the architecture of Apple's new headquarters.

How's that Amiga working for you now?

I'm not anxious to defend the bankers involved in creating the mess but I thought that much of the TARP fund was eventually repaid. Is that not the case?