I'm also a designer, though perhaps not as knowledgeable as stevew at least as far as digital circuitry goes. But I'd like to add a little more explanation on WHY auto place and route tools are not as good as a person, because "instinct" doesn't tell the whole story. All the tools I have used do not do any prediction, look-ahead, or planning; so they tend to paint themselves into corners and rely on sheer horsepower to find a way out. Secondly, all the tools I have used work their way through each stage of the layout one-at-a-time, completing a stage before moving on to the next with no method of returning to an earlier stage with new ideas when opportunities and difficulties present themselves. So, for example, the APR tool might place the devices 10,000 times and then pick the best one based on whatever criteria are selected for. Obviously it can do this in a teeny tiny fraction of the time a human could do it. Then the APR tool might proceed in the same fashion to connect power, do buss routing, do point-to-point routing, then "clean" or "optimize" these routed connections. What it can't do is get to step 5 and see that it is having some trouble and if it just when back to step 2 for a moment and nudged that block over 2 microns I wouldn't have to do this or that. There is stuff you can do when you are looking at the big picture that you just can't do by looking at little pictures millions of times per second.

I've wondered about that since I first heard about this kind of weapon. I wear hard contact lenses, and I vividly remember a safety film we watched in junior-high before they let us weld anything. The film explained that looking at the flash from an arc welder can vaporize the liquid between the lens and your eye and cause the lens to adhere to your eye. Then when you try to take your contacts out, you pull off the front of your eye. So I wonder, have they deemed these micowave crowd-dispersal weapons as "safe" because it will only blind 1 in 200 people or something like that? I mean, how many people still wear hard contacts anyways. And they should know better than to be protesting.

You're wrong right there in the first sentence. Just because they copied, doesn't mean it was illegal; it wasn't copyright, it wasn't a trademark violation, and it is only a valid patent if there wasn't prior art. And secondly, IF it was violation of a valid patent, the remedy is NOT supposed to punish Samsung, it is supposed to pay Apple back for damages done. But your second sentence is right on, $10 per device for pinch-to-zoom and "snapback" is absurd when real patents on important communications tech are licensed for pennies or fractions of pennies per device.

Liv Tyler's dad.

The guy went to 16 stores, probably in one city and got some anecdotes from salespeople. Really? And we're supposed to conclude that lots of people who would not have otherwise bought a Samsung went out and bought one because of the trial? Okay, well I can play that game too. I had a lot of trouble finding a case in stock for my Galaxy S3, therefore I conclude that the S3 is a very popular phone that outsold what case makers predicted. It is a runaway hit! I don't need to bother with actual sales data because I have an anecdote. Facts are not needed when I have a good story.

If people find they can do everything they want to from their Android phone or pad and never buy another PC, it isn't meaningless to Microsoft.

It would be tremendously risky for MS to deliberately wreck the product line, PCs, that they still have the lion's share of, in order to push people towards tablets, where Apple currently dominates, and I predict Android will pass them in less than two years, just as they did on phones while MS phone ran a distant 4th behind Blackberry. Once things like a full-blown Quicken are on Android, the last bit of leverage MS will have will be Exchange and Office. So they can hold out and try to get business and consumers to buy MS pads so that they can have Exchange, or they can port Exchange and Office to Android and not rely on the O/S business so much any more. Since Office and Exchange are their real money makers, and their tablet business is non-existent yet, I think we can all guess which division will win that political battle inside MS. But of course they have to try to preserve their O/S.

Actually, putting lots of expensive inventory that loses it's value over time in a bunch of stores with a bunch of employees is much more expensive than the Amazon business model. A specialty store for commodity products just doesn't make sense. Best Buy IS a fairly bad business in a shrinking market and I think it is completely fair to compare it to Zynga and Chrysler.

I'm excited to see what this guy might do with the company if he doesn't have to answer to shareholders, but I disagree that his willingness to gamble $8.5 billion means anything as to the quality of the plan. Cerberus took Chrysler private and were still losing money when they sold it to Fiat. Smart people valued Zynga at $7.5 billion not too long ago and it is worth $2.23 billion today and I don't think it will stop falling soon. The fact that this guy thinks he can make it worth more than $8.5 billion just means he has a lot of confidence.

and yes, that is sarcasm. I love my Galaxy S3

Everyone should think the way I do, and if you don't you're overly influenced by marketing trends. If you would just listen to me, then all the manufacturers would give me exactly what I want. We don't need choice as long as everyone realizes I'm right.

So the gist of his argument is that no one else is creating new worlds like they did in Bioshock. It is all New York (GTA) and Military Shooters(CoD, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, etc.) No one is doing historical fiction (Assassin's Creed, Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire) or SciFi (Halo, Killzone, Gears, Dead Space, Bulletstorm, Crysis, Homefront, Rage, Resistance) . He totally ignores the fantasy genre, which I can kind of understand since they all have similar worlds, but some are well designed and have strong storytelling. Basically, he is full of crap, and I think he knows it and knows that getting a lot of people to disagree with you is a good way to get some publicity for your new game.

If you had all your media on a Windows PC, which you probably don't but lets pretend you do because lots of people who don't read slashdot do, then an Xbox would be a pretty good way to get that media into the livingroom for $200. The big thing it is missing is that it isn't a DVR, but it is actually a pretty good solution for the rest of the problem.

That doesn't answer the question. I don't believe the shape of the tablet, or the look and feel, is something that can be copyrighted, patented or trademarked. So unless the UK has something else, I don't see how their similarity matters. I could decide that I like your style and copy you, getting the same haircut and wearing the same clothes. Everyone would agree that I copied you, but why should the law care? So I ask an honest question, does the UK have another kind of intellectual property where "registered design" means something?

So Apple has the rights to "cool." Is that patent, trademark, or copyright? Or does the UK has some other category where a "registered design" means something important?