Just yesterday, we had a story about the FBI seizing servers in virginia and most of the comments were negative. Of course, in this thread, most of the comments are positive.

One difference is we know the purpose of the seizures in this case, which makes it seem less fly-by-night, but I wonder how the hosting providers felt when the servers were first seized. Not that we should let the FBI seize whatever, whenever, but sometimes quick action to seize evidence is necessary, even if it inconveniences others.

I looked at the terms linked in the article. It appears these terms are attached to special purchases from Apple solely for promotional purposes. (i.e., you contact Apple beforehand about buying some for a promotion and they give you a discount). In that case, you are accepting the contract. And it's not like they'd sell you 249 iPods then get pissy because you had fewer than 250.

But, I believe that if I buy an iPad at retail, I can use it in whatever promotional capacity I see fit as long as I do not violate Apple's IP.

In short: nothing to see here, move along

How did you see my password? I thought it only came up as ***s?

Oh, I get it, to you it shows up as ***s but to me it shows up as hunter2

Well, if it is a phishing scheme like google believes, it's not quite the same thing as a data breach like we typically use the term.

Sort of like the difference between me being tricked into giving away my ATM PIN and a hacker breaking into the bank system and taking money from my account.

One of the hallmarks of cancer cells are mutations that make them divide like crazy and never stop. The baseline division rate before they became cancerous doesn't really matter much by that point.

I have no doubt that Apple realizes a vibrant community of developers is what fuels the app store and the iOS ecosystem, as well as the chilling effect this sort of lawsuit can have on someone looking to make apps. If at any time some patent troll can ambush you and take your revenue away, you'll think twice before starting to write an app.

Apple has a history of taking time to respond to news like this, but I'm sure they are looking at all possible options here, from agreeing to pay more in licensing fees to get immunity for developers to launching a nuclear bomb of lawyers at Lodsys.

And, if they find a good solution, they'll combine it with FUD and use it as marketing: "Why develop for the questionably written Android (did they steal from Oracle?) without any protection from submarine parents? Come develop for us, and we'll protect you!"

Apple PR failed to remove a lot of the misconceptions about the little location file on the device, so let me take a crack. The location information on the iPhone is not YOUR location, but rather a collection of location data points that includes the cell towers in the local vicinity, some of which could be up to 100 miles away. As a result, the phone is not storing your location, but instead just downloading a bit of cache data so it can look up your location faster when you want it to. That responds to the 'storing' part of your post. With respect to tracking, if you know a way for a navigation app to give you directions and locate you, but not track you, I'd like to hear it. In the meantime, if you would like the phone to NOT know where you are, period, just switch off 'location services', which, as of 4.2.3, also deletes the local cache database.

Meanwhile, all sorts of information about your location is leaked by all the devices you use. One trivial example is your IP address, which, while not a precise locator, gives the other end some idea about where you are (assuming no proxies, etc etc)

Right, until comcast runs out of addresses for customers and has to pay $1000 on the open market per address. No home user is going to pay $1000 to get connected when some other ISP has gone IPv6 and can connect them for $35.

The vast majority for me is defense and health care. Even though I am exempt from medicare taxes, 25% goes to that category. Anyone who thinks we don't need health care reform is crazy!

Second, if we stop funding health care people die. If we stop funding defense, what happens? Seriously. If the defense budget is cut in half, in what ways is my life or way of life threatened? I can intellectually measure the value ofnthe rest of my tax dollars in the other categories, but, for defense, it's hard to imagine what I get after spending as much per capita as, say, Japan, on defense.

Maybe they can't. But I would suggest:

-reduce the number of ads by an order of magnitude and increase the relevance of the remaining by the same factor. Some weekend movies have 8 minute commercial breaks for Christ sake! No wonder we hate them so much
-allow me to watch the content whenever I want, wherever I want. None of this 5 most recent episodes crap. None of this web only, no mobile viewing either.
-make the fee 10x less than cable, the fees for which are out of control.

-I'd also like to see a try at a crowd sourced patronage system for TV. I'd pay a lot more if I knew I was paying the director and cast directly, and then they could release the content under creative commons or something. Don't know if enough people would pay though.

Yep, you got so screwed that you only became a billionaire instead of the richest person on earth. If only we could all be so fortunate.

Not if you contractually agree not to tether when you sign up for service.

Of course, if they change my plan to charge me for tethering and I'm NOT tethering, well, that would probably not be legal.

Thank you for marketing WP7 in a post that seems like astroturfing. How does this relate to MS v Apple's updating mechanisms, again?

Other comments have taken to clearing up some of the misconceptions regarding first-to-file versus first-to-invent so I won't duplicate them. However, one thing not yet pointed out is that the vast (VAST) majority of the rest of the world uses a first-to-file system.

By switching our system, it reduces the burden on an inventor (and thus the legal cost) of obtaining a world wide patent as the systems become closer to the same. And note that Europe has not considered switching to first-to-invent as a way to combat patent trolls, which says something about how much the USA switching will help/hurt trolls.

It's really bricked. See here:

"... If this is successful, it should allow the handset to recover its original firmware and resume operation. But not everyone can get this to work, indicating that the devices are truly bricked, with the only option being to return them to the network operator and have them replaced under warranty."

The article has more details; the problems appear to be restricted to a few samsung firmware versions. Given how religious MS is about testing every combination of everything come patch time (how many times have we bitched about the slowness of a patch), I'm going to speculate the source of the cock-up is a miscommunication regarding which firmware versions are out there (MS didn't know they existed) or what the differences between them are (MS thought the differences were irrelevant come patch time) and at least half the blame lies with Samsung.