They wiped the visible parts of the CE slate clean, but it's still the CE kernel. They needed to keep the CE guts to get the phone to market when they did. If they had started fresh, they wouldn't have made the same design compromises with the CE kernel that they did years ago. IMHO, Apple made some very smart decisions with iOS, especially in power management features. It's amazing just how much of the iPod/iPad/iPhone gets shut down when idle or doing something like watching video. I think Apple's heritage as a hardware + software company gives them a big advantage over a mostly software company like Microsoft or Google.

As far as Nokia and RIM are concerned, I really don't understand how they have managed (and continue to mange) to do almost everything wrong.

Are you claiming that the iPad isn't the best selling tablet?

Every other manufacturer's tablet isn't fun to use, has poor application support, and poor battery life. The iPad works well for lots of normal people and is affordable (but not cheap).

Start hitting them with damages when they file these erroneous claims and watch how fast that shit stops

The flipside to that coin would be for people who upload content for which they don't own the right to get penalized without notice. I think the claim / challenge method is better.

That's a little like blaming Ford when somebody drives too fast in a Mustang.

Wikipedia also says this:

The United States is the world's largest manufacturer, with a 2009 industrial output of US$2.33 trillion. Its manufacturing output is greater than of Germany, France, India, and Brazil combined, despite manufacturing being a small portion of the entire US economy as compared to other countries.

I'm not sure what the trend is, but I'd guess that the manufacturing sectors of China and some other countries are growing faster than ours. A lot of it depends on what you are measuring. By dollar output, the US is doing well because we make lots of expensive things that are in high demand.

20% of global output might not seem that impressive to you, but the US has only around 4% of the world's population. I think that makes us relatively productive.

I understand that they use off-the-shelf consoles to run the software, but I thought that they did all of their development on actual developer consoles (the things that look like a dual-deck VCR).

we don't make anything here any more

This is a common misconception. According to wikipedia, the US is the world's largest manufacturer, representing a fifth of the global manufacturing output. The number of manufacturing jobs has been shrinking, but that's because high volume manufacturing of simple things has moved out of the US (mostly to China). Big, expensive things are made in the US and those sectors (telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, aircraft, etc...) are growing. The people working in these sectors are more highly skilled and well paid.

Have they solved the problem with pollution from coal plants?

I don't believe they need custom firmware. If they have dev consoles, won't their software be properly signed?

Exactly. Mobile gaming converts another industry legend.

Who cares? It might be a truism, but the people who care, care. As a programmer, there's a balance between maintainability, performance, and ease of development that I care deeply about. I'm proud of my work and I'm not willing to slap something together with no regard for efficiency or longevity.

If I were making a game, I would probably be willing to sacrifice some ease of development for the sake of better efficiency. If I were making a prototype to demo UI concepts, ease of development might be paramount. Whatever trade-offs I'm making, I try to be aware of them and make good decisions because I care about my work.

Flash is dead. It would be very foolish to start a new project with Flash today.

they can stick to computers that have dedicated graphics cards and therefore have a better chance of making it work well cross-platform

How are you defining cross platform? Recent versions of Windows and OS X?

Slashdot seems to think that old Star Trek shows count as prior art, I doubt that would cut it in the court of law.

Are you talking about when Samsung referenced tablets from Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" as prior art?

I wonder why companies like B&N don't look for help from the community on digging up prior art. If they would have sent out a call for help and managed to get it noticed by outlets like Slashdot, I bet they could have doubled the size and quality of their list. There are a lot of old farts here that helped build the stuff that's being patented 20 or 30 years later.