Security never ever works if the attacker and the one being attacked is the same person

Normal text-entry widgets and password boxes have different usability and security requirements. For instance, you don't want your webrowser to show a dropdown list of all your passwords as plain text. As soon as both widgets look mostly the same you can be quite sure half of the website programmers out there starts using the wrong widget.

They don't expect people to buy stuff at those prices. The prices are high so that they can pressure OEMs into making shady deals.

I don't know if GSM phones check with a database to see if they are allowed to connect to the access point when listing networks.

What is claimed in the patent is doing ALL of the following in a single product:

- Scanning for access points or looking them up from a storage medium
- Looking up access rights for the access points from a database
- Listing access points to the user, where access points belonging to the same provider are shown as a single item.

Some claims ar more specific, but i think doing only 2 of the 3 things above should not count as infringement or prior art.

Disclaimer: My knowledge of patent law is by reading slashdot. And patents are generally harder to understand than obfuscatet perl-scripts.

I hope they get this patent and start going after patent trolls. Often pantents are aquired for defensive purposes, so that you can countersue if somebody sues you. Normally patent trolls doesn't produce any products, so there is no way to sue them for patent infrigment to protect yourself, except if you own a patent for abusing the patent system :)

Instead of using a different url for handhelds, why not use a customized CSS together with the "handheld" media type?

See http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/media.html

Having two different urls for the same content, but for different target devices breaks the concept of linking. Google and other webpages linking to Wikipedia can not know (and should not know) what kind of device the users have.

The same way they download drivers for their netework cards?

There is no law of conservation of matter, only the law of conservetaion of mass/energy. And black holes obey that.

When they anhilate particles, their masses increase.

There is no way you can block illegal content without destroying freedom of speech. Even if the blacklist is public, there is no way of knowing what kind of content has been blocked.

The right way to treat illegal content is prosecution and/or take-down notices.

That is easy, Just bomb the e-mail account with pop3 request.

Why not have the OpenID provider log authentication requests? This would even be better than the current situation where you have no way of knowing if somebody is using one of your existing accounts