One of the very interesting things that was pointed out to me is that scrolling with a mouse wheel and scrolling with a finger both work the way you expect them to, but they work in opposite directions. With a mouse wheel, moving your finger up moves the document up; on touchscreen devices, moving your finger up moves the document down. That's the kind of thing that makes just putting a desktop OS onto a touchscreen device a losing proposition: you need to change fundamental input interactions in order to make it work the way people think it should work.

In fact, when you plug an iPhone into a Mac, you can see in the process list that usbmuxd is what Mac OS is using to talk to the device.

I don't really find that amazing at all. The point of a computer for most people isn't anything to do with the computer, it's just a tool for doing something they care about, and an excellent UI makes doing that thing easier. If the restrictions on freedom are less of a hindrance to doing that thing than the design is a benefit, then they'll buy that product.

For most people, this isn't about philosophy, it's just about the most efficient way to do what they care about.

This has been kind of overblown. The answer was actually "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.", and he was speaking in the context of court orders. It's just a statement of reality: if Google is holding some of your information and the US Government comes along and wants it, they have to hand it over. So if you're worried about that happening, you probably shouldn't upload it to Google (or anyone) in the first place.

Because you can't display video on eInk, and people do an awful lot more video watching than book reading nowadays.

The YouTube guys have said that they don't want to spend the hard drive space to hold three different formats on disk (and considering 20 hours of video of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, I can't blame them), and that the bandwidth requirements for the same level of quality are significantly higher for Theora than for H.264. So basically, YouTube uses H.264 because it's cheaper than any alternative, presumably even after factoring in licensing costs (which I think are capped at like a few million dollars for each licensee, and thus are probably noise to YouTube).

From what I've heard, this is basically impossible (so far) due to antenna and radio design problems. At least on the GSM side, you can apparently support either AT&T 3G or T-Mobile 3G, but both doesn't fly. (There's money to be made for a handset maker who did so, if only from not having to manufacture multiple SKUs for different networks, so it's not a lack of trying. The BB Storm is close, but still doesn't support all 3G frequencies in the US.)

From a cynical point of view, it sounds an awful lot like the people I know whose parents had them home schooled but then didn't actually spend any time teaching them anything. They didn't end up learning anything and now aren't really prepared to get a job that pays the rent.

I don't think it's impossible to make it work well, and for a certain kind of kid I think it would be fantastic. Unschooling would require a lot of involvement from parents, though, probably a lot more than public school would, and I expect that some portion of parents aren't willing to provide that involvement. I'd worry that those parents will latch onto unschooling as a way to justify letting their kids do whatever they want without any supervision.

If you go down that road then you end up with the world we have today: developers first look at the spec, and then they try to find out whether or not that part of the spec actually matters to the real world of browsers. The HTML5 editors want a better world, one where the major browsers are actually 100% compliant. They may not get there, but they definitely won't if they put things in the spec that browser vendors have said outright that they won't implement.

Indeed. I live in NYC, and since it has a sufficiently extensive network, I don't ever need a car, so my yearly transportation costs are $972 (soon to increase to $1068), paid for with pre-tax money. That's less than a lot of people pay just for insurance on their car, let alone gas or maintenance.

Actually, they definitely did make more money than they would have without the patent process. The chemical industry is one in which it's difficult to come up with a chemical that does a specific thing, but easy to produce a lot of a chemical once you have it. The patents weren't used to protect the company from patent trolls, they were used to protect the company from other major chemical companies. Without a patent, if they came up with a new chemical and put it on the market, another company could come along, analyze what they were selling, and produce substantially the same product without putting in the time and money upfront for the R&D. That would seriously reduce the profitability of coming up with new chemicals.

There are some industries in which the patent system works like it's supposed to. My dad was a chemist until he retired, and he generated a number of patents which have been really valuable to him and the company he worked for. It costs a lot of time and money to come up with chemicals that do interesting things, and patents makes it so that doing so is profitable.