It's related to design, not functionality. It's not as if Apple was trying to prevent anyone from making a smartphone, just prevent someone from creating a smartphone that (to most consumers) looked identical to an iPhone. They never said that they objected to Samsung making a phone that leveraged location services, push notifications, an accelerometer, and a touch screen.

Apple suing Samsung was related to Samsung creating a phone that looked almost identical to the iPhone; it wasn't to prevent Samsung from using any particular technology. Samsung was the one that started trying to use their own patents to prevent Apple from using specific technology.

When has Apple attempted to stop someone from using something covered under one of their patents without the other party first bringing litigation against Apple? I'm not saying that there's no chance it happened, I just do not recall a case in which Apple has attacked another company unprovoked.

If Apple didn't hold this patent someone else would use it against them. I can't really fault a company for defending their right to use some technology. I haven't seen many cases where Apple was the first to enter into litigation.

Student loans will still exist, just not from the government.

I think that a lot of the complaints mentioned in the post apply more to large commercial games than to Indie efforts. I love some of the large commercial games like Red Dead Redemption, but felt that I expected more polish out of such a major effort, while I've played some indie games that felt nearly perfect (Braid, Limbo). Perhaps the issue is that a lot of the larger commercial games are repeats of an old concept, while many of the indies feel fresh. When you've already experience a mechanic ten times over you become free to pay attention to some of the minutia.

I really got sucked into this one. I saw Mitnick on the Colbert Report, downloaded the sample to my iPad, quickly reached the end of the sample, purchased the full copy, then read until the book was finished. I heard the other side of the story while I was really into computer security, this made getting Mitnick's personal account of events something that really interested me. Reading through this book brought back a lot of memories and proved to be much more enjoyable than I had initially anticipated.

The Russian security firm was able to brute force devices that were locked with a 4 digit PIN because there are not that many possible 4 digit PINs. They could not crack a phone with a text-based lock code.

Only when the user sets a 4 digit pin as their lock code. When the user has a text-based lock code the key can be much longer. The security policy of the phone can be set for force a text-based password.

I was able to carrier unlock my iPhone, so it looks like level 5 is available. Also, there's nothing stopping you from creating a custom OS for iPhone hardware, the big stumbling point is that iOS source code is not available as a base.

Nice troll good sir.

I'd be shocked if that were the case. I think that this is really just a way for Apple to reduce storage costs. They've got this great new data center, but they don't want to fill it up with 500 copies of every song in their music library, encoded in all different formats and bitrates.

true, but as a percentage of the population there aren't too many "true audiophiles". There are, however, plenty of people who claim to be audiophiles (meaning that they rip their music at the best bitrate of the day).

Yeah, it's ridiculous that someone would hire a person that they've worked with in the past and know that they can depend on.