They could give it away and no one would notice. RIM is dead, they just don't know it yet.

Its not the same issue at all. Within 30 days of the release of IOS5, something like 90% of the supported phones were updated and running the latest version. Android carriers have 0 incentive to offer ICS upgrades, they would much rather that you go buy a new handset and the way they get you to do that is to NOT provide updates or new features for your existing phone. Plus, they lack the technical expertise or manpower to take the ICS base and reengineer their bloatware onto it before distributing it out to the customers as an upgrade. Also, it becomes an increasingly ugly problem when the carrier has 5 or 10 different handsets from different vendors with different hardware that they have to test and verify before they can release the upgrade. Its just not going to happen. Going from 2.2 to 2.3 is not such a leap and you are lucky your carrier offered and update for you.

Bottom line is that fragmentation on Android phones is a major problem and its only getting worse, not better.

And that is exactly whats wrong with the Android in general. As soon as you buy one, your OS is out of date and you cannot upgrade without doing a root/hack. Using "rootzwiki" may be good enough for the .00005% of the population that really understands what they are doing, but it sucks for the rest of the world who just want a phone that can be updated when fixes and new features and new OS comes out.

1% of the Android market is running ICS today. By the time that figure even approaches 10%, ICS will be out of date and their will be something with an even lamer naming acronym for everyone to crow about.

Have you tried iPGMail - http://ipgmail.com/ - for the iPhone/iPad?

OS X supports S/MIME encryption, which is quite different from PGP.

You are off by a few hundred billion, do your research...

AAPL is #2 with a market cap of $360 BILLION. XOM (Exxon/Mobil) is #1 with $380 B.

Do you have anything other than your own personal opinion to back up your "fact"? AAPL corporate earnings continue to grow, their products continue to sell and expand their market share, they are the #1 or #2 company in the world in terms of market cap and they have a ginormous cash hoard to draw upon for further R&D and expansion.

If you want to see a perfect example of a company that actually IS circling the drain, take a look at RIM.

"follow-the-leader features"? Siri-ously (har har)? Oh look, Google has a Siri-like app now! Leading-the-followers is more accurate...

Apple doesn't give a shit if you have PGP on your iPhone or not. There are some decent PGP apps available for a fair price. http://ipgmail.com/ for example.

This is the Hangouts feature in Google+. I expect FB to roll out a "circles" feature any day now.

But Clapton done went and put a cap in the sherriff's ass, fo SHO! But not the deputy. He may have been trippin' on Cocaine at the same time.

I understand the point entirely. RMS wants to invent some new tax on purchases, which would involve a huge addition to our already bloated government to solve a problem that 99% of the population doesn't view as a problem. They just want their eReader to work. The fact that you can't freely share the eBooks with all of your friends without jumping through some hoops is an inconvenience at worst. I've had iTunes purchased music (with DRM) for many years, I have a shitload of kindle eBooks, I've yet to lose anything due to DRM. Your experience may differ but if you've actually lost significant amounts of content due purely to DRM, maybe you better stick with the free DRM-free shit, mass market products with DRM like iTunes and Kindle are clearly too difficult for you to master.

I'm definitely in the minority here, but I *LIKE* my kindle and I dont give a shit if the books have DRM or not. I don't need Richard Fucking Stallman dictating the rules by which I am supposed to live my digital life. This is how the world works - someone produces a product, charges a price for it, and you have the FREEDOM to either buy it or not buy it if you dont think it is worth the price. You do not have the right to steal it just because you think the price is too high or you disagree with the concept of capitalism or with selling an artistic work. That is not "rebelling against the system", that is just being a thieving cheapskate asshole.

Sure, I could go to the trouble of breaking the DRM and sharing it with all my friends, the instructions for doing so are freely available, and its not hard. I'd really rather just read the damn thing.

If you want a book and dont want to give up your name or email or credit card, go to a bookstore and buy a hardcopy with cash. Or, write the author a nice letter and ask him to send you a free copy because you don't believe in DRM and paying for stuff like music and art, I'm sure most authors will run right down to FedEX/Kinkos and send you a freebie straight away.

Who gives a shit who had the idea first, that means nothing if you cant capitalize on it. The tech highway is littered with carcasses of shitty companies like Palm and Sandisk and Creative who had a good idea and had no idea how to market it to the masses and dominate the market. Love them or not, you have to give Jobs credit for having an amazing team of visionary designers and engineers who can take someones poorly implemented idea and turn it into gold.

I dont care who first invented the hand-held mp3 player (I had a 128KB Creative RIO ), I care who makes the BEST one, and that happens to be Apple.

Apple frankly does not "suck at innovation", thats narrow minded myopic thinking. They have revolutionized industrial design with their products over the past 10 years, you have to be blind or willfully ignorant not to recognize it. Their "closed" business model is orthogonal to the discussion. The fact is they are one of the only truly successful AND innovative companies and their growing market share and market capitalization speaks directly to that fact.

You can hate the fact that their software and hardware isn't "open", but you cant deny they are well designed and often truly unique when compared to the other products on the market in terms of their physical design.

How in the world does TC technology "fuck with your freedom"? Please give concrete examples. Microsoft uses it for bitlocker security, but they are not "fucking with your freedom" to wipe it out and install whatever OS you want. TPM devices can be disabled by the platform owner at any time. Also, as I originally wrote, TC != DRM. They are not related. I dont believe there are any mainstream DRM implementations that rely on TPMs to enforce restrictions. It's easy enough to write DRM schemes without it (Apple's FairPlay, for example).

Trusted Computing technology is not necessarily a "downside". The FUD about it being about DRM or denying you the ability to run the OS of choice on your system are just that, FUD. There are some useful applications built on top of TC technology.