Apple is complaining that Nokia isn't offering the Standards based cell phones on Reasonable and Nondiscriminatory basis? Isn't Nokia required to do that as part of submitting those patents as part of the GSM standard. It stated that in the lawsuit that nokia wanted a patent cross-license agreement with apple for the rights to the GSM patents. That's not reasonable and nondiscriminatory.

Aren't works for hire generally owned by whoever is paying... City pays contractor for work, city owns the work, not the contractor.

They already have access to jailbreaked phones. If they are going to do something this nefarious intentionally, they aren't going to care if hacking iphones is illegal.

...LIKE Zoidberg!

from Salon article in January 2000:Courtney Love does the math

That Mitch Glazier, the congresional aide? now an RIAA lobbyist It certainly wasn't an accident. I've never understood why they just didn't fix that.

The parent needs a higher score pronto. Hopefully a fundamental score of +5 insightful, and not an emergent one of +4 interesting +1funny

I have no idea what I'm saying.

isn't there a -1 joke was way to obvious? (to be fair it was the first thing I thought of too)

Which is weird, because in the Wisconsin case, the officers had a warrant. The judges there said it wasn't needed!

Here's one

Well, I thought it was kind of funny.

All right! Wait, is this The april fool thread?

"How will it end?"

"In fire"

Apple Remote would cost you $20 extra.

"In December 2006, Palm, Inc. paid $44 million to ACCESS for the rights to the source code for Palm OS Garnet. With this arrangement, a single company is again developing Palm hardware and software. Palm can modify the licensed software as needed and it need not pay royalties to ACCESS over future years."
--Wikipedia, no citation given.

So it sounds like palm did decide to pull the plug, the new agreement gave Palm rights to the source code (again).

Assuming it's true, how much money was involved in splitting palm up, only to reunite (sort of) later?

Apple paid xerox in apple stock, to let their engineers see what was going on - so I don't think stealing is the right thing here.

Apple's copyright wasn't invalidated, there was a contractual agreement between microsoft and apple that allowed microsoft to copy some elements of apples design. My understanding is that the contract was supposed to be for developing apps for the mac (apple's side of things), but microsoft claimed that it protected them in windows too. The judge agreed with microsoft in some places, threw out claims in others. The original lawsuit's copyright claim wasn't even considered, as it all became a contract dispute.

My understanding is that the modern water bed wasn't patentable because Heinlein had described such a bed in enough detail in some of his sci-fi books (stranger in a strange land and Double Star) to be considered prior art. So there is some precedent for using sci-fi concepts as prior art. see wikipedia entry on waterbeds