But in no way do I support the demonization or boycott of people just because they have a different opinion of something than I do. To me that's a for of bigotry itself, and why would I want to be bigoted?

This guy financially supported an unconstitutional attempt to stop certain people getting married. It's not bigotry to shun people who are trying to change the law to reduce your legal rights.

If they weren't the first with conversational layout, they were the ones that popularised it.

They didn't get Ajax right. They just based their user interface around it, which none of the other major webmail providers were doing. This made things a lot faster, which most users appreciated. In fact, their use of Ajax was pretty lousy. You couldn't even open an email in a new window because instead of using proper links and hooking into them with Ajax, they concocted fake links based on spans that could only work with Ajax.

I can't believe Comcast wouldn't see something like that coming though, nor have term limits that would let them stop it quickly enough for it not to be a viable proposition for Apple.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Apple have something in the works for a network. So far they've been happy to make deals, but Apple like to be in control of everything themselves. If they were going to do something like that though, I would assume that they'd try to jump straight to mobile networks and skipping wired connections altogether. They've got the cash to build something like that and every incentive considering all of their mobile devices would use it as well.

It used to be the case that if you wanted to make a great device, you needed to own both the hardware side and the software side. These days, you also need to own the network side as well.

Trademark law, like copyright, is relatively sensible as it is designed to be used. Trademark law is designed to protect customers, not corporations. It's there so that when you buy a FooBar, you know you are getting a genuine FooBar and not a knock-off. However some people treat it like ownership of words and use it as a club to censor people. That's what people usually object to, not trademarks as they were intended to be used.

He should pay people to go around smashing windows so that glaziers will call him a hero too.

Frankly, I think this is useful.

Sure, but that doesn't mean NASA should be doing it. Get some other government body to do it. Or set one up if there isn't anything suitable already existing. Don't use money allocated for space research for something other than space research.

For attackers, the advantage of abusing the WordPress pingback feature in this manner is that they can spread their attacks over a large number of unique IP addresses, making it harder for the targeted sites to block them, Cid said. "It does not amplify the bandwidth utilization, but the scale and reach of the attack."

From the description of the issue, all that seems to be happening here is that an attacker makes an HTTP request to a third-party blog that supports Pingback, and that blog makes an HTTP request to the target. As stated, there's no amplification, so all this appears to be doing is masking the source of the attack.

To what is he referring when he says that it amplifies the "scale and reach" of the attack?

Since his lab is under supervision of the French government, he was required to review his findings with authorities. [...] They told me that this presentation was unsuitable for being public [...] Filiol said his research is now classified.

I know he says that pulling out was the moral thing to do, but describing this as "self censorship" is a bit of a misrepresentation. He showed every tiing ahead with it until the French government got involved, and if he had wanted to go ahead with it, the French government would have stopped him.

Why have I never seen any combination of iDevice, AppleTV, and any TV that can scale the smaller screen to the 1080p screen?

I don't know, why haven't you?

This is a solved problem that Apple has gratuitously failed to fix for years now.

This was never broken. Go back to the first devices and the first version of iOS that implemented AirPlay and write an application yourself to test it out. The functionality is there. If you only use applications that don't support varying resolutions, that's not Apple's problem.

What value has this man added to a single piece of equipment sold in the last 40 years?

Zero, and that's precisely the problem here. The patent system is designed to encourage inventors to publish implementation details rather than keep them secret. While the patent is active, the holder of the patent can capitalise on their temporary monopoly. Once the patent expires, everybody is free to use that implementation as documented in the patent, thus adding value to the world.

The alternative to patents for most companies is not publishing everything freely, it's keeping them as trade secrets, which never expire. The patent system is an attempt to convert trade secrets into something that is eventually freely published.

This mechanism failed here. What should have been published a long time ago and free for everybody to use a long time ago was locked up and kept secret in the patent application. This invention hasn't benefitted the world because the patent office sat on it. Saying that he hasn't contributed to the industry shouldn't be considered an attack on him, but an attack on the patent office that held up the publishing of this patent.

Android apps can cope with different/changing screen resolutions and aspects. iOS may have a problem though since it is designed for a number of fixed resolutions and screen sizes.

Don't mistake what's common for what's designed in. There's very little about iOS that is resolution dependent. While applications generally make assumptions about resolution, iOS and its UI frameworks are fairly flexible. In fact, you've been able to develop iOS applications that use varying screen resolutions for years now - AirPlay lets you set up views on external displays.

I just hope they are not iOS specific and can support Android as well, because there is no way I'd want to lock myself into owning an iPhone for the lifetime of the car. Hopefully wireless charging will be included too, so it can be a true no-cable solution.

These two are very unlikely. Apple's general MO is not inclined towards interoperability. The last major move in that direction was to support the iPod and Safari on Windows, and that was when they were very much the underdog. Since then, they've been moving away from interoperability. Wireless charging will require handset support and they've indicated the technology isn't there yet to do it to their high standards yet.

Because just a little over 5 years ago, the cash cow was... iPods. Now iPods sell even less than Macs.

Because everybody who used to buy iPods now buys iPhones instead, which does everything an iPod does and more. They didn't lose sales, they moved their customers over to a more expensive product.

Are you saying that Apple have a product waiting in the wings that's an entire replacement for an iPhone but earns them more money? If not, what's your explanation for the idea that they want to move away from iPhones and iPads?

Oh yeah, 5 years before THAT, the hot cash cow was Macs.

It still is. Their Mac business is growing, and it's growing even better than investor predictions - they just had one of their best quarters ever for Macs. They sold 4.1m Macs Q1 2013, investors predicted 4.6m for Q1 2014, and they sold 4.8m. The fact that their iOS business eclipses their Mac business is simply due to the sheer magnitude of their iOS business. It doesn't mean that their Mac business is hurting.

The impetus is on Apple to find a new cash cow because it's obvious that iPhones and iPads aren't going to be generating the profits they used to.

Apple's profits are growing and this is mostly fuelled by iOS devices. Apple sold more iOS devices in the past quarter than in any previous quarter. People have been saying that the iOS business is drying up for many years. iOS device profits continue to rise regardless. If the fact that they've just set a new record for number of iOS devices sold in a single quarter isn't enough to convince you that that the iPhones and iPad business isn't "drying up", what would?

the company's deep desire to move away from iPhones and iPads

iPhones and iPads make Apple an obscene amount of money and they are in a controlling position in the market. It should go without saying that they don't have "a deep desire to move away" from them. Add new product categories? Sure. Move away from iPhones and iPads? Nope.

"Apple must increasingly rely on new products to reignite growth beyond the vision" of late founder Steve Jobs, said Bill Kreher, an analyst with Edward Jones Investments in St. Louis. "They need the next big thing."'"

Growth is a bullshit metric. A company with one customer can grow their user base 1000% by getting to ten customers. A company with hundreds of millions of customers can't grow like that. Growth naturally slows as a company gets larger. Only bullshit artists looking to get page views or prop up a stock price blather on about how Apple need the next big thing to continue growing. They don't need to continue growing. They are raking money in faster than just about any other company. Trying to grow at the same rate as they have done in previous years is not only a ludicrously unachievable expectation to place on them, it's probably bad for business if they were stupid enough to try. Apple's core strength has always been a small, focused product family.

It's Apple. If they use their normal strategy, the product they release will not have every feature that everybody wants. It's going to have 80% of the features that 80% of people want, but done in a very nice way. There will be fitness features, but they will be aimed at the average slob who keeps telling himself he needs to get fitter, not experts. Fitness buffs will complain that it doesn't do X, but they'll end up using it anyway because it's convenient because lots of other things will start integrating with it.

The behavior of light in the 2 slit experiment might be an example of this.

Yeah, when I first read about the double slit experiment, I thought it was very similar to short circuiting evaluation in programming languages.