I think that the charts are depicting different things... the first is based on online votes (and we all know the kinds of people who flock to those), and the second is actual retail sales.

Mobile network operators do not care which mobile phone brand you choose (save for the amount of subsidy each brand may require)... as long as you take it with a contract from them. In other words, they have little reason to lie about which smartphone brand their customers are choosing when they sign up for new contracts.

I am more inclined to believe the CEOs of 3 different publicly listed companies who are fiercely competitive and have to answer to the scrutiny of shareholders and analysts, than some random web site running an unscientific online popularity contest.

iTunes was hardly a first mover

So, while AltaVista, Napster and Friendster may be in the first mover categories of their respective industries, iTunes falls into the same space as Google and Facebook... who all built upon and capitalised on the missteps of the early pioneers in their respective industries.

I whole heartedly agree with this... and this is the basis of many patent review cases.

However, what many lay persons often miss (which patent review engineers, investigators and lawyers often do not) is that many novel inventions are often obvious with hindsight... sadly it is often these seeming obvious inventions that make it big and become the target of attack (e.g. slide to unlock)

Of course it is doing things in the background... every modern pre emptive multi-tasking operating system "is doing things in the background."

The question is: why is Windows so bad at it?

Dear gbjbaanb,

We will gladly do so... as soon as you also ask the following competitors to do the same:
- Juniper Networks
- Cisco
- 3Com
- Teledata Networks
- Netgear
- Alcatel-Lucent
- :

After all, the back doors we have in our switches are the same back doors we inherited from their code when we stole it a few years ago.

This was my initial reaction as well... And then I remembered the recent cases of people getting killed, or ending up in a coma due to what is likely to be the use of clone power supplies and cables

Apple has gone to great lengths to mitigate its legal exposure... going as far as offering a discount on an Apple replacement for your third party power supply. For Apple to suddenly ignore the risks of being sued (and to your health and safety) after it can be shown that they could have done something to prevent the use of unauthorised chargers and cables would be stupid of them.

No... He does not mean a web site...
He actually means what he says... a web app[lication] - an application written using the latest web technologies (JavaScript, CSS, DOM and XML/HTML), downloaded from a web site to execute within a browser environment that supports the HTML5 API and standards against which the application has been coded.

A web app is as real an app as any of those that you say you "... don't need to download and install ..." You can even choose to save a web app locally on your phone or desktop (just like any other application that you download off the internet) so that you do not need to download it every time you need to use it - fortunately, web and browser caching technology makes this a non-issue.

Do not confuse a web site with a web application or a web page.
Web pages, however interactive, are not necessarily the equivalent of web applications... however both are downloaded from web sites (technically a web server).

That is of course a rhetorical question.

The implication of this verdict is that if George Zimmerman is not the cause of Martin's death (whether willfully, accidentally or in self defense)... therefore Martin is the cause of his own death.

• Martin should not have been walking home on that streatch of road that night... otherwise he would not have encountered Zimmerman and raised his interest and suspicions.
• Perhaps Martin should never have confronted the stranger (Zimmerman) who was stalking following him in the dark... he should have run straight home
• It is okay to be suspicious of people you haven't seen before in your neighbourhod... in fact it is okay to follow them around to see if they are up to any mischief. And if they should confront you (given that you would be a stranger to them too) and an altercation should break out (given that they would be suspicious of you too) it would be okay to kill them... after all, you were defending yourself - not withstanding that the fact that you were defending yourself from an confrontation of your own making.

The "captured" ScanEagle drone was clearly not shot down... and its pristine structure indicates that it didn't crash either.

Doesn't it concern everybody that Iran appears to be able to capture these drones out of the sky and land them fairly intact... with minimal to no exterior damage.

Does this give credence to Iran's claim that they are able to take over the controls of a drone and land it relatively safely without too much structural damage?

Is it possible that they could override the controls of a cruise missile as it enters their airspace... and send it back from whence it came... gasp!

I understand the logic of having a more powerful ground transmitter that overwhelms the week satellite transmitted signals used to control drones and missiles... but that is still a far cry from actually overriding the controls of a sophisticated drone and tricking the drone into believing that it is still receiving legitimate instructions.

Don't all drones have an automatic "return to base" command as soon as they lose contact with their controllers... at the very least they should have a self destruct.

I remember a time when people said the same thing about smart phone keyboards:

"... to be useful to professionals, a smart phone must have a physical keyboard" went the conventional wisdom

And so the standard bearer for making the best smartphone keyboards was RIM, and everyone benchmarked their mobile devices against the Blackberry keyboard

... until the iPhone and several Android devices arrived and showed that one could approximate the physical keyboard productivity using an on screen touch screen keyboard.

Of course a touch screen keyboard will never be able to emulate the feel, responsiveness and feedback of a physical keyboard... the same can be said for virtual game controls on a touch screen device.

However, people that emphasise this aspect of physical game controls are under the same misapprehension that RIM, Palm, Microsoft, Nokia and their ilk were under when they convinced themselves that the original iPhone could never be a serious contender without a "real" keyboard - based on research showing how important smartphone users rated the quality of the keyboard to be in their decision making process.

From the CD to MP3, Email to Twitter and physical keyboards to virtual keyboards... we have seen a gradual dumbing down of what mankind finds to be of acceptable standard or quality. The virtual game controls (and they don't have to be touch screen... we have seen interesting game controls using gyros and motion sensors), like the touch screen keyboard, simply need to approximate the feel, responsiveness and feedback of the physical controls... and there comes a point in the cost-benefit equation when virtual controls cross the proverbial "good enough" line such that most gamers convince themselves that they are getting more out of the new paradigm than they are loosing out on by letting go of the old paradigm.

Trust me, many Blackberry power users have gone through the agony of having to tamper their idea of what the best data input mechanism for a smart phone is in order to take advantage of what an all glass screen can do (such as having a different virtual keyboards for different data entry requirements).

My advice to all those who find physical game controls to be sacrosanct is to look as how quickly the sanctity of the physical smart phone keyboard evaporated when the utility of their virtual approximations out striped the usefulness of their physical manifestations.

Everything does not rely on GPS... the iPhone, for example has had support for GPS as well GLONASS since the iPhone 4S (http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html). The iPhone seamlessly switches between the two satellite constellations (as well as Wi-Fi and GSM triangulation) so the consumer never really knows which system is being used to provide location services). So clearly the world is not solely dependent on the budget the US chooses to spend to keep GPS working; it is dependent upon the combined budgets of the US, Russia and soon the EU and hopefully China one day.

While the separate national or regional systems result in duplication of effort and resources, the upside is that it also results in a high level of redundancy for consumers - kind of like how the Internet is a network of networks. I particularly appreciate how the newer satellite constellations, like Galileo, are offering improved accuracy at consumer level

Given that nearly every member of his family also received the message, it is very unlikely that he had intended to solicit sex from all the recipients, “skin on skin”. Remember, if the prosecution accuses him of “causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity,” they have to prove their case, not the other way around. That is what "innocent until proven guilty" means.

Clearly he did send the message, which is why he could not be exonerated from the crime that he was accused of... However proving intent was always going to be an uphill battle given how indiscriminately wide his message went.

I think that Judge Elias' conclusion that “it is difficult to conclude that he was targeting anyone” is the only reasonable conclusion (unless you have evidence that the prosecutors did not have).