I guess this was inevitable... After this strategy worked for Samsung in differentiating itself from Apple's iPhone, someone was bound to try to see if the same strategy would work against the iPad.

I think that what HP missed in Samsung's game plan was that they built their G-series phones as premium devices... size alone was not enough

Selling a whole bunch of cheap devices will get one more market-share, and very little else.

Maybe the small matter of getting the thing into space using a rocket engine is why they still need the Russians.

The most powerful rocket engines are made by the Russians... and the US buys several a year to launch its biggest payloads into space (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-military-national-security-agencies-vexed-by-dependence-on-russian-rocket-engines/2014/05/30/19822e40-e6c0-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html)

SpaceX is developing some pretty powerful launchers, but until they can match the power and reliability of the Russian RD-180, I don't think that NASA or the Pentagon (who are the biggest buyers of the RD-180) will be turning their backs on Russian engines.

From the linked article: "Long-term U.S. plans to produce a domestic cousin to the RD-180 never got off the ground. The aerospace sector discovered that it was comfortable with the workhorse Russian engines when it came time to launch sensitive missions like spy satellites. The Atlas V rocket has made more than 50 consecutive successful launches using the RD-180. NASA and other government agencies rely on the Atlas V for some of their scientific payloads."

I have no doubt that the Dragon capsule will live up to its billing... So far, Elon Musk and SpaceX exceeded expectations on virtually everything. But, until then, the rickety, but dependable Russian Soyuz will continue to be the preferred choice of most astronauts for getting to and from the space station.

However, the real reasons that astronauts like Chris Hadfield et al think that the Russian Soyuz will be hard to replace are hard to fit into a single post.

• Consider, for instance, that the Soyuz TMA-M can hang around the space station for 6 months, and be ready for use to return astronauts safely back to Earth, without a maintenance crew having to go and check every nut and bolt - a feat that even the Space Shuttle could never muster (for the record, the Space Shuttle had a mission duration of about 12 days - a few Columbia missions went up to 16/17 days).
• Another example is that it takes the Soyuz just 6 hours to go from launch to docking with the space station (for comparison, it took the space shuttle almost 3 days to reach the space station after launch).
• There are many other little things like these that are not cool or sexy, but make the ruthless efficiency and effectiveness with which the Soyuz executes and fulfils its purpose is second to none. It will take a lot more than a larger tin-can and a more comfortable ride to convince astronauts to put their lives in SpaceX's hands.

Sounds eerily like the same thing that dictators have been saying for years when citizens organise themselves on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Heck, it was just two short years ago that we were hailing the ability for the common folk in Arab countries to organise themselves on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, outside the watchful eye of state agencies, and plot the often violent overthrow of an unpopular government.

Surely if organising violent protest action on social networks was good for the Arab Spring, it should be good for the European Spring

So... what has changed... have the roosters come home to roost!?

No, I am saying the direct opposite of that:

I know it is a bit of a long read, but it is in the same paragraph that you have selectively quoted from.

Most of us can live with the fact that our security and secret agencies sustain our way of life, maintain our security and liberties, preserve our freedoms and protect our and values by denying others (often in far flung lands) of the same as long as we are not forced to confront the morality of that reality or explain to those whose rights, freedoms and liberties the preservation of our own tramples upon why they are not worthy of the very values, liberties and freedoms that we are willing to go to such lengths to protect and preserve?

The activities of spy agencies of every country are conducted in secret for a reason. Often we, the tax payers in whose name those agencies conduct their business, do not want to know the price that some innocent person in some part of the world that we barely know of may have paid for the preservation of our own way of life. We would much rather believe that they deserved to have their rights trampled upon, their liberties denied, their freedom curtailed and yes, if necessary, their life snuffed out; so we grasp at the justifications that our security agencies give us to help us sleep at night: Afghanistan is a cesspool of terrorists... they want to destroy our way of life... etc, etc.

So, it seems that the NSA is monitoring every cell phone call in the Bahamas, Afghanistan and probably every other country that uses US made telecommunication equipment. This revelation should not be a surprise, and we, the tax payer that pays for this should, be relieved to see confirmation that our spy agencies are using our tax dollars to detect threats to our freedoms, liberties, and general way of life before they materialise on our shores...

Our feigned disapproval comes not from finding out the details of what our spy agency has been up to in our name, but rather from the internal conflict that we all must confront at discovering the true price of our way of life.

Here is a reality check for all of us: our freedom, liberties and way of life often come at at the cost of denying someone else of their freedom, liberty and sometimes their life. So, instead of pretending to be surprised at the discovery of what the NSA has been up to in Afghanistan, we should instead seek to bestow upon the people of Afghanistan the very same freedom, liberties and values that we treasure and hold dear, so that hopefully one day, they too can attain the same levels of property that we enjoy and drive out the terrorists who not only threaten us, but threaten them and their ability to prosper as well.

I think that scenario has already played out before a South Korean court.

The summary from the Wall Street Journal:
The Seoul Central District Court rejected all of Samsung's claims against Apple, including a request to pay 100 million won (about US$95,000) in damages. It noted that the two patents are invalid because they can be easily developed using existing technologies.

You can read about it here: http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

In 2012, a Korean court had found that Apple did infringe on 2 standards essential Samsung patents. This is what got Samsung into trouble with the European Union regulators, because you cannot volunteer your technology to become part of a standard and then later hold the industry (or competitors in the industry) to ransom by selectively refusing to license that technology on FRAND terms - this is the same reason that Obama overturned the iPhone ban, by the way.

Is this for real or is this just for laughs... Are you really expecting such a massive catastrophe that none of your neighbours would have a phone... not even a passer-by... not even a fireman attending to the catastrophe!? Given the scenario you have just described... what would you use the hidden key for... "the smoldering (sic) lock" lying in a pile of ash?

I obsess over old family photographs that are yet to be digitised, certificates, awards, children's memorabilia, etc.... basically stuff that no amount of money or insurance could ever replace. Things like passports, identity documents, some data backups with bank and insurance details, etc. are in a fire proof safe... but I still do not have a solution for those bulky irreplaceable items.

Firstly, it is DARPA... so we are not just talking about civilian applications (although that will surely follow) but we are talking about the wide scale military and civilian application of technologies that various military and aeronautical platforms (think Space Shuttle) have possessed for years.

Secondly, it is DARPA... so we are talking about spending billions of tax payers money to duplicate civilian efforts in the hope that the military industrial complex can trickle down these benefits to civilian applications faster and more efficiently than the commercial efforts can.

Finally, because it is DARPA... we are all hoping that this is not the start of yet another road that leads to yet another F-22 or F-35 project that will cost the tax payer hundreds of billions and fall far short of what was promised.

So... yes, this announcement is different in many ways

Paging through that magazine reminded me of why I got into computer engineering to begin with... I remember looking forward to each magazine, for the various programming quickies... I remember waiting for my first PCB etching kit so that I could design my own circuit boards...

Sigh.

When men were real men and computer engineers were real engineers.

So much speculation from people who do not appear to have even read the article.

FTA: “Bad ephemerides were uploaded to satellites. Those bad ephemerides became active at 1:00 am Moscow time... a GLONASS fix could not take effect until each satellite in turn passed back over control stations in the Northern Hemisphere to be reset, thus taking nearly 12 hours.”

The article concludes that the outage was probably due to a human error which "...could conceivably occur with GPS, Galileo, or BeiDou" and advises consumers not to rely on only one system.

My [completely uninformed and speculative] guess is that the Russians probably rushed a software update to meet some military deadline and it backfired on them - now Putin's troops amassed along the Ukrainian boarder may have to do without whatever feature they were trying to quickly enable.

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.