Perhaps not how it should work, but it is how it does work. Unless/until you are actually accused of infringing and hit up for money, you can't get the issue before the court at all.

How about if Apple just didn't sue the entire planet for rounded corners and touching the thing you want. You know, just have those bogus patents in a portfolio and only bringing it out when someone threatens to sue them.

They had that option. It works well for many.

Both are the problem. I can understand Apple having defensive patents, but they are using their patents offensively. They are actually pushing the button over and over. They are willfully abusing a system that is wide open to abuse. Both are at fault.

Practically all patents fail that one. There is actually a sub-specialty in patent law to describe an invention in such a way that you get the rubber stamp and can win in court but a person of average skill in the art will have no idea what you're describing, much less how it is done.

I agree with you completely. I live in the backwards state of Western Australia and sunrise has only just gone back to being around 5 in the morning and all the birds and retards are getting up at that time of the morning.

We've had a few referendums on daylight savings and despite the obvious benefits (more light after work to do things, no longer being 3 hours (and 20 years) behind the eastern states). I believe the reasons it was rejected last time was because the cows would fade and the curtains wont know what time to get milked.

Congratulations - You've just described ADS-B [1] - however its MUCH more often than every 5 minutes - and more airliners already have it. In fact, look at the tracking info from flightradar24.com for the flight in question [2] - then it disappeared... Having yet another bit of tech to combat this is stupid.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... - Bonus: How it works - http://www.airservicesaustrali...
[2] http://theaviationist.com/wp-c...

Any windows user since '95 who sticks their most commonly used icons in a corner of their desktop.

The paging is done well on the iPhone (and many others as well) but was really just a natural development once touchscreens were invented.

It is impossible for the web site operator to contact every Comcast user and provide them with instructions for alternate DNS. It is much more appropriate to pay $50 and submit an Ask Slashdot to solve the problem once and for all. FYI: A later post did solve the problem. It turned out to be a DNSSEC configuration issue.

Except that the very point of touchscreens was to make that possible. Touchscreens are older than Apple itself, they just weren't practical for most purposes until recently.

As for obviousness, even children too young to read yet understand put your finger on the menu and say "I want that". They have understood that since before the invention of the computer.

The old phones did what interfaces without touch still do today. Highlight the item with the arrows, then select. Replacing that with touching the item to select it is embodied in the invention of touch screen, which is older than Apple itself.

Nobody said they were first to build a device with a capacitative screen, just they were first to market with an OS purpose designed for them. E.g. the multitouch pinch-to-zoom stuff that wowed the audiences.

Other phone OSs were more capable than the early versions of iOS, but they didn't have any of the gee-whiz effects, and adding a capacitative screen to an OS that didn't support multitouch actually made them worse, not better to use..

It seems likely to me that the probably reason this device isn't required is engineering conservatism. Before something like this is required, you have to convince people that (a) it's a good idea, and (b) this is a good implementation of that good idea.

Don't forget the politics.

First off - that device presumably transmits to a satellite. Who owns the satellite? Very important question - is it owned by an American company? Russian? etc. etc. etc.

Secondly, the satellite beams data back to the ground. Who owns that ground station? The company? Is it run by a country?

Thirdly, who owns the data? Is it stored on an American server? Russian server? Malaysian server?

It's very easy to say that every plane should be equipped with this. But the politics are what are likely to derail it first.

If it's an American satellite going to an American owned ground station and American servers, well, the US government might use it as a "right" to know the passenger details of every flight it records. The US does it for every flight that overflies its airspace, even if it doesn't stop in the US. Boeing and others actually start designing their planes to have enough range to go from Canada to Mexico AROUND US airspace so those flights don't have to give the US any information at all.

Then there are the countries that distrust the US. Snowden, anyone?

Then there are questions about data longevity, whether it reports voice (i.e., it does cockpit voice recording) which brings up its OWN can of worms (why do you think we have fligth data recorders with thousands of channels of information and storage for tens, if not hundreds, of flights, and CVRs haven't gone beyond 30 minutes of recording? (Granted, the modern CVR now has around 6+ channels of audio recorded simultaneously on solid state media)

In fact, it's the whole politics that makes ICAO move so slowly - it takes many years to implement rules across the board.

There are times when I sincerely believe we, as a nation, don't deserve the Constitution we were given.

Nobody actually said that, and I am (and was) aware of the Prada's hardware capabilities. It was an excellent design, and I have no doubt at all that Apple paid it a LOT of attention when they were planning the iPhone, but...

The OS and software didn't match the hardware design. Running an OS written in Flash on top of WinCE very quickly exposed the limitations of both of those products, including no possibility of multitouch.

So what kind of protection would you feel is reasonable for a unique, refined design that makes all its competitors look like they were designed by idiots? The first-mover advantage is pretty useless when a competitor can duplicate your device in a few months.