Nice. What's different or unfamiliar is incorrect.

'cause on the first day God wrote a specification document, on the third day he coded madly, on the sixth day God ticked off the last box on the acceptance test plan, and then he sat back and cracked open a can of Galactic Suds.

It comes in galaxies? You bet.

I'll do my best, though you probably will refuse to undertake the first part of the exercise: thrust your mind back to December 22, 2005, the day before the patent application was filed, and block out everything you've seen since that date.

To unlock their phones, people do things like entering a code or holding down a physical key, because almost everyone's phone has physical keys. Others have flip phones and merely open their phone to wake it up. There are a few phones out there with resistive touch screens like the Palm line... they too use physical sleep/wake switches.

In a somewhat related field, Micron has had a patent application published for unlocking computers by moving the mouse in a geometric shape, such as a line, square, or triangle. They also talk about doing it for touch screens, like those on kiosks or point of sale terminals.

So, say you want to come up with a new, intuitive way to unlock a phone? What do you invent?

Now, I'm sure you jumped up and yelled "slide to unlock!" But is that really true, if it's really 2005 and you've never heard of that?

Plus, say you did implement a slide to unlock feature... would it be like Micron's or Neonode's: draw a geometric shape on a screen with no indication of success or failure or other response until the figure is complete? Why, that increases security, since an intruder wouldn't know that they failed as soon as they deviate from the required line! That seems like a great idea, right?

Back in 2005, no one had thought of having a dynamic image following the user's finger as they drew a line to unlock the phone. No one wrote anything about it, made a prototype, or even apparently mentioned it in passing.

Now jump forward one year, to December 2006... There are still no capacitive touch screen phones on the market. Slide keyboard phones are really popular and, of course, unlock when you physically slide out the keyboard. There are still plenty of flip phones. Palm has a great color smart phone that you unlock with a button on the top (it also doubles as the IR port). How come no one has implemented a slide-to-unlock system if it had been obvious for a full year?

Now jump forward another year. Apple's iPhone is released to great fanfare and includes a slide-to-unlock system. It's the only one on the market that does - which makes you wonder if it's really been obvious for two whole years?

Jump another 18 months. It's now fall 2008 and Samsung comes out with its first modern smartphone. And it implements slide to unlock. In fact, everyone who has put out a smart phone after the iPhone is using slide to unlock systems, including even Palm, who had smart phones before the iPhone that didn't use it. If it had been obvious for almost four years, why hadn't anyone else done it before the iPhone? Was the iPhone the inspiration for everyone? And therefore, can you really say that, years before the iPhone, it was obvious?

If an idea is relatively trivial to implement, but no one ever even had the inkling of a thought to doing it, is it obvious? Or is it one of those simple, beautiful ideas that change an industry once some inventive person first creates it?

You can't reason your way into religion, it has to touch you personally. Someone in 1700 Europe would not be able to reason his way into belief that such things as elephants existed. He's have had to visit Asia or Africa to believe.

God is only invisible to those who choose to ignore him.

It's OK. You weren't. I stopped reading once I got most of the way through the subject line.

" Microsoft is very good with backwards compatibility"

I am completely flabberghasted. They can't even keep backwards compatibility from one version of word to the next. It friggin blows my mind that someone would come here and post something that absurd. Seriously.

Oh come on! I can already hear the Reeses song in my head: Two great bloats that churn great together!

That's what she said

"It's why Cops dont have to call the mayor when they see a guy running into a bank with a gun in his hand and a big sack with a dollar sign painted on it."

Yeah. That's why I never paint a dollar sign on my big sack, or my gun either for that matter!

It seems you have no idea what the internet is, and have confused it with the web. Here's your sign ...

"This carries big implications in NSA's spying/QUANTUM program"

Oh, I totally agree. When the US no longer controls it they can exhert pressure to those that do, and then poin the finger elsewhere since they can say "But we don't control it anymore! We can't be held responsible!" Anybody who thinks the US won't control what they want through black-ops activities is an utter fool if they have been paying attention to any of this.

Until recently, all Apple devices used a common charger. At some point in the not-too-distant future, all Apple devices will use a common charger again.

So, by platform, Android isn't that much different than iOS.

Apple made some design decisions vis-a-vis their connector. You don't have to agree with them, but they had some specifications that they wanted to meet that USB didn't and still doesn't allow them to. (Having a reversible connector that doesn't need to be aligned a specific way is a perfectly reasonable design decision from the point of view of usability.)

Anyway, you can plug that cable into basically anything that accepts a common USB 2 connector and it'll work. So it's compliant on at least one end of the cable.

I don't know what expensive proprietary software you're talking about--iOS? I mean, yeah, I don't want to stop using iOS because I like it. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

It works, so presumably they did address those issues ;-)

Also, photons don't have cross-talk. That is a specifically electro-magnetic phenomenon.

Unless cops, and I mean a lot of cops, start going to jail for their criminal behavior, then this isn't working at all. I know for 100% fact that many if not most cops are criminals who commit perjury and break the law on an almost daily basis. Yet, somehow, magically - none of them ever does anything illegal, and no matter what they do they are da officas! Dey wouldn't do nuttin' wrong! Sure they kicked a guy repeatedly in the head, but hey - you don't know what it's like to get such an adreneline rush just from the idea that you are going to be able to kick some poor bastard in the head and then get away with it! Can't you see man! It's OK, cause deys da coppas, and dey get excited, so you can't expect them to not kick a sick and helpless guy in the head, or shoot an old man ... just in case, don't ya know!

I'm sorry. I require that those with whom I might have a discussion like this have at least a modicum of reading comprehension ability coupled with at least semi-functioning logical facilities, but good luck finding someone who doesn't care about those things!

"If WW2 were to happen tomorrow, we'd still sit on the sidelines as long as possible and you can be sure that the second we declare war there will be protests in the street."

You mean unlike WW1, where we .... wait for it ... sat on the sidelines as long as possible? I don't know about protests, because there was no internet ot TV (as it exists today), so there may well have been many, many small local protests.