Ooooh. What the article MEANS is "betting on HTML5 as a MOBILE strategy instead of writing native SMARTPHONE applications was a mistake." That's much less broad. Also, as HTML5 is still in its infancy and not yet a finished standard, I think it's kind of early to make this statement.

It's FaceTime on an iPhone, so I seriously doubt AT&T had any say in its inclusion with the phone. Which means that no, you can't remove it at all, although you can download additional videochat apps if you so wish.

then-Palm CEO Ed Colligan in 2006:

We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.

We all know how well that turned out for them.

What's the practical distinction to US citizens, though? We access the whole Internet through US-based ISPs, and the US government can impose regulations on ISPs, so as far as I'm concerned the government has the ability to control the Internet.

Of course, I would much rather have them in control than the ISPs themselves...

That's not how it works. The reason they can do that with this Internet is that they were the ones who invented it in the first place.

Not to rub salt in your wound, but this seems kind of ironic given that the logic behind a lot of the attacks on iOS is that users should be able to choose whether they want to use it or not. It seems to me that not having the option not to use Flash is just as bad as not having the option to use it.

Am I missing something here that says we have to compare all these people on the merits of their accomplishments?

Steve Jobs did great things. Dennis Ritchie did great things as well. We can argue all day about who was "better" or "more influential", but what's the point? Why not just celebrate their lives to honor them, instead of to passive-aggressively piss off people who look up to someone else?

If you celebrate Dennis Ritchie, do it for his monumental contributions to computing. If you do it just because you think Steve Jobs got too much attention, you're doing a disservice to both of their memories.

I did. Here are the first five; tell me which of them looks remotely like an iPad to you?

Yes, and in this case those rules state that you must return found property to its owner, or—if you can't find its owner—the police, otherwise it's stealing.

And where is the contention here, exactly?

Theft? Selling stolen property? If you lost your phone and the person who found it decided to sell it instead of return it to you, would it be a crime then? Or does it only become okay when it happens to a company you dislike?

That is the full article.

Thaaaaaaaaaat is not Techdirt. It's a publication with a similar name but which I've never heard of (and also seems to harbor some odd hatred for Apple).

How is it bad for someone with no programming knowledge that they aren't free to, for example, look at the source code of iOS or distribute modified versions?

In California, not turning in to the authorities a found object with a value greater than $100 is considered stealing.

Because it only confirms that it belongs to Apple if Apple makes a public announcement, not asks for it back privately, right?

I realize there's a presumption of innocence and they haven't been found guilty of anything, but come on, man. They publicly acknowledged purchasing property they knew was stolen, destroyed it, and when the owners asked for it back they wouldn't listen unless the owners would announce publicly that it was theirs. They indisputably broke the law in more than one way, and it sucks to see them getting off scot-free.