And why couldn't that guy just, oh, put it in neutral or turn the key off? Seriously, he said, "I tried the gear shift, the keys, emergency brake. I tried everything and none of it worked." How does none of that work in a 2001 Ford Expedition?

Get a modern manual transmission that has a hill-holder clutch.

People aren't putting "all sorts of sensitive information on their phone." Their phones are connected to the outside world. Take for example the iPhone email application. Should, if you are arrested, the police be able to search through *ALL* of your email via the phone? How about visit any websites you might have failed to logout from? This data is not "on" your phone, per se, but the phone is a portal through which the data can be obtained. And some data might even be cached unbeknownst to the device owner. Where is the limit? Where is the legal line?

They may or may not be responding to their customer base, but I think they're more afraid of Amazon, who have been increasing their available online content, streaming as well as purchases. The Kindle Fire announcement marked Amazon as a big player in the online media world, and I'll bet suddenly Netflix realized they were the third wheel next to Amazon and Apple.

You mean once Amazon ships the Kindle Fire, where Android is just the invisible underlayer.

So my reading of it says that a teleconference is NOT the same. If you have a real image of the person on the other side of the communication, that's not the "virtual reality emulating real-life activities" in the patent.

Popularity vote of what? I see h.264 implemented in software and even hardware all over the place, ranging from my TiVo to even my point-and-shoot camera. I'm fairly certain I've never even heard of WebM before today.

IMHO Android would have been a non-starter if the iPhone had been available to all carriers (GSM & CDMA both) and not restricted to AT&T. A lot of people (myself included) passed on iPhones for the sole reason of refusing to use AT&T. Android currently suffers from too much product fracture. Too many different customer experiences based on vendor customization, and so much different hardware it's hard for developers to test everything, as well as hard to use newer, better APIs because older OS versions, whose updates are controlled by the carriers and may or may not happen, don't have them.

On some websites, presumably due to poor coding on the part of the Flash applet developer, a storage amount of 0 will simply cause the Flash applet to fail. This is the experience I had when I tried this a year or two ago.

I love how many people argue that the Apple lock-in is what makes them prefer Android over iOS. Ever try to use an Android phone without a GMail account? A Droid from Verizon will not even activate without one. I would much prefer to be locked to my own Mac (Mobile Me is not mandatory) in my own home, than forced to use Google services. Unless I want to use third-party email, calendar, and contact list applications, which likely don't integrate with the OS, vary in quality, and often are a general pain in the port to use.

I find this lawsuit particulary funny simply because their offices in Burlington, MA, are next to each other on the same street, Van De Graaff Drive, which is basically just the driveway for those buildings. You easily hit a golfball from one to the other. I wonder if they make dirty faces at each other? (Sun's up a different road, at least a half-dozen par 5's away.)

You need Whispernet because if you look closely, you'll see that this "game" runs in the web browser. That's right, it's just a website that has a display layout for the Kindle. You can point any web browser to their site and play Zork.

If you watch ONE show a night on that thing, you're going to have tossed $365 out the window over the course of a year.

But compare that to likely well over $400/year for cable ... this is the ultimate a la carte solution for the casual or infrequent watcher.

I'm fairly certain it ran Emacs 18. I remember that it was an overnight compile for us on our Sun 3/60's, but something (readme? configure?) claimed a couple-minute compile on a Cray.

Just send up Salvage 1. Or maybe Quark.