What does the place of manufacture have anything to do with fake retail stores? Wouldn't this be just as news-worthy if this was happening in Latvia?

I wonder what the context of the question was. I find it surprising that 34% is an accurate number. After all, the word "3G" is on the screen pretty much 100% of the time. More likely, people who don't have a 4G phone aren't sure what "4G" means, and the previous question biased the response to this question.

Q: Do you know what "4G" means?
A: Yes, it is technology that certain phones use for wireless communication.
Q: Do you plan on getting a 4G phone?
A: I already have an iPhone 4.

vs:

Q: Have you ever had a 3G phone?
A: Yes, I had the iPhone 3G.
Q: Do you plan on getting a 4G phone?
A: I already have an iPhone 4.

IANAL, but aren't they saying the exact opposite? Aren't they saying, "We have invented a superior technology and design because of these specific patents, which HTC illegally stole/copied/whatever"? I am not validating the patent system here, just trying to clarify the tactical stance.

I don't think people realize how annoying this feature was (is? does it work today?). When facebook was pushing it, I would routinely get emails from people I knew. I had no interest in facebook at all, but they would correlate the sender's network and tell me about all of the other people I know who are using facebook, whether they invited me or not.

Really, google cutting this off has more to do with the *members* of the contact list rather than the person sending the invite.

I don't think Facebook did a good job at letting people know what the planned implications were for providing access to an address book. As a member of many people's address books but not a facebook user, I am glad that Google made this difficult for them.

I suspect that mischief that does not result in permanent damage would be far more tempting than something like slashing tires. Unplugging a car that is in the middle of charging would be such mischief. It reminds me of those parking meters that just internally tracked which spot had what time remaining. Someone would enter their parking spot number, pay for an hour, go shopping, then someone comes along and pays for 5 minutes for that spot in order to cause a ticket to be issued 6 minutes later.

The way to fix these problems is to require access to the car. Parking meters should emit a printout that the driver can put on his dashboard. Perhaps plugins would have some way to "lock" the cord to the car with access tied to the car keys. People could still cut the wire, but I suspect that would happen far less frequently than walking down a block unplugging every car.

"Digital" has come to mean "lacking media". For example, some of the movies you can buy on dvd or blu ray come with a "digital copy", which is a (usually) DRMed file that is playable on a computer or tablet. Of course the "dvd" part of the disk is also digital. But outside of some niches, 100% of all entertainment/art people consume is digital. Using the word "digital" to characterize something as a stream of 1s and 0s is now a meaningless distinction.

For people who have a technical understanding of what a dvd or cd is compared to a netflix stream or mp3, using the word "digital" in this way is indeed a bit strange. But what would you suggest as the word to describe "lacking media"? "media-less" doesn't work because the music and movies are generally casually referred to as "media" (let's go to my media room and watch a movie). "disk-less" is awkward to say.

After seeing "digital" used in this way a couple times, I was able to get over it just fine.

Sounds like you are railing on iOS, but do you realize that iOS has nearly ever feature you are touting in this not-yet-existent Cisco tablet? Even the example of leaving a phone in a bar is a stretch -- the thing was immediately wiped remotely.

I'm sorry if the humor didn't come across. It was not meant as any kind of substantive criticism, it was meant to make light of the fact that you are talking over the heads of probably 98% of the people who read what you wrote. I have no way of knowing if what you said was accurate or not, and that wasn't even part of what I was trying to communicate. If anything, I was teasing you for using such dense language with such little context. Really, though, what happened is that I read what you wrote, thought to myself, "this is what engineers experience when they hear management using highly specific language to describe business models", and I thought of that funny buzzword generator. It's funny, right?!

No offense, and I'm sorry that my terse comment was misunderstood.

Is there some physics version of the Web Bullshit Generator?

I have heard it said that at some point the military would not buy software that required a mouse, so MS made an OS that didn't require one. I don't know how true this is, but MS has obviously put an enormous amount of effort into allowing their GUI to be run without a mouse. There are probably dozens of people who work on this aspect of Windows/Explorer exclusively.

I had a company-issued blackberry for about a decade. Each year or 18 months or so they would get refreshed, and I'd get the latest model. The early models were solid and great in almost every way, but each subsequent model was worse than the one it replaced. They haven't made a decent keyboard in at least 5 years. Their screens got more pixels and more colors each year, but the overall quality of the screens got slowly worse. My employer supports iOS now, and I'm happy to never have to touch a blackberry again.

I also did some app development for blackberry devices, and I can tell you without a doubt they have the worst platform, the worst tools, and it's obvious they never cared about making development workable. I only ever saw one third-party non-game app that was decent, and I estimate it took 15 people 6 months to build that. Compare this to some of the iOS and Android apps that a single person can put out with a couple weeks worth of effort.

Going with Android seems like it would be akin to starting over. I don't see what assets they have that HTC or Samsung don't have. They have their Enterprise Server thing, but I don't understand what advantage that has over Exchange + ActiveSync which every other platform seems to support. I would be happy to be enlightened about what advantages Rim might have left.

I am certainly not trying to say that the operating system had no api prior to the release of the sdk, and I am certainly not trying to indicate that my opinion is rooted in facts.

I have done very limited os x development, but it is enough for me to see the overlap, as well as the mysterious divergences, in the two apis. You are right that there is no direct evidence that a public api and app store were in the pipeline. I just don't think it is possible to turn an internal api into a public api with all the supporting infrastructure and tools in such a short period of time. In casual conversations with other developers, this is a widely held belief.

There is no way that the SDK was released as a capitulation to developers. The iOS SDK was released 8 months after the iPhone. If you have done any iOS development or otherwise taken a look at it, you would know that it is impossible to build such an SDK and supporting materials in such a short period of time. The SDK and App Store were clearly in the works when they initially released the iPhone. Perhaps they were behind schedule, or perhaps there was another reason for staggering their releases.

Since it didn't say in the summary:

Is there any concrete information that the problem was that the url was /AccountDetails?AccountNumber=123? I haven't seen any.

There are a ton of understandable (but still inexcusable) reasons for an organization to subvert it's own security measures. Perhaps this online banking site had a requirement to display account information from two different backends that are otherwise unaware of each other. Perhaps this was implemented using javascript or flash "drm" or "cryptography". Perhaps a vulnerability those libraries allowed the attackers to compute some hash 2 billion times which yielded 200k valid account numbers.

This obviously reeks of a hacky shortcut of something that should have been implemented properly, but I haven't read any credible facts that it was as simple as you put it.

Again, I'm not trying to excuse anyone. Just saying it's probably more complicated than you are making it out to be. And this guy was probably quoted out of context and probably was not being understood by the reporter.