I wouldn't state it quite like that, but YES. Woz is not and never has been the target market for the iPhone, except in the beginning when no other alternatives existed. The iPhone is for people who want an easy, out-of-the-box device they never have to mess with and helps them do other stuff. Android is for tinkerers, cheap folks, and folks who easily succumb to marketing (Samsung alone spends 15x Apple's budget on marketing), and Windows Mobile is for Microsoft employees and people who want to be different. BlackBerry is for people whose company gives them a BlackBerry and makes them use it.

If you are comparing features on a bulleted list, the iPhone looks mediocre. If you're actually using it in your daily life, it's great. The iPhone isn't about checking off features on a list and never has been.

I'm not arguing that it's a defensible patent, but it's also not patenting what the summary or TFA claims. Here's the #1 core claim of the patent:

1. A computer-implemented method for providing recurring delivery of products, the method comprising performing instructions under the control of a computer system for: receiving at the computer system a designation of a delivery slot and a recurring delivery list comprising one or more list items, each of the one or more list items identifying a product, a quantity to deliver, and a frequency of delivery; periodically generating, by the computer system, an order having a date and time for delivery based on a next occurrence of the delivery slot, the order being generated in advance of the date and time for delivery such that the order has a period of time of pendency prior to the delivery; creating, by the computer system, one or more order items for the order based on a last delivery date and the frequency of delivery of each list item in the recurring delivery list; receiving at the computer system a change made to a first list item of the recurring delivery list during the period of time of pendency of the order; in response to receiving the change, determining, by the computer system, whether the order includes an order item corresponding to the first list item; in response to determining that the order includes an order item corresponding to the first list item, modifying, by the computer system, the order item corresponding to the first list item based on the change made to the first list item of the recurring delivery list; and providing, by the computer system, the order to an order fulfillment system capable of causing the one or more order items to be delivered substantially on the date and time for delivery.

In other words, it's a particular implementation of a subscription system that has to include every element in the above list in order to infringe. It would be easy to work around this in implementing a subscription system. It's also not generally how milkmen used to operate. It's also PROBABLY covered by prior art, but whenever I hear "X just patented Y that's stupid LOLOL!" I have to go to the claims, and I usually see that, no, only a particular implementation/method for accomplishing Y is covered.

Yes, a machine indexed the content of your gmail to find ways you might be vulnerable to persuasion by a company's marketing. No, Microsoft does not do that.

That we know this much about the project means it's not one of the projects that are THAT deep and dark.

It also trades back and forth with C as the single most popular programming language in the world, on which huge amounts of server software is written-- almost twice as popular as C++, which is what most of LibreOffice is actually written in and three times more popular than C#, its biggest competitor in the bytecode-on-virtual-machine environment.

Also note that LGPL is very different from GPL...

It's true, and I think it first really hit home with most people when Business Insider posted their "Microsoft Operating Profit By Division" chart about 3 years ago. Since then the XBox group has had some profitable quarters and some losses (a big one last spring), but is still down a couple billion. If you're "genuinely interested" in the exact amount, just open Excel and type in the numbers from all of Microsoft's quarterly reports for the last decade to get an exact amount-- the numbers aren't secret.

Your use of "MSM" and inability to relay facts in the article you're actually discussing -- facts that are also included in every other news account I've read -- leads me to believe you probably get your news from one particular (in fact, the MOST "mainstream" and popular of them) cable news service, and should probably just stick to that instead of coming here to post...

Possibly. But after the first Gulf War we found an awful lot of Soviet munitions with English instruction manuals among the Iraqi arsenal.

As the original poster replied to the first of the dozen people who suggested this... if you require a data plan for support, they'll sign up for a data plan, get support, then immediately cancel the data plan. The only way to recoup costs in a consistent manner is just require certain things for certain devices to be on the network. No one is forcing you to use either the device or the network, so you're welcome to take your business elsewhere...

Indeed... Microsoft Excel was refining itself on the Mac when Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS was the primary spreadsheet for the business world in the 80's. It wasn't until OS/2's failure in the early 90's (when the other office software had generally gone the OS/2 path) that Office-on-Windows really picked up steam. Each version of Word was ported to Windows from the Mac until the much-maligned 5.0 version when they tried to reverse it and failed badly. The question in the late 90's, though, was whether Microsoft would cancel the Mac version of Office entirely or keep it going. The fact that it was always profitable probably helped the decision, but in promising to do so and investing $150M they got out of a huge number of lawsuits they probably would have lost.

Seriously, the processor powering the computer most are using to read the statement about the lack of invention is the result of dozens of fundamental discoveries and inventions over the last decade.

iOS has some really nice development tools. I don't port to Android, but for those that do I've heard an iOS-first, Android-second strategy can produce better Android apps because the toolset on iOS helps debug and optimize the software faster and better. It might be worth looking into.

Things don't have to be either-or. The email system can route both userid@domain.tld and First.Last@domain.tld (with First.M.Last for conflicts, and shortened forms for very long names if desired, or omitted at the user's discretion) to the proper users. There's no reason to restrict each user to one and only one address. I think most Western non-geeks would prefer First.Last where possible, and forcing people to remember some jumble of userid letters seems like a system designed for the ease of the implementors instead of the users.

You're kind of ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that Apple didn't write MacOS X from the ground up. Most of it is NeXT with a different GUI, and which in the beginning had an integrated old-school Mac API grafted on ("Carbon", which has mostly been deprecated in favor of the NeXT's traditional API). NeXT chose BSD because it was done by Avie Tenavian, whose CMU work on the Mach kernel (which used BSD) became the core of NeXT's OS. They chose BSD because Linux didn't exist yet and everything else was locked down pretty tightly. So you're talking about an OS with roots in the mid to late 80's and decisions inherited from that time. It's probably on a short list for being among the longest-surviving continuously maintained OS in common usage today, predating NT, Linux, Solaris, and many others.