Again really good technological sythensis is very innovative in itself, and a rare type of innovation. What is the bigger invention, inventing something fundamental, or figuring out how to do something really well that can make that fundamental invention useful? Lots of people have ideas, those only take an hour or a few minutes. The hard work is the thousands of hours in perfecting an idea, not the spontaneous "concept" moment. Few companies have the wherewithal to do product design really well.

For example, I just got a quad-core Nexus 7 for software testing. I was amazed that even though it has 5-10x the processing power of the 1st generation iPad, the user interface is 5x slower. Now this device has one primary job: to be a user interface. Google is full of smart people and has had years to get it right. But they haven't. This is just one of the serious flaws in this device, and point to lack innovation of concept synthesis.

If you remember 10 years back, apple was a small underdog company... not popular. They became popular on the back of their products, their quality, and innovation - not marketing as you present. Their Ad budget is surprisingly small, like 1/4 of Samsungs. Google is going to spend 1/2 of Apples whole budget on just the Moto X.

How about this: Design a really great UI and industrial design made up of a 100 little mini-innovations or signature graphic design elements. Now try to decompose your product into a bunch of design patents to keep others from cloning your invention. You will end up with a bunch of 50 page patents that refer to the intricacies of rectangles and rounded corners.

When referring to the simplest elements of a single claim, every patent sounds reductionist and silly... That doesn't mean the patent as a whole isn't innovative or at least the describe signature design style of your company.

Nobody thought of the collection of details that make up the iPhone's design before Apple showed it to the world. Only after, does it seem obvious.

Your link points to Apples patents which samsung violated, not the SEP patents that Samsung is holding Apple hostage for. I see nothing pointing to Apple refusing to pay FRAND terms for SEP patents. Neither 'SEP' or 'FRAND' are even referred to in those articles.

Apple is in the right here, and is even being backed by competitors like Microsoft (http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/microsoft-and-intel-back-apple-in.html). Any serious commentator seems to agree that this is nothing more than Samsung blackmailing Apple: Samsung takes extortionate position against Apple in new ITC filing (http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/07/wheres-doj-samsung-takes-extortionate.html). Samsung wants a cross license to use Apple design patents that define what make an Apple product unique, whereas Apple wants to use SEP patent than every phone must have... And Samsung is trying to gouge them outside of FRAND terms to try and black-mail Apple to use their non-SEP patent portfolio.

To quote Forbes:

(http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/04/links-4-aug-of-course-apples-imports-were-not-going-to-be-banned/)

Please actually read the source articles out there.

Fosspatents:
"Florian Mueller of Foss Patents, who has been following Apple and Samsung’s case before the ITC, called today’s veto “a victory for consumers and fair competition.”"

Forbes:
"To the surprise of almost no one the Obama Administration has overturned the looming ITC ban on the imports of certain of Apple's older products...The particular reason used was that the patent in question was a standards essential one... This seems reasonable enough: the EU also has a similar policy that violation of SEPs, that should be available on FRAND terms, cannot be used to ask for product or sales bans... It’s possible to be rather cynical about this. Apple is the largest single taxpayer in the US and it’s sorta unlikely that an administration would ban the products of said largest taxpayer. But I think such cynicism would be misplaced here. The important point being that it is indeed all about a standards essential patent. And the general movement in patent cases seems to be that SEP violations should not lead to product bans. So, given that this is an SEP violation, no product ban":

According to the IEEE review of portfolios, Apple Has the Most Powerful Patent Portfolio in Consumer Electronics, based on quality, originality, generality, and innovation.

Google, nor samsung are in the top 20.

Just because you don't understand how design patents work, "bullshit" i think you call them, doesn't mean you know what you speak of.

Apple has a very innovative talent of seeing the big-picture and putting together technologies in ways that other people didn't imagine, with a keen eye of how to make it useable to the average person. In so doing they have blazed the trail on many fundamental product categories that spawned whole industries (the personal computer, the GUI computer, the portable music player, the modern smart phone, the tablet, etc). Did they do something that was a category first, or the first use of a technology? Not often, but Apple's ability to synthesizing ideas into a well-honed product is an important type of innovation. It It is not fundamental science, but it is no less important or valuable, and should not be underestimated.

For example, even if multi-touch has been around in labs for 20 years, but nobody could figure out what to do with it. And cell phones had been around for 20 years, but had horrible interfaces and couldn't be used as real web devices. It is no less innovative to bringing together the two, with all the small details of those "bullshit" design patents to make it into a package that really works for an end user. Was it innovative? Based on the fact that *every* phone manufacture is has followed suit with a variation of the iPhone, and that this stuff is hard to do, and google is still struggling 5 years later to make quad-core tablets that are as responsive the to users touch as Apples 1st generation iPhone with 10x less resources. Is it Innovative? You bet cha!

(http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/apple-has-the-most-powerful-patent-portfolio-in-consumer-electronics)

You are mis-informed (or a astroturfer, as samsung seems to be paying a army of these),

Samsung is not offering FRAND terms. They are trying to do a armed robbery stick-up. Read fosspatents.com (http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/07/wheres-doj-samsung-takes-extortionate.html)

Samsung is trying to use SEP patents as a weapon to get Apple to cross-license their design patents, which are the most valuable patents in tech right now according to the IEEE's survey of patent quality and innovation. Apple feels that Samsung should do its own design innovation, and not try to ride their coat-tails as a product copy-cat, and has no desire to turn over its design patent portfolio.

Whereas, Samsung has some SEP REQUIRED to be 3G compatible, that they won't license under FRAND terms, apple has to choice but to use 3G... and yet apple is refraining from using their Nortel SEP patents against samsung.

Nobody is saying that they don't have value. They are saying the need to be licensed on FRAND terms. And because they patent standards, coming up with non-infringing alternatives is impossible, because it wouldn't be compatible. To use SEPs as a weapon could be detrimental to the economy, because we need standards.

Apple, like samsung has purchased large patent portfolios, like Nortel. Apple has spent several billions in buying fundament standards patents. In fact apples patent portfolio was rated #1 in patent value/quality by IEEE last year.

Apple has still refrained from attacking anyone on standard essentials. There purchases have been defensive, not offensive.

I think that mobile computing finally found success in iOS and its copy-cats due to the thoughtful simplification of the UI/UX. Desktops are by nature a different beast, and 15 years of translating the desktop UX to the tablet/mobile was a failure until Apple re-designed what mobile UX should be in the first iPhone.

Your thinking is clearly a programmers view, not an end-users. Which is why you, and most programmers, desperately need UX designer help on your projects.

I just bought a Nexus 7 2nd gen off the internet. I was blown away how little Google understands good UX/UI, and the need of the OS to be user-centric in allocating resources. The device while sporting very fast a quad core 1.5 Ghz processor and 2GB of RAM, has the slowest user response I've ever seen. It was 4-8 times slower at responding to user touch, and in UI transitions the a 2 year old iPad2, despite having 3-4 times the hardware resources! I had to drop the idea of supporting Android in our app, because I can't even get acceptable behavior on Google's own super-tablet.

This type of thinking, that has programmers worrying about geeky things like what kind of multi-tasking they have or whether they can root the device, has kept Android from focusing on what is #1 importance: the user. And while I have no doubt the Android will take the majority of the marketshare with poor-performing low-cost devices and Google and Amazon selling quality hardware below cost because they have ulterior motives... in the end the market will suffer because Android is being driven primarily by least common denominator market politics and a programmer-centric point of view.

That is the point! They are "flimsy" in the since they are design patents, as there are other design solutions to the design problem another company come up with. Samsung could have come up with alternative solutions without co-opting apples design, and which would not have been misconstrued as a Apple design in the marketplace.

Samsung is using patents as weapons for essential standards patents that you MUST use to implement a standard technology to be compatible, 3G in this case. Apple has a corporate policy not to sue other on standards patents that they hold.

Samsung is being anti-competitive by trying to lock competitors out of making 3G compatible cell-phone. Apple is only saying design your own UI and industrial design ideas and quit copying us.

Because this is slashdot, we have to knee-jerk Apple right? Apple is on the right side of this argument if you can get past your bias.

Apples position is that there are two kinds of Patents:

1. 1. Standards Essential Patents. The kind of patent you must use to be standard compliant for thing like 3G, bluetooth, etc.
2. 2. Design Patents. These are the patents that describe the uniqueness of your design, the look and feel

3. Apples point, and completely reasonable is this: Don't copy our patented design, come up with your own ideas. There are variety of ways to design a UI and industrial design, there is no reason your company needs to copy another when you can invest in your own innovation. Android/Samsung largely is a bottom feeder here, it is co-opting the iOS look and feel to ride on Apple's coat-tails, as opposed to innovating their own look and feel like Microsoft did with surface/metro.

   On the other hand, standards patents are required to implement a technology like 3G, WIFI, Bluetooth, etc. Everyone must use these to be compatible. Samsung was trying to hold Apple hostage for patents under license terms that were many times the FRAND terms that Samsung offered other companies. It was a sleazy maneuver on Samsungs part.

   Apple owns many Standard Essential Patents too. Though they defend their design patents vigorously, they have taken a very principled stand not to sue others on standards patents, including not counter-suing Samsung.

   I think Apple should be applauded, they don't troll with patents they don't use, they don't sue over standards patents, and they defend only patents that cover their design look and feel that leaves you free to design an alternative device to a similar end but that can't be misconstrued being a rip-off product.

I should point one more thing out. The while the limits of the carnot cycle in a vehicle is limited at around 25-30%, in practice it is around 15% due to the non-ideal operating regime, transmission losses, etc..

It is definitely a hit piece.

About 5 years ago there was a study from a couple of Boston University professors of the Energy Return on Energy Investment for texas Oil.The most stunning thing was that when you include refining, and once run through a ICE engine, the EROEI is less than 1. Thats right, a car engine could not drive the pump that pulls it out of the ground after going through the refinement process! American crud is a net loser.

This means that when it comes to USA oil, it is energy subsidized by coal power. Which is fine, as gasoline is a convenient form to store energy. But it is important to understand that the EROEI on global oil has steadily declined over the last 100 years.

Fundamentally the ICE engine is limited by physics. It will never get more than 25-30% efficient. Whereas the electric car can achieve 70-80% easily, and is only limited right now by technology. And as the EROEI of these fuel stocks decline, this will become increasingly important.

While others here are correct in saying that there are better languages (True), and they can do many of the same things with other server side tools (True), there is one thing that client-server javascript brings to the table that is unique:

You can write a single code base that can float between client and server making it a single platform. So if you make a design change, you can run parts of your code on the serve side, or client side without a whole re-architecture or re-write of the system.

Because of the single "platform", there are whole client-server system frameworks like meteor and derby that can put you far ahead of cobbling your own pieces together.

Because of the single "platform", it empowers commercial app developers to expose the UI, but hold some code chunks back, so their proprietary code isn't exposed.

Indeed, this is nothing new.

Most concrete ready-mix suppliers cut their portland cement by around 20% with Fly Ash , another pozzolan. It makes better, cheaper concrete. This is well known. However, the more Portland Cement you replace with pozzolans, the slower the cure.

The markets skew towards high-portland content concrete is largely dictated by the desire to strip forms as soon as possible. With portland, forms are striped in 24 hours. WIth high pozzolan content concrete, the forms often need to be in place for upwards of a week.