There is NEVER certainty regarding a SCOTUS ruling. Expectations cover a spectrum and not everyone makes the same bet. SCOTUS could have ruled in such a way that this company lost their patent protection altogether which appears to not have happened. Just because what you outlined is the most likely outcome does not mean it is the only possible outcome. Some people were clearly betting on other, more pessimistic, outcomes than the one that actually occurred. It's pretty much the same thing as betting on the long shot in a horse race instead of betting on the favorite. The odds are against you but if you are right the profit is much higher.

The SCOTUS ruling IS new information. Prior to the decision there were expectations regarding the ruling but it could not be treated as a certainty.

A well written book will can transport me (and let me admit here that I own a literary agency, and am the son of one of the golden age SF writers, a hugo, and other, award winner... I know at least a little bit about well written books.)

Yes, when I'm reading a well written story I'm transported to a different place as well. I feel sorry for those who don't read.

I'm also compelled to remind you that the real world disagrees with your perception.

Perception can never match reality, it's far too complex and we're far too simple.

I should send you a copy of Nobots when it's done (what's online is a crappy error-filled first rough draft).

It wasn't that driving while on the phone was worse than drunk driving, but that it was as dangerous. The difference is when you're drunk, you're drunk from when you start the trip until after you get there. With a phone you're only dangerous for the part of the trip you're on the phone. Plus, someone drunk is less likely to be wearing a seat belt than if they were sober.

It is extremely rational behavior. Think of it like playing a poker hand. You have imperfect information so you make your bets based on the likelihoods of various results. Some results are more likely that others and you play accordingly. As more information becomes available your betting strategy may change. That is exactly what is happening here.

One has to understand what is driving prices for the stock market to make any sense. Information about company performance is at the core but it is NOT what drives prices. There is no direct link between a company's financial performance and their stock price. What drives prices is peoples expectations and in some cases people's expectations about other people's expectations. (and even expectations about expectations about expectations... you can keep going) If you invest in the stock market you are placing a bet not so much on what a company will do but on what other people will think about the company. When you buy IBM stock you are saying in essence "I expect more people to find this valuable in the future". Any secondary market (stocks, baseball cards, tulips, real estate, etc) works this way. It's shockingly rational (with some exceptions) but highly chaotic and thus hard to predict.

You couldn't be more wrong. They do not use the legacy file system as you know it. They use a task specific file system. It's evident in every aspect of iCloud, and iTunes.

You're bewildered. The device uses a filesystem just as we know it. The user doesn't get to see it, but it is there. Additionally, there's a filesystem exposed to the user that consists of app-on-desk and/or-app-in-folder; this is horribly broken, but nonetheless allows the user to organize apps in the way that the computing community has long determined to be desirable.

You should ask yourself this: Why are there named user folders in iOS in the first place? There are two obvious reasons: to reduce clutter, and so you can *organize* your apps: games, photography, etc. To argue that organization at the user defined level isn't Apple's goal is ridiculous, that's exactly what the folders have done all along. They just have not done it well. Now that the count limits have been sundered, they'll be better; but you mark my words, these other limits are also impacting the device's ability to do work, and creating one-app-only zones where anything that can be done to a file must be in the one app that owns it, with the notable exception of the photos, where Apple has made the mistake of again creating a unique filesystem for them that doesn't benefit anything else. It is form over function, and it's well known to be the wrong path. Why did it work with iOS at all? Because these devices started out as non-general-purpose computing platforms. But now they're much more powerful, and so they're going to have to come with a general purpose filesystem to complement them. There are several ways to do that, but the current implementation is only a partial image of one of them, and amusingly in the case of your arguing position, it's a limited version of the bog-standard computer filesystem we're all familiar with.

You see the files specific to the task you are working on.

No. You don't. That's part of the problem. If I have a text file, there should be all manner of apps that might have business with that file. Text editors. Log viewers. Spellcheckers. Many more. But because the paradigm is primarily app-owns-file, this sharing is crippled. You can't use the synergy of multiple apps to work on files, and that shoots the device, and the user, right in the foot. If, on the other hand, one could organize one's data and access it via that organization, without relying on a broken idea of app-owns-document, then that synergy would be brought up to the level of a modern computer system. It's a failed, crippled vision and Apple has already begun to revise it with iOS 7. Further, not only should apps be able to see whatever files you want them to, you should be able to put one swatch of (for instance) text files in one folder, related to one task, and another swatch for another task in another folder. This prevents you from having to wade through every file for every task that you ever did.

I'm not looking at it from the perspective of a "geek", as you wrongly assume, or the least bit concerned about multiple shells, etc.; I'm looking at it from the perspective of a business owner for whom the functionality of iOS falls far short of what I need just with conventional file management for mundane, non-geeky files. Would geeks benefit from such changes? Sure. Would the left side of the Gaussian be bewildered and lost? Unlikely. The existence of the ability to create subfolders does not have to be used. The search facility is still there, much like Spotlight exists on OSX. You *can* use such a system like a drooling idiot; but it makes no sense whatsoever to limit everyone to that status.

Imagine the iOS device after years of use. Full of files, many perhaps of the same name. You search for "mom" but there are 40 instances. Which one is the one you want? Without folder organization, how can you tell? This is just one of the obvious pitfalls. We need date; we need organizational context; we need sharing among apps for all files; we need limits lifted and tree structured folders implemented. And it's going to happen or Apple will be left behind. Mark my words, I've been watching computers since the 70's and there's just no way going back that far is the way to go.

The iPhone can forget old networks or did you mean something else? To my knowledge it has always had this capability.

That's not really surprising. All that means is that the market expected the news to be worse than it actually was. Once the ruling was handed down and the uncertainty removed, the stock rebounds based on the new information. You'll see this all the time where a company has a terrible quarter and their stock price goes up because while it was indeed terrible, it wasn't as terrible as expected.

The file system is not revealed at all.

Wrong. The apps on desk, apps in folders functionality IS a filesystem. It's broken, and stupid, but it's still a filesystem. There's a perfectly good filesystem within the context of the actual OS -- it couldn't run without one -- but the user has their own. Apple partially addressed their mistakes with iOS 7, allowing many items in a folder (finally) and I expect they'll allow subfolders next time around as people continue to demand them. It's entirely irrelevant if they expose *the* filesystem, the point was, the unit USES a filesystem, and the user needs A filesystem; the apps=on-desk and/or-in-folder functionality IS, in fact, A filesystem, albeit a crippled and pitiful one. Apple will either up the iPad's game to be more capable or it will be left in the dust as this class of devices becomes more powerful overall. People on the right side of the Gaussian are interested in doing real work on these tablets (and perhaps even on the phones.) You can't do that until applications can work in synergy, apps don't have to reinvent every feature in order to make use of it, apps can share data, there's a reasonable way to organize both apps *and* data, and limits on folder content count are lifted (and as I said, Apple's already addressing the fact that they screwed that up badly.)

When I download or create a file, I need to be able to get at it with all of the apps that can deal with it. I need to be able to put it somewhere so that I can find it again with minimal effort -- and no, that doesn't mean typing its name into a search box -- it means "tap."

You'll see. Apple's stuck in the 1970s. Back then, we looked at, and tried, no folders, and limited file counts. We got past that as fast as we could, because it sucks. Apple's always had a problem with form over function; the mac mini is an example where they realized it and fixed it. The new Mac Pro and the filesystem exposed to the user in iOS are two areas you'll see change in rather short order now.

In other news, water is wet.

Was anyone under the delusion that it was ever over 10%?

I found write performance hit a huge wall once the things started filling up. Perfect to kb/s in an instant and then getting stuck at that speed, and of course since an erase is a write recovery from that state took ages. The answer I suppose is to not let them get anywhere near full - where that point is will undoubtedly vary by model based on their internal controllers. I can't recall where it fell over but I think it was still under 90% with one set of SSDs.
I replaced them with spinning storage and people were happy, but that was something that didn't need a lot of file operations per second.

"How long is a peace of string"

About the same as a "Concordat of Worms".

Things that you may have avoided doing when you were younger may not be as difficult as you think and there are few things as satisfying as mastering something difficult.
Pick two - something that you've only ever been average or below average at doing and something that you've always been terrible at or that terrifies you.

It doesn't have to be technical, it could be a sport or learning to sing or dance.

It's not pandering, it's doing what is required to stay relevant. The new gnome just isn't quite at the point where it works as well as the older gnome interface, so the old one stays if RHEL want people to keep on using their distro.

Thanks for the great post. As a disclaimer, I've been working as a contractor for the last 18 months or so supporting a major TV/Cable company's broadcast operations' embedded software for digital video, and years earlier I did work for IBM with digital video and cable set-top boxes, so the below may be biased in that sense.

One thing I might point out is that in Europe, even with TV, the sort of community life you describe is somewhat more intact. So, there is some sort of difference in the USA. TV is no doubt part of the change in our society. But there are other factors. One is the spread of the socially isolating automobile. Another is the movement of women into the paid exchange economy and away from the home-based gift economy (including less in-home child care), away from the subsistence economy of home production, and away from voluntary participating in local community-planned economy. Another is increasing material aspirations, including how larger homes with larger yards physically separate people more; see "Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth" by Suniya S. Luthar. The rising professionalization of so many activities has discouraged individuals helping each other (you are more likely now to see a psychologist instead of talk to your neighbor over the fence while putting up laundry, with the solution being prescription drugs instead of social change). Lengthening school days (and years with grad school) means less people are around regular communities. The rise of big box stores displacing locally-owned neighborhood stores is another factor. So is the loss of the family farm and the culture that produces. The reduction of unions in the USA and loss of long vacations and shorter working hours is probably another big factor making for less time to be neighborly. No doubt there are more factors as well due to technological and political changes.

Your post reminds me of a Simpson's episode where for some reason all the TVs stop working and the community immediately renews itself, families interact more, kids play outside, everyone is happier and healthier, and everyone acknowledges that, but as soon as the TVs start working again, people go right back to sitting in front of them. That too has a ring of truth to it. Why would that be? There is a book by Dierdre Barrett called "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose". It suggests that humans, like all creatures, a wired to respond to certain things. In prehistoric times, these behaviors like responding to quick movements (might be a snake about to strike), or seeking out sweet things (like ripe berries), were adaptive and helped us survive. With modern technology, where quickly changing scenes on a video screen or piles of processed sugar are both easy to conjur up, these tendencies may be maladaptive. Paul Graham wrote an essay on "The Acceleration of Addictiveness", about many addictive things including drugs like cheap alcohol becoming bigger and bigger challenges. The book "The Pleasure Trap" makes a similar point, focusing mostly just on junk food. For food, it used to be that to get sweetness, you had to eat a lot of fruit which had fiber and phytonutrients which were essential to human health. Now you can just get obese on sugar, and get sick too, because you won't be eating the fiber or phytonutrients. The same is true now for interesting experiences. In the past, when TV did not exist, or when it had only a few channels with less programming (like when I was a child), then it was hard to overindulge in it. When you wanted to see people, you generally had to interact with real people in real families and real communities, which generally had other health benefits (maintaining healthy social connections). Or you might read a book. :-) Now you can be part of a TV "family" and get lots of excitement and laughs very easily, but you do not gain the real social connections from that time investment that could help you in other ways. That is an aspect of Neil Postman's book on TV: "Amusing Ourselves to Death". There is also a theme in "Brave New World", where people are controlled by pleasure, as opposed to in "1984" where they are controlled by pain.

Since humans are such visual creatures, and because visual input is more direct than auditory input from sounds or language which requires more inferences (including self-talk from reading), video is a fairly direct path into the brain. Young kids especially tend to be able to adjust their imagination of some fairy tale they heard read to them to what they can cope with (e.g. "Jack slew the giant with a sword"), but if they actually see that depicted graphically on a screen they may get nightmares for years. Radio and reading require much more work in terms of thought and imagination to process. So, some mental exercise and control is lost in watching video in that sense. And of course physical exercise is lost when sitting on a couch (as opposed to using a treadmill to watch video), as is exposure to sunlight when watching indoors (a vital nutrient to make Vitamin D in the skin, required by the immune system to work correctly). Video has also been historically expensive to produce, so the video we see in general is shaped by the most powerful interests in our society, as opposed to cheaper-to-produce interactions with neighbors or books which tent to reflect broader interests. The book, "The War Play Dilemma" talks about how deregulation of broadcast television around 1980 lead to a 24X7 experience of marketing to kids (e.g. superhero videos, toys, foods, and bed sheets) which the authors say has lead to a reduced, stylized, and extra-violent play repertoire in many boys. They have another book "So Sexy, So Soon" on what that has done to young girls.

Still, even for music, which used to mean community, digital audio on cheap players now means you can have music whenever you want, but the immediate community of musicians that listening to music used to imply is no longer there. So, music becomes another supernormal stimuli, missing in the social fiber and social nutrition it used to imply. Clay Skirky, in "Here Comes Everybody", also talks about TV as like gin, a social lubricant and painkiller to deal with rapid social upheavals. It can be hard to say entirely if that is good or bad to have an effective painkiller in tough times, whether music or sitcoms.

None-the-less, video can be a useful tool for education or cultural togetherness. People have made that point in some replies. A book by Henry Perkinson called "Getting Better: Television and Moral Progress" makes the case that TV helped broaden social norms in the USA to help move past prejudice and narrowness (like on race relations, an example being Lt. Uhura on Star Trek, the first depiction of a black female in a command role in US TV in the 1960s). There are some current TV sitcoms, documentaries, and news shows that sometime bring up important issues. I myself am, to a large extent, a creation of 1960s and 1970s TV -- PBS back then, the Thunderbirds, Star Trek, Space 1999, Sealab 2020, the Yogi Bear Show, the Andy Griffith Show, Gilligan's Island, Green Acres, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, and so on. They were not the only influences in my life (church, summer day camp, family, construction toys like TogL's, electronics from Radio Shack, neighborhood kids, school, etc. also mattered a lot), but TV stories were important moral shaping forces in the nature of good storytelling and in inspiring the imagination.

Humans, more than monkeys, are "Monkey See, Monkey Do" creatures, and a video of someone doing something can instruct in some technique or show a role model, like in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood (even if according to the medical community, screen time is best avoided for kids under two, and limited after that). With the rapidly falling costs in video production, more neighbors can share videos with each other, like on YouTube. And they are. So, our society faces a big challenge now to integrate the idea of digital video into our lives in a healthy way. As above, it is not the only challenge though.

As for me, I have mixed feelings working in the broadcast TV industry (as I have had for most jobs I've done), even as I try to do my job to the best of my ability. As above, I benefited a lot from TV in my youth, but I also think it can be an unhealthy "supernormal stimuli" when overindulged in. One problem is that probably 90% of jobs in our society are either useless or harmful to some extent (see Bob Black on "The Abolition of Work"). Yet, our culture still collectively believes in this imaginary concept of fiat dollars used to ration access to food and shelter, which gives money some reality especially in the absence of a basic income. For a lot of the other 10% of jobs that are meaningful (museum curator? plumber? independent journalist? musical therapist? reading tutor?), people compete a lot, and/or they take years of apprenticing, and/or those jobs don't pay much and so to have one you need a spouse with a big income (working in the 90% of other jobs). I could work in the auto industry, and lament about socially isolation from personal cars. Or I could work for Google and lament the loss of privacy. Or I could work in medicine, and lament how most heart surgeries are needless compared to good nutrition (see Dr. Joel Fuhrman). I could work in the health insurance industry and lament how we would be better off with single-payer Medicare for All. I could work in the organic food industry and lament how the meaning of the term "organic" has been reduced and how people are eating organic sugar instead of organic vegetables or how I was mainly producing for the affluent. I could work on computer games and lament how kids were not getting enough physical exercise. I could work as a school teacher and lament taking part in what John Taylor Gatto calls the dumbing down of the USA. I could work in the defense industry and lament security theater and the irony in my sig of using technologies of abundance to potentially create global scarcity. I could make custom carpentry, and lament that it was mostly all going as a reward to the 1% who helped create a rich/poor divide by lobbying for regressive tax policy. And so on. Or I guess I could focus on positives in those various industries instead of, or in addition to, laments. Maybe I could do better as for meaningful work, but after decades of trying to make free and useful educational and communications software and open content (to little financial success), it is hard to go against the power of the marketplace and "The Pleasure Trap" and "Supernormal Stimuli" indefinitely. It has to be a collective effort to move forward, although every collective effort is also made of individual efforts. At least my wife can have some time to still work on free alternative stuff. And at least I can tell myself I don't work for Fox News. :-) Even if Fox News does indeed raise important issues too, now and then. :-)

As Theodore Sturgeon said in defense of sci-fi, when people kept pointing out all the schlock sci-fi stories, "Ninety percent of everything is crap". The same is true no-doubt for broadcast video. According to various industry pundits, broadcast TV's days may be numbered to probably a decade or two more as a major force in our society. On-demand (and often user-produced) internet video is the rising star, even if still small for total hours watched, as is obviously other internet social media (although that is often used while watching TV). What will shape that change, according to pundits, is where advertisers decide to spend their dollars, which are still mostly going to broadcast TV right now. Or, I might add, what will also shape that change is the degree to which we have a money-driven exchange economy dominant in our society (compared to a gift economy, subsistence economy and/or planned economy).

Perhaps the bottom line is that, to the best of our knowledge, we can't relive past time. So, we can't go back and redo the past fifty years knowing what we know now, assuming that would even make a positive difference given other factors we may not understand. We can only take what we have learned and figure out how to move forward from where we are now as individuals and as a society. Digital video can be a useful tool. How can we best make digital video part of a healthy society going forward? And how, in other ways, can we work to restore healthy communities with aspects of what you described as history? The Amish have one approach (tight regulation of technology, with every item scrutinized for its effect on community life, on the premise that just because you can do something, that does not mean you should). But even the survival of the Amish is based on aspects of the larger global culture around them (including refraining from nuclear and biological war) which they do not directly engage in to try to affect (except by setting an example). Are there other options to create, regenerate, or support healthy 21st century communities that embrace aspects of modern technology? Blue Zones is one place to look, for their work in Albert Lee, MN.
http://www.bluezones.com/programs/blue-zones-communities/albert-lea-mn/

Based on what evidence? Where is your data? Faster != More reliable. Spindle based hard drives are (usually) quite reliable and there is plenty of real world usage data documenting exactly how reliable they are. Companies with big data centers like Google have extremely detailed reliability performance figures. SSDs have a lot of advantages but they only recently have started receiving wide distribution and to date they have poor market penetration in data centers where it is easiest to measure their reliability in the real world. Manufacturers estimates of reliability don't mean much in the real world since they have an obvious conflict of interest.

I have little doubt that SSDs will over time replace spinning platters in most places but claims regarding their reliability in relation to spinning platters is somewhat premature, especially in a data center environment. I wouldn't be the least bit shocked to find out they were more reliable (having no moving parts helps a lot) but just because they should be doesn't mean they will be.