Do you seriously believe that if it wasn't Apple, it wouldn't be someone else? That's the epitome of naive.

The fact that they happen to currently be the biggest and baddest on the block means this shouldn't surprise you. Microsoft had its own form of evil, usually just stealing an idea from someone else and getting it to market first. That Apple uses a legal (if marginally unethical) method to do the same thing shouldn't even raise an eyebrow.

Apple is a company. They're in it for the money. Stop treating them like a person and this is all perfectly logical. HTC is a direct competitor. Why would Apple not do everything in its power to hinder or stop them from being a competitor?

Does that include the Declaration of Independence? I suppose it would be much easier to change in digital form...

In Facebook's case those audits should probably be about once every two months... There was a new violation (location tracking) on the iOS mobile app just this week.

It should be noted that none of the licenses you cited (with the possible exception of the private pilot license, and maaaybe the temp driver's license) endanger other people beyond yourself. A driver's license isn't just to protect you, it's to protect *everyone else*, and in a way that crosses state boundaries. There are just too many "John Smith's" in your state (let alone in the whole U.S.) to not have some secondary means of identifying you are you, especially given that driver's licenses are used as a primary for of identification (whether they should be or not).

Hmm... then how about an increasing set of fees for submitting patents that are found to be too broad. In other words, they *charge* you an extra grand for the first time you do it, doubling it for each successive violation. An incentive for the USPTO to rule in the other direction, and an incentive to companies to stop trying to patent obvious things. They might be able to get away with it for a half dozen times, but then it will start to hurt.

On the other hand, all that will accomplish is corporations spinning off distinct corporate fronts to allow them to keep up the patent wars... crap! How do you stop this??

And the only reason that this hasn't been patented in the past is that nobody honestly believed that the USPTO could be so freaking stupid. Boy did we underestimate THAT...

Not that I necessarily believe these quakes are the result of fracking (WAY too small a data set), but did it ever occur to you that the seismic changes caused by fracking could indeed take decades before they become present?

So much for their incentive to upgrade. Now if their network is overloaded, it's a selling point. Brilliant marketing actually, even if it is a slap in the face to net neutrality.

At least from a software perspective, they have conditioned people into seeing the difference between the "home" version and the "business" version of the OS as nothing more than a license upgrade... a somewhat virtual "magic wand", if you will.

Perhaps I'm not quite understanding this, but is AT&T saying that a mere 5% of its customers (who we can pretty much assume are not all in one place) are able to use the network in such as way that it can bring it to it's knees, such that they need to throttle them back? Really? Mind you, any one of those 5% only have to get from their phone to a tower... ONE connection. After that, it's at least copper, right? So at any one cell point, these magical 5% are causing huge issues? Aren't our phones connected to two or three towers at a time? I realize that there is only a certain amount of spectrum at any given time in a given area, but is their network THAT sensitive?

Except that the cable company CAN add more hardware to increase their throughput, the cell companies have a fixed amount of bandwidth to slice up at any given time. In higher density areas or at peak usage times, more towers wouldn't help.

About the only advantage I see in this is the possible efficiency (which doesn't really make sense unless the car is electric). I mean, bright is bright. Screw "modulated for safety". If the point is it's brighter, then it's brighter at both ends. This just means that when they come over a hill, they can blind you from a mile away. We don't even need high beams anymore.

Could they maybe tie this into a range finder or adaptive landscape mapping or something? I'd hate to see what their laser headlight would do to a puddle of water, or god forbid a fog or rainstorm. It would look like an IO tower from TRON was slicing apart pieces of the sky.

The way I read it, 30 seconds.

So why not just mine the moon? I mean, it's already in a stable orbit, has some limited gravity to keep things from floating away, and is (hopefully) not going to "accidentally" come crashing down on top of us if something happens to go wrong. Do they even know that this passing asteroid has anything worth mining? Seems like an awfully big expenditure for something that could turn out to be a big fat dud.

You do understand that the coconuts are falling naturally, right? Whereas we are fracking ourselves. If you had people up in the trees dropping coconuts on unsuspecting tourists, wouldn't it be a good idea to tell them to stop rather than comparing meaningless statistics on death rates?