When I heard that the iPhone was "missing" the headphone jack, my first thought was "good call".

Here you have this insanely popular electronic device that people have with them at all times, and what's the number one complaint about it? No, no, /. friends, no, it's not planned obsolescence. It's "this thing dies if it so much as looks at water."

Well if you're going to try to take care of that problem one thing you might go for right away is getting rid of that crazy big hole in the top that by its very nature of design is all about exposed metal contacts.

I guess you could get all crazy in your head about DRM and shit but as someone else points out, at the end of the day however the sound is delivered it must end up being converted into a signal that can be used by standard speakers or headphones.

The only way around that is if Apple plans on making it so you have only two options: * play the sound directly through the iPhone's built-in speaker * send the sound via some Apple-proprietary encrypted cousin of bluetooth to one of Apple's own special speaker systems that if they get large enough to entertain a party probably cost many thousands of dollars

If that's the direction they're going to go I'd like to imagine it's going to be a complete failure because people don't have the money or wherewithal to spend on special speakers from Apple (the computer company, not the music company).

But then again you only have to know a handful of Apple users to understand that they would do exactly that, and would be glad to go broke doing it.

Emoji's are meant to be a quick and simple way to express what is going on in our lives. Guns are real part of our lives. They can be used for cruelty or entertainment. If we keep censoring every little thing because someone might be offended we'll devolve in and Orwellian society.

Sure, they use caller ID spoofing so that we, the recipients, can't block the number, but you know who knows exactly who the spammers are? The phone company, for two reasons: first, they're routing the calls from end to end, so they know the real source rather than the spoofed one. Second, and more importantly, they're billing them for the calls. They're not sending out bills for thousands of calls to the spoofed IDs, but the real ones. And while individually, those calls are cheap, the tens of thousands a day add up and the phone company makes a lot of money from the spammers, all while telling the FCC and consumers that their hands are tied.

Freeze their assets until they release the billing information to the state AGs. That'll untie their hands really quick.

No, Microsoft are not screwed. Microsoft's partners are screwed. If Microsoft starts pushing out equipment that people want and emulates Apple - then there's no need for Dell. Anyway, who is Dell going to get an OS from? Apple? Dell has to keep selling Windows because its consumers need it (enterprise and business). Linux is not an option. It's not just hardware partners Microsoft is screwing over - channel partners are in deep shit, too. All those millions of little IT shops days are numbered, too. Office 365, Azure integrated AD, etc. All spells a lot of trouble for people who have spent the last 10 years selling SBS boxes and PCs to small businesses.