Do they contribute back as much as they should, ethically?

I don't understand why this nonsense gets modded up. Apple is under no ethical obligation to contribute anything to open source. They are under a legal obligation to contribute to open source software in specific circumstances, such as in the case of distributing of modified GPL software. Its complete bullshit to expect any company or person to go above and beyond the legal obligations of using open source software, even if that software is helping them bring in heaps of cash.

Unless you're posting this on a Commodore64 Im going to conjecture that you and almost every other slashdot user are enriching "slave owners". Do you think there are many high-volume commodity electronics manufacturers that don't use Foxconn or lesser known manufacturers who use similar practices?

The same Kodak who filed for bankruptcy primarily because they failed to wrap their liver-spotted heads around the digital imaging revolution?

No

Ah right, in 1997 running FVWM on a Pentium Pro was fine for me, a super-power-user, so its obviously good enough for the general computing populace. Marketing, design: call it what you want, but Im casting my lot with the company thats making boatloads of cash selling products that according to the Slashdot crowd are over-priced and under-functional.

Many companies hire artists and usability experts to look at the final product and make tweaks and recommendations.

Hmm. These days, serious consumer-oriented software development efforts will have these types of folks sitting at the table before the first line of code is written (and usually calling the shots over engineering throughout the whole process). But yeah overall great points, wish more people realized this.

Are you joking? I video chat with one of my (non-technical) best friends a few times a month. My other friend video chats with his long-distance girlfriend every day. Another friend video chats with her family on the other side of the ocean a few times a week. At my last job skype video conferences were a fixture of our development/design process, and also common for interviewing engineering candidates. Video chat pretty much happened.

The truth is that people communicate a lot of information through their facial expressions (and hands/arms). Its simply a richer, more human interaction, as far as real-time conversations go. Yeah for discussing the finer details of a new memory manager for the Linux kernel IRC or Jabber is probably ok and maybe even superior (I'd rather not see the fat cheeto-encrusted face on the other end of that conversation anyways). But for normal conversations between normal people its great technology.

Right, grandparents that may have health problems, may not be capable of driving on their own, may live 7000 miles away, and/or may not be able to afford the gas money at $4/gallon. They're so lazy.

Less knowledge! Thats what drives society forward!

What a fucking joke. Having a nation of amateur auto-mechanics accomplishes nothing for society. Specialization has always been the vanguard of civilization. 10,000 odd years ago some enterprising folks learned all about how to grow edible plants as a reliable food source, and then idiots like you probably laughed at them because they were too busy creating civilization as we know it to hunt for themselves. The fact that I can pay some bloke to fix my car means instead of spending a weekend fixing it myself I can learn things that won't be obsolete in 5 years.

Classic Slashtard mentality. You know a lot about computers so you think yourself some intellectual fucking superstar, and belittle those who are doing more important things than swapping out motherboards.

Its even more boring than that. The jailbreaking developer community has been able to tap into the iPhone's serial port for some time now. I was interfacing with the iPhone over serial in early 2008, before the iPhone SDK was even released, using publicly available information from the jailbreaking community.

The real "news" here is that someone's found a use for this thats caught the attention of the mainstream online technology press.

You joke, but I contracted there a few years back, and at one high-level meeting I sat in on, half of the managers present had iPhones and wielded them shamelessly. I was the only one with a MacBook Pro... but it was running Windows.

Your point being? If I write a book on a Mac, is Apple a co-author of that book?

If the Sun generated EM with the same amplitude and frequency characteristics as a man-made radio transmitter, how could man-made radio transmissions be separated from interference from the Sun? Calling the Sun a "giant radio" is at best a misleading oversimplification.

Nice try, but "every alien must have proof of registration" is a lot different than "every person must have proof that they are here legally".

No, this is because the grounded metal case (a.k.a. Faraday cage) of the WiFi version attenuates radio signals, which in this situation likely made 3G reception too spotty. The black plastic cut-out better allows 3G signals to better pass through the back undisturbed. Wifi has a greater tolerance for this attenuation, as the sender and receiver are at closer distances.

This is why the original iPhone had a relatively large plastic bumper on the bottom, whereas the iPod Touch has a relatively small plastic notch on its otherwise all-metal back. Later iPhones have all-plastic backs, whereas iPod Touches continue to have nearly all-metal backs.

As well, from a non-technical/"I want to look cool sitting in a coffee shop" perspective, the black plastic could just as easily be regarded as a cheap looking disruption to the otherwise contiguous metal back.