...because the patent was not on "sharing bits over radio", it was on some extremely clever and complex technologies that were developed, intially for radio telescopes, and then extended to the difficult problem of fast communications inside of an echoey and interference filled environment.

Just because this is now done inside a chip that costs a few euros doesn't make it simpler, and just because 99.999% of the people using it (99.9999% on slashdot) have no idea what is going on in their little box, it doesn't mean it isn't worth other companies paying for the patents.

They are emulating arcade games on an AIRBUS???!!!! Wow, how cool would Sega Rally be on that?

They'll just hire some taiwanese design team to take and ARM core and hang some extra bits on it like a functions for mp3 decoding, then get TSMC or some other taiwanese Fab to produce it. AFAIK they didn't even design the ipod tech themselves, just decide on the look of the thing and contract all the rest out.

You'd be amazed how much you can do with them, apart from most news sites and forums they also work with yahoo-mail and gmail.

And you can use them on an ssh session tunneld through the https port to your home server for a bit of sneaky reading from work.

People paying with their own money will put up with a lot to save a few quid or euros. Companies earning money from the software they use will pay a *lot* to make sure it works as quick and optimally as possible. If someone is sitting in their bedroom and writing software that outperforms what your full time programers are doing, then I would suggest getting either new employees, or a new career for yourself. As an example, there are lots of free and good programs to view GDSii (chip layout) files, but my company pays a big fee for a site licence for the one that we think works the best with the sort of large files we deal with. If it saves a few minutes each time someone uses it, that is worth every penny to us.

Take note of the date, 1990. I've been hearing about this company around Cambridge for ever. They are a classic case of a good idea fucked up by useless managers. They actually had a working B+W unit about 10 year ago till the idiots in control decidced they had to have colour before selling it. Meanwhile they burnt through their cash on expensive managing directors and golden handshakes and parachutees and god knows what else. Most of the origional good people have left (I supervises one doing his PhD after he left) and it seems to be little more than a marketing scam there now.