Was there the same outcry when pop-up books were introduced?

Having downloaded Alice for the iPad, it looks more like the app has revitalised Lewis Carroll's work, and made it fresh and interesting for a new audience -- It's certainly a more sensitive and respectful adaptation than the Tim Burton movie.

Obviously there needs to be a balance between text and images, but I can see parents reading this Alice app to their kids, with the physics-simulations being an attractive bonus to keep them entertained. Now that books have to compete with DVDs, TV and the internet, what's wrong with a little novelty here and there to coax kids into engaging with the written word?

Far from "ruining" reading, it looks more like Alice for the iPad is the first book app I've downloaded that actually makes sense on the iPad. Right, I'm off to play with the Caterpillar some more.

"What is clear, is that the rise of the App Store revokes control of the computer from the user."

Wrong. It may "revoke control" from the power user. But, the general public will view the iPad, like the iPod, as a simpler, more friendly way to get things done. It gives them control.

The general public doesn't care about our App Store hang ups, or cries of "DRM". Previously, the general public has struggled to install and play movies / apps / music at all, now they can tap a finger and it's there. Did these users prefer the pre-App Store world, where you had to have specialist knowledge to access this media? I doubt it. They couldn't access that world at all.

Here on Slashdot, we see the iPad bringing "DRM", and view it as a "huge step backwards". However, the general public sees the iPad as easy access to movies and apps, simple, straightforward accessible computing. The general public see it as a huge step forwards.

Our loss of control, as geeks, is most people's gain. Don't you think that complex media should be accessible to the general public, quickly and easily? We cry DRM at Apple, but do we really mean that we just don't want the general public in our clubhouse? What's wrong with the iPad and the "consumer mainstream" derided in the story? Not everyone wants to pop the bonnet and fiddle with the engine. In fact, hardly anyone does.

The story is seriously blinkered.

The issue Apple faces is that the patents Nokia were originally pursuing were patents that every single other mobile manufacturer was happy to license.

Actually no. Nokia wanted Apple to give them much more than "every other single" manufacturer. Nokia wanted to charge Apple 3x the fair and reasonable rate they charged others. They also wanted free access to Apple tech. Here are just a few of Apple's complaints:

Article 81. In Particular, in or about the spring of 2008, Nokia demanded that, as part of it’s compensation for licensing Nokia’s portfolio of purported essential patents, Apple must grant Nokia a license to a particular number of Apple non-standards-essential patents...Apple immediately rejected the proposal and reiterated Apple’s position that Nokia’s F/RAND obligations required it to licence Nokia’s purportedly essential technologies.

Article 82. ...In or about May 2009, Nokia demanded a royalty approximately three times as much as the royalty proposed the prior spring, which was itself in excess of a F/RAND rate, as well as “picks’ to Apple’s non-standards-essential patents.

Naughty Nokia. Go to your room.

An iPhone, plus contract, plus a bunch of apps, movies and songs, could easily be worth more than £22,250.

So did Walt Disney. The original plans for EPCOT in Disney World included a massive translucent dome covering the "community" and its twenty thousand residents.

EPCOT "would be a testbed for city planning and organization. A giant dome was to have covered the community, so as to regulate its climate (this idea was later seen in the 1998 movie The Truman Show). The community was to have been built in the shape of a circle, with businesses and commercial areas at its center, community buildings and schools and recreational complexes around it, and residential neighborhoods along the perimeter. Transportation would have been provided by monorails and People Movers (like the one in the Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland). Automobile traffic would be kept underground, leaving pedestrians safe above-ground."