> This is just another in a long series of slashdot articles that have pointed out the broken nature of our patent system I assume you mean the US patent system. I my section of the world something like this would never see the light of day. From my point of view, there must be many parties of interest, who make billions of dollars (per decade), resulting in the delays in reforms. There is just too much money to be made. This problem is so bad in the US, it looks like Third World country politics, horifficly infantile

Quite funny your post ;) NFSW lcd_calibration 4 adults http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sexual_intercourse_with_vaginal_lubricative_fluid.jpg

Thanks for the explanation. I've been an avid amiga user for about 15 years, but didn't know this. My handle is also referencing to RAD: the persistant amiga Ram disk, is 'encoded' in it {RemADeus}

Enligten us...

Remembering from a time, long before war ;) ...there's no sunshine when she's gone, she's gone, gone too long, anytime, she goes away ...

The most [b]sneaky[/b] of all these evil interfaces are the ones which ask you for your mobile phone number (like in mafia wars) so they can verify the link between your identity and your name. I have made sure my FB account has garbage as info (I only use it for MW), and I laugh at the attempts to get any of my phone numbers through the appps

Actually, customer relations was one of the reasons Walmart failed in Europe (especially in Germany) when it tried to expand to over here a few years ago. ;-P

The other thing regarding this case might be that every retailer has to give a 2 year warranty on any product. One more important fact is that in the first 6 month after the purchase, the law specifies that a consumer that claims the product is at fault is right unless the retailer can PROVE that the product works as advertised, or the customer damaged it on purpose. So there would be not much to gain for the retailer by going to court, unless he can prove that in court.

For the remaining 18 month of the warranty the burden of proof is reversed, so there the customer would have to prove that the product was already defective by design when he bought it.

With rare exception, programs in the background are consuming little or no power in Android. This is Linux after all... a program that's not doing something or waiting to do something is sitting on a wait-task queue... it's not consuming any power until the thing it's waiting for (a timer, an I/O event, etc) happens. Sure, it's possible to write an evil application that sucks power in the background... I've seen one of these since I started using Android five months ago. The small win with multitasking is the ability to very rapidly switch between applications. I do this all the time, and it's dramatically more efficient than on any single tasking OS, like PalmOS or iPhoneOS. The big win is intentional background processes, eg, daemons in Linux-speak. So any application can stick around and do its job, monitoring other forms of communications, checking the weather, tracking or changing settings based on locale, or simply offering me the same ability in any old program (Pandora, Museek) that Apple reserves for just their apps on the iPhone.