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Apple shipped iOS 5.1.1 yesterday. iPhone 3GSs bought in June 2009 are eligible to upgrade to iOS 5.1.1 today. How many Android phones from 2009 are running an even vaguely up to date OS? None.

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In order to underscore the sense of urgency Apple stresses the “massive, continuing harm on Apple” resulting from Samsung’s alleged infringements:

“While the parties have been readying the case for trial Samsung has vaulted into first place in worldwide sales of smartphones, with massive sales of its copycat products. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/industries/samsung-electronics-reports-record-profiton-strong-smartphone-sales/2012/04/26/gIQAraz0jT_story.html.) Samsung’s infringement of Apple’s intellectual property has already resulted in damages that reach billions of dollars. [...] It is critical to Apple to start trial on July 30, to put an end to Samsung’s continuing infringement.”

Samsung claims Apple is “[u]nable to compete in the marketplace” and “instead seeking to compete through litigation, requesting injunctions against the full lineup of Samsung’s mobile phones and tablet products”.

So grabbing 73% of all mobile market profit means “being unable to compete”?

I’m really curious what glue they are sniffing at Siemens…

The short version:

The long version:

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It really appears that The Pirate Party is no fluke in Germany. After winning 9% of the vote in the Berlin parliament elections, and then 7.4% in Saarland, the party has now received 8.2% of the vote in Schleswig-Holstein. These are each local “state” elections, and there’s another big one next week, in Northrhine-Westphalia, where they’re apparently polling in a similar range. It seems clear that The Pirate Party is certainly surpassing the German Green Party as the preeminent 3rd party — and it seems to be having an impact.

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Of course, it’s worth noting a point that’s been left out in many of the discussions about the success of the German Pirate Party: Germany has some of the worst copyright laws around, especially on issues like secondary liability. Perhaps those two things are linked… and perhaps those who keep pushing for more draconian enforcement of copyrights might want to take that into account. There’s little to no evidence that such laws do anything to slow down infringement, but it sure seems to make people respect copyright law even less.

I’ve posted quite a number of stupid internal marketing videos here. I never knew they copied the entire concept of “stupid marketing video” from Apple.

Embedding disabled, but check this Apple’s Internal Marketing Video from 1984.

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Mitt Romney likes to blame President Obama for developments the president didn’t really have anything to do with. As it turns out, the inverse is true, too — Romney likes to take credit for developments the Republican didn’t have anything to do with, either.

Despite his 2008 call to “let Detroit go bankrupt,” presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Monday that he would “take a lot of credit” for his impact on the U.S. automobile industry’s comeback.

During an interview with WEWS-TV in Cleveland following a campaign stop, Romney said his views helped save the industry.

“I pushed the idea of a managed bankruptcy,” Romney said. “And finally, when that was done, and help was given, the companies got back on their feet. So I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.”

Look, I’ve come to expect quite a bit of dishonesty from Romney, who seems a little too comfortable working from the assumption that he can say literally anything and quite a few voters will believe his nonsense.

But even by Romney standards, this is just laughable.

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The central feature of the Twinning Program involves matching a child of Bar/Bat Mitzvah age with a child who perished in the Holocaust, forging an unforgettable bond between two identities and creating a bridge between the present and the past. A “Page of Testimony,” documenting the life of a Holocaust victim, links the Bar/Bat Mitzvah child with a Holocaust victim by matching their names, birthday, or country of origin. Alternatively, the child Holocaust victim may be one that is a blood relation to the Bar/Bat Mitzvah child.

The morons…er…Mormons have the idea of baptising dead Jewish children. A very old Holocaust survivor from New York just came to Ottawa to celebrate the Bar Mitvah of her long-dead nephew. It doesn’t make much difference to the dead person.

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No, dinosaurs did not fart themselves to death. This is what happens when you get your information from Fox News.

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It’s quite clear that Android was being designed to a completely different target before the iPhone was released. What we see here would have fitted in perfectly with the world of Symbian and BlackBerry. This early build of Android is in fact even less capable and mature than the 2004 release of Symbian Series 90 (Hildon), the OS that runs on the Nokia 7700 and 7710 – Nokia’s first, and only, pre-iPhone touchscreen smartphones. It’s not hard to see that iPhone really changed the thinking across the entire industry, and caused everybody to start from scratch. Android, webOS, Windows Phone 7, Windows 8, BlackBerry 10 – all of these exist because of the iPhone, and standing on its shoulders they have made some amazing and unique contributions to the ecosystem.

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I’d say it seems pretty clear HTC is now listening to a different set of “customers”.

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“Within five years after discount retailing pioneer Korvette’s opened its first store in 1957, over a dozen copycat discounters had emerged. In contrast, the giant discount furniture retailer IKEA has never been copied. The company has been slowly rolling its stores out across the world for [close to 50] years; and yet nobody has copied IKEA.

Why would this be? It’s not trade secrets or patents. Any competitor can walk through its stores, reverse engineer its products and copy its catalog. It can’t be that there is no money to be made: its owner Ingvar Kamprad is the third richest person in the world. And yet nobody has copied IKEA.

Our sense is that the other furniture retailers have followed the positioning paradigm and defined their business in terms of product and customer categories, which are readily copied. Levitz Furniture, for example, sells low-cost furniture to low income people. Ethan Allen sells colonial furniture to wealthy people.

IKEA, in contrast, has organized its business around a job to be done: “I need to furnish my apartment (or this room) today.” When this realization occurs to people anywhere in the developed world, the word IKEA pops into their minds. IKEA is organized and integrated in a completely different way than any other furniture retailer in order to do this job as well as possible.”

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The owner of Dajaz1.com appreciates the fact that the United States Government, on studying the matter further with all the information the RIAA could furnish, determined that there was in fact no probable cause to seek a forfeiture of the domain it had seized and held for a year.

That exoneration, however, did not remedy the harms caused by a full year of censorship and secret proceedings — a form of “digital Guantanamo” — that knocked out an important and popular blog devoted to hip hop music and has nearly killed it.

The original seizure was unjustified. The delay was unjustified. The secrecy in extensions of the forfeiture deadlines was unjustified.

Five details are notable here.

First, the seizure occurred pursuant to language the PRO-IP Act authorizing seizures of property used in connection with the making of, or trafficking in, “articles” in violation of copyright law. In that context, “articles” are physical items. The law does not authorize seizure of domains that link to other sites. So from the beginning this seizure was entirely legally unjustified, no matter what the allegations about infringement…

Second, seizing a blog for linking to four songs, even allegedly infringing ones, is equivalent to seizing the printing press of the New York Times because the newspaper, in its concert calendar, refers readers to four concerts where the promoters of those concerts have failed to pay ASCAP for the performance licenses.

Third, RIAA’s grand and sweeping attacks on dajaz1.com suggest that RIAA’s powers of demonization far exceed its ability to substantiate its malicious statements with specific and credible facts.

Fourth , when I explained that the blog publisher had received music from the industry itself, a government attorney replied that authorization was an “affirmative defense” that need not be taken into account by the government in carrying out the seizure. That was stunning.

Fifth, when discussing the secret extensions with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, I repeatedly asked the government attorney to inform the court that my client opposed any further extensions and asked for an opportunity to be heard. Not once did the government reveal those requests or positions to the court. The government should be embarrassed for keeping that information from the court.

This entire episode shows that neither the government nor the recording industry deserves any additional powers with new so-called “antipiracy” legislation, especially in the context where copyright law has been expanded and new anti-piracy remedies have been crafted ***16 times*** since 1982. This episode shows that the copyright establishment and the government are very much the “rogues” that deserve to be reined in.

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Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was observed for participants reporting a life-changing religious experience. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was also observed from baseline to final assessment among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again. These associations were not explained by psychosocial or demographic factors, or baseline cerebral volume. Hippocampal volume has been linked to clinical outcomes, such as depression, dementia, and Alzheimer’s Disease. The findings of this study indicate that hippocampal atrophy in late life may be uniquely influenced by certain types of religious factors.