"But here's what's really going to cook your noodle..."

Was App Store a category of a thing before Apple invented it?

If that guy invented the concept of an auto shop, then why not?

Much more absurd things are trademarked in America. Including mottos that claim superiority or greatness without any basis in fact. The whole patent system is broken, and we have an entire thread complaining about one trademark of App Store?

Only on Slashdot... and this is the day I have to be waiting for sysadmins and free to post.

I'm sorry, but this is common practice in America.

One of my favorite places to get a drink is called Gin Joint.

If you're against trademarks, fine. If you're against a very specific type of trademark (generic term for the product itself) then be prepared to battle a long list of precedent, and also be prepared to point to a dictionary that shows app store to be common usage before Apple trademarked it. But you're in America, where I can trademark the slogan Best Programmer in the World (tm) without any proof of it and attach it below my name, so forgive respondents if they think you're just picking on Apple.

BTW, trademarks do provide consumer protections by helping identify things. When I bought a car for instance, I really did want the one manufactured in Ingolstadt.

How do you like SQL Server?

In the short-term, an FTC Complaint (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ftccomplaintassistant.gov%2F) works wonders due to their power to impose fines for every complaint.

File early, file often.

Sorry, but chimps have been taught to fly planes. There are also plenty of chimps with MBAs. You prove nothing.

So in order to save a frank assessment from becoming an embarrassment in a hypocritical situation, we should let the government lock down all information it wants from its citizens.

Hey, those political ads once every four years are all I need to make a decision at the ballot box, what do I need to know what's going on for? Hell, even the ads are too much, I just vote for the party my family always has.

If I bother to vote. Prime time TV is much more interesting anyway.

In this current "war on terrorism", the real culprits and people who are financing and supporting this war are not getting hit, and indeed are being protected. A more properly used term is "low intensity conflict", but other terms can be used too. Until you hold the leaders of this kind of activity accountable for their actions, it will continue and indeed "terrorism" will increase.

Exactly. People like Cheney and Bush only get richer, and since they will never be held accountable for their actions, there will be others. The wars will continue, those who feel oppressed or occupied will fight back, and Haliburton and the body scanner manufacturers will continue to get rich.

Yes, I'll be the guy in front of you today getting groped, then dragged away for questioning. Will this post be worth it? No, because the vested interests are too powerful to stop, and anyway, you think the terrorists just hate us for our freedoms or some other Orwellian shit.

100,000 people (given the average of 4 cc/person).

Yeah, the metro in New Delhi is driverless, too.

Relax. No one is spelling the end of Android or Google. But Google did not create Android as a gift to the OSS community. They created it to be able to drive search revenue their way, instead of having to rely on Apple. If the product they invested in cannot actually drive revenue, it causes their investment to have been in vain.

Harvard Business Review understands what the average geek does not: that large corporations implement strategies to create profits, and some fail. The only thing that's sad here is the groupthink on /.

So let's say Baidu makes a market with localized apps and pays providers to point to only that?

Or let's say China Mobile sets the phone with their own default market. Even Verizon can do that.

Many ways competitors could become much bigger than the "official" market pretty quickly.

Maybe so. But it takes someone who is willing to rethink design to break away from the "standard" case size.

It takes someone like Apple.

*ducks*

Sorry, sorry, I know we hate them now. Forget I ever posted this...

Every patriot thinks their country produces the best quality. But after Mercedes brought one model line here and could not after years of trying match the quality they were getting in Germany, they decided not to do it again. And the quality of American cars, well, speaks for itself.

So I have the option of starting anew in a country with high salaries and a spotty quality record, or I can go to the factory in China that already makes the iPhone and iPad at very high quality with workers who do not expect to spend hours on Gmail and Slashdot *ahem* everyday. Guess which I'm going to choose? The tax rate has nothing to do with it.

Ah, my nationalistic friend, it can be seen as exactly the reverse. After all, we were racing against them, too. The truth is that they were superior in many areas (airframes and engines, spacecraft--Sputnik caused us to shit our pants), and we in others. It was a two-way race.

And no, the military build-up did not cause the USSR to collapse. It was their highly-flawed economic system. No matter how little they spent on their military, it would have still failed them.

Oh, and China does not "a history of... copying technology", they have a history of inventing it. In recent history, they suffered horrible colonial wars, but they're back. Don't let your patriotism confuse you.