Re: Sky have shafted football and are doing so to cricket,

Do you know what the viewing figures for other similarly high-profile eagerly anticipated games have been in recent years, particularly those that were on free-tv. For example, FA Cup finals, champions league finals, the manchester derby in the cup this year, the manchester derby in the fa cup semis last year, various all english champions league matches in recent years, even games like Chelsea-Barcelona this year? If all these free to air games attract audiences vastly bigger than 4m, then your point is valid, but in isolation an audience of 4m means nothing.

Re: Why?

Because with a touchscreen, at least with my Sony touch screen reader, you can write notes in the margins (not useful for reading novels I grant you, but it is very useful for annotating journal articles), and you can turn it into an electronic notebook, which I find useful for note-taking at talks/meetings etc.

Just buy

A pair of headphone with a right-angle jack?

if you had any of these...

You wouldn't be competing in the same market place as the well known companies to which you are alluding (well, maybe in the case of the shack selling radios, but Radio Shack do not operate out of shacks and so there is a level of abstraction that makes the term trademarkable), so there wouldn't be confusion, and you could name your company the same thing without a problem. See some of the above comments for Apple and Apple in computing and recording respectively.

All of this Microsoft Windows discussion is irrelevant

It matters not a jot whether Microsoft have a history of trademarking generic terms, that is not what is at issue in this case. Just because the USPTO have previously granted trademarks that may or may not be generic does not mean they should grant this one to Apple.

Each case should be judged on its merits, not on the history of either protagonist to the case.

Both sides in this seem to be acting as rational businesses, Apple are trying to create intellectual property which gives them a trading advantage and Microsoft are trying to stop a competitor from gaining an advantage through the creation of intellectual property. Microsoft have a history of being on the other side of the debate, so what? It may be a bit rich, but someone should be trying to prevent Apple from gaining this advantage, so it may as well be Microsoft.

I disagree

Saying that they will not insure men is far more discriminatory than saying they will insure them for a high premium. By not insuring men they are withholding a service from an entire group of people on the basis of gender, by insuring them for a high premium they are offering that service for the statistical price at which it is affordable to them.

Surely...

5 boring metric tonnes of propellent is 1.087 elephants? Assuming of course the average elephant tips the scales at 4.6 metric tonnes, but even if that 4.6 is british tons the figure is still only ~1.07 elephants.

Hopefully to de-confuse

It will take less time and effort to copy from CD than to download, but you get to download it on Saturday whereas the physical format is shipped in May sometime, so unless you have the world's worst internet connection, it makes much more sense to download. Not that i think the extra £3 is worth it for the WAV upfront because as you say, the LPCM stream will be on the CD.

other stores...

It's still pretty easy to find e-books from other retailers, waterstones, wh smiths etc, and to get the freebies from project Gutenberg and Google Books. Once you've found and downloaded the book, getting it onto your device is as easy whether it was torrented or got at legitimately, the whole process is pretty easy imho.

Not necessarily equally available

As I understand the product is not equally available in all countries. Different broadcasters get rights to different games. Specifically with football, no UK broadcaster gets rights to broadcast games kicking off at 3pm on a Saturday, this is partly to protect the gate receipts of smaller clubs. Foreign broadcasters often do get rights to these games. Surely this has to be considered?

One Plus Point

I have the first Sony touchscreen reader, I forget the name, PRS600 maybe? Anyway, it has decent note taking ability, there is a slightly lag in writing with the stylus but not enough to be annoying to me. Oh, and the bonus of a full dictionary for whenever you encounter a new word, or just to use as a dictionary. And it does PDFs out of the box.

Re: IR lights

Also, once someone worked out that was what was happening (and it wouldn't take long), then anyone who seriously wanted to record the film could just buy a filter to block anything above say 700nm.