The title should probably mention that it only effects email. Comment #48 explains the reasoning behind it, and frankly seems perfectly reasonable.

The problem there is email is generally used as an authentication authority for most online services, and a stolen phone hands over exactly what organised criminal outfits need to begin start real indentity theft.

Having done some work with financial services this was a huge problem, as soon as an email acocunt is compromised hackers used automatic services to reset every password they can find... because the email was the point of authority.

Because of this the product we designed had a two point authority process. But alas the second point was a text message sent to the stored cellphone number, which would mean in this case all your data is pwned.

I see most banks I deal with now have moved to phone call only authority checks. But in all honest once you have access to a decent a email account you can harvest the needed information quickly. My current banks just wants name, access code (printed on my card FFS), birthday, mailing address and bingo I'm in.

Can someone confirm for me if Apple require developers to use this API for in-app purchases? If that is the case, I really hope that they step up and do something about it soon.

I imagine Apple is furious. They paid Lodsys in good faith for a license. Hopefully now they are rewriting the API to get around the patent. Then they can tell Lodsys to go fuck themselves.

There's no proof that Apple paid Lodsys for this patent. It's almost certain that they have a licence for it from a previous deal with IV who was the previous owner of this and many many other patents. Lodsys can't sue Apple so they're trying to do so indirectly by threatening the ecosystem.

You're probably right, and what's more, it's likely they didn't license this patent specifically, but rather it was included in a family of patents for which they negotiated a license fee.

They've done this for over a year now.

My bad, I thought it was new.

Reddit tried this (you can buy a reddit gold account with extra features). It hasn't worked.

Be available outside the US.

Hardware is still cheaper than the extra hours developers will have to put in writing the "C scripts" (...) in the first place.

I'm not a huge fan of flash and while the percentage seems rather huge, at least the problems are actually getting patched.

"Add in the fact that on the new MacBook Air, merely stripping Flash from the default OS X install adds two hours to the battery life"

I'd like to see this test replicated with some other technology filing in the gaps that Flash leaves when you remove it, otherwise this means nothing. Of course doing less will used less power. I suspect playing a video while browsing the web would have a similar (how ever probably slightly less significant) effect.

Old men don't like it when things change, and assert their opinion as fact, trust me.

Old men? You could have just said people and been done with it. When Facebook moves a button there is outrage and mass demonstrations. You younguns and your confirmation bias. Amiright?

I have a Kindle 3, and while its not as large as the DX, I'd say it was still a good alternative to the real thing, but it depends a lot on how you want to read the book.

If you read the book from cover to cover then it'll be great. If you want to look up specifics in the book, then it'll be great for that too thanks to the search.

On the other hand, if you want to flick through the book reading the parts that interest you then paper is still much easier to use.

As for an iPad, I can't see how it would possible be any better than a dedicated ebook reader for reading programming books. I'd stick with my Kindle.

I disagree about the Kindle 3. Its screen is physically too small to be good for information dense pages. PDFs are especially bad because their layout isn't reflowed, meaning you must X-Y pan around with the plasticky buttons.

I like my Kindle 3, but for reading I think it is only suitable for novels and plain prose. I actually use the web browser a lot. It's terrible, but it's free! (3G data, no fees or contract)

"On the other hand, if you want to flick through the book reading the parts that interest you then paper is still much easier to use."

True, but you can make this work a bit better by setting up bookmarks. If a book has a table of contents that links to the chapters, that would make it easy to set up bookmarks for each chapter, that can be accessed from the menu.

I certainly hope so, I just hope that they manage to pull it off.

I expect the next couple of releases to be garbage though, I just can't see them having enough time to make it fast and stable enough to be work using. If I'm wrong I'll be delighted.