• There’s talk about Verizon not only delivering LTE during 2010Q1 but also will have a brand new Apple LTE enabled toy. Start panties knot tying.

• Get your popcorn kids. After Apple killed Pre syncing Palm turned around and made the Pre pose as an iPod so iTunes would see it. And that wasn’t enough so Palm complained to the USB forum about Apple discriminating against Palm usb ids. This is going to be fun.

• Turns out Apple rules the higher end computer market. This just goes to show how much market data can be confusing. Microsoft’s 90%+ market share turns out to be only true in the lower end, lower margin segment. In the $1000+ segment the tables turn with Apple having 90%+ share. Also, there’s a twisty maze of broken hardware, crappy vendors and oem deals MS has to navigate while Apple is tightly vertically integrated

• The Wave is coming in September. On more Google news, there’s a new Android build available. It seems to be 2.0 “Donut” but then again not quite.

• And after all the hubhub and whopla about not IE on Windows7 Microsoft gave in to EU and is giving users browser choice on install.

• The Irish said religion can’t stand up to scrutiny by passing a law criminalizing blasphemy. As we know, this particular “crime” is committed by people practicing science in general so I predict interesting years ahead for the irish economy.

• The mobile market is a cruel mistress. The Nokia Q2 year on year profits droped to 30%. That’s droped to a third of 2Q2008, not 30% bellow (yes, N97 fail). Meanwhile, SE bled $300M this quarter. Definitly things are .. erm… looking up for SE as their loss drop around 25% from last quarter.

• MS had their WTF!?! moment with the announcement that EU won’t get Windows7 upgrade versions. Their reasoning seems to be InternetExplorer crapiness is so deeply ingrained into Vista an upgrade to Windows7 wouldn’t remove it so to comply with the remedy they invented they won’t be selling upgrade versions. There’s two things here, one is MS is trying so hard to pit consumers against the EU they’re tripping over themselfs. The other is, Microsoft says an upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 won’t remove the Vista crap. It will be fundamentally different from clean install in the way the core technology will be Vista. So remember kids, upgrading to Windows7 is a waste o time.

• On expected news, Apple shut the Pre out of iTunes. Palm is playing it “your loss apple! so there”. I say, Nokia can sync their phones to iTunes without dodgery, why can’t you Palm ?? Meanwhile, people figured out the WebOS SDK is crappy for games.

• On Piracy un-news, vhs is going to kill the movies. Or at least, it was in 1979. Glad to see people are still morons.

• On censorship news, Australia is considering going with a 3 strikes law. This is pretty much in line with the Great Wall of Australia. Lets do the australian govt a favour and disconnect them from the Internet. That would save them a heap of trouble! Meanwhile, New Zealand is moving along with their Great Wall. What’s with APAC and great walls ??

• Oh the irony! Amazon sold a pirated version of 1984 and then deleted it from people’s Kindles. ++ungood!

• The N97 reviews are in and they’re not easy on Nokia. My opinion is the N97 should’ve came in at the sub 500E price point. At 700E people just think “yeah, I can get an iPhone 3GS for that money…”. I, while going through the UI realized Nokia removed the soft keyboard which just made me realize I have no interest whatsoever on the clunkyness of an hardware keyboard on a phone.

• Japan is paving the way of the future as usual and NTT is lauching a HSPA femtocell. WiFi ? We don’t need no stinking WiFi!

• Google with a small bang announced they’re ok with Exchange on GooglePhones and with a big bang the Chrome OS vapourware. It’s going to be very open source so Google expects the community to very helpfull.

• On rather a surprising twist on a consumer case against Microsoft, the judge ruled for Microsoft because IP addresses don’t identify persons. This, if upheld, will of course mean all ongoing RIAA cases against babies, grannies and single mothers must be thrown out. Meanwhile, a judge in Spain believes sharing copyrighted material is fair use as long as it’s not commercial. Meanwhile, Sarkozy is trying to reinstate the HADOPI law. So the score is USA crazy, Spain k3wl, France evil and PirateBay sellout.

• On Evil news, BT is droping Phorm. That’s means no more sabotaged web pages for you brits!

• Apple didn’t screen an app in blatant Nintendo copyright violation cause it’s not their policy so they believe they’re spotless. On the other hand seems to me this screams for a DMCA takedown against Apple (which they will happily comply with) and a damages suit cause Apple does take 30% of the loot (which I’m curious about)

• On pirate news, RRRRRR, The Pirate Bay sold out. I’m fairly sure it will come back under another name. That’s always how it goes.

• I don’t usually link this stuff but ComputerWorldUK is running a story about “The Huge Hidden Cost of Microsoft Software” following the millions of GBP the City of Manchester had to sink into making conficker going away. I’m pretty sure you won’t find this case study on Microsoft’s get the facts ad campaign

A Minnesota court says each downloaded song is worth 80000USD. That’s a lot of money for a song, but how does it relate to real world things ? Say, body parts.
Luckily, the state of Connecticut puts a value on lost body parts to help us make sense of the court’s decision. According to SimplyHired the average salary in Connecticut is 884 USD/week. Let’s round it down to 800USD/week cause high salary lawyers seldom lose a thumb and figure out what’s worth 100 weeks compensation.
One good candidate is loss of hearing in both ears for 104 weeks. Losing a penis, uterus or vagina can also go up to 104 weeks. The 4 finger menu is worth 103 weeks. But in my opinion the 2 fingers and one nose menu is the winner at exactly 100 weeks.

So, in summary, illegally downloading a song inflicts the same damage as the loss of two fingers and one nose.