Never one mind the implications for Motorola’s devices, the upcoming Droid Bionic, the next Nexus device, etc., and focus on what this buyout really means. This is a throwback to the nuclear arms race, or in other words, mutually assured destruction, by means of software patents.

The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to “protect competition and innovation in the open source software community” and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

And when they talk about strengthening their portfolio, they’re not joking. Back when the Nortel patents went up for auction, Google was outbid by over USD $1 Billion for them, and all 6000 patents went to the Apple/MS/RIM consortium.

In comparison, Motorola has over 17,000 patents, a bounty nearly 3-fold over the Nortel portfolio.

This is ramping up to absolutely ludicrous levels, with all of the giants trying to level one another with a patent battle. If this isn’t reformed soon, it will eventually wind up taking down the industry here in the US.

Do not confirm or deny that any such software has been installed.
Do not attempt to remove or uninstall any malware software.
Do not send any escalations or contact Tier 2 for support about removing the software, or provide impact data.
Do not refer customers to the Apple Retail Store. The ARS does not provide any additional support for malware.

Ouch. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft, and even other OEMs like Toshiba, Dell, and HP.

Apple was too busy tweaking to respond.

The sensor was moved to the top of the phone due to the front-facing camera taking up residence in its previous space. It appears now that the move may be causing the screen to turn back on during calls, resulting in calls being ended, put on hold/speaker, or other wackiness. Yikes.

Some users on that massive Apple support thread are even reporting turning on FaceTime by accident…with their face. Seems oddly appropriate!

Seriously? You’re going to boo Michael Bluth because he got an iPhone before you? C’mon, let the man have his iPhone. It’s all he has left since Arrested Development was canned.

Check out the results one Gizmodo reader sent in of speed tests while holding and not holding the phone:

Reception & 3G speeds drop like a stone when you touch the iPhone 4.

Of course, the latter issue was predicted (via Google Translate) a few weeks back by Danish Professor Gert Frølund Pedersen, who noted that not only was this concept quite old, but easily demonstrable with other antenna systems.

Maybe this is the result of overworking your Chinese slave labor assemblers to the point of suicide. I mean, they have to be assembly problems, because surely Apple wouldn’t release a new, highly-anticipated product with so many flaws, right?

Oh, wait. Yeah, they would.

Now, I of all people realize that Boxee is alpha-quality software, and as a result, I expect it to have some issues. I was not, however, prepared for the fact that using it would be a constant and unending struggle to get my media playing back properly from my SMB shares.

A little background on my setup. I have 1.5 TB of SMB-shared drives that contain all of my (legally ripped) music, movies, and TV shows. All data are in lossless formats, films are in a /Device/Film Title (File Year)/VIDEO_TS format. Permissions are properly set on the shares, and Boxee can see the shares. Most of the time. With that out of the way, here is my current movie-watching experience thus far.

1. Out of over eighty ripped films thus far, Boxee randomly picks up a whopping seven. Just seven. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason as to which seven Boxee will randomly pick up. Today it seems to like Batman, as it pulled up Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Gotham Knight.
2. Batman aside, Boxee incorrectly identified An Inconvenient Truth as An Inconvenient Tax. When I told Boxee that it had picked the wrong film and manually selected the proper one from a list of alternate options, the title changed to the proper title, the description of the film changed, but , but not the associated photo, which still shows up as An Inconvenient Tax.
3. The Incredibles is identified as simply “Movies”. The DVD photo is correct, but there is no description. The path is listed as, and I’m not joking here, “stack:/../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../VTS_02_01.VOB”. Yes, I counted to make sure I got that right.
4. I selected Batman Begins. It started playing great, nice and smooth, until it transitioned from the first VOB to the second, whereupon the audio decided it would randomly switch to French for no good reason.
5. Finally, it likes to randomly pretend the Movies share doesn’t exist, and every fourth or fifth time I access it, it tells me nothing is found. Then it goes back to the aforementioned random seven.

This is far from ideal. A six-year-old Daewoo DVD player works better than this. Heck, Apple’s DVD player on my Macbook will successfully play a ripped, uncompressed DVD by simply pointing it at the film title on my share. All I’m looking for is the same functionality without having to build a generic MCPC at each television in my house.

*No, I don’t care that they insist on spelling it in lower case, I’m giving it a capital letter like it deserves.

One would think that if I imported a folder of wave audio in the structure, “In Flames/Colony”, iTunes might recognize that the artist might be In Flames, and that the album might be Colony. Instead, it does nothing but stupidly import the files into one huge directory, leaving it to the user to sort them all back out. Now imagine I imported 20 albums at once, and now they’re just all sorted by track title. Yeah.