I can confirm this, as someone I know that works at my local Apple retail store was showing me her new free iPhone the other day. She was quite buzzed about it.

Of course we need truck mounted laser cannons! How else do you expect us to defend ourselves when the machines rise up and send flying HK-Seekers to kill us all?

Remember, this ad campaign is focused on Europe, where the N95 is pretty inexpensive if you get it with a contract. Vodafone UK has it for free if you get a high end service plan, so you really don't have to have $700 laying around if you happen to live in a country with a decent mobile carrier (i.e. not the USA or Canada).

http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/index.cfm?go=paymonthly.productdetails&pid=445&WT.svl=link1

I read somewhere that the recording industry and music publishing industries consider ringtones to be a public performance of the work, which incurs higher royalties than a "private" performance which is their explainaion of why a 30 second low fi ringtone costs three times the price of a high qualiy digital download of the full song. (They have never come down conclusively, however, on the legal status of ghetto blasters).

Of course, it could just be an instance of the carriers being just as money grubbing as the music industry and wanting more ringtone download revenue and using the music industry as a scapegoat. Or it could be a little greed on both sides.

"Please put down this phone. You have 20 seconds to comply."

(Thief puts down phone)

"You have 15 seconds to comply."

Jer: "I have an iPod. I've bought music from iTunes. That music is LOCKED"

You can always burn to a CD and then rerip in an unprotected format. Also the iTunes Plus music can be transcoded into MP3 or repackaged into a standard AAC container.

So does the GTI I saw at the VW dealer this past weekend with an iPod dock in the armrest (with the track listings displayed on the radio/nav system screen) count as prior art?

Yeah, you can make cell calls from airlines. Just look at the people from Flight 93 who were calling home in the middle of the hijacking. I do wonder if you need analog capability to pull it off, though, so you may be limited to dual-mode CDMA models.

Quote: "Well there goes the bandwidth of the entire Internet. Now millions of people in addition to thousands of news stations will be clogging the data routes with streaming TV."

It's not a dump truck!

Quote: "They had a hard enough time just getting the Zune out-the-door before x-mas - nevermind getting it to seamlessly integrate with MCE - Vista wasn't even ready at that point."

Umm, they already had this fuctionality available in the PMCs like the Gigabeat. It would have actually had been LESS work for Microsoft if they hadn't thrown out the work they already did and made the Zune a Plays For Sure PMC device with special skins and URGE integration, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel by creating a custom Zune-only syncing software and online store.

Microsoft has failed with the Zune because they have turned their back on their own pre-existing brands, software and products instead of extending and enhancing them with tight integration across Vista, WMP 11 and the WM-DRM online stores like Napster and Yahoo Music. By redoing everything from scratch with the Zune brand they are pissing on their previous customers and hardware partners. The Zune is a total, unmitigated disaster of product design and marketing. They may be able to fix it in a Rev. 2 or 3 version, but I think they'll wind up pulling the plug way before that, just like they did with the PMC devices.