ktappe

This is the local council's fault. When you convert a road into pedestrian only, you put bollards in place to block vehicles. It is not rocket science.

This is the very thing that's making me cancel Amazon Prime this coming Monday (the day they add ads to Prime Video.) If these companies wanted to wean us off of all the streaming services, they're finding a way to do it. People hate ads.

M68000 said:

Does anybody find this really hard to believe?  There is an acceleration rate on objects that increases per second because of gravity.  It’s something like 9.8 meters a second per second.  A freefall from 16000 feet is no joke.  Could this be a made up story? I have cracked iphone screens from about 5 feet, can’t imagine what 16000 feet would do.

I think you responded to the wrong story. But assuming you're talking about the iPhone that survived falling out of the Alaskan 737 MAX, it's believable because iPhones have large flat surfaces so their terminal velocity is not very high; probably less than 100MPH. As long as it landed on a soft surface (grass, leaves), it's totally possible for the iPhone to have sustained minimal damage.

hmurchison said:

They thought the clone vendors would attempt to expand into new markets but instead they 
simply sought to cannibalize the company with inferior offerings.

The clones weren't inferior. I bought several PowerComputing units for my then employer and they worked great. They were faster at a lower price than Apple's Macs.

This situation is quite interesting. It's a real-life, unscripted drama that nobody knows the end of.  All of these possibilities are in play:

* Biden signs the waiver of his own accord.
* Apple influences Biden to sign the waiver (perhaps via a large campaign contribution now allowed in the wake of Citizens United.)
* Apple redesigns the S9 and U2.
* Apple abandons the S9 and U2 and is already hard at work bringing an S10 and U3 to market that don't violate Masimo's patents.
* Apple successfully challenges the patents with the USTO.
* Apple only sells the Watch SE until August 2028.
* Apple buys Masimo (or a controlling stake).
* Apple successfully gets Masimo's watch taken off the market, thereby giving them a bargaining chip to get their own back on the market.
* Apple licenses Masimo's technology for an unreasonable price.
* Apple initiates and wins a FRAND suit that forces Masimo to license the technology to Apple at a reasonable price.

Obviously some of these are far more likely than others, but you can't deny that nobody really knows what the outcome will be.