“I love the car comparison. It’s something lots of technonerds love to say is impossible to carry off, comparing cars and computers. But that’s just a lack of imagination on their part. Or they simply don’t get the difference between metaphor and simile.

I usually agree with this viewpoint, as computers and cars are so different that most metaphors and similes fall apart if you think about them, which is generally the idea. However, this article is one of the few I’ve seen that manages to pull it off.

Moreover, Apple owns many patents in regards to multi-touch. So, it really seems like an exercise in futility to weight Apple’s chances of defending it’s use of multi-touch on the iPhone based on one patent. Finally, there might be many different implementations of multi-touch, but until the iPhone I can only think of only one that uses it on a phone.

Just my thoughts.

Sorry Vern, but yourself and some others above seem to have totally missed the point about journalism …
Well-researched.
Investigative.
Responsible.
Trustworthy.
Principled.
Ethical.

A lot of the “pundits” (wrong choice of word in my view as it means expert, but I understand Dan’s derogative line of thought) are not journalists by any stretch of the imagination, they are at best merely commentators, and are not dissimilar from the majority of their readers, it is often up to those very readers through their own comments to correct the erroneous omissions, inaccuracies, mistakes, fallacies and the outright Lies.

The pubescence of the tech industry or the web has nothing at all to do with the maturity of the auto-industry and coverage of it by the media.
In the past persons with an interest in cars or any other field of pursuit for that matter, were limited to the news papers, books, magazines and the occasional television program, and all this within the confines of their particular country.
Since the mid nineties the World Wide Web has allowed people to find facts and figures, knowledge, advice, trivia, empirical understanding …
In short Information. Information can be found in a space of minutes or hours, and with careful scrutiny, consideration and evaluation a person is almost certainly enlightened.

However, as we all know the web is a two edged sword and amongst other ills, it is also the reason that today we get “pundits” at certain Tech media conglomerates and personal blogs who have been given a position and the circumstances to espouse to well over 2 billion plus people via the web, nothing wrong with that except for the inept, bungling amateurs, the reprehensible, morally corrupt shysters, and the lazy, ignorant gossipmongers.

Most journalists have a point of view or information that they wish to contribute to the community, via their media outlet, however the number of outlets for means of expression has proliferated by a factor of eleventy-ten (a very big number, kinda like bajillion) so it’s not like the old days (pre the mid-nineties in this case) and the reviews, tests and reports on such and such car.

Besides I for one, will not sit back and wait 80 years while the misfits get their collective acts together.

Today more than ever it’s STILL about MONEY and the MOTIVATION behind the report.

News, was once a bastion of propriety, is an extremely cheap commodity, which these days is by subtle and not so subtle design is intrinsically intermeshed with entertainment and business. Lets face it most news these days is entertainment!
The media conglomerates world wide know that, and that it must be delivered constantly – 30 / 60 / 24 / 7 / 52 factually or not. – I know, as it has been my profession over the last 30+ years, the ethical changes and content remodeling over that time are eleventy-ten (immense).

Sorry for long post n’ rant, as you can tell I despise the current media situation.

When PCs went from 4.77MHz to 6 or 8 or 12MHz, that was a huge difference in what could be accomplished. Same with the memory and disk capacities. My original IBM PC couldn’t even store a single song from my iPod, let alone be able to decode it. This paradigm is slowly changing, since improvements are now incremental. Ten years ago, PCs were made to surf the web, do email (aka AOL) and play “Quake”. Today we surf the web, do email, and play “Crysis”. The raw capability is no longer paramount, but journalists are not going to give up on a winning formula until the old one collapses completely.

Even in the early days of the “Hi-Fi”, one was expected to know how to soldier, and a pre-assembled stereo was for sissies. A modern audiophile would pluck out his own eye before cracking open one of his priced components.

I think we need to start a new movement: digitalphile?