What if Microsoft demanded a 30 per cent cut of your speaking fees if you happened to make use of a PowerPoint presentation in your talk? What if you used Photoshop to edit your photos and Adobe only allowed you to sell your creations through their online photo store? Sound crazy? That's what Apple is up to with their new iBook Author software.

I'm always saddened to hear about the passing of anyone before their time.

The recent announcements of the premature deaths of two very public individuals has brought wall to wall media coverage, very public displays of mourning along with speculation on the future of their life's work.

Having never been a fan of the empire that Steve Jobs built, I posted online wondering when this fawning coverage would end. Someone remarked sarcastically that it would last about as long as the coverage of Jack Layton's passing.

"When Patents Attack!" is the title of a recent episode of This American Life, a program produced by Chicago's National Public Radio affiliate WBEZ Radio. This one-hour episode is an expose of a new and parasitic industry that's burst on the scene in recent years, namely the "patent troll" industry. It also takes a look at the current patent war under way between the giants in the tech sector.

This month saw Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation team up with the Apple Computer Corporation to launch the world's first digital-only newspaper called The Daily.

This newspaper is not available on the web at all. It's solely available as a paid app for the Apple iPad for US$39.99 a year, or US$0.99 per week. This new iThingie-only newspaper will have its own staff of approximately a hundred journalists.

Personally, I don't give a rat's ass what Rupert Murdoch puts out. I'm not going to buy it.

Apple Computers, already well known for crushing end user freedom on their devices, has hit a new low.

According to this blog post on iFixit.com, Apple has begun replacing the standard "Phillips" screws on the cases of new iPhone 4's sold in the U.S. with "Pentalobe" screws.   They've apparently already done this to iPhones sold in many parts of the world.