According to analysts at Goldman Sachs Microsoft is making a handsome amount of patient license. Microsoft has already made similar royalty deals with several other Android device makes, most notably among them is HTC. Samsung and HTC account for over half of all the Android phones sold in the U.S. over the past year. The most notable company that has not signed a deal with Microsoft is Motorola who is the third largest Android maker in the U.S. With Google buying Motorola, we don't see a royalty agreement being made any time soon between Microsoft and Motorola either.
The reason Android device makers are signing deals with Microsoft is pretty simple, because they don't want to be sued. In an interview Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith said, "So far we have not seen a single Android device that does not infringe on our patents." In order to protect themselves from being sued by Microsoft, and ultimately paying more these companies are cutting hedging their bets and paying Microsoft upfront.
There has been no official word from Microsoft, Samsung, or HTC as to what patents in particular are being infringed upon, but Microsoft has a history of infringement cases against Linux-based products. It is rumored that HTC's royalty deal with Microsoft is for around $5 per Android device sold, so it would be safe to assume that Samsung's agreement is in that area too. Part of Samsung's agreement is the company's continued support of Microsoft phones, which basically means that Samsung now is agreeing to keep making Windows Phone devices. In a report released earlier this year it was estimated that Microsoft is making more money from HTC selling Android phones than it is selling its own WP7 devices.
The OPERA neutrino experiment at the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory has measured the velocity of neutrinos from the CERN CNGS beam over a baseline of about 730 km with much higher accuracy than previous studies conducted with accelerator neutrinos. The measurement is based on high-statistics data taken by OPERA in the years 2009, 2010 and 2011. Dedicated upgrades of the CNGS timing system and of the OPERA detector, as well as a high precision geodesy campaign for the measurement of the neutrino baseline, allowed reaching comparable systematic and statistical accuracies.
Scientists across the world, and even at CERN - home of the Large Hadron Collider - have been sceptical about the OPERA finding. The OPERA measurements, if independently confirmed, would mean that, in theory, information could be sent into the past, making time travel possible. "Time travel seems to be the go-to topic when faster-than-light particles are mentioned, but don't hold out hope for a TARDIS just yet," physicist Dr Jonathan Carroll at the University of Adelaide wrote on The Conversation website, referring to a time-travelling machine featured in the British television drama Doctor Who.
But he said it was more likely the OPERA finding was the result of a mistake in the calculations or experiment. "The much more likely scenario is that the analysis has overlooked some seemingly insignificant but critical aspect, and that re-analysis will led to a very good agreement with the speed of light. "Should that be the case, the followup press release will no doubt refer to the 'Phantom of the OPERA'." Another physicist likened the CERN discovery to flying carpets, saying: "This is ridiculous what they're putting out.
