Samsung versus Apple

I wasn't planning on posting anything this week, but I've read a few news posts that Samsung has lost against Apple and must now pay $1 billion in damages for patent infringement. If this is indeed true (and I sincerely hope it isn't, because while I am not necessarily a Samsung fanboy, what Apple has done is beyond outrageous), this really gets my goat.
I hope Samsung appeals this. All of the arguments for why the case is ridiculous have been done to death, so I won't repeat them here. If this ruling stands even upon appeal after appeal, that'll basically mean that only Apple will control the smartphone market. But now Steve Jobs is gone, and I've noticed as a result that some of their new product releases haven't exactly been groundbreaking; plus, their new advertisements on TV (which I've been able to see since coming home for a short break) are pretty awful in their cheesiness and are nothing like what Steve Jobs would have put out there. So this means that the Apple-dominated smartphone market will stagnate. I'm going to guess that while the cult of Apple will keep drooling over every new product release, eventually regular people will wise up to the lack of innovation at Apple and stop buying said products. But while that would make it amusing for me to watch Apple fall in such a way, it won't change the fact that Apple's monopoly of the smartphone market is essentially codified in law. They have essentially set a nuclear strike on the smartphone market, so that if they should fail, so should everyone else.
Oh, who am I kidding? I'll stop prognosticating ridiculous scenarios and be satisfied with the fact that I have a perfectly functional LG dumbphone that can talk, text, and take pictures.

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LG Cell Phone City ID Gripes (and 0x100 Posts!)

Das U-Blog now has 0x100 (the hexadecimal number 100, equal to 256 in the standard decimal system) posts! Yay!
That aside, I've been having some issues with my cell phone. I'm not talking about call, build, sound, or photography quality; I'm talking about a feature called "City ID". When I first got the phone, whenever I made or received calls, I could see not only the name and number of the person in question but also that person's location (and I believe this is based on the location where the phone is first activated, not the real-time location). It still seems like a pretty cool feature, but unfortunately, the trial version of this feature expired a few weeks after I got the phone. Since then, my phone has been bugging me far too often about whether I want to upgrade to the paid subscription for the program now or later. (How about never?) These messages first started appearing once every few days, but it seems like they've increased in frequency since then, and now it seems like they appear every other time I press a button on my phone when it's powered on. Recently, it's gotten even worse.
A few weeks ago, instead of this message, I finally got the option to completely remove the program from my phone. Without any hesitation, I did so immediately, and it was gone for a few days. You can probably tell by that statement that it came back after that, and that is what happened.
A few days ago, I got a message asking if I want to renew the free trial, so I said yes (rather foolishly). Instead of getting that, I got this weird screen full of news that would only belong in the National Enquirer. I quickly got out of that page and have noticed nothing relating to that since then. Of course, the messages asking me to renew "City ID" have only gotten more frequent.
I'm getting the feeling that this is some sort of malware (not deliberately malicious, but just extremely annoying) and that I need to remove it somehow. I've searched a little bit on the Internet for help in this regard and have found nothing so far. Does anyone have any idea how I can get this cursed program off my phone for good?
(UPDATE: A couple minutes after finishing and saving this post, I did just one more search but with more general search terms and I found the results I needed on the first page itself. Wow! Hopefully this really does mean that "City ID" is gone for good from my phone.)

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