<story><title>Apple Pays Swiss Federal Railways $21 Million For Clock Icon</title><url>http://mashable.com/2012/11/11/apple-licenses-clock-icon/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>marvin</author><text>It this really true? I hope this doesn&apos;t count as a useless contribution, but paying 21 million dollars for a clock design on your mobile OS seems to me like complete insanity. For this price, you could literally hire multiple competent workers to do whatever you wanted for the rest of their working lives, and still have money left over.&lt;p&gt;It would be a lot more rational to just switch to a different clock design and pocket the money. 21 million is almost just a rounding error in Apple&apos;s accounting department, but it&apos;s still a ridiculous amount of money. I can&apos;t possibly believe that giving your users this specific design and not losing face due to backpedaling is worth this much.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple Pays Swiss Federal Railways $21 Million For Clock Icon</title><url>http://mashable.com/2012/11/11/apple-licenses-clock-icon/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tedmiston</author><text>Watching the motion of the real Swiss railway clocks [1] with its smoothness is quite soothing.&lt;p&gt;&quot;It requires only about 58.5 seconds to circle the face, then the hand pauses briefly at the top of the clock. It starts a new rotation as soon as it receives the next minute impulse from the master clock.&quot; [2]&lt;p&gt;1: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvIvKiDWDks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvIvKiDWDks&lt;/a&gt;
2: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>