And stuff like this is why I'm bored with Americans and their petty squabbles. You have absolutely amazing feats of engineering with which you have accomplished utterly awe-inspiring things, yet you chose to spend most of your time squabbling over whether one group of millions of people should be coloured red or blue based on whether a slim majority voted for PersonA or PersonB in a hugely over-inflated popularity contest and the benefits that come with this apparent colouring.

I'm sure you'll have some clever rebuttal, but I'll say it right here: I won't be bothered to read them.

Enterprise is a huge part of the history of human science an exploration. Damage to it is news. I bet you'd complain that it was a slow news day if a major storm blew through Paris and water damaged the Mona Lisa too, eh?

Yet people still buy it. Who are to/he/I to say that it's excessive? People are willing to pay the 3x markup to Apple for what they are offering. Why do you think that private transaction between two parties has anything to do with you?

And to re-quote from above, it appears that he posted it on his own wall, then someone else entirely took a screengrab of his posting and potsed it to the official Find April facebook page. Once again, totally changes the standpoint. The original joke-poster was in bad-taste, but on his own wall is not too bad. Whoever re-posted it is the prick and it's him/her that should have been arrested.

I would *guess* that it's because the quote is largely irrelevant and obviously trolling for responses. "Troll" and "Flamebait" tend to get a bit mixed up on /.

This is one of the very few comments that actually deals with the most important part of the affair - which the media doesn't seem to have said.

If you actually want the answer to this question, then it's "the courts of law" (I'm sure that there is a specific one to deal with this, but I don't know enough about the system). The law courts are deliberately NOT answerable to the government to prevent interference from the current incumbents.

I never understand how people seem to expect that if all the components of a device add up to $x, that you should be able to buy the device for $x. I'm not saying that Apple don't put a big markup on their devices, but do you think that it's free to do all the design, assembly and development of the OS/software?

Visual metaphores are just easier than text as you can get the information from a quick glance. Who cares if they don't really represent what they are anymore. People seeing the following road-sign know instantly that they are approaching a speed camera but no-one's really used a camera that looked like this with the concertina-front in about 100 years. Just because modern cameras don't look like this anymore doesn't mean we should go out and replace all our road-signs with more accurate ones. That's why the phone icon, the camera icon and the floppy-disk-to-save icon will not go away. Because everyone knows what they mean.

In the linux world (and pre-Windows-95 world), we call them 'directories'

Exactly. Why do designers put pretty effects like wood, brushed chrome and glass in? Because they make it look pretty, and people like pretty things. Sure, it doesn't really add any functionality and you could do it entirely with a single block of colour like Google's new 'clean' interfaces or Windows 8 (formerly-known-as) Metro. But given the choice between two interfaces that do the same thing, one pretty and one bland, I'll choose the pretty one every time.

Interesting to see you get modded down for criticism of Apple toys, but then as soon as you 'fess up to owning numerous Apple toys, you get modded up to +5 on both posts!

As a researcher you probably have the benefit of large work-tables to spread the papers out on and the luxury of not having to pay a non-negligible sum of money for the weight of all your research papers and probably have the luxury of ample storage. Airline pilots don't have those.

Plus they can quite probably counteract the problems of power outages, dead batteries, viruses etc but taking a charger or indeed (gasp!) a second one (which I believe is the plan).

Do what I do. Start it paused, but then put your phone/pad/musicy in your pocket and say to the stewards when they ask that the music is off but you're using your headphones as ear defenders to make the flight quieter. Then slip your hand in your pocket and start it playing again. I do this even if I'm not listening to music, just to make the takeoff quieter. If I'm not listening to music I'll have the other end of the headphones unplugged and in obvious view for their benefit.

Same thing goes for the pilot's eyeballs. I'm pretty sure they're smart enough to think of taking a spare.