Not at all. From personal experience, it typically takes a non-backordered Apple product 2–3 business days from the origin in China to clear customs in Anchorage, then another day or so before it's ready to ship out of a FedEx Hub in, say, Indianapolis*. So you're realistically only adding about five days to the lead time, and surprisingly little cost (LOTS of iPhones to a pallet — Apple packaging isn't efficient for environmental reasons).

* As a bit of a special case, I live in Indianapolis, so I've actually had Apple products ordered on a Monday ship FedEx from China and deliver by Friday, with standard shipping (officially "5–7 day" shipping).

Sure, but even so, what if those who "excoriate execs and companies who move parts of their businesses offshore" are only a small minority? Also, so long as "components sourced abroad and assembled in a Saipan sweatshop" is "made in the USA," the mark isn't particularly informative (not that this is what Google is doing, but it does suggest some sort of additional marketing would actually be useful).

That actually sounds much better than the usual "puzzle-style" interview questions I hear. I'd personally begin by asking for high-level details. What applications do you have in mind? Alternatively, are you looking for a specific sort of boat? Without knowing the first thing about boats, there are obvious orders-of-magnitude design, process, and resource differences between building a kayak, say, and an oil tanker. Note here that I'd be careful to avoid detailed design or requirement questions: by my own admission, I don't know how to build boats, so the resulting "requirements discussion" would almost surely be "bike-shedding."

Next, given that there's (presumably) a well-established industry selling ____ boats, why are we assuming at the outset that we should build rather than buy? Suppose the answer is "we're not an end-user, our business plan involves breaking into boat manufacturing."

Fair enough. Then doing profitability requires both building and selling boats in a market with established players, and, by our (my) own admission, we (I) don't yet know how to build a boat, let alone do so well enough to make a manufacturable and marketable product (not to mention the highly nontrivial matters of actual marketing and manufacturing "at scale"). So unless we already have a crack boat-design team at our disposal (in which case, why are you asking me?) it might bewiser, at least for a few years, to get our feet wet by OEMing third-party boats, building something related but less ambitious like "boat accessories", etc., before committing to full-on "boat-building."

And so on. Presumably this is the sort of discussion they want to hear?

The .NET libraries are proprietary and protected by patents.

Maybe so, but how could a valid utility patent on a .NET library routine not extend to a functionally equivalent routine on Java or any other platform?

What could work, however, is an inexpensive "trusted media coprocessor" that takes DRM video and renders directly to the video hardware. Probably too wasteful of silicon on small mobile devices, but it could be reasonable on the desktop. Ideally, this would be subsidized by the media companies themselves, complete with open source reference drivers. Fine with me if they want to "own"the playback hardware, so long as they're willing to pay for it...

Why would they choose this over a Metro-style app?

AI is to real intelligence what margarine is to butter - it's artificial. It isn't real. You're never going to get a Turing computer to actually think, although some future chemical or something machine may.

Define "real" and "actual". Also, the Turing test isn't tied to Turing's particular theoretical model of computation, rather, it's intended to be as "cross-platform" as possible, for reasons including, but not limited to, the philosophical and linguistic quagmires involved in defining things like "intelligence" and "reality", by a simple "qualifying exam": phase one, in which we throw out all potential "artificial ducks" that can't even quack.

Apple developer tools must be installed from the App store, costs nothing but you still need a credit card. And command-line tools doesn't install by default, which is most of what I want.

You don't need a credit card to download free stuff from the App Store.

And Xcode need not be installed from the App Store: installers for both Xcode and the standalone command-line tools packages are on developer.apple.com/downloads (registration required).

Here's my prediction: The version of OS X that comes after Mountain Lion will only let you install applications/software from the App Store. Again, Steve's plan; not Tim's.

So Xcode will only run on Windows and Linux?

I suppose this would shut up the "it's bullshit that iOS development requires a Mac" crowd, at least.

The article isn't clear whether it's 96kHz on just the master, or the disc also.

Actually, it is. To wit, FTA,

In order to enjoy the benefits of a 96kHz disc, you need an AV receiver capable of playing it.

It may not actually be a placebo effect. This is only true if you assume the goal is high fidelity, not merely results that "sound good." Recall that some people prefer vinyl to digital audio, in spite of its inarguable lower fidelity, and this has nothing at all to do with the placebo effect. It is, after all, trivially easy to identify vinyl vs. digital in a blind test. But if, as stated in the article, the result must then be distributed as a 96KHz track to yield the "improvements", that's almost surely bullshit.

Yes, well, except for the fact that holds 57% of the voting shares, so nobody can stop him from voting dissenters off the board. So there isn't that. There is, however, financial self-interest.

With that said, this deal has been blown way out of proportion: 1% of Facebook in cash and shares to take what Zuckerberg, the board, and much of the industry saw as a potential major competitor out of the picture, which is sensible if, say, Zuckerberg gave Instagram even odds at taking 2% of Facebook's business, no?

Furthermore, the profit potential of Instagram itself is only of tangential importance to Facebook; it'd make similar sense for Zuckerberg to offer $1 billion in "shut up money" to RMS if he had reason to believe the FSF was (somehow) a huge risk to a big chunk of Facebook's earnings, and not on account of Stallman's lucrative speaking fees!

Even if the AUP forbids it, who cares? In what fucked-up world could "a system which tracks students' social networks after they have logged in at school" even arguably be a responsible use funds earmarked for education?

Also, given that the student's transgression required special technological measures merely to detect, how could it possibly be argued that it fucked with the school's educational mission to a degree that merits such a "last resort" as expulsion?

Then again, while it's hard to imagine this being the idea, "don't trust technology you don't control, and don't enter into agreements you don't understand, because they'll be used to fuck you in the end" might be a more useful lesson than those he's missing.

Separation of church and state? Sounds like the government forcing church: "If you don't toe the line on secularity, we're gonna fire your ass." That's a threat if I ever heard one.

That certain religions hold "the separation of church and state" to be immoral doesn't make secular government a religion any more than certain religions holding birth control to be immoral makes condom use a religion. More generally, "belief" is not interchangeable with "religious belief": along with the majority of people in the world, I "believe" I can walk down the sidewalk without falling through it — does that make me a "religious solidist?"