1. They develop and maintain the marketplace
2. They process your transaction, run the payment gateway that interacts with dozens of banks in 100+ countries. they process transactions to the developers as well
3. Pay their transaction fees to banks and VISA/MC
4. Develop and maintain the SDK, and IDE etc that help the developers build the app in the first place
5. Keep your personal credit card info safe ( Then again, Perhaps not :( )
6. You may use your data plan but apple still has to host the files on their servers, considering the amount of free apps downloaded, the deployment costs are certainly non trivial
7. Most importantly ensure significant user base is there for the developer to sell to, through marketing strategies like cross subsidy( sell you cheap phone, and recoup in app purchases)
All this of course does not mean they have to charge 30% margin, but certainly the cost is not trivial.

Very rarely the number of people directly employed makes the difference, If Microsoft is spending $1 Billion in the state, it will probably source significant % of components locally( usually part of any tax break agreement), that will generate lot of business for the local economy, the vendors will in turn will be ordering components, magnifying the effect on the economy, the state tax on all these other transactions will perhaps offset the breaks given to Microsoft.

On the other hand, paying 84 people for 6 years will do very little for the economy by itself

Different people are motivated by different things: security,money, or street cred,or just for fun, the reporter is under no ethical,legal or moral obligation to disclose to anyone in any manner; he is not the manufacturer it is not his fault the bug is there or his responsibility he did not built software/service using the buggy software that people paid for.

Preferential disclosure done which ever way is bad. Chances of black-hats getting hold of it becomes higher, if *some* special people know of it before others; what guarantee is there some dissatisfied employee won't leak it. what makes google, or Red Hat more special than Average Joe running his applications on top of OpenSSL with potentially compromised keys ?

Responsible disclosure has to be fully public; it ensures the manufactures fix it faster; there are vendors who fix zero-days only if they get exposed public exposure. just look at the way oracle fixes java zero days.

since when is news is about what impacts the most number of people ?

Them not being aware is not that this product looked like fluke's, it is do with the fact it is trademarked.. if you check there are dozens of products of similar design, they merely made the common sense assumption that since similar products where already there, there was no trademark protection.
Of course you can argue that they should check and double check before etc and they are at fault.. They are not denying that they are at fault merely saying is too costly for a smaill business to to check fully without an "Army of consultants or attorneys"

Another C2 user here.. sometimes i go on 5 day work trips without taking the charger with me....

All smartphones cheap or not, are like gas guzzling SUVs when it comes to battery life, most die at the end of the day, For me and am sure many other users the phone guaranteed to have juice at the end of the day is far more important than all other bells and whistles

Do you know uncyclopedia exists? http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/...

Well it is true, hindu's do drink cow piss as you call it, they believe it has religious importance ,and it is not just piss, eat dung too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It has something to do with cow being very holy i believe, more probably because historically the cow was such important part of the farmer's economy. Almost all Hindus will not eat beef and one of the flash points for hindu - muslim violence is the fact the muslims do. The alleged fact that beef was used in making bullets that soilders to bite before using was one the manifest causes of the 1857 mutiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Personally i find eating cow shit disgusting and not eating only beef quite amusing, but then again I am Hindu and a vegetarian.

I am not OP, but I since i think i am part of that audience.

Sure i don't have a 3 digit ID like you, I am fairly recent user, I comment rarely, my comments are barely interesting, but guess what? people like me are the vast majority of the users, most of them don't even have an account. I am happy that slashdot is trying to stay relevant and there are people like me still joining and visiting the site and it has not (yet) become a site of old men complaining about the good ol'days.

if the community is thinking that slashdot can continue being a viable new site by catering to links browsing sys admins from the 90's it is unrealistic.

It is not like dice is changing a winning formula, readership is dwindling, they have invested a lot of money, are they supposed to just sit and watch it all collapse? If you really want to make a difference and keep slashdot classic, offer to pay for it. if enough active community members do, they will keep it. Advertisement based business models need certain critical mass, slashdot is fast losing it.

Don't want to pay big bad DH anything? build your own news aggregator, there is enough unhappy with the beta people with serious talent and plenty of time on hands in this site. Do something useful and quit bitching about.

P.S Beta IS shitty, broken, very JS heavy etc etc,However #fuckbeta doesn't help either, giving constructive feedback is more meaningful? Dice may not listen/execute it, but at least it has better chance of working than #fuckbeta

i agree.. i did that last 2 times i got them.. You know what sucks bigger than beta? people constantly whining about them.. It is making the site unreadable worse than beta is doing..

Basically you saying immortal designs however flawed are not to be touched? I will now ask you consider this challenge
* Ask DaVinci if he got MonaLisa right the first time? Or ask him how many changes he made till Mona Lisa became the painting it is today. Or even better ask him if he is happy with the painting the way it is or it was when he last worked on it?
No work is ever complete, no true creator, artist or programmer for that matter will say his work is ever complete. Change is always for the good, however shitty the current version is. I think a quote from Tao of Programming is appropriate

P.S. I don't like the beta either, but am happy at least they are trying to do something.

Management getting some!

also if you are using w3fools not a good one either!

not really, factoring in inflation it still a bad loss