Some of that info seems bogus. 10,000 CNC mills? Unlikely. 10,000 CNC machines of all types across all of Apple manufacturing, maybe.

There's a nice video about how Apple machines a round can for their round desktop computer. They're going through a lot of steps to make a can, yet they're doing it in a low-volume way. Here's how soft drink cans are made. Same shape, but much higher production volume.

Apple is doing this to justify charging $2700 for an x86-64 machine with midrange specs.

There are amusing efforts to sell disk drives to Google. Near Google HQ there is a movie theater complex. I once saw an ad run before a movie. Two minutes of sales pitch for bulk purchases of enterprise hard drives, with lots of technical detail. Clearly this was addressed to a very specific audience.

DoublcClick has such negative value that their servers should be blocked at firewalls, or at least "host.txt". Even if you have AdBlock, blocking them earlier saves bandwidth.

Personally, I like the idea of that. It encourages and funds a lot of Canadian artists that might otherwise get swamped out of the market by monied American interests.

Personally, I would much, much, much rather the CRTC enforce rules for true network neutrality for Canadian internet users and find some other way to promote Canadian content.

Or, more accurately, for someone else to force the CRTC to go that way, because there's pretty much zero probability that they'll do it without coercion.

Judging by the number of broken web sites I've seen lately, we could use a bit more staticness and a bit less dynamicness. :-}

...laura

That's basically the 2013 'Donglegate' controversy in a nutshell.

Maybe they should just offer a link to a free YYZ download with every Netflix membership. Problem solved.

It does. There's a Craiglist-type feature on Bloomberg trading info terminals. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. You can message other people via the Bloomberg system if you see something you like.

There's a paid social network for rich conservatives. This is independent, not a Bloomberg thing. It's only $5/month, which is apparently enough to keep the noise level down.

There's a persistent rumor that there are special news sources for rich people. There are, but they're very narrow. There are lots of newsletters you can buy for $50 to $1000 a month that provide detailed coverage of obscure business subjects. If you really need to know what's going on with bulk carrier leasing, oil drilling equipment activity, or wafer fab capacity shortages, there's a newsletter for that. Offshore Alert, which covers offshore scams, is one of the more readable ones, and you can see the first few lines of each story for free. There are expensive newsletters devoted to security and terrorism, which give the illusion of inside information, but they tend to be marketing tools aimed at rich paranoids.

If you want to know what's going on in the world, read The Economist. After you've been reading it for a year, you'll have a good understanding of how the world works.

The problem with relying for support for separation from the younger generation...

Well, yes. It still takes at least a generation for them to work it out of their system. 40 years might do it, but seeing where we are now in Canada I think it's going to take another 20 or so before we can really feel comfortable that separation is truly dead.

The reality is that there's more people in the RoC (Rest of Canada) who would vote to kick Quebec out than there are Quebecers willing to pull the trigger on separation.

Oh, definitely. And to some degree, I think the growing understanding that Quebec wouldn't be able to unilaterally dictate the terms of a separation actually proceeded is one of the biggest factors in killing the movement.

Apple also sells music in its lossless format, and there it's hard to get "robust" without annoying the listener.

No argument that it's hard.

But if Apple (I highly doubt U2 is directly involved in the research itself) did manage to develop a robust audio watermark that doesn't suck, it's understandable how someone would get the impression that it might result in an "unpiratable" format, at least within the bounds of the Apple walled garden.

For $8 a month they offer a pretty good selection.

I agree, assuming that selection includes movies I actually want to see. Now it mostly doesn't, so its value to me is approaching $0, sadly.

Yes. Unfortunately, as my trust in them goes up, their useful library continues to shrink.

The separatist movement here has burned itself out, the generation who were pushing for it being seen as burned-out old farts. Go back to the UK in 40 years and tell me that everyone lost.

From what I read of the demographics, it's mainly the younger generation of Scots that supported separation. They're pretty much at the stage of Quebec in the 70's.

I wonder if this will silence or encourage the separatists that want Quebec to leave Canada?

Encourage.

The margins are way too close. If it would've been more like 75% against, the Quebec separatists might have taken a bit of a morale hit, but 55% ? That's a "Please Play Again" for a separatist. The 1980 referendum was 59% against and it certainly didn't stop them.

The real question is whether the Scots are going to be smart enough to tar and feather the next bunch of politicians that decide they want to run a country? I'm not optimistic.

Because it shows that neither know what they are talking about. If I can HEAR it, I can copy it. And the quality can get pretty damn good depending on how the sound is captured.

The only way I can see something like that working is a robust audio watermark containing the purchasers iTunes information. Won't stop copying directly, but would theoretically allow them to go after a "source" and possibly publish revocation lists that some devices could support to suppress "pirated" music.

Of course, that would only be applicable to online stores (I assume the record companies would force other stores to toe the line on the technology) and likely could only be enforced on iDevices. It obviously could be trivially defeated by ripping the music from a CD (for that short while we still have mass-pressed anonymous, physical media), pirates buying music using throwaway store accounts, or other peoples accounts being hacked.

But, let's face it, at this point the best they can hope for is deterrence rather than outright prevention.