"I never understood the fascination of leasing a car for an individual."

A car is a depreciating asset, it never goes up in value.

In that sense, it doesn't make sense to want to "own the car". If you get, say, a TrueCars.com price on a lease, as an example, the cost of leasing versus the cost of owning is razor thin.

But with leasing, you can always get out of the car and into another one with full warranty, a fixed turn-in value and security against unknown events like the car gets wrecks or damaged in an accident (leases state that as long as the repairs are done by a certified shop, that doesn't matter).

Unless you plan on throwing miles on a high quality 100,000 mile car and run it forever, the cheapness and security of car leases if you do it right, is often more convenient than actually owning the vehicle. Buying saves a few bucks a month in the long run and more if you intend to keep it "forever", but most people don't keep their cars more than 3 to 5 years and if that's the plan, leasing has the lower payments and fewer unknowns.

No because it is Apple ... or something.

[I never have understood the Apple hate. Is it 'Linux has failed envy' or 'I am stuck on Windows' remorse or something. I'm sure this will be -18 flamebait or something real soon ... ]

I don't think you have ever been in sales.

Sales is like herding cats. Most of sales is working corner cases and people sitting on the fence.

Sales is about getting someone to pull the trigger, make decision and make the decision you want. And it is the most factor in cash flow and growth.

The revenue difference in losing those sales is pretty massive. Certainly not worth falling on your sword for.

I'm sure that Apple, with $160 B in the bank, and developers writing entirely new programming languages like Swift are betwixt --- just betwixt!!! --- at the things the open source community can write in code that they can't figure out!!

Maybe some day Apple will smarten up and move to next to Stanford and Berkeley so they can buy some coding talent and be able to patch these kinds of things.

Until then, they will be at the mercy of the GPL v3.

[Either that or how the hell can this even be exploited on a Mac, sigh ...]

Apple isn't into commercial software.

They make their $$$ off the hardware that is handsomely marked up.

But thanks for trying!

Oh, and Google ... ha! ... well ... Stanford pledged to not do privacy research with Google grant money, so you can read between the lines. Google's interest aren't the same as the "user's best interest" if it conflicts with advertising or privacy.

You have potential, young Skywalker, but your comments clearly prove a Jedi, you are not.

But you will be someday ...

But highly improbable is finitely improbable ...

"and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.

Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way: If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one, is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea ... and turn it on! He did this, and was rather startled to discover ..."

The 2005 movie was pretty bad and marred Hitchhiker's Guide in my mind. The 6-part miniseries was a really great portrayal. Too much to ask for it be something that can be condensed to 90 minutes, yes. Yet, for some people it Hitchhiker's Guide isn't some stupid "42" meme. And what is better than the miniseries is the book. I read Hitchhiker's Guide out of boredom starting in a public library and after page 1, I could not stop reading it and it brought immeasurable joy. [And Douglas Adams has been gone quite a while now, what a shame ...]

"Lots of Chinese pollution is caused by satisfying western consumption."

And they have the money now to be able to afford scrubbers and other technology to keep their air and water clean!

Instead of keeping trillions in surplus in the bank while air and water pollution is miserable, they should use a small percent of that to have cleaner air and water for their citizens.

China has major smog problems and I'm not sure what color the Yellow River is, but I'd drink cat piss before drinking from the Yellow River.

Tending to the environment helps everyone, which is why the US and Europe don't have acid rain problems like in the 1990s.

No one benefits from polluted air or toxic water, China has made great strides in the last 20 years and they have the resources to raise their own state of affairs for the human condition in their country by cleaning up a bit. A fair amount of it would probably be easy since, as examples, Europe and the USA know how to do it.

[Unless you are looking for a political griefing thread, which this being the internet, isn't exactly uncommon.]

I am glad they are discovering these security issues and addressing them. Maybe in 5 years, most of these kinds of devices will be secure.

Anything "on the frontier" needs whacked into shape a bit.

I don't want one (now), but I disagree.

Some day they will probably make something of this sort that I do want.

Wouldn't be nice to automatically know what you did and didn't have in the refrigerator or make sure you turned the air conditioning off while on vacation.

Perhaps. Perhaps not, but I imagine at some point something very useful and relevant could be made.

Well phrased.

Are you kidding me? Microsoft might as well be IBM. They have such a huge installed base of corporate buyers, they could shovel out garbage for 2 decades and make $40 billion a year.

They could make Steven Elop their CEO, and even he couldn't begin to run Microsoft into the ground.

In fact, they should just to prove that their company is so entrenched that even an idiot could run it.

And they could drive home the point, by having one run the company just to show the world!

I seem to be one of 10 people commenting incorrectly.

Which goes to show how bad Microsoft is at marketing.

And because of this flaw, they can't make any products in-house and will have to pay $2.5 billion to buy a game with Nintendo 64 style block graphics from the 1990s.

Either way, if as you say, they wanted to make sure "no part of the user experience could fail", they failed that goal when they shipped Windows 8.

In their pursuit to ensure a good user experience, perhaps they had a plan for spammers and viruses and email fraud but little did they know that while looking outside, the biggest blow to the user experience was being developed by themselves.

Maybe their new CEO will develop a task force that can detect coming assaults to the user experience occurring in his own building!!!

(You had a good and informative post with some exceptional information quality, I will be Googling some of those.)

And an insult. It was like Microsoft trying to usurp your own computer and tell you what it could do and spy on you too.

Trustyworthy Computing had the idea that apps could prevent you taking screenshots and assert insane privileges on your own computer.

It was offensive as hell.