Because that's what having a standard means, right? When everyone just chooses their own?

The ZF-1.

The reason why not is obvious. Oil companies have their place in the markets, their sunk costs invested in equipment, technology, business processes, and distribution networks. Their interest is not in getting off oil as soon as it is possible, or practical. It is to stave off that transition as long as possible, to make sure that extracting and refining oil remains profitable right up until the last possible drop that can be produced and consumed is produced and consumed.

Presumably at some point, if they want to remain in the energy business, they will themselves convert to something else so that when there is no more oil that can be practically and profitably produced, they will remain in the market by diversifying.

So there's the time when environmentalists say we should transition (now) and the time when oil companies say we should transition (when oil is no longer profitable, when they say so) and what actually happens will fall somewhere in the middle, very likely much closer to the latter than the former, because when it comes to resolving conflicts of interest between the energy sector and interests of ordinary citizens, most Western governments have a pretty terrible track record.

I'd describe it this way:

For those in the target market for whom "runs on Linux" is a positive trait, there is no need to mention that these products are based on Linux: they already know.

For those in the target market for whom "runs on Linux" means nothing, there is no value in mentioning that these products run Linux.

For those in the target market for whom "runs on Linux" is a negative trait, there is an incentive to not mention Linux.

Educating the public about what Linux is and does, and which products use it, is a goal that is largely orthogonal to the objectives of companies that want to make and sell products that use Linux. Users want to complete their tasks; if Linux can do this and the product performs well and is available at a decent price, it will succeed whether people know they are using Linux or not. If it can't, it won't, regardless of whether or not people know it uses Linux.

The value in knowing the identity of a platform comes when it becomes a broad ecosystem, the way "Windows" became shorthand for "runs all the applications you've already invested time and money in"-- those applications you bought and trained people to use in order to accomplish your assigned tasks. To some extent, iOS also has a similar identity, in that tablets running other mobile operating systems may do everything iOS devices do as well, or perhaps even better, but that means less to people who have ever-increasing stables of iOS apps they wish to continue using.

The Linux ecosystem is very deep, but is centered squarely around servers and software development, and less around general productivity, communication, or entertainment-- the things most people use computing devices for. People already use lots of devices that contain Linux all the time-- DSL routers and switches, for instance, but most of them don't know these devices run on Linux, and they don't need to.

Stealth craft... unveiled? Sounds like somebody's been breaking the first rule of Not Being Seen.

Should you feel threatened? Do you design consoles or program console titles? If not, what exactly about the potential success of the ATV, for gaming or any other living room purpose, is supposed to threaten you?

That said, I do seem to remember a few years back when some executives at Motorola, Nokia and RIM mentioned that they didn't feel at all threatened by the idea of Apple making a phone, because it was unheard of for a company to walk into a new market and make a big impact right away, and it was obvious that big, established companies with a long history of designing telecommunications devices were going to have a big advantage in that segment for a long time to come.

Maybe people should in general have a slightly lower threshold for feeling threatened. Perhaps not as low as Newell's, but then again, this is a game he has a clear stake in.

What I find most interesting is that the threat is described mostly as an ideological one; that if Apple somehow succeeds in competing against the console makers, this is somehow bad in itself as well as bad for Steam and Valve. Does Newell just think the console makers are weaker competition, and he'd rather have them to deal with than Apple?

I'm also still at a loss to describe what this Apple and Steam-fueled overthrow of console gaming is supposed to look like. Keyboards and mice are not taking over from controllers in the living room anytime soon, for reasons that should be obvious. Maybe something new will, but if so, we haven't really seen it yet. PC games on Steam can be, and are, played with controllers, but there's a good deal of overlap between the AAA titles available for each platform, and I'd be willing to bet a good portion of the long tail that's available on Steam but not on a major console contains the higher proportion of games that aren't made for controllers and are intended for keyboard and mouse.

If backporting decent controller schemes onto Windows games was that trivial, something tells me MS would have made more sincere efforts to bring more Windows games to the Xbox; or perhaps they were just insistent on trying to make their console the primary development target-- which for a fair number of developers they did, whether 1st party or not.

I have Steam on my Mac, an Xbox 360, and a few iOS devices around. I'm not sure where the Steam box is really supposed to add value to the ecosystem. I can't think of a controller-optimized title I could play on a Steam box that I couldn't already get on a console, or a non-controller-optimized title I could play on Steam but would prefer to on a Steam box rather than a Mac or PC. Where there are overlaps, I don't see where the Steam box has an advantage over the other platforms. Where there is no overlap-- people who right now only have access to one platform-- I don't see why Steam would be the primary pick.

I suppose it's not impossible that the Steam box (Steamboxen?) might grow the Steam market, but right now it looks to me like it's a living room machine designed for people who are already on Steam and think consoles are for idiots. Those people are already on Steam, though. If Steam boxes are subsidized, Valve just ends up costing themselves money to retain their own clients, and if it isn't, I'm not sure how it competes with consoles on price and specifications. Why are people who own PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s now supposed to buy a Steam box for their next living room gaming hardware instead of the next iterations of either of those platforms? If Valve is trying to grow the market, why would people who have so far avoided consoles buy a Steam box at all?

I can easily get why Valve wants to do these things; it just isn't clear to me how, right now.

The analogy between PCs and Windows gaming with respect to Apple and iOS gaming misses the single most important aspect of the latter relationship: Apple is the platform holder for iOS. HP is not the platform holder for Windows; they are a manufacturer of commoditized devices that run that platform.

While it is true that the generic nature of the iTunes store means that developers can be successful on the iOS platform without Apple necessarily "getting" gaming, I think it is not difficult to draw a clear distinction between that and HP's situation, where anything HP does or does not "get" about gaming is entirely irrelevant to how well games do on Windows, whether on HP hardware or not.

If by implication the author means to suggest that by staying the same, the ThinkPad will not die, it may be worth examining how the business of selling ruggedized iDen handsets to Nextel subscribers is going. Because, after all, people loved those things and never wanted them to change.

I'm uncertain as to how you can posit a break-even point without any mention of costs.

What costs are associated with selling this content that aren't already incurred by running the service as it is now?

They're seeking to monetize something they're already doing, and I'm willing to bet the odd settlement for legal issues would be more than compensated for by the sheer volume of sales, as you mention in your example.

Visual email?

As opposed to what? Voicemail? Braille-mail?

Google Trends accurately measures what it purports to: people using Google to search for something.

TED doesn't detect earthquakes. It detects people twittering about earthquakes, and assumes either that correlation equals causation, or that false tweets won't rise above the level of background noise.

The real question is... twenty minutes for other reports? We can't put a seismograph online in real time, or are we afraid to do so?

How about a free, open source, crowdsourced Kickstarted network of online jury-rigged seismographs, then?

You don't even need that. This isn't an app, it's a KML layer for Google Earth, which is already in the store. Put the info into a KML file, put it online, and then enter the URL of the KML file in the Google Earth search field.

Of course, this only gets the information out there in a useable form. It doesn't let you draw attention to yourself by claiming you've been censored by Apple. Which was really the entire point of this.

Actually, he's not. You focused on the word "innocent" and ignored the word "declared". If he is not charged, he cannot be declared innocent. He is presumed innocent. They are not the same. The former is a positive statement to establish the proposition that the individual did not commit the alleged crime, and that there was never any evidence to the contrary. The latter is a presumption that applies to all people, whether charged or not, that they are innocent of any allegation until evidence is brought forth. The two statements are categorically different.

This story doesn't need a correction, it needs a retraction. The only item of significance was the misattributed quote.

That eventuality is presumed within the question of "whether the US military would be able to perform operations in North Korea". The question being asked is whether or not, should the need arise, the US military would be able to function in or near North Korea given the situation described above. The "need arising" means war. So, yes, presumably in peactime North Korea is able to disrupt the navigation systems of US recon planes in the area, and removing that capability would be an act of war.

Should hostilities start, presumably those capabilities would be disabled (or at least such disabling would be attempted) and whether or not that would be an act of war would be a moot question-- else why is there a need for the US to "conduct operations" in North Korea?