That was last year. Still, I think that what are hurting them the most are the high prices of energy and the strong yen. The yen is around 20% more expensive than 2 years ago. No matter how much they try to restructure they can't offer competitive prices against Korean or Taiwanese offers.

JVC stands for Japan Victor Corporation.

Well, Sharp has a very nice patent portfolio, so that could be valuable to Apple. Sharp used to manufacture very nice phones. On a side note, for what I saw in Japan Apple is seen in the same light that many Japanese corporations, so that wouldn't be really a problem. After all, Sony had a stupid moron of American origin* for too much time at its helm and that almost destroyed their company, too. But, I think that what is causing now more troubles to Japanese corporations are the high prices on energy since they still have most of their nuclear energy power stations stopped and the very strong yen. A strong currency with high energy prices is a combination that would cripple any corporation that depends on exports.

*not to be called an attack on Americans. Stupidity, sadly, is shared among people of all ages and nations.

In my experience, the cabin crew at United/Continental is nice, the counter people at Houston is even nicer, but the sales people, at least here in Mexico, deserve to be sent to the most Taliban infested places of Afghanistan or Pakistan dressed like christian preachers wrapped in the USA's flag, or sent to New York's ground 0 with T-shirts praising Osama bin Laden. What I disliked was that the plane wasn't that clean and the ticket price was 2 times more expensive than the first time I traveled with them that route despite the fact oil was 15% cheaper and USD was only 10% up; but even more disgusting was how they tried to weasel out to not provide service to a friend that cancelled his trip to Japan due the march's 11th 2011 quake and tsunami.

My wife absolutely loves this product. She feels a bit guilty that she didn't bought more for her and our artist friends.

Aside from that, legally accepted euthanasia protects the family and the deceased to make the proper insurance claims. All life insurance policies become void in case of suicide, but in case of legal euthanasia they should apply.

Carlos Slim is the richest man in the world thanks that he bought the state's telephone monopoly business for less than 10% of its real value, and he kept that monopoly for more than 15 years. The key to understand Mexico's history of economic failures in the last 30 years instead of the enormous success of the south koreans that 30 years ago had the same level of development of Mexico is that here our crony capitalists are lazy beyond belief, and the concentration of wealth simply is killing our internal market. Think of us like what will happened to the USA if they never had the Glass-Steingall and antimonopoly laws ever enacted.

On a weird defense of Apple's lawyers, I must say than here in Mexico you can get legally get away with the murder of your own daughter* if you know the right people, so is not a stretch that they expected that the judge would have behaved accordingly to the customs, not the law. My mom's house was legally stolen by an ex-judge, so I know first hand what kind of scumbags are in our judiciary. I would rater deal with the "justice" of the Sinaloa drug cartel than any cop or judge any given day. Our impunity rate nationwide in murder is 99%

Well, the Zen Rinzai was in the old times the Zen school that followed the Japanese Imperial Court, many samurai and the japanese state men, so I'm inclined to believe that they have a more permissive view of war than the other branches. One of the principles of Zen are simplicity, for Zen you can define the whole universe in terms of the shapes of a circle, a square and a triangle, you could say that they had an intuitive grasp of analytical geometry. We can agree or disagree about Jobs personal traits but clearly, in relation to consumer electronics, the simple design of Apple products certainly is loaded with Zen philosophy. I was told about Jobs by the Abbot of the Daisen-in temple in Kyoto last summer, Mr. Sooen Ozeki, and he again talks about Jobs in his last book, quoting Jobs speech at Stanford like an example of Zen thought.

Best Regards

If you had read TFA:

I think this guy has done far, far more than his fair share to bring happiness to others, much more than what 99.99 % of the rest of humankind will ever do.
  The nice thing about Buddhism is that the most philosophical branches are almost devoid of religious thought but full useful guidelines for life. Amazingly, for example, for applying Zen concepts to popular electronics is that at the Zen Rinzai school Steve Jobs is considered a Zen master.

At least this is not in the level of the fictional world of Sword Arts Online where the player is the one who dies. Still, a serious level of a bug and lack of security in the xBox 360 software.

Actually the virtual keyboards are pretty useful, and specially in the case of the iOS versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers,(mostly in Numbers) are a godsend, since the keyboards change according to context, and in case of multilingual imput, in my case, Spanish, English and Japanese I can use the proper spell checker even word by word if I liked just by changing the virtual keyboard. For all the non alphabetical writing systems the virtual keyboard is so superior to the usual imput methods that the use of a "real" keyboard is a hindrance.

It's hard to believe that they managed to screw up this way. A significant percentage of americans believe that most problems in the world can be fixed by dropping bombs and/or murdering leftists. Sadly, that is not true, but this stupid method has created a easy way in many places in the world to become a popular politician, regardless of the overall quality of these guys. While the current Prime Minister of Pakistan can only appear to his people that he is powerless at best, kissing Obama's ass at worst, they gave to Khan a much needed helping hand after his blunders in regards to Afghanistan and his almost lukewarm condemnation of the attack against Malala Yousafzai. If Khan ever becomes Prime Minister he does have a very easy way to stop drone attacks: stopping all the traffic of supplies trough Pakistan to Afghanistan, even to deny access to pakistani airspace to NATO's supply airplanes. Without fuel or spare parts these drones cannot fly.

The New Yorker article should be the one posted, not the stupid crap of "The Diplomat". I think that the problem with chinese corruption from american POV is that they are not getting their share of it. For the corruption that Walmart or Halliburton promoted in Mexico that are in significant ways the cause of our security crisis they are only getting a slap in the wrist.

I use a last gen Apple TV when I need to put video on the big screen, and to send audio from any of my macs or portable devices to my home theater. No need for a dedicated tablet when a $100 device does the task very well. For better network performance and sanity, instead of using Apple TV's built in wireless I use it hooked to a Gigabit Ethernet switch that provides connectivity to all the networked devices in the entertainment rack.