On this site a substantial number of readers use a phone whose OS is produced by a company that gets 95% of its revenue and profit from recording everything about you that it can, finding your weaknesses, and selling access to them to the highest bidder with zero oversight. Compared to that, what is the outrage over a Government agency sifting through metadata looking for people who want to hurt us and trying to stop them?

It can't possibly be Google's fault; this is Slashdot. It must be Oracle's fault that Google copied badly from Java.

"A competent midwife" is a loaded statement. In the UK most midwives have at least a 3-year degree or an additional set of courses on top of a nursing degree. In the US, many midwives are "self-taught" or taught by apprenticeship by others and there is little oversight. And, of course, the US does not have universal health care so many more pregnancies are higher risk with reduced prenatal care of the mother or child. I'm not sure where the study the parent poster was quoting was done, but it should certainly control for health care systems as well.

They simply show a diagram of an iPad and claim a design patent on anything that could be confused with it. "Rounded corners" does not appear in the claim list at all. One could create a new device whose corners were a different radius and it wouldn't infringe. (Plus, this patent has never been tested in court-- the Samsung trial used much more complete patented renderings, and claimed software similarities while this is a hardware design patent.)

My answer is: Apple doesn't have a design patent on rounded corners and never claimed to have one. (And Gore never claimed he was the inventor of the Internet, either.)

Not just that, but hotel chains do this because it's how businesses and the Government (apparently) like to pay them. They negotiate a fixed price for a room then reimburse employees for fees like parking, Internet, etc. If you go $1 over your allotted room rate you're in trouble, but $20 parking and $5/night internet? No problem.

Samsung's case hinged on a standards-essential patent they had agreed to license on fair and nondiscriminatory terms and was decided by the ITC. Apple's patent was not part of a standard and was decided by a US court of law. The cases aren't even remotely similar, no there's nothing "blatant" here.

Every point in your post is the complete opposite of the truth. It's the Republicans who repeatedly threaten to take away the Government when they don't get concession on top of concession. And most of the safety net programs are designed to keep you from becoming destitute and therefore remain employable instead of becoming a social burden. And the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is not Government health care; It's the opposite of that. You are required to take responsibility for yourself and get yourself insured so we don't have to pay for you when things go wrong, but beyond that it's up to you to make a deal with your own private insurer. They even provide an online free market system in which to do it. It's a Conservative wet dream, but they can't let Obama get credit for it. That's why they have no plan themselves, just repeal and go back to the old system.

So now they're demanding we bring back pre-existing conditions, re-enstate lifetime insurance caps, make it harder for low-income and working class women to control their fertility, make us pay for some uninsured YOLO's emergency room visit, keep graduate students or people starting their career from staying on previous insurance while they're getting on their feet, eliminate preventive care for diabetics and other high-risk individuals forcing them to go to the emergency room when things get bad, eliminate vaccination programs, allow insurers to raise rates to increase their profits arbitrarily, prevent individuals starting businesses to self-insure in an open competitive marketplaces or else they'll shut down the Government, refuse to negotiate a budget, and default on the debt. Yeah. That makes sense.

Why are you defining "Linux" as just the kernel? The original meaning was the entire OS, with the phrase "Linux kernel" referring to just the kernel. If you want to err on the side of brevity, "Linux" is accurate, "GNU/Linux" is what RMS wants everyone to call it, and "GNU/MIT/BSD/Apache/Canonical/RHEL/SUSE/Linux" would be more accurate. I'd advise ignoring the last two options and calling the OS by it's original name-- Linux.

The article is BS, because it assumes there are no legit technical reasons to go to ARM's 64-bit standard. To name a few:
1. Twice as many general purpose registers
2. Twice as wide general purpose registers (so 4x the number of bytes in the register file)
3. Twice as many SIMD registers
4. Double-precision SIMD
5. On-chip encryption
6. Sparse address space for security
7. Memory mapping huge files (49-bit virtual address space)
8. A64 cleaned up the old instruction set quite a bit

And yes, tablets will probably have 8GB of RAM in the next couple of years. The XBox One and PS4 will both have 8GB, and Apple is rumored to be gunning for the living room soon as well, so putting this in the 5s gives them economies of scale before they even release a product.

Besides, the iPhone Simulator has always run on the Mac in x86, so most iPhone software has already shown a high degree of Mac interoperability. In short, having the bittedness in common with the Mac is probably way, way down the list for why they went 64-bit so early.

And while we're at it, why don't we start electricity services which allows everyone to pull down their maximum Wattage 24x7? I think it's completely reasonable to have a very fast connection for when I need it, but cap it so it's not abused. Netflix is essentially a subsidized service these days, and everyone expects to get it for some small fee each month, but the infrastructure can't support that yet.