Flare is one thing, but PURPLE flare is rather obnoxious. Look at the examples linked from the story... iPhone4 gives a bit of flare (saturation) as expected, but iPhone 5 gives the startling purple flare.

5. Do nothing to fix existing phones. Quietly fix the problem and roll it out as iPhone 5.1

Yes, but they also state that intent may be gauged by actions (& statements). In practice I'd guess the US doesn't often use this rule because they want to keep taxing you (as a US citizen), but anyone looking to do this would be well advised to reseach it thoroughly before just assuming they'll be able to retain their US citizenship without qualifications.

Saying that OS X killed Linux on the desktop is a misstatement at best since Linux on the desktop never became mainstream. You can't kill what's not yet alive.

However, client-side (but not "desktop") Linux is very much alive and kicking in the shape of Android tablets (Kindle, Nook, Nexus 7), and currently owns the small form factor tablet space. Apple is the one trying to play catch-up here with the rummoured upcoming iPad mini.

It's interesting to note that the success of Android is following the path led by Apple with OS X ... first on the smart phone, then on the tablet. This was an easier path to mainstream adoption since it wasn't fighting the entrenched desktop ecosystems head-on, but rather building a brand new (smartphone) market. In this vein it might be better to view Nokia's incompetence as the real killer of pure (non-Android) Linux since they were the only ones targetting a Linux-based smartphone. If Nokia had moved faster and followed a release early, release often" path (as Android did), they could well have been successful.

Sure it (shorting against the box) can be used to defer/reduce taxes. That's one common use of it.

Say you have a stock that you'd like to sell, but you don't want to pay taxes this year. What you do is instead short it ("against the box" since you still keep your original shares), thereby locking in the current price. Since neither your long or short position is closed, you currently pay no taxes. Then, whever you want to take your profit (e.h. next tax year, or when you have offsetting losses), you cover your short position and sell your shares, thereby becoming liable for any taxes owed.

That the way to defer taxes...but you can also reduce taxes to ZERO by simply NEVER closing the positions.... You buy a stock (or get in in an IPO), then rather that sell it short againt the box, thereby getting your cash, and NEVER close either long/short position, thereby never incurring a tax liability. People actually do this - it's not just a theoretical tax hole.

A giant mech warrior that throws chairs and can rip cars in half would be epic. A stress indicator butterfly? Not so much.

OTOH it might help protect the microsofties from Ballmer if they could get him to wear one.

Not just for power users ...

In Linux it's simple enough to, say, mount your root (OS data) folder on an SSD and /home (user data) on a HDD, but Windows 7 isn't so flexible.

What most people (power users) end up doing under Windows 7 is to install the OS on an SSD, then use a "junction point" (cf Linux hard link) to redirect the /Users folder to a HDD (and reconfigure the Windows TEMP directory to be on the HDD to avoid killing the SSD with excessive temp file create/delete cycles). The trouble with this is that Windows 7 junction points don't play nice with restore points, as you'll find out when having to revert to a restore point and all your user data disappears requiring major hackery to restore.

So, for Windows 7, a HDD with built in flash cache is a MUCH more convenient solution than using a separate SDD - even for a power user.

It depends on what level of (artifical) intelligence you're talking about. If it's amoeba level intelligence, then maybe ML can achieve similar results, but if it's rat or human level intelligence then obviously not.

I think most people take AI to mean something that could minimally pass a Turing test, not a silicon slug.

Support Vector Machines are just a way of performing unsupervised data partitioning/clustering. i.e. you feed a bunch of data vectors into the algorithm and it determines how to split the data into a number of clusters where the members of each cluster are similar to each other and less similar to members of other clusters.

e.g. you feed it (number of wheels, weight) pairs of a lot of vehicles and it might automatically split the data into 3 clusters - light 2-wheeled vehicles, heavy 4-wheeled ones, and very heavy 4-wheeled ones. If you then labelled these clusters as "bikes", "cars" and "trucks" you could in the future use the clustering rules to determine the category a new data point falls into.

This isn't Artificial Intelligence - it's just a data mining/classification technique.

As I understand it, a Higgs Boson compatible with the standard model could have been found at a range of different masses, and the search for it has involved searching the possible mass range until it was either discovered or not.

Assuming that this new discovery is indeed the Higgs Boson as predicted and compatible with the standard model, what is the significance of the particular mass that it has been found to have? Are there any macro-scale predictions that depend on its mass?

.. when I bought my first home computer in 1978 (a 1MHz Z80-based NASCOM 1) it came as a bare motherboard and a bag of chips (ICs, not potato) and you had to build it yourself.

Then we memorized the Z80 assembler op codes and wrote programs directly in hex, poking those codes into the chips we'd just soldered in.

And we liked it like that.

I'm not sure they actually wanted to make a vapourware annoucement, but they were forced to by the Nokia turn of events and headlines (Nokia - Microsoft's main Windows phone parter in the process of imploding and just announcing 20% layoffs and reduced sales forcasts).

This event had "last minute" and desperation written all over it. Why would they time it on the day after the Greek elections when the stock market could have been plummeting. Why pre-announce without specifications, prices or a ship date? Why no real demo or applications? Why was presenter Steven Sinofsky (Windows head honcho) so nervous his hands were shaking?

I think they just decided to throw this out at the last minute as a desperate attempt to say "forget Nokia, our mobile strategy isn't dead yet".

It's a lot of money, but it's less than 10% of what Google is currently bringing in. I happen to think that Google will find a way to prosper as the internet changes (not sure how, but I have faith in their flexibility), but a 90% revenue cut certainly would be bad news!

Most geeks are gonna have backup drives for digital media whose size far outstrips any solid state media they have. Myself I've got a 64GB SSD boot drive (no tablets/smart phones) and 2TB+ of hard drives.

We're starting to get relatively close in price - now just a factor of 20 (SSD $1/GB, HD $0.05/GB), but I'd not be surprised if hard drives remain cheaper for at least another 10 years.

Selling stock you don't have doesn't require options - it's called "naked short selling", and specifically is allowed by the SEC as a form of IPO stabilization.

I don't have any great source for how this went down, although you can google for the greenshoe (aka over allocation) option in the facebook IPO contract as well as the SEC sanction of naked short selling.

There is one site here claiming the same events, but it's really more a matter of assuming that the underwriters were smart enough to take advantage of the greenshoe provision rather than risking their own cash to support the stock. Seems like a fair bet to me.

http://dealbreaker.com/2012/05/facebook-ipo-goes-nowhere-in-exciting-fashion/