Those 'conservatives' at the meeting were really agitating for Apple to make decisions based on their short-term ROI rather than their long-term ROI. Short-term decisions are necessary but a healthy company rarely does them. For example, many companies, including Apple, spend a lot of money on research. Research costs a lot of money, has an uncertain return on the expenditure, and a lot of time passes before that return is ever realized. From a short-term perspective, companies should never spend money on research but should instead just pass all of the money on to their shareholders. Yet, if companies operated in that way, they would go out of business fairly quickly. So...that is the beauty of the free enterprise system. It leaves companies free to operate in what they see as their overall best long-term interests and often, those are as Apple's Tim Cook presented them rather than as the 'conservative' shareholders wanted. When shareholders gain too much influence over the daily operations and decisions of the company, it usually leads to the company's demise as shareholders seek to transfer cash assets to their pockets and leave the company limping along and struggling to continue. However, that just means that the company's competitors pick up the business that the wounded company can no longer compete for. Ultimately, it's a self-correcting system, as long as there is a competitive marketplace with no one company grown so large as to monopolize all of the business.

The landline telephones in the old USSR didn't hang up when the user put the handset back in the cradle and so people routinely put a pillow over them.

Okay, I'll burn what's left of my karma and point out the reason why we can't get along...because Microsoft HAS NOT CHANGED. They are still the price-gouging, competition stifling, astro-turfing, anti open standards, monopolizing enterprise that they have always been. What HAS changed is the rise of Mac OS X, iPad, Google Chrome, etc. that have created some real alternatives to Microsoft.

From their point of view, people are nothing but cogs in their machinery of state to be used and abused as necessary to keep the machinery turning. A person has no more value to them than a horse or a cow...maybe even less. Moreover, this is not new. The North Koreans were doing the same thing to pows during the Korean War, many of who never returned. They invented 'brainwashing' which was basically continuous torture until the target was mentally broken. They are still holding the USS Pueblo that they illegally seized from the US Navy in 1968. The captain of the Pueblo provided graphic descriptions of the torture he witnessed while held in captivity. President Bush termed them part of the 'Axis of Evil.' They recently threatened us with thermonuclear devastation and have repeatedly launched missiles over international waters. The UN is still technically at war with the North Koreans. The latest UN report on atrocities is just another in a mountain of paper describing how wicked people do wicked things.

Slashdot has been plowing ahead with their 'beta' site despite the obvious elimination of functionality for reading and responding to comments and the predictable complaints from /* members. The comments and discussion are, after all, the ONLY reason for slashdot to even exist. They say they are 'listening' but they obviously are choosing not to 'hear' and so we have to think that that is intentional. Maybe we should consider that the problem with the 'classic' (gotta love how that word characterizes everything) site is NOT that it has an unattractive appearance, uses too many resources, doesn't display enough ads, or is too difficult to support going forward but that it does the discussions too well. You provide a forum for intelligent people to share thoughts and ideas and...guess what...intelligent people share thoughts and ideas...and for some people (governments, scientologists, corporate pr departments, etc.) that is a problem. There are very, very, few sites that offer the ability to comment and share interactive comments with others in a construction and information fashion...and slashdot is one. We should consider that the 'beta' site is just another way of snuffing out one of the last few flickering lights of informative discussion on the internet.

People need more substance in their social interaction than what is provided to them by using facebook. Eventually many facebook users will do what this user did and close their facebook account in favor of real conversations and face-to-face meetings.

"Hitler's armies famously used the slogan "Gott mit uns" ("God with us") on their uniforms, and had a cozy relationship with the Vatican."

Hitler brutally suppressed Catholics in Germany during the years of his 'third reich.' Moreover, the Nazis sent thousands of Catholic priests to the concentration camps in Poland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/catholic-martyrs-of-the-holocaust

"Hitler's armies famously used the slogan "Gott mit uns" ("God with us") on their uniforms, and had a cozy relationship with the Vatican."
Hitler brutally suppressed Catholics in Germany during the years of his 'third reich.' Moreover, the Nazis sent thousands of Catholic priests to the concentration camps in Poland.

What is the point of a new 'Windows' version? Is it provide major new capabilities, change the user interface, help Microsoft, or what? Shouldn't Microsoft actually spend some time thinking about what its users want? Users want a) compatibility with all of their existing hardware and software, b) familiar interface, c) reliability, d) security, e) access to new hardware and software protocols, f) minimal cost. I am guessing that a 'Windows 9' will not provide any of those things except...possibly...in a limited way...e) since that's what Windows 8 provided. If that is the case, the Windows 9 is the answer to a question that Microsoft users are not asking and its very mention fills them with dread.

War is a brutal savage activity that spreads disease, decimates populations, lays waste to cities, destroys entire cultures and civilizations, will eventually destroy the habitability of our planet, and is the ultimate expression of the human desire to possess their neighbor's belongings and force them to do one's bidding. Yes, some countries have entered into agreements with other countries about the humane treatment of non-combatants and prisoners, and the limitation and use of certain horrific weapons but...in the end, the 'laws of war' fall into the same category as 'honor among thieves' as being an idealized concept to make the non-practitioners feel good but one with no actual meaning.

This we all know: the universe spontaneously exploded into existence, without any divine assistance, some 14 billion years ago and coalesced into stars orbited by rocky planets. Water condensed out of the interstellar gases and filled the earth with oceans, whereupon carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen reacted in the primordial atmosphere to form amino acids that then self-assembled into self-replicating molecules that then caused the self-assembly of functioning cell membranes comprised of proteins and fatty acids that then began dividing and reproducing into the multitude of life forms present today. This was all made possible by a fortuitous arrangement of rocky substrates in deep ocean trenches that facilitated the combining of the proper molecules into the proper order on the rocky surfaces. After a certain length of time had passed, the early cells began randomly forming into male and female forms to allow better combination of nucleic material than that allowed by random mutation (although that has been good enough for bacteria and viruses for that the last 4 billion years). The creation guy doesn't have a chance.

Making nuns provide other people's contraception is like requiring orthodox jewish to provide bacon or forcing atheists to pay for the gideons and their bibles. It's just wrong.

Pitting the two legal 'sides' against each other in a figurative battle and commenting on the results (as TFA does) is missing the point completely. We live in a time when the technical capabilities and resources for surveillance have become so much more powerful than those of privacy than, in effect, window blinds and draperies no longer exist and we are all unintentionally parading around in front of uncovered windows without any clothing. To put it another way, governments will monitor all communications for no other reason than that they can. Even if the NSA is stopped, you can be sure than every other country in the world either has its own program underway or is in the process of rapidly doing so. You should assume that someone somewhere is logging your calls, surveying your internet traffic, gathering your voicemail data, recording your online banking profile and purchases, and so forth...because they can. This situation will not change until the technology available to defend yourself from digital intrusion catches up with the technology already available to the offense...and that might be a while yet.

Make of that what you will.

The point (apparently) of this rule is to drive people to make the 'right' choice (i.e. non-incandescent bulb) by eliminating the 'wrong' choice. Of course, as TFA says, if the no-incandescent choice were really so obvious, no rule would be needed. I was enthusiastic about cfl bulbs but the enthusiasm died really quickly with real-world experience. CFL bulbs are dim initially, slow to power up to operating temperature, expensive, release dangerous waste mercury powder if broken indoors, create toxic waste when discarded, have a much-shorter life than advertised, and grow dimmer as they age. They probably also consume more power than advertised (based on all of the other false claims) but I have not measured that. Undoubtedly, though, they produce more light per watt than an incandescent bulb but even that comparison is not completely correct. If incandescent bulbs are in a heated space, then the 'waste' heat that they produce is still used by offsetting the amount of heat that must be added from the room heating system. For home use, incandescent bulbs still have a place, as many consumers know, and THAT is why they need to be banned, because otherwise, people would still use them. So, now that we have the George Bush ban on incandescent bulbs, we can look forward to more household toxic waste (much of it probably improperly disposed of...when did you last see your local hardware store collecting spent cfl bulbs?), more toxic dust released in living spaces, more spending by consumers on light bulbs, lower lighting levels in residences (leading to less reading, more eyestrain, etc.), and lights left on more to avoid waiting while the dim cfl bulb warms up after being powered on. Sounds like a typical federal government program...wasteful, ill-advised, unwanted, unneeded, and expensive.