Except that Apple has historically never been one to sacrifice profit/(perceptions of) quality for marketshare.

You mean except for the Classic, LC (Low Cost), and Centris model lines, right?

Somalia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_States

According to Wikipedia:

Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia are the only states that levy sales tax on groceries. So, yeah, Americans don't generally pay sales tax on food used to prepare meals seems about right.

Ah, Air France. Flight 447? An Etihad Airways pilot with 520 hours of experience flying planes was able to handle a very similar situation with no loss of life. But hey, the west is best

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/5722038/

Uh. No.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2012/10/03/american-airlines-seats/1610189/

The work in question was either done in-house by American Airlines employees or in a contractor's facility in North Carolina. Unless North Carolina is now part of China, your fear mongering is just that.

How about a third group: enjoys crass humor, knows the time and the place for it is not a talk at a tech conference.

She wasn't eavesdropping.

Avdi Grimm said it best:

One other comment to address a bizarre accusation of hypocrisy that's come up a few times. If you cannot tell the difference between:

- someone tweeting a dick joke on their personal Twitter account, and;

- someone making a dick joke...
- ...while attending a tech industry conference
- ...that has a Code of Conduct
- ...as a representative of a sponsor
- ...while sitting in the middle of a crowded auditorium
- ...during a talk that others are trying to listen to
- ...but still loudly enough to be overheard ...if you seriously cannot identify any difference between those two scenarios, I really don't know if I have enough clue to help you. I can check the back room but in those quantities we'll probably have to back-order it.

I can understand the "overreaction" argument. But the "she's a hypocrite because she tweets dick jokes" argument just doesn't even get off the ground. Nor does "she was eavesdropping on a private conversation".

If that doesn't help, how about Richards' own blog post:

What I will share with you here is the backstory that led to this –

The guy behind me to the far left was saying he didn’t find much value from the logging session that day. I agreed with him so I turned around and said so. He then went onto say that an earlier session he’d been to where the speaker was talking about images and visualization with Python was really good, even if it seemed to him the speaker wasn’t really an expert on images. He said he would be interested in forking the repo and continuing development.

That would have been fine until the guy next to him

began making sexual forking jokes

I'll make this real simple: the PlayHaven guys weren't making private jokes, they were responding inappropriately to public comments.

Um, yes. Reread my comments. The only reason it was seen by "thousands and thousands of people" was because someone went looking through her tweets and shared the direct link to it. Unless you were to go explicitly looking for it, it's not readily visible. It's less like leaving a note on a bulletin board and more like leaving a note on the ceiling in front of someone's door. It's there if you look at it, but even if you walk by (follow a twitter user) you wouldn't see it without explicit effort.

Contrast that to the inappropriate jokes being made in response to a public conversation she was having with a third party.

I'm not quite sure where you get this right to be not offended thing. It's a private event, so we're not dealing with restriction from the government. In fact, PyCon has a code of conduct (that's since been revised/clarified). That's the entire reason that PyCon staff escorted the two men out of the conference.

From the updated PyCon code of conduct:

All communication should be appropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks.

Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are not appropriate for PyCon.

Attendees violating these rules may be asked to leave the conference without a refund at the sole discretion of the conference organizers.

I'm not sure where you're getting the impression that this was a private conversation. It was a setting where they were expected to be quiet, and they weren't. They shouldn't have been talking in the first place, and instead they were talking loud enough for others to hear and exchanging inappropriate jokes. Per Richards' blog post, the speaker was talking about inspiring the next generation of coders. If the two guys were so disinterested that they needed to have an off-topic conversation, or in need of so much privacy... they should have gone elsewhere. Yeah Richards was talking as well (responding to someone else's remarks). Were I there that would have done two things: 1.) annoyed the hell out of me 2.) served as an indication that whatever I say will be heard by other people. In fact, from the blog post, the jokes were a response to a public conversation between Richards and someone else. These two guys (should have) had zero expectation of privacy.

Um, yes. You're not going to see her tweet containing the dick joke automatically unless you go looking for it. OTOH, the two guys were being loud enough that someone (and likely more than just one person) heard their back and forth.

AFAIK this is the penis joke she made:

http://i.imgur.com/1ND42rS.png

Whether or not you're into penis jokes it's, IMO, worth making a distinction between a talking loudly at a conference and a twitter mention. IIRC, her twitter post was semi-private, being automatically visible to the intended recipient (and potentially mutual followers) but nobody else. Someone could see that she posted that, but they'd have to go looking. Not only that, but twitter is a medium for both professional and casual postings. OTOH, if you're talking loud enough to be overheard in a crowded conference hall that's far less private, but is typically intended to be a more formal setting than twitter. From what I can tell, she wasn't eavesdropping, but the two guys were being loud enough to be disruptive (regardless of whether the topic of their conversation was appropriate or offensive).

Look, I enjoy a good penis joke... but I you know what? I'm a guy and I get tired of the frat house / Bevis & Butthead mentality that seemingly pervades so many tech things. I went to the last MongoSF with my then-boss. At one of the talks I sat next to a woman who was an employee for a government contractor looking to glean some insight into fixing the problems they were having with their Oracle to Mongo migration. I spent some time before the talk picking her brain. At every opportunity my boss interrupted with jokes and comments that were off-topic at best. After the talk, my boss came up to me and asked if I got her number and if was going to fuck her. Is it really that hard to act in a semi-professional manner in public? Dunno, I've made a point of not going to tech conferences with my boss any longer, so. There's a time and a place for dick jokes, and a conference is neither that time nor that place.

What amuses about this situation is how much all of the free speech champions are nailing Adria to the wall for someone else's actions. Free speech is good and well unless you don't agree with it or the reactions to it, right? Right-o.

http://www.muktware.com/4529/why-google-killing-open-document-formats

So? The problems with the Vega were not immediately apparent. OTOH the promise of the Vega was immediately apparent. Same with the Alliance (which also garnered awards from the French press and French auto buying public). The Merkur range, OTOH, suffered mostly from poor marketing. These car of the year awards aren't about who's built the longest lasting, most reliable car. They're about who's built the flashiest, most innovative car.

Japan's ANA says Dreamliner batteries replaced 10 times.

Batteries will fail, usually in some sort of spectacular manner. Their specific chemistry doesn't matter. In fact this is so well known, and the possibility of a fire was so well anticipated that Boeing did indeed design a containment cage for these batteries. Take a look at the pictures from the Boston incident. The heat damage was pretty well contained (the containment vessel was damaged quite significantly, but the rest of the nearby electronics remained intact). What *wasn't* contained, and what likely got the 787 grounded in the first place was the electrolyte solution. It's my understanding that unlike other types of batteries (lead acid, NiCd, NiMH) the big problem with the electrolyte solution in Li-Ion batteries isn't that it's corrosive. The problem is that the Li-Ion electrolyte solution is flammable.

That said, it's also my understanding that the batteries in both the Japanese 787s were fairly new (one was in a new plane, one had recently been replaced).