say it's better than anything else. And better than they expected.

Personally, I don't really need one - it doesn't have enough sports-functions and all the rest (notifications, messages) isn't important to me as I don't sync my work-email, work-calendar with my iPhone.
And my iPhone is too old to be paired with one. But it's an intersting device, nevertheless.

I don't understand the hate towards people who buy one.
"I don't have any music, so I don't need an iPod (or the music-playing capabilites of the iPhone) - so I can't see how anybody else would need such functionality."

I had to chuckle about your last sentence.

That kind of optimism is rare.

Also, unfortunately, totally unfounded.
I live in Switzerland (but I'm not Swiss, so I can't vote (well, it turned out I can vote on things that my church puts up for vote) and the way things (esp. the tax-system) are set up here is very interesting. I'm not sure if a larger (population and land-area wise) state like the US or Germany (or even Russia) could be governed like Switzerland. But as nobody has tried, nobody can be sure it wouldn't work ;-)

He knew (or feared) he would lose his license - and came to the conclusion he'd rather die doing what he liked most - because from what I've read, he really liked flying.

So far, I've not read an official statement that said he wouldn't have been grounded.

As such, in his own very twisted logic, he was right.

I was wondering, though, if pilots don't get to use the loo on the ground?
I usually try everything I can not to use to loo on the plane - especially if the flight is only two hours like this Germanwings flight.

I'm not sure if it's a good reaction to go crazy with new regulations for the pilots. They've already got to go through the same security checks as passengers (which is insane, as this sad case proves) and now they're supposed to distrust each other?
Next thing you know is that each keypress has to be acknowledged by the 2nd guy or it will be automatically voided.

At some point you've got to trust these guys up there in the pilot seat to do the right thing.
And, as voiced in previous posts already, instead of trying to find more reasons to ground pilots, we should find ways these people who are dedicated to their job can continue to do what they love to do, after they've dealt with their problems.

Probably.
But he could also have died during that "routine" operation. Or left in a coma, because the doctor or someone on his team screwed up.
Nobody can say that for sure.
What we can be quite sure of is that Steve Jobs, when he realized that a fruit-juice diet wasn't really helpful and pursued the "conventional medicine"-path, woke-up from the operation soon knowing that he was basically living on borrowed time.
In the remaining time, he created (and drove his employees very hard) a lot of new or updated products that laid the foundation for Apple being more than a very big company. Apple is now really an empire.
Whatever you think of him - he made more of his life than most of us can dare to achieve in three or four lives.

As for TVs - I'm glad Apple skipped that. Just look at the mind-bogglingly brutal deprecation these things have come under recently.
TVs selling for thousands a couple of years ago can now be had for hundreds.

In my opinion, yes.
And I don't freak out about the "radiation" of normal phones and WLAN like some people do.
I've also heard that it's inefficient. OR rather, even less efficient than charging via cable.

I don't know why people are so angry about the lack of ports.
If you need lots of ports, something between the 11" MBA and the 15" MBP will surely fit the requirements.

Dell's XPS seems to be an OK-alternative, but you've got to run either Windows or Linux.
If this is supposed to be your bring-your-own-device laptop that you actually do work on and need to connect to a LAN directly, then it might not be the best thing.
But that's not the fault of the laptop or Apple.

How many people in Starbucks do you see who use a mouse with their laptops?

I'm not a US citizen (German, but living in Switzerland), but follow the debate somewhat from the sideline - half amused, half horrified.
I suggest you take a look at the archive of the Isaac Brooks Society for FATCA:
http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/ta...
And judge for yourself if this is what you want to "gift" to your children?
I have to live here for a another couple of years before I can seek citizenship - but given the dire situation most countries' financials are in, I doubt they would enact the same laws as the US regarding out-of-country taxation - if they could enforce it.
If you love your kids, don't give them a US passport. It will severly limit what they can do later in their life
As for visa-free travel, see this page:
http://www.ibtimes.com/best-pa...

I know about Quest.
But as you say, that was fourteen years ago.
And it was (IMO) partly his fault.
Apple's accounting has been under the microscope for a couple of years, going as far as citing the CEO in front of a Senate hearing. Given the state of Uncle Sam's finances, I guess they would have found something by now.

I guess even if there was a way, the vendor would probably just get a NSL to put the backdoor in himself

I'm still waiting for the first CEO to go to jail for refusing this.
Either it's easy to say "No", or nobody bothers, because "war against terror etc.".

AFAIK 11% of the bail-out money went to Greece, 89% went to creditor-banks.

Mostly German banks, that is.
And I say that as a German myself (though I don't live there anymore and as such don't really pay into the "system" much anymore - I'm in a financially much more responsible country now).

The "bailout" was a nice way to help shift that debt from private corporations to the public (=tax-payer) - and look good doing so.
If Greece doesn't want any more "rescue-plans" like this, they actually don't lose much money. But their creditors will stop receiving money from IMF&Co. This amounts to a de-facto "default" and will stop the influx of capital almost completely.
I do believe it's impossible for Greece to pay back the amount of debt they have. Not in a hundred years.
It takes two to tango - when Greece joined the European Monetary Union, apparently "everybody" knew their numbers where cooked from the beginning.
Politicians can't pay back the money but at least an effort should be made to make them accountable in front of history!

I've had quite a lot of issues with Mavericks, though.
Yosemite solved them almost completely.
Almost, because sometimes my 2012 MacMini will randomly disconnect from the WiFi access point (an almost 10 year old Linksys 54MBit AP-only).
Then, I have to disabled WiFi completely, wait a few moments, re-enable it and reconnect to my AP again.
It's very random, which leads me to the conclusion that it could also be an issue with the AP and/or all the wireless networks around me, probably using much later and much "better" technology and basically killing my WiFi.
I don't really blame Apple. There are so many devices out there, so many buggy firmware- and driver-versions, so many buggy OSs and the spectrum is so overloaded these days as everybody and his dog has at least one WiFi AP (sometimes several, via a mesh-setup or a simple repeater (adding to the problem inadvertently...). I sometimes wonder why works at all.

I don't personally have kids, but I've heard that kids are required to walk to school (distance permitting), so that they get used to the traffic.

Someone needs to make a wiki-page about all those times Sony has been hacked.
They're already too many to keep track of in your head

Next question?