Right, well to support the guy you are replying to, Apple _didn't_ get into the ebook market. Well, not the dedicated ebook-reader market, at least.

If that were so, then why did Apple provide a hardware capable of playing decently-performing games, if Apple never intended the first iPhone to play games in the first place? Sounds like a waste of over-specced hardware, which is not something that Apple is known to do.

Oh, I know, which kinda backs up my point - AT&T made it pretty obvious that a duopoly was at play. Why would the government make it even easier for that to take hold?

Y'know for the past year or so I've been wondering how AT&T was ballsy enough to drop unlimited data and tiered text messaging for users, not to mention their tethering plan scam, when they should have been keeping up appearances to the DOJ that they actually care about their customers. Looks like that was a bad idea!

Ok then I guess I stand corrected. You're on the fringe that may not have benefited. Though tell me, by which operating system and desktop environment are you posting, now?

If you use a smartphone or tablet with anything better than PalmOS5, then yes, Apple HAS made your life better....indirectly, at least. Competition with Apple's progress spurred other manufacturers to up the ante in the products you probably enjoy today.

Not as a value-added feature, but they were added to the newer models as of the iPod 3G, yes.

Um, NO. It was a standard firewire connector on both ends. http://media.techeblog.com/elephant//ul/23125-450x-r_5.jpg I know, because I owned one. And, at first the filesystem was NOT obfuscated, to boot. the filenames were merely truncated, not turned into random four-letter filenames like it did later on.

What I'm trying to understand is the yearly thing. I only see myself needing to do this once only, to upgrade the songs that I got over the years over "other channels". Since I no longer buy CDs, I see no need to pay for anything beyond the first $25. What happens if I cancel? Will the songs I uploaded still be accessible?

Hmmm...though they originally made it sound like it was built-in for free, I could live with $50 - even though I may not even have a use for it, I can see it being something worth playing around with, at least.

Uh, apparently you did not actually read the link that you are linking to: "How to get the Mac App Store The Mac App Store is available as a free software update for Mac computers running Mac OS X v10.6 or later. If you have an earlier version of Mac OS X, you will need to upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard."

Looks like I'm pirating Snow Leopard just so I can buy Lion, then.

I'd assume that you can opt out of the iCloud stuff. At least I hope so, since I definitely do not software updates being automatically pushed to my jailbroken devices.

But I will definitely go for Lion at $29. The thing is, how will it be made available to Leopard users? Jobs said it was Mac App Store-only.

(posting non-anon this time)

Don't laugh - I hadn't touched it in years at this point, and never "pimped" out my page to begin with...it was just an easy way to communicate with my family cross-country with pictures, etc.

But on a whim I went to stalker paradise site mylife.com and looked my name up - lo and behold, I found a picture of myself. A pic that I had only ever uploaded to myspace. So, even though I had set my profile completely to private, myspace apparently sold my picture to mylife.com. Fuckers.

Maybe Facebook isn't much better, but I have yet to see Facebook pics of me from Google/mylife searches, etc.