They kept the IP and some human capital. They just sold the brand to Lenovo.

The importance of the patents it stave away patent trolls and Apple law suits. Thereby saving billions in damage fees (a la Apple v Samsung).

We're going to need more vomit bags. People who were prune to motion sickness will be worse off without the windows since they are cut off from the last piece of sensory information that tells them that they are moving.

Totally agree. It's the same in reverse too. If you started with Chinese as your native tongue, then romance languages are very difficult too. This is due to the way sentences are constructed. I was doing some translation the other day and found that I often had to reverse the order of different phrases in the sentence to get the sentence to flow. There is one upside of starting with Chinese first and that is understanding the different tones within Chinese. Most of the westerners that I know who is learning or trying to learn Chinese struggle with tones. The words for mother, numb, horse, and to insult have very similar sounds as they are simply the 4 different tones for the same pinyin combination. Most of the time, if a native mandarin speaker says those for words (in mandarin) in quick succession, most westerners wouldn't be able to tell which is which. I know someone will now point out that a lot of Chinese can't distinguish between r and l, so learning Chinese first is not any better. But I want to point out that's because they were taught incorrectly and they think it's the correct pronunciation. Both the r and l sounds exist in mandarin so there is really no reason to get them wrong except if they weren't taught correctly.

Of course, if you learn both languages young enough then both languages are "easy". It's all perspective and when you are trying to learn each of the languages. Therefore, the statement aimed at the western audience is correct, it is notoriously difficult. But if the same statement were aimed at the Chinese, they will laugh mercilessly at you because it's pretty darn easy.

You probably have telephone lines running through the house. One way to easily wire cat5e or cat6 cables is to run them the same way as the telephone wires. You open up the wall outlet for the telephone wire. Take it apart and tie the wire to a piece of string that is sufficiently long. Pull on the telephone wire in the basement until you see the string. Tie the cat cable to the string as well. Go back up stairs and pull on the string until both the telephone and the cat cable are up stairs. You can get a jack with both telephone and cat outlet from a electonrics hardware store and you can have ethernet cables running to all the telephone ports as well. Just repeat for the other jacks and you'll be wired in no time. Just remember to pick either 568a or 568b beforehand and stick to it. I recommend 568a because it's easy to wire into the punch block of the patch panel. As long as you stick to 568a the entire way through, everything should work out of the box.

Fair point regarding the Google+ search results. I guess I never really thought about that. I guess it's good that they reversed the result huh?

Not sure if I follow the real name policy argument. Personally, I understand that people want privacy and there was a huge outcry when Blizzard also required real names as part of their RealID row out. But at the same time I think the issue that both Blizzard and Google wanted to address was cyber-bullying by hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. I think everyone else just got caught in the crossfire because of a few bad actors. In all seriousness, neither Google nor Blizzard really benefits by having your real name. It's not like the earn money by knowing your name, they earn money by knowing your interests. Your name just doesn't give them that. And for them to require real names, there must be something else there. But then again that's just my 2 cents, take what you will.

Even if you had a Google+ account, if you didn't use it, what did it matter?

That makes no sense. China just banned its government from using Apple products, not Apple products in general. It hasn't sealed itself from outside ideas and innovations at all. Chinese citizens can still buy iPads and iPhones so Chinese smartphone manufactures still has to compete.

Another reason why this may have happened that most people probably wouldn't think about is that this might be a move to fight corruption. iPads and iPhones have been vastly popular as "gifts" within the government. Banning the government from purchasing them as gifts would help to fight some of the corruption problem they're having.

1. PPACA sets up a tax liability for all and a tax credit for those who gets health insurance.
2. Congress has the power to levy taxes (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 and amongst other places in Article I, Section 8 as well as the 16th Amendment)
3. Constitution does not forbid congress to pass legislation that enables citizens to receive tax credits. And the congress did that by the creation of an agency to help people get health insurance. "Federal and State Exchanges"
4. Therefore, PPACA is well within the power of congress according to the constitution.

The Supreme Court found this to be the case so if you think it's unconstitutional, you'll have to take it up with the Supreme Court. Although, they are highly unlikely to want to hear the case again.

You may think Obamacare is bad, in reality, insurance premiums are high because hospitals have to make up for its huge amounts of bad debt from treating people without insurance and can't play for their treatment. And since hospitals can't refuse emergency room patients, they take a huge loss. Not to mention, it clogs up the Emergency Room so that someone who absolutely needs Emergency Care may not receive it in time. To make up for that, the hospitals charge insurers a huge amount and provides really bad service. The wait time at certain hospital ERs are 4 to 6 hours. To fix the problem. you need to keep people out of the ER, make hospitals charge less.

The PPACA attempts to do that by: 1. Encouraging people to get insurance. It's ok if you don't, you'll just have to pay some more taxes.
2. If you have insurance, you go get seen by a doctor before you have to go to the ER. This reduces the stress on ER and ensures that the hospital's bad debt is reduced.
3. Hospitals are put on a new plan to get paid. Instead of a set fee for providing a service, they are now paid to manage the health of an individual. Before the incentive was to do as many tests and treatments with the patient as possible since the government paid up for each one. Now the hospital is paid a set fee to provide care towards 1 patient per month at a certain standard of care. If they do too many tests, that will eat into their margins. If they do too few tests and the patient gets really sick, then they fail the quality of care test and they get penalized on the payment. Either way, the hospitals will be incentivized to provide good quality of care without going overboard. And this will reduce the cost of care overall, which will in turn reduce healthcare insurance premiums.

Full disclosure: I work for a major pharmaceutical company on the impact of PPACA on their ability to access physicians and sell their products.

Go to Business School. It's a huge investment, but it really lets you go anywhere that you want. Also it will allow you to build a pretty good network that you can leverage in getting that next awesome job.

So they decided that it was dangerous and made it illegal to point lasers at air planes yet they think it's some how safe to point it at cars? Seems like someone forgot to sanity check their idea.

And this is why we can't have nice network infrastructures.