Why do people use market capital as a means of comparing companies? In many ways, this is like comparing apples and oranges, and lends very little insight into the real competitive advantage one company may have over another.

Citation? Otherwise, I think you are "making this up".

You are right, it is not so simple. And your IBM analogy does not hold here. First the USB specification and vendor ID assignments are handled by a third party, not Apple. Second, there is a well-documented API for adding non-Apple device support to iTunes. You just have to get off your lazy butt and use it. IBM used their monopolistic position to force their customers to buy only IBM products. Palm tried to use Apple's dominance in the MP3 market to leverage the functionality of iTunes with little or no work. Palm could have used iTunes to sync, but they decided to use a way that ended up breaking their USB vendor contract.

Citation please. I've written apps in Python to use the iTunes XML file, and they have not broken after all of my iTunes upgrades. At least since iTunes 5. What Apple usually does is add to the format, stuff like smart lists or video. What one has to do is be defensive in coding so that you don't pick up stuff you don't want. My applications only work with audio files, so I filter out anything that is not an audio file. The XML parsing remains the same.

I believe Jobs gets paid $1 in salary at Apple. I know that this is not his complete compensation, but he is not making tons of money. He already did that ages ago.

Apple's nuts on this. I went to Apple's Bug Reporter to complain about this. You may have to be a registered developer to do this. If so and you are one, please burn some Apple karma and let them know that their approval process is nuts.

I'm really tired of the overuse, especially in the news media, of the words "could" and "might". What's often lacking when they are used is any sense of how probable the outcome might (!) be. Perhaps I'm just overly sensitive to it now, but the NY Times seems to be particularly prone to this type of reporting, stating a supposition but failing to adequately describe the probability that the supposition is closer to true than false.

That was my first thought as well. Simply nuts.

Not according to the WSJ.

At American Express in Phoenix, I worked with someone that had Nevada UNIXOS. Jim, you still around?

How do you keep them from eating your mice?!

Go ahead. Publish your findings. I eagerly await your paper. But I do think black holes and neutron stars have been detected. I guess you are a troll. Enjoy your food.

Not to be an AT&T apologist, but there is a BIG difference between outright lying and simply being uninformed or just a call-center flunky reciting a script.

Wake me up when the cars can fly like those from The Fifth Element

That's when I want one...