The real comparison comes in how good the machine is at doing what you need it to do. If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.

Measles is tracked in part because it's really easily preventable with a safe vaccine which had eliminated it on the North American content a decade ago, and because it's one of the single most virulent diseases known to man. In a susceptible population, breathing the same air of someone who has it will make you 90% likely to get it. Many of the "pandemic" worst case scenarios is the measles virus combining with a more deadly virus to create a super virus, but even without that measles complications are common and can lead to permanently reduced vision, encephalitis leading to brain injuries, or other long-term problems. In the developed world the death rate is something like 0.3%, but in the undeveloped world it's sometimes over 25%. Nasty, easily preventable stuff worth tracking.

This makes no sense to me. First of all, G+ is a non-starter because Google is even worse than Facebook about collecting all the data they can on everyone who touches their services and trying to sell to them. If it ever were to catch on (however unlikely that may be), you'd see the exact same thing there or worse. The rest, well, if you can't monetize it somehow, who's going to pay the developers to develop it? A bunch of enthusiasts only gets you so far, and won't be able to keep up with an organization that has a revenue stream that's able to sustain a large development team. Apple's theory has been to tie their services to hardware and make money there, thus negating the need to track and spam, but it doesn't seem to produce great online services that way (and most geeks here seem to prefer Google monitoring their every move to Apple's model anyway). So basically, it's not going to become world-class if it can't be monetized, and while the only two models today (track and spam like FB and Google or tie to hardware like Apple and Samsung) each have significant issues, you don't seem to be proposing any alternate model that could be self-sustaining either.

The Matrix came out in 1999. Remember those switchblade phones they used? That was a Nokia 8110... state of the art in 2000. The PalmOS phones wouldn't come out for a few years after that, which are arguably one of the first mass-produced "smart" phones.

On this site a substantial number of readers use a phone whose OS is produced by a company that gets 95% of its revenue and profit from recording everything about you that it can, finding your weaknesses, and selling access to them to the highest bidder with zero oversight. Compared to that, what is the outrage over a Government agency sifting through metadata looking for people who want to hurt us and trying to stop them?

It can't possibly be Google's fault; this is Slashdot. It must be Oracle's fault that Google copied badly from Java.

"A competent midwife" is a loaded statement. In the UK most midwives have at least a 3-year degree or an additional set of courses on top of a nursing degree. In the US, many midwives are "self-taught" or taught by apprenticeship by others and there is little oversight. And, of course, the US does not have universal health care so many more pregnancies are higher risk with reduced prenatal care of the mother or child. I'm not sure where the study the parent poster was quoting was done, but it should certainly control for health care systems as well.

They simply show a diagram of an iPad and claim a design patent on anything that could be confused with it. "Rounded corners" does not appear in the claim list at all. One could create a new device whose corners were a different radius and it wouldn't infringe. (Plus, this patent has never been tested in court-- the Samsung trial used much more complete patented renderings, and claimed software similarities while this is a hardware design patent.)

My answer is: Apple doesn't have a design patent on rounded corners and never claimed to have one. (And Gore never claimed he was the inventor of the Internet, either.)

Not just that, but hotel chains do this because it's how businesses and the Government (apparently) like to pay them. They negotiate a fixed price for a room then reimburse employees for fees like parking, Internet, etc. If you go $1 over your allotted room rate you're in trouble, but $20 parking and $5/night internet? No problem.

Samsung's case hinged on a standards-essential patent they had agreed to license on fair and nondiscriminatory terms and was decided by the ITC. Apple's patent was not part of a standard and was decided by a US court of law. The cases aren't even remotely similar, no there's nothing "blatant" here.