The UK isn't doing very well. Many people can't get 25Mb because that's way above what ADSL2 can offer them and there is no alternative. I only have a choice of one ISP (Virgin) and they suck.

I remember back on 2004. My girlfriend in Japan had 100/100Mb fibre and it cost her about £20/month. Over a decade later nothing like that exists in the UK. That's how far behind we are.

I wonder how they came up with the 627,000 figure as well. Number of licences sold * average number of programmers per app maybe? Some people shit out apps all day long, ending up with hundreds or even thousands in the App Store in the hope that one makes it big. When are are 100,000 other flashlight/advertising apps the only way to have any hope of being picked is to create 1000 slightly different flashlight/advertising apps of your own.

The number is actually lower than 0.0001%, because by "interesting" they mean "downloaded how_2_pipe_bomb.pdf" and not "genuine terrorist threat worthy of further monitoring". Back at school everyone had floppy disk copies of the Anarchists Cookbook, and I imagine it is pretty popular with the kids online these days too. Terrorist suspects, the lot of them.

Thanks, I'll look for it next time I install.

Actually it's kinda dumb. They avoid tax and then complain that there are not enough skilled workers for them to hire. If it gets too bad there won't be enough people with money to buy their products.

Japan has the largest number of long-lived (50+ years) companies in the world. They pay their taxes and treat their staff well. Long term gain over short term profit.

That amount includes the stuff they can't dodge like sales tax and employment tax. In fact they should be paying around 40% on their profits of $40bn in the US, but by moving it all to Ireland they pay 0%.

My Panasonic TV was made in Japan, my Nissan electric vehicle was made in the UK.

Okay, I'm sure parts were made in China... Less so with the TV because Panasonic manufacture components themselves in Japan too. The point is that if Japanese electronics manufacturers (Sharp, Sony and many others also have factories in Japan) can do it then so can Apple. Even Samsung has factories in Korea. Apple only recently started doing to assembly in the US, that's it.

On aggregate they provide better value than the competition? $100 for 16GB of flash memory? Okay.

You would have to be crazy to buy a $700 smart phone these days. Look at devices like the Nexus 5 and OnePlus One. High end, very fast and usable, better specs than an iPhone in fact and similar to other Android high end phones. Yet they cost half as much or less.

Sounds like you want a really cut down Linux system. Perhaps Gentoo? Otherwise you are inevitably going to get stuff you don't want in the default install of every commercial OS. When you start up MacOS or iOS you have to tell Apple to fuck off I don't want an account fuck you very much, and ditto with Android and a Google Account. Ubuntu comes with all kinds of crap installed by default, including sending searches to Amazon.

It's annoying but it's apparently what most people seem to want.

When you install Windows 8, if the machine is connected to the internet it will ask for a Microsoft ID. You can't seem to skip it either, or at least I couldn't find a way to. You can remove it later, or just disconnect from the internet when booting for the first time.

I have not tried Windows 10 so I don't know if you can skip it now, or if you have to disconnect still.

I think Google started it. Makes sense for web stuff because instead of wasting bandwidth on a button image you just have a flat shaded HTML element. At any rate, Google's web apps started going that way long before either Apple or Windows 8 did.

I think it's mostly fine, the only big issue being that some designers don't make buttons stand out enough. The calculator app in TFA is the worst, with no indication of where the buttons are except for their captions. Apple made Yosemite look very washed out too which doesn't help. Google is a mixture - they use a lot of bold, primary colours with loads of contrast but then also use some very low contrast elements too sometimes.

Star Trek's LCARS had the right idea. Loads of contrast, simple flat look. Could have done with some more colour.

I like the flat look except for one massive flaw - buttons have no outline. Look at the screenshot of the calculator in TFA. What part of the window is a clickable button and what isn't? Not knowing means my brain automatically lines the cursor up with the small numbers, which is much more effort than just getting somewhere over the button which is probably quite large.

The rest of it looks fine. The icons are a bit "1987 made-in-Deluxe-Paint for a PD library" design, with thin and awkward looking lines in places, but generally quite acceptable.

Which is the amount they couldn't find a way to avoid. Their profits would be taxed at around 40% in the US, but they funnel them to Ireland (the famous "Double Irish") and pay 0% on them. What they do pay is made up of sales tax, employment taxes, and tax on things like property that they can't pretend does not exist in any taxable jurisdiction.

It may be 24% on average, but it's much higher on some items. Flash memory upgrades for phone and tablets cost 10-15x what other manufacturers charge, for example, let along what they cost Apple.

Their products seem to be needlessly expensive too. I have a OnePlus One. It's faster, it's got more memory, a better screen and is built at least as well if not better than an iPhone 6, yet costs about 1/3rd as much. If Apple is only making 24% on their phones they must be making the cases out of gold pressed latinum or something, which it turns out bends rather easily.