Brick and mortar stores are legally barred from overtly providing different pricing for customers based on age or gender. They can't have a price tag on an item that reads:

Women Over 35 - $32.99
Women 35 And Under - $29.99
Men 38 And Over - $28.99
Men Under 38 - $26.99

However, common loyalty programs at stores profile customers by age, gender, purchasing habits, and all sorts of other demographic criteria and selectively issue coupons and promotions that have the same result (e.g., a drug store might print out a coupon for a male customer for lady's perfume to incentivize a purchase before Mother's Day, but wouldn't issue such a coupon to female customer who is inherently more likely to buy the product).

Thanks for your comment. I certainly agree with your points #1 and #2. However, the opportunity to capture 30% of Adobe's, Microsoft's, Avid's, and others' Mac revenue constitutes a large, not a little, gain.

Just looking at Adobe, it's likely that Apple could make $300 million a year if they could tax all Adobe's Mac sales (admittedly, that wouldn't happen for quite some time). That's a significant chunk of the $1.7 billion Apple is currently on track to make off of App sales in a year, and that's just from taxing one company.

Also, Macs are still a profitable market that's not going away anytime soon. Apple may be making way more money off of iOS than OS X, but they still enjoy great margins and profits from the Macs. Apple's calculation will be that they can make OS X even more profitable if they make it more like iOS.

Finally, the other pieces of the ecosystem, such as roaming user accounts between Macs and iOS devices, are big features that they want to implement. Apple has already forced Mac App Store applications to be sandboxed, while also restricting certain APIs to App Store-distributed applications. They're already on the road to Mac lock-down, it's just a question of how fast they'll get there.

Cloud/Software-As-A-Service/Web Apps are obvious wins for the Googles/Microsofts/Adobes of the world. They

1. 1. eliminate piracy
2. 2. guarantee a steady revenue stream
3. 3. allow vendors to data-mine user behavior
4. 4. avoid App store sales fees

Adobe's move is not just about locking-in customers, it's about ensuring that they don't have to give Apple and Microsoft a cut of all their sales. Gatekeeper on the Mac and Windows RT are harbingers of Apple's and Microsoft's long-term strategies: force everything through the App store and skim off the top. All the major software vendors are fighting a war and the consumers caught in the crossfire.

None of the Massachusetts delegation voted on the bill. Here is the roll call.

Why didn't any of the 9 representatives from the state vote? Because the President was in Massachusetts following a terrorist bombing earlier in the week.

The bill has been in Congress in some form since 2011. If the sponsors and supporters of the bill truly believe that this bill is necessary to enable "integrated operational actions to protect, prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from" threats to security, wouldn't it make sense to schedule a vote on passage of the bill for a day when at least some representatives of the state most recently victimized by a terrorist attack could vote? Is there any opportunism at work here, given that the entire Massachusetts delegation voted against the bill the last time it was up for passage?

It's worth reading the full text of the bill. It contains statements such as "The Director of National Intelligence shall establish procedures to allow elements of the intelligence community to share cyber threat intelligence with private-sector entities and utilities and to encourage the sharing of such intelligence."

As a strong financial and moral supporter of PBS, I am simultaneously appreciative of PBS's even-handed coverage of the Aereo story and disappointed by their participation in the suit.

There's much to dislike about Aereo's business model. The company's technical and legal maneuverings allow them to excessively monetize an otherwise low-cost service. Like so many water bottling companies, they provide a small convenience, and they should be allowed to, but there are good philosophical and financial reasons not to buy what they're peddling.

The larger story is that the trajectory for all broadcast media is obvious: consumers will always push for free, accessible content. Aereo's service is just a stopgap and will ultimately fizzle out along with Viacom, News Corporation, and their peers.

That's what makes PBS's position in this all the more troubling. PBS actually has one of the only viable and worthwhile models: viewer-supported broadcasting. Given that PBS survives on the generosity and goodwill of its viewers and that its viewers clearly want accessibility, they should focus on delivering what viewers want - open, free, accessible content - directly to their audience. They've made huge inroads over the past few years with their online services but come on, go for broke and put everything that you can online. That's the best way to cut out the middlemen, outpace the hamstrung big medias, deliver uncompromised programming, and win the hearts, minds, and support of the public.

I've long wanted a large reflective display for coding. While I typically set a dark background in whatever editor I'm using, staring at a backlit display all day can be harsh. As reflective LCD technology improves, I continue to hold out hope that someone will make a desktop monitor with the technology (it would be a great second display for coders or anyone doing basic text entry, and doesn't need to have especially fast pixel response time, etc.).

Evidently, the new Chromebooks don't have a physical dev mode switch (the old ones used to break a lot), but can be put into dev mode via a firmware switch. The price and combination of expansion ports (USB 3.0, HDMI, etc.), make this a pretty appealing target for hacking, although the ARM architecture means that lots of software will have to be recompiled, as the original post mentions.

While it seems like the early versions of the iOS App may limit voice input to search, it makes sense that Google's angling to compete with Siri's personal assistant functionality by integrating with Google Calendar, Gmail, etc. Using the Google's iOS Voice App to "book an appointment" on an iPhone configured with Google's ActiveSync/Exchange Gmail and Calendar connector could appear to behave identically to Siri.

Siri would presumably trigger a calendar event creation directly on the phone after receiving data from Apple's server, while Google's Voice App could transmit the appointment creation command to Google's server and add the appointment to the user's Google Calendar. The appointment would immediately be fetched by the iPhone's Calendar App, so the two actions would appear the same to the user.

Amazon also reduced pricing for the service yesterday, which may be good for future subscribers, but is really annoying for those who already had subscriptions and just renewed for more money. Anyone who spent several weeks uploading music files one year ago likely didn't want to let their subscription lapse and have to repeat the entire process. Amazon waited a couple of weeks until everyone up for renewal was billed for a new year, then, less than a month later, they fundamentally changed the service's functionality and lowered the pricing.

I completely understand that Amazon's terms and conditions for the service give them the right to do this, and I also expect that early adopters often pay more for goods and services as prices drop. However, it's clear that Amazon was being quite coy here. They also issued an iPhone cloud player app shortly before "unlimited music" subscribers had to decide whether to renew, incentivizing re-subscribing.

It's clear that the new service is great for Amazon, as it allows them to de-duplicate their data and significantly reduces their bandwidth costs. It also may be a good thing for many customers who can get sanitized versions of their music files. As my original post mentioned, however, some users of the service saw the appeal of uploading and unlimited number of their personal music files (e.g., with meticulously edited album artwork, tags, and the exact compression they wanted). Without notice, Amazon is essentially replacing all these files for paid subscribers with different files, which sets a really bad precedent not just for music, but for cloud storage services in general. While I'm sure some users prefer the new functionality, others don't and it would have been better to allow users to opt in/out.

The other big story here is that at least some of the labels seem to have offered Amazon similar terms to Apple, showing that Apple's agreement for Match is not exclusive. In Netflix v. Amazon (video streaming) and Apple v. Amazon (music stores/matching), Big Content seems reluctant to let any one player dominate.

Regarding the press release: yes, it's official, it's linked from Amazon's more recognizable Amazon.com domain; for whatever reason, they post their press releases on a different domain.

Sorry, the second "the" in the first sentence should be removed. My bad.

Google has been using eye tracking technology in internal product testing for years. If they included electrooculography (EOG) sensors in the glasses, such as those demonstrated in this prototype from ETH Zürich, they could allow wearers to manipulate real world objects just by staring at them.

Some more thoughts on this (think: virtual telekinesis) here.