That's called jailbreaking.
I didn't see Apple taking a strong stance against this.
They did say it was wrong and bad and talked a lot, but no real action was taken against jailbreaking.

You should tell that to the 40 expat who have been sent back home so far this year, they were considered "too expensive"
But it's true I'm white.
But my boss is not white.

On a more general note, I think expat are mostly respectful foreigners.
We are not here for long usually and we didn't choose the destination.
We just want to fit in and know very well we are spoiled compare to locals.
I was in Japan during the earthquake and was outraged at the way we were treated compare to locals.

No, but it looks like we are a lot in the same boat

Maybe it's irony, but moderating +5 Informative something like "reading The Economist" is showing something about the current Slashdot, why not the Wall Street Journal right? There is "Wall Street" in the name it must be good to get a finance job!! Yes it's the usual rant.

Anyway, I've been in IT finance for the past 7 years, one of the main european financial institution.
I can code but I'm no math head and have no special social skills (appart from applying good advices you can find from trustful resources that you should already know). I've been expat in 3 different countries and I'm now in Singapore, moved to project manager 4 years ago and soon getting a nice promotion to switch to accounting control. I bet you don't understand how that can be a promotion, I wouldn't have either 7 years ago.
But outside this, if you can code, you know how the various business of retail or investment bank are working and you did bet on the right technology you'll find a job easily. Here it's all Java if you want to have a nice job. Short term, low budget crap is using PHP/Whatever tech being evaluated at the moment.

One warning though, this investment bank is very conservative, that is I'm typing this on a WinXP cousin made for the bank and have no idea if or when we'll switch to something more actual. New technology get about 3 or 4 years approval time, so you either stick with standards (IBM, Oracle) or you can forget about the latest fun technology for your time spent in the office.
Outside this small detail, I obviously love this job and the people here and all over the countries I've been sent to.

And please, prepare properly for interviewing and do you research before contacting me, if you are interested.

Ok, you are right on the "not produced by Apple", it's true.

When I talk about developer.apple.com, I'm more thinking in terms of framework like Core Data, Core Audio, OpenCL, Quartz, that you can find on the iPhone as well and are changing the way apps are done. The success of all these iPhone apps is tightly linked with the fact that you can create pretty apps easily and quickly...

You can put together a GUI or app quickly with Python and Gnome on OS X as well... That's my point. As long as 1 person thinks Cocoa and Objective-C is better it's a more useful platform to work with.

We are all Mac users for different reasons, like Slashdot has actually many different opinions.
But saying that Apple has never produced anything remotely as useful as the open source software movement doesn't make any sense. Most of MacOS X code is based on open source (as you said). So I can do as much as you can with your Linux/BSD box, how can that be less useful ?
And if you add all the stuff Apple added on top of the open source core (and that's an awful lot, have a look at developer.apple.com for information) you'll realise that this is actually more useful... No ?

Windows since NT version has been designed to be secure. Really I think they had a good shot at it. The result is not impressive, but they tried. If you are talking about bloat and bad decision leading to complex issues, I agree with you. But you can't say that a modern version of Windows has not been designed to be secure.
IE now, it's a different story. Actually I think IE8 use the same security model than Chrome (the browser), each tab/window gets it's own process, same with plugins no ? I actually don't know enough of IE to really talk about this...

It boasts a new UI ? Compared to what ? Chromium browser ? Previous version of Chromium ? Another OS ?
Sentences starting with "it will" and "it is going to" are just useless.
It is designed to be secure, like all other browsers/OS and it will be full of bugs like all other browsers/OS which are going to make it a lot less secure.
Nothing interesting there for me.

Agree with you, but Flash Lite support is not going to help with your crippled web site. I can take a Nokia with Flash Lite and my video on YouTube still doesn't work. You need full Flash support + plugin to get no crippled web site

Don't know if it's a serious question or not, but the answer is yes, it works with both. All command line stuff is there. You compile your Java with Android compiler, deploy the result to the emulator using command line if you want. If I remember correctly it's even based on Ant.

I did a project for the Android Challenge.
I'm working with a Mac and Eclipse is not the most user friendly IDE on this platform.
The process is smooth enough, forget about Linux, it's all Java based. I do Java stuff 10h a day so I felt right at home. It takes a couple of days to feel right about the suggested class design. Appart from that, I felt it was all very standard stuff, nothing really amazing, persistence is nice enough with sqlite but that's about it. You won't find any major revolution in there, it's very close to a simple standard Java application. So I didn't do more code since (it was based on SDK 1.1 if I remember correctly) and since I didn't even win the right to carry on with the Challenge, I left everything as it was (I got good technical marks, but the profitability of the idea wasn't there...). You see, if you didn't win somehow you didn't have access to the new SDK, unlike all the other lucky bastards. So why bother...
Now I've got to get back to the Web SDK of the iPhone and the CSS transformations, these are rocking my days (actually more my nights).

Let's wait for the 75$ netbook then. Don't hold your breath.
And good luck to you if you feel like an entrepreneur and start a business renting netbooks for what 2$ an hour ? What would be the purpose for an hour ? Quick Word document ? I just left my doc on this netbook ! Quick Google doc ? Oups, you have to pay for the Internet.
I'm all for technology to help fight poverty, but even netbooks are out of this league. If you talk about telephones now that might be interesting (not smartphones).

I think you missed the fine title of my comment : what is the reason ?