Since Apple reports sales to end users, approximately 0 and 10,000,000, respectively.

You're going to the wrong conferences and for the wrong reasons. I go to a pretty well known one each year that I can and my employer gets huge returns on it. The value isn't from going to the training seminars - honestly, I know more about the subject than most of the presenters. The huge win is in identifying ecosystem trends ("oh, I guess we've collectively decided to follow this path now") and rubbing elbows with peers from other companies ("we had that problem, too, and this is how we solved it").

Conferences are probably inefficient at training, but that's not really what you'd want to attend one.

Careful there. By design, the IPv6 address space is very sparse. For instance, my house has a /48 netblock allocated to it. If that were the universal rule, the effective address space would be 2^48 networks, not 2^128 hosts. That's also assuming that all of the /48 space is allocated perfectly and densely, and not like a /16 per ISP which would mean that we'd never be able to have more than 66,000 ISPs.

IPv6 will not feasibly support 2^128 hosts because it was never meant for each host to be consecutively numbered. While your coworker is incorrect, your standpoint isn't exactly right, either.

It also has a Glacier backup, which is great for huge backups that you don't need to restore often (or ever). I use Time Machine to backup our laptops to our DS412+, and it pushes those backup volumes up to Glacier once a week. If something catastrophic happened like a massive earthquake or a house fire, we could recover all our most important data (including irreplaceable like our photos) just by replacing the hardware and clicking "restore". For less than $10 a month, that's a great feeling.

Young Wolfgang accepts your challenge.

I'm Just Some Guy. And yes, I'd be furious if I gave my kids a CD and they whined as petulantly as half the posts I've been reading here and on Twitter. It's OK not to like any particular band, but I lack an understanding of the amount of entitlement required to rant about someone receiving a free gift that they have every ability to ignore./p?

So, desktop apps. What's the difference now?

The correct analogy would be: do you like tofu? No? Well, here's a coupon for free tofu anyway. If you like it, pick it up at the store. If not, don't. Either way. Free tofu.

Stop. Apple just adds the album to the list of music you have access to. Everything else you describe flows from your incorrect understanding of this key point.

They absolutely do not in any way make you listen to it.

That's basically what they did. They gave everyone access to it, so you now have a link to download the music by clicking one of the songs and tapping "play.

No, it's about someone starting a U2 radio station that you don't have to tune into unless you want to, but now it's there if you want to hear it.

I swear to God, if my kids whined as much as the Internet has about me giving them a copy of an album I like, I'd ground their ungrateful asses until their iPods decayed into lead.

The best part is hearing the lamentations of software patent attorneys and rejoicing in the sounds of their despair.

I can imagine plenty of uses for this in automated systems such as video system or other data gatherer. And even if it's to be used to record manually-triggered output, there's much to be said for the concept of "so much freaking storage that I can pay for this once and never have to think about it again over the lifetime of the equipment I'm using it with".

Were you dropped on your head as a child? Quoth the wiki:

In 1848 Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), wrote in his paper, On an Absolute Thermometric Scale, of the need for a scale whereby "infinite cold" (absolute zero) was the scale's null point, and which used the degree Celsius for its unit increment.

Celsius degrees came before Kelvin units.