They don't even have to say anything: she knows her job depends on co-operating. Bottom line is that she doesn't own Yahoo, she is a servant of the shareholders - she is expected/obliged to put their interests first.

OK, she could decide to not comply, or blow the NSA's cover on the extent of spying, but if she took Yahoo into direct conflict with the Federal Government over a personal opinion I doubt she'd stick around in the job for 24 more hours before the board decided she had to go.

It's the kind of kind of grandstanding that Jobs might have got away with (what you gonna do, fire me?). Zuckerberg is an interesting case: he still owns nearly 25% of Facebook, so his chances of being summarily fired are less. Still, I find it hard to imagine a CEO deliberately risking jail and being allowed to continue to serve (as the share price plummeted)

No need for threats and blackmail: the market does it for you...

Bruce Schneier is on the team reviewing the docs, so it's safe to say that they're pretty technically competent when it comes to encryption:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier

I think people are quick to fit the evidence to the theory, although I agree that some of the iOs 7 design is surprising. Personally, I like surprising, but I'm curious to see how well it works in practice.

On the more general point, the back of the iPhone 3G was plastic. The original iPod is made of plastic (for, like, a decade). As is the MacBook. and the original iMac was too, which essentially defined Jobs/Ive's design first approach. Jobs never had a problem with a plastic, properly applied. He had a problem with screws, but that's another story.

He also blessed precisely this route to diversification, cannibalising the heck out of the iPod (very expensive, and a huge money maker at the time) with the Nano and the Shuffle to spread downmarket and dominate the market. Worked pretty well that time around. I think they have to compete with the cheaper devices - they learned the lessons of the 90's. Owning the upmarket is fine, but you'll get squeezed year by year and people catch up with your quality (think Windows). Pay the same attention to detail for a cheaper product and you can outflank the cheaper providers by applying your brand halo.

Dear the internet,
despite your declaration of love, I see you've been unfaithful lately:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_(Source_StatCounter).svg
hugs,
Mozilla

"Google Doodles like this do rub me up the wrong way. For a start, the person concerned is often an obscure one (or at least obscure outside the US - the US-centric doodles end up on Google UK, where they probably don't belong)."
I'm confused: you object because you learn something? Maybe I misunderstood.
Personally, I prefer the ones I don't know... (sorry if this seems snotty - I'm perfectly sincere.)

"Getting a movie made in Hollywood is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it."
Douglas Adams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_and_agriculture#Food_security
Your scenario of cutting emissions causing collapse is not clear to me - please explain. I'm not advocating cutting all emissions - increasing carbon efficiency of existing modes of production is the main tool in the toolbox.

ok, this stinks of troll, but I'll take it:
"So calm the fuck down about religion, deniers, AGW, man made causes, SUVs, smug ass Californians, and Al Gore. Just realize accordingly, spend less money on ski equipment and more money on boats."

I dig your cool complacency, and actually I kind of agree. Global climate change probably won't make much of difference to your life during your lifetime, and maybe not even to your kids. Because you're rich. You can afford to pay 50% more for food (as agriculture is disrupted): the worst that will happen is you might move house, accept a slightly lower standard of living and bitch about the price of things. Oh, and 'buy more boats'.

It's the poor who will pay. I don't mean the middle class, I mean the 1 billion+ people who live on less than $1 a day. They will starve in greater numbers and die in greater numbers - they can't move, or "buy less ski equipment". I get that you don't care about that, but I hope that as a society we can bring ourselves to give a shit.

Another weird thing about those books: great as they are (Pirsig's was my instinctive answer to the question posed) both of their sequels (Lila, Te of Piglet) are quite terrible, dull and to be avoided. For some reason they both lapse into a similar mode of complaining about the modern world, feminism, etc, etc...

;) +1 insightful!
Not entirely true, though: people like Karim Rashid and Philippe Starck are the real high-priests. SJ did believe that the user experience wins over everything else - it's just he also believed in polling a user-group of precisely 1 person.

You're right: the summary dramatically undersells what Bill Moggridge achieved: he was a passionate believer that the experience of a product was the true definition of success (not the look or even the functionality), and that only you could only design great products by deeply understanding your users. Essentially, he took design out of the hands of the 'high-priests' of taste and aesthetics, and put the power back in the hands of the users.

This drove him to co-found IDEO (full disclosure - I'm an ex-employee), which gave him the leverage take interaction design (a term he invented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_design#History) beyond GUI's to all products and services, and to define a lot of what matters most about design today.

Well, if you're willing to trust uncited Wiki-facts, Carl Sagan negotiated with the rights-holders specifically to get permission for playing the pieces of music copyright-free outside of the solar system. It's a cool work-around: of course pretty much any recorded performance has copyright restrictions, but Carl Sagan figured the disk itself wasn't intended to be played by any human so legally he just needed rights outside some geographically restricted zone (say, the entire solar system) to have all the rights he needed to create potentially the widest distribution mixtape of all time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

We're arguing across each other: You're arguing about about what Apple will do with this patent, based on past example, and I'm arguing that the patent, as filed, is entirely reasonable and valid. Both can be true.

Feel free to take the last word...

I think you're arguing that Apple shouldn't be allowed to patent their designs because they are too simple, right? Their 'efficiency' is the problem. I can't imagine how you'd decide whose designs are 'complex enough' to be worthy of protection.

I've looked at this patent 3 times and I don't see how you decided that Apple are doing what you say they are: it's honestly just a set of pictures of their product. There's no 'claims'. In the text they describe it as "an ornamental design". I think you're saying that it's not ornamental because it's too simple, but what can be done about that? Disallow simple design from any protection? Force Apple to add curlicues?

At the end of the day, the decisions on infringement are made by a court based on whether it would cause confusion with customers. On the issue of wedge-shaped computers, there is plenty of prior art (passim) that means this is not a 'wedge-shaped' land-grab, and wouldn't work if it was. Design patents do not include prior art searches, AFAIK.