Yes, they have. Because they've shoved more different products out the door in a year than they've done in any year before this one, and they have a loyal following that buys whatever they put out. For now.

I'm not saying that they're going to run out of money soon. They'll be around in ten to fifteen years, sure, but not as a market leader, if they keep this shit up.

Apple is dying. They've got three phones on offer now (the ideas used to be that you'd go buy "The iPhone") and four tablets, of which one is in a format that just doesn't fill an apple niche and two of them were released without much fanfare VERY shortly after "The New iPad".

I think they're flooding the market with products in order to do as big a cash grab as possible and then bunker down in the coming lean years until they can find a new Steve Jobs.

So in exchange for shutting up about it, they'll probably get it officiously, thanks to nations who also want full control but didn't formally ask for it (ie, all of them?).

Or am I being paranoid?

You know, the Germans once owned my own fair nation in much the same way.

We had people who killed Germans where and how they could. We call them 'heroes of the resistance'.

With an attitude like yours, it's not surprising that people keep firing rockets at you. With an attitude like yours, don't be surprised when your support falls away.

Because the people living in Israel are somehow Egypt's problem? No, if the people in Gaza aren't able to flee, it's because they're living in a prison. And, technically, by their own government. The parallel to ghetto's, specifically the Warsaw Ghetto, is not exactly fiction. The suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto was much, much greater, but the people inside it are in a very similar situation.

They fire rockets at you and your family and blow up buses, and you fire tanks and bombs into fully built-up and barricaded (by you) residential areas (effectively an open-air prison or, if you will, a ghetto) without letting people flee. In my outsiders' view, that makes you both pretty much equally shitty.

I'm wondering what an Israeli perspective on this is. Do you see a separation between Palestinians and Hamas? Are Israeli actually still striving for actual peace (rather than defeat of Palestinians) or is it a matter of time until the ethnic cleansing starts, or... what?

Because as I said, from here, both parties look equally and homogeneously shitty, with the Palestinians being the underdogs. Usually in such a situation, I'm very wrong, and I'd like to know if I am, and how so.

For the series Space: Above and Beyond, they were loading the Hammerhead full-scale models onto a ship, when a Russian spy was caught taking pictures of them. Since they were stamped USMC, he thought they were the US' next generation bomber or some such.

Ah yes, the way taxes on cigarettes and gasoline work in the Netherlands. Make it more expensive, and people won't use it.

Except it doesn't work. Even at >$8.50 per gallon.

Future shock is a state of mind. I have worked tech support (I was young, I needed the money) at an ISP, and there were quite a few 60-70+ folks who'd ring up because they got everything set up except E-mail. Best customers to have, as they actually listen, and learn.

People who believe the world has grown too alien have given up in general. We are all now generations that are used to rapid technological change. I don't think we'll be too scared of what'll happen when we're ancient.

Your system of broken beyond voting machine snafu's and other voting mechanisms.

You have an electoral system. You don't decide who gets to be president, you get to decide who your State thinks should be president. And that State gets a vote that is dependant on how many people there are (ideally). If 49% of people pick Republican, and 51% pick Democrat, then 100% of the electoral votes of the State go towards the Democrat. And because of this, other parties can't get a word in edgewise.

There have been states that have gone to vote for third parties (or independents), but these were barely even a blip because mainly it's Republican or Democrat.

Let's face it, the concept of United States is dead anyway; the federal government has seized so much centralized power since the Civil War, it's no longer a collection of states with a small central government. So either fix that, or don't pretend any more and go the full monty. National elections, where every vote is a vote.

Just to hit you with a clue-by-four:

Pictures like this are pictures OF ACTUAL REAL BONAFIDE PEOPLE. If you see a picture of a child being raped, that child was actually raped. That is why normal people have an adverse reaction to pictures and movies, as well as in-person, because they have that realization.

What you're saying is, you'd be horrified if anything depraved happened to his children while you were there, but you'd be A-ok watching pictures of the same happening. Please, seek counseling, you need it.

I certainly do hope you're alone. If you had been working for me, you wouldn't be working for me.

(a) Don't obfuscate your own development base. On par with "don't shit in your own bed" for common sense practices.
(b) Don't insult customers (external OR internal) within the product. Or in writing at all, really. Preferably not orally as well, but there are limits.
(c) Be semantic wherever practical.

For two years my only security on my iPhone was 'slide to unlock' (ie none) and keeping it on my person except at trusted locations. Worked fine. It's like writing things down in a notebook. You don't tie a stronger string around it, you keep track of where it's at.

Beyond that, it's convenience.

Ten steps to wiping the phone? Talk about opening yourself up for a DoS attack.

Saying that Jesus was an inspirational guy but not the son of God is what the Jews and Muslims do. Prophet, yes, son of God, no. And if a Christian did say that, nothing would happen to him. Certainly Interpol would not be involved.

Three gods or one god is a matter of semantics. It's the Christians who muddled that one up.

And Islam does recognize other prophets than Muhammad, such as Jesus, as well as many of the Jewish prophets, right down to Adam. They do, however, reject the idea that Jesus is a son of God.

The histories in the holy books of these three religions is so incredibly similar that it's obvious these are different interpretations of the same mythology. Since all three religions claim that the god in their histories is still their god, the position that these three gods are the same isn't an obviously incorrect one.