The way the mandatory two year warranty as mandated by the EU is implemented is very different from AppleCare and AppleCare goes beyond it. If a fault becomes apparent after more than six months after you buy the device you as the customer have to prove that the fault is due to some technical problem that was caused during the manufacturing of the device. This is pretty much impossible to do without the help of a lawyer. So technically a company can refuse to pay for any repair after six months and there is not much you can do. Within the first six months the burden of proof (that you caused the fault) lies with the company.

Apple's standard warranty is one year, already making it easy to get repairs for six months longer than the minimum required by law. After that year they play the burden of proof trick I mentioned.

The main problem is that it is often very confusing when a company offers a warranty deal beyond what is required by law, confusing the different concepts or as in this case giving the impression that there is no coverage at all.

CP violation in Kaon decays can be explained by the Standard Model, but if the magnitude of CP violation they have claimed exists in the D system can not. It would be the first actual hint of physics beyond the Standard Model at the LHC. That would be some very exciting news (especially because everybody expected the big "discovery" detectors ATLAS and CMS to actually find something new first, i.e. the Higgs or Supersymmetry).

I use Windows like I use my gaming console: I fire it up to play a game and shut it down afterwards. All my other computing needs are more than met by OS X.

Do you want a thief to have access to important PDFs on your laptop (credit card statements, purchase receipts, license numbers of your software, whatever), to your e-mails and all that?

Yes, you do. The first thing to try would be to get a location and see if the police is willing to help. But if it turns out that there is no way of getting the laptop back, I would very much like my laptop to be wiped of all personal data I have stored on it.

I'm a research scientist at particle physics institute and my anecdotal experience is the opposite: Nowadays, it seems like at least 3/4 of the laptops I see at conferences are Apple laptops (plus a growing amount of iPads). The desktops at my institute are either Linux or OS X.

OS X is a great environment to use LaTeX in, make presentations (Keynote + LaTeXit for equations is awesome), code scientific software or run apps like Mathematica or Matlab.

The only supported ways to use Time Machine over the network are using a Time Capsule or using a Mac running Mac OS X Server as the backup target. All NAS that offer a Time Machine function do that using unsupported software (I think usually a version of netatalk that runs on Linux).

If you're using a NAS that is not a Time Capsule (I have a QNAP for example that offers a Time Machine target function) and run into problems it is quite likely a problem with your unsupported NAS's implementation of AFP.

By what mechanism can a browser know when the memory it has reserved is needed elsewhere in the system? I don't think it works that way.

When people complain about browsers needing excessive amounts of memory they usually refer to memory leaks, not to intelligent use of memory through caching.

The bit about how some people misinterpret the amount of free memory the OS reports is totally true, though.

The big question is: Is Android encroaching? I'm not sure the answer is that easy.

Have a look at the two graphs in these posts on Asymco: http://www.asymco.com/2011/08/22/nokia-vs-android/ and http://www.asymco.com/2011/08/05/the-competition/ .

Android is growing tremendously, but it doesn't seem to eat away any of Apple's marketshare. In fact, it looks like a lot of dumbphones are replaced by new Android devices and that Android is eating up Nokia's former share in the smartphone sector.

Another interesting fact is utilization (don't have a link handy, sorry). If you look at website statistics, WiFi hotspot statistics, the story is usually the same: a big majority of the devices are iOS. It does make sense if you consider that a lot of former feature phone users are now on Android, but continue to use their new Android devices as feature phones.

As long as Apple continues to sell more and more phones---and right now it still looks like that is the case---they don't have to worry about Android.

You can download the actual paper by the OPERA collaboration here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 They have measured the distance of 730km to an uncertainty of 20cm using GPS and a dedicated geodesy campaign. Of course, when they talk about their six sigma result, this uncertainty is already included. If this turns out the be a fluke, it will most certainly not be because they messed up their distance or time measurements in a trivial way.

I think this could actually be the first tablet that might have a chance of challenging the iPad. The hardware+OS quality is important, but I dare say that the integration with a healthy apps and media ecosystem is just as important, and that is where Amazon could really shine:

The excellent tie-in with for-purchase or for-rent media is one of the big things that make the iPad so interesting. You only need to enter your Apple ID and you're set. Amazon could do the same thing with their huge MP3, video and books library. You won't have to download any apps that might be not so well-integrated, you won't have to set up several different accounts (and subscriptions): just enter your Amazon login and all that media is right there, with the option to stream or sync whatever you've purchased in the past.

So even if the third-party apps selection isn't that great (right now, Android's biggest weakness), Amazon still has a cheap tablet meant for media consumption that ties in excellently with their services. This could be big.

This is only true in the case of a Mac Pro where you can actually get similar cases, and even then Xeons and the appropriate mainboards aren't cheap. I'm not sure where you can get the parts to build something similar to an iMac.

I agree, but third party apps are *the* reason to get a tablet. On a phone you can get away with a lackluster third party app selection, because, well, it's a phone first. With tablets, getting the hardware of a competing device right is one thing, but the really hard part is having a software ecosystem as good as Apple's. I don't Android is there yet (and sadly, I don't think any of the Android manufacturers or even Google are putting up any effort to change that).

They give an 8/10 to everything, though (well, *extremely* bad product get 7/10 and absolutely outstanding ones 9/10).

Would it even be possible to sell the coins for $500000? Is the market at a given time big enough to actually fulfil such a sell order?