If I, as a third party, want to offer telephone services that use broadband internet (VoIP), Comcast will be able to make my access to their consumers so crap

Well it's a shame then the FCC rules under discussion would have nothing whatsoever to do with that,.

Gosh, I wonder what you are getting if it's not at all what you thought. I wonder what you are getting from an agency intertwined with the cable companies, when you ask them to provide regulation from same companies... Perhaps utterly the opposite of what you wanted?

When people read the summary of this story, I'm sure a lot will be like "blah blah blah blah MAGNETS GOOD FOR HEALTH AND CURE EBOLA blah blah blah.

This problem could have been easily avoided. Send iTunes users an announcement that they can go to the store and get the U2 album for free, if they want to.

That's how it worked for everyone that didn't enable auto-downloads of purchases (which is not enabled by default).

I *wanted* the album, and it took me two days to figure out how to get it. It did not appear for me anywhere automatically...

I can't believe people get worked up over being given music for free. Hey guess what, all sorts of free crappy music is in whatever music streaming service you favor also. Why not complain about that?

They're both still vulnerable to supernovae. You should have at least one backup in another galaxy.

Fun fact, the real reason for the Voyager mission was someone wanted a permanent backup of William Shatner singing "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds". You didn't ever see the back of that record they included with Voyager, did you... now you know why.

I'll admit I should have granted more leniency because the OP mentioned Gore, and as such was already political. But you still took the opportunity to take a shot at Obama and talk about Agenda 21 and I don't see why were either of those were relevant. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with talking about either in general, but when you take a comment with political content and respond by injecting additional political commentary it suggests you're more interested in the politics than the science.

I wasn't projecting anything. You may not be partisan in the sense of Republican/Democrat but the fact your comment grinds unrelated policial axes suggests that ideology is very present, at least in the context of that comment.

Sea ice is irrelevant to sea levels.

Land ice matters for sea levels, and the land ice is shrinking.

Only four sentences and you find time to take unrelated shots at Obama and the UN (Agenda 21).

Why do I get the feeling your opinions are driven by partisanship instead of science and economics?

Why are you talking about the Arctic in an article about the Antarctic?

Furthermore why are you talking about Al Gore and models? Sure Gore is somewhat important in his role as an advocate, but Al Gore saying something wrong doesn't mean the models are wrong, it's means Al Gore is a politician who doesn't know the science. I'm not up to date on the models but I never got the impression that an ice free artic in this timeframe was the consensus of the scientists (sure, some thought it could happen, but that's not the same thing).

Btw, on that topic the Arctic ice is still shrinking.

I've not over years of use, I guess it's that weak-ass Gorilla Glass 2 the original post was wishing for. Hopefully Apple ditched them if you can simply scratch it with keys.

I've kept a number of different iPhones in pockets with keys for years, zero scratches. I've not seen an iPhone screen witch scratches (cracks if it's dropped, yes, but not scratches).

Also, they HAVE used Gorilla Glass. In fact I'd imagine the newer ones ALSO use Gorilla Glass, they just aren't saying that (which they did not in the past also).

This is absolutely right, and I would go further to say that this kind of technology cannot be perfected without mass adoption. For instance, there is priceless value to the smart phone industry of having billions of "testers," an expansive variety of users that drives a healthy community of app developers, and a high enough density of adoption to justify wireless infrastructure investment. In the end, the economic value of the combined smart-phone user base is probably many times more than whatever resources the 1%ers could pool together to invent a technology that only they would use.

Now, consider the fact that medical treatment carries significantly more intrinsic risk to the user than smart-phone usage (though user born risk varies. . .), and it is hard to see why 1%ers would try to monopolize this technology. On the contrary, I think any rational person with significant wealth and interest would invest in ways to bring this technology to a large enough population in order to ensure related treatments could be confirmed safe at a statistical level.

You can't offload anything onto the GPU. Only certain specific types of things, and certain math.

It's not very specific, it's pretty broad. The Accellerate framework includes quite a lot of stuff...

We could offload more still if OpenCL was on iOS (which contrary to another post I jet put up, it is not quite yet - it's just lurking under the public API surface).

Apple's done a lot of work with Grand Central Dispatch (is that the right technology?)

GCD helps manage tasks across multiple cores pretty well.

The GPU leverage though, is handled either by writing OpenCL code, or normal code that uses the Accellerate framework to do a variety of math, which internally hits the GPU when it makes sense.

OpenCL is kind of involved to get into but it's often very easy to fix up the math in heavier calculations to use Accellerate.

And they do need the hype - they have a large portion of customers who are more likely to be repeat customers if they're gently pushed to upgrade instead of waiting.

You misunderstand, they don't need the hype not because hype is not useful, but because there is already boatloads of it. The amount of hype from "iPhone Plus sold out" is minuscule compared to already existing hype from all other vectors; it adds zero to the push to upgrade compared to months of relentless news about the iPhone 6 beforehand.