Apple double-pinky swearing that they'll never, unh-uh, not ever unlock your iPhone

That's not what they said - they said the've altered it so they CANNOT unlock your iPhone, even if they want to.

Given how the technology works, that is a quite reasonable assertion. iOS devices have had full device encryption for some time, without that key you have nothing.

All this "canary" bullshit begs the question why, if Apple really cared one little bit about their customers, don't they just come out and say what they have to say.

That just shows a misunderstanding of what companies are legally ALLOWED to say. Once you get the order you CANNOT talk about it, thus the device of the canary.

They really think you're stupid.

No, the rest of us that understand encryption think you are.

This isn't the first study to suggest that taking artificial sweeteners in drinks is bad and correlated to obesity (though they didn't actually test a direct connection to obesity in this study). Previously the theory was that the artificial sweeteners caused greater hunger later on by priming the body to expect a rush of sugar calories and getting nothing instead. One implication of that theory was that artificial sweeteners in conjunction with a real meal might still cause less weight gain than real sugar.

This study might change that if the negative effects on the gut bacteria happen even in the presence of other food.

Does anyone know if there's artificial sweetener studies that tackle the question of whether taking them in conjunction with real food makes a difference?

Photography on a cell phone does not equate to photography with a digital camera -- knowing what f-stop is, or shutter speed, or focal length, or a LOT of the other of the fine-grain minutiae

1) the technical aspects are not really photography - they are details of a tool. They are not composition nor lighting nor mood nor concept.

2) The iPhone with iOS8, and version of Android for a while I think let you control all of those aspects in advanced camera apps (well focal length you had to add adaptor lenses, but lots of people do use those).

Flickr already missed the boat on being the social media image sharping app of choice.

They are not the social media sharing app of choice.

They ARE the primary choice for sharing images from people who are photographers, and also happen to primarily use smartphones. Yes, even over sites like 500px... Flickr has far more volume.

One of the things I think when I look at something like that is, the $10k difference is illustrating how much more people make that care enough about computer science/programming to take the time to explore many languages - not so much that they are all getting COBOL jobs, they are just more competent.

The six has a flat back, Mr. Always Corrected.

Fine we implement your libertarian paradise and taxes drop drastically.

You've done nothing to fix this problem because you misunderstood it.

Corporations don't avoid taxes because they're too high, they do it because it's profitable. Corporations compete by competing at the margins, if a competitor in your libertarian paradise goes from a very low tax rate to a slightly lower tax rate then you'll have to follow otherwise you'll be at a competitive disadvantage. If you are a libertarian this shouldn't be a surprise but gospel. The essence of libertarianism is people acting as rational self-actors, so why would you expect corportations to leave free money on the table just because the pile is a bit smaller?

Type-casting -oh my lord type casting- is so astoundingly bad in Swift

What don't you like about it?

I like it because it precludes a lot of stuff from going wrong unless you are very explicit in telling swift how you would like to be shot in the foot.

Whoever wrote that article doesn't understand Swift well, or Apple for that matter:

Swift is designed to support a world built bottom up in Objective-C. It's meant to play well with the bazillion lines of existing Objective-C, not supplant it.

This is totally wrong. Apple could not be more clear that Swift is built to supplant Objective-C. It will take a while to re-write the frameworks but they are encouraging everyone now to write new stuff in Swift, and as rapidly as possible making the bridge over to the Objective-C frameworks as Swift friendly as possible.

I think Apple will not open Swift at the moment because they want to have a small core group directing where the language goes, at least at first... and then it will open up more from there. But that also supports the notion that swift is not an auxiliary language, but the primary path going forward.

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.