Wait a second, stop right there.

The Apple TV is shiny and black .

On top of that, it's $99. I don't think you can buy any other similar device for $33 to $66, and there isn't a "I want to pay even more money" button on the Apple Store website, or do you expect us to believe that people wander into Apple's retail stores and try to haggle the price up?

If you're going to troll, at least try and be informed about the subject.

I have an unlocked iPhone 4, on T-Mobile's US service.

Edge is slow, but it's very reliable and doesn't use much power. Sure, I'd like to have 3G speed but I guess I'm not really missing it much since most everything works acceptably on Edge (no Youtube, but again I don't think I'm missing much there). I have had other 3G phones, and and I have a 3G iPad on AT&T, so it's not like I don't know the difference. The lower monthly cost and better customer service from T-Mobile outweighs the speed deficit for me.

The one advantage is that I can use the "Personal Hotspot" tethering feature on the iPhone to share the connection without incurring an additional $20/month charge as I would on AT&T. Phone service is already too expensive (and yes I get the irony that I'm talking about a $650 device).

Somehow I picture the executives at Google, and US State Department officials having a good laugh over this one.

Nobody outside of China believes the type of propaganda crap spewed by Chinese newspapers.

I bet they also appreciate the customers who work outside of the theatrical clothing field.

All that means is that FaceTime's protocols will be open - so anyone could build their own implementation of a FaceTime client or a FaceTime server (presumably it needs one).

It does not necessarily mean that Apple's FaceTime system will accept connections from non-Apple FaceTime clients, or that Apple's FaceTime clients (the FaceTime app on OS X, or FaceTime on iOS devices) will connect to non-Apple FaceTime servers.

Which is too bad, really. I hope they do fully open it up to outside use, but I doubt it.

As long as you're not a criminal, you don't have to worry about it too much. The government can't take your stuff away and sell it unless you cause them to by, for example, mailing bombs to innocent victims.

None of the items mentioned can be considered private records. Driver's licenses, birth certificates, deeds, and academic transcripts are publicly accessible anyway, even before they become evidence in a criminal trial.

The other items became public information or government property once they were entered into evidence in the court proceedings against him, unless Kaczynski's attorney won a court order to have the evidence sealed or to have the items returned to him - which he didn't.

Not really, unless you believe that individual patients should really really be x-rayed every year*.

*which seems like in most cases it might just be a way to pad their bill.

Was there ever an episode of UFO where something actually happens?

I've watched a bunch of them and it's always just one or two things happening, never a complete story. So unsatisfying given the work that went into the visual look of 1969's version of 1980.

I wonder why the shirts made of string never caught on.

The picture quality is often poor too.

Since your technical arguments aren't valid you throw in an ad hominem attack. I guess you're not going for any positive moderations, and that's ok.

Turns out you don't need a 100ft screen if you sit closer to it - like you can in your own home. We have a 108" picture from our projector and it is a better picture than I've seen in a number of the local theaters.

The number of channels is irrelevant if they are not set up properly. Even as recently as a couple of months ago I've sat through muddy sound in a theater. It's not like I live out in the middle of nowhere either, there are a lot of theaters in the area so you'd think they'd want to stay on top of their game to compete with each other.

Pretty much all decent modern surround sound receivers will do automatic calibration - if the theaters did this too, we'd probably be much happier theatergoers. My receiver supports 11.2, which is in fact more than 7 channels, and it wasn't expensive. Our low frequency setup is the envy of our audiophile friend, and it wasn't expensive either.

As it is now, we only go the theaters as a social occasion with friends.

It's not a single product that would be hurt by those things - it's that they are anathema to Apple's design principles.

The guiding set of principles at Apple are a constant movement towards Dieter Rams' ideals of "good design".

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design helps us to understand a product.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

Good design means eliminating parts that the user interacts with (the battery cover, physical controls, etc).

Good design requires reducing parts count where practical - the battery cover, the battery connectors, the casing a replaceable battery must have, for example. I have a first generation iPhone in my pocket which is still on its original battery, so I'm not too worried about the difficulty of replacing it. I'd rather have a physically smaller phone or a better camera in the same-size phone than a replaceable battery.

Any time a designer adds yet another button, or another removable part, they're moving away from that ideal of "good design".

Now, wether you agree with that philosophy or not is up to you and there are a wide range of products on the market if you don't - you aren't required to buy Apple products to fulfill your needs or wants. The idea that Apple can lock down the entire market is a fallacy often professed by anti-Apple trolls in these discussions.

Of course, Jonathan Ives is just copying the old Braun products

, but that's not such a bad set of products to copy.

When it looks like you're operating it in a way that does not comply with all of the laws.

You can read into that the Japanese government believes that PSN is not a legal service in Japan if PSN does not protect the privacy of the users.

Great. Nobody would ever confuse it with the other TPM.

You'd hope these acronym buffoons would eventually try Googling their three-letter combinations to see if they've already been used in the computing field.

Seriously? Do you really need to?

I've got a Windows 2000 install that's still going strong at 10 years old, and a couple of XP installs well over 5 years old. We even have a couple of Linux systems that have been running continuously longer than you keep Windows XP around - we only had to restart them during a UPS replacement. The Mac OSes only get upgrades (which counts as an install, I guess) when The Steve unveils a new version, so the system OS install I'm using right now is however old 10.6 is (about a year and a half). I have an install of OS X 10.5 on a PPC Mac at home that is still working just fine after 5 years.

So, this begs the question, what are you doing to screw up your XP installs in a year?

Even my boss, the resident malware catcher (seriously, I think he actively tries to get malware on his system) is using a three year old install of XP.

I think you'd be safe to extend your reinstall interval.

That's the same retail price - not the wholesale price.

Don't retail outlets charge a markup too?

Surely Barnes & Noble is getting some cut of the $5 they charge for a magazine. Might even be more than 30%.

Wouldn't you expect that Amazon make a profit on things sold via their website?

The only difference is that we can all see what Apple's cut is.