For scanning email that might have windows viruses.

Remember that $130m budget doesn't include marketing costs. On the other hand I suspect the $185m doesn't include DVD sales, streaming, rentals and so forth. Figuring out profit on films can actually be trickier than it first appears. However I suspect the reason no one will risk their money financing what these directors want is because even if a fairly good film like Watchmen only makes a little bit of profit relative to cost, what does that say about more average films? Given there's no guarantee a film will be good why risk the money? If you cut a little and get a PG-13 rating then you're guaranteed tons more money. So why invest in the R rated film? It's fine for film geeks to talk about R-rated films, but why would I as an investor want to do this?

I'm not sure that's true. Jobs wanted to take the Mac in a direction I think was a mistake. (Think of an iPhone ahead of its time) Jobs also had some major failures like the Apple///. I think the initial direction Apple took the Mac against Steve Jobs was wise. However it made some huge major mistakes such as not getting it linked into a modern operating system, mismanaging the development of MacOS, the whole Taligent/Copland disaster, a confusing product array, and worst of all the PPC transition. Yes the transition went smoother than anyone expected but their choice of PPC in hindsight clearly was a big mistake. Apple did try to introduce innovative products like the Newton. But most were ahead of their time. I think Jobs learned from his mistakes and NeXT and from looking at Apple's mistakes and came back to create some great stuff. However the transitionary time was uncomfortable. (The lined garishly colored iMacs, Sys9 and OSX 10.0 - 10.1, and so forth) The rise of MP3s and the inability of existing companies to put a half decent interface on them was honestly all that saved Apple. Throw in the rise of viruses and malware that helped bring some PC users to the Mac and that's the main success. Apple's resurgence owes as much to the mistakes of everyone else as it does Jobs.

His NeXT days? Even his return at Apple was anything but sure. Apple's stock took quite a while to improve significantly. The initial Sys9 iMacs were a modest hit (and I thought ugly as sin). OSX was basically unusable until 10.2 and arguably not truly competitive until 10.3. The PPC chips were far behind Intel in price and performance. One could go on. Apple was doing better, but only by measuring against the pre-Jobs disaster.

I have to disagree. The simplified interface on the original iPad was revolutionary. I remember trying to navigate with the player I had at that time. It was a nightmare. Then you got this device with this round wheel you could navigate with your thumb and quickly get to the right song. The menus were simple and it just worked. Whereas most electronic devices of that time (and arguably for years afterwards) were an usability nightmare of confusing menus and settings. The iTunes store really wasn't even that big a deal in the early days. Everyone was getting songs by Napster. Apple came in when the boneheaded studios wouldn't set up their own easy to use system and took advantage of it. But it was years before the iTunes store became as ubiquitous as it is now - mainly the RIAA making P2P a pain.

This is the typical geek reaction where usability doesn't count for much. (Personally I think Apple still could do a ton more on usability - especially on OSX) The difference between the initial iPods and everything else wasn't on what they did but how they did it. And it was a huge gap. Ditto with the iPhone versus other smart phones of the time. Now Android really is largely a copy of Apple's iOS although I'll give them props for doing some things much better, such as notifications.

It's useful to birds too given conservation efforts tied to orinthology.

Strange. I have Google Voice, tethering, and VOIP running on my iPhone. Oh yea, I spent the 2 minutes to jailbreak it. Works fine. No problems. Even commercial applications on the Cydia app store.

I had the same thing happen when I was brought in as the new IT guy. It almost certainly had been done by the fired IT guy though. And it wasn't two weeks worth but over a month with extra backups from before that destroyed. Fortunately we had paper copies and had to re-enter all the data. So my first week in was this disaster and about six months of 14 hour days.