Sapphire would not have prevented this. It would have made it worse. Sapphire is much more brittle than glass, which is actually quite flexible. With sapphire people would have bent phones with shattered screens. Luckily you'll probably never see a phone with a sapphire face:

* It's brittle
* It has to be milled to shape, increasing costs over glass due to manufacturing and lack of quick scalability in the manufacturing process.
* It is less transparent than glass, so battery life will suffer due to increased screen brightness requirements to be on par with glass phones

Apple bought that sapphire factory for the high-end apple watches. Sapphire is common on high end watches and Apple wants to hit all of the checkboxes necessary to be able to sell into that market.

For Pete's sake, read and comprehend before being incorrectly righteously indignant!

September 2013 comes before December 2013 by any reasonable reckoning. If the last post on the blog was December 2013 and the one from September 2013 is referred to as the penultimate post it's a fairly safe assumption that the author is correctly stating that the September 2013 post was the second to last post made.

I'm glad the author cites the blog posts he's written against the idea as supporting evidence that there is a groundswell against the idea....

Up the road at Purdue University there are always quite a lot of memes about Indiana University. They're all really negative, so that might affect the study results.

So, installing malicious software means your information can be accessed? SHOCKING.

The first commercial game I shipped, SVGA Air Warrior (November, 1992) came on five 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disks. Three of those disks contained nothing but drivers for various video and sound cards. DOS absolutely had drivers, they were a nightmare to deal with.

John Conner will save us.

Do you truly, honestly, I mean...REALLY believe that Microsoft expends any time at all even thinking about ReactOS or WINE, let alone worrying about the .00000000000001 of a fraction of a portion of a negligible amount of a percent effect it might, MIGHT have on their bottom line?

Seriously, answer seriously, please.

You're not going to just put a 777 down on some rural 2 lane road. You need a clear 1 mile (or more) straight reinforced runway. Not only is a 777's wheel track too wide for an average road the gross weight of the plane would crush the asphalt (or dirt or gravel) under the wheels. Bare minimum you'd need a fairly modern multi-lane highway. Something like that would be traveled enough that someone would notice a large commercial airliner attempting to land on it.

All he needs to do is point a webcam out his window and I'm sure he'll be able to get face recognition hits, names, addresses, SSNs, etc... of everyone standing in his yard.

...and all you ever saw on store displays in the 80's was the result of:

10 PRINT "FUCK "
20 GOTO 10

I'd have to say that code is a contender.

Man, here I was hoping helm's deep would reinvigorate LOTRO. And yes, I had even pre-ordered it.

Sales are not profit. R* didn't make a billion dollars in one day. GTA V sold $1B worth of copies in a day. At best R* will see about 40% of that. Even then, VCs aren't going to just jump at game development. GTA is the exception, not the rule. It cost over $265M and took somewhere in the neighborhood of five years to make GTA V. During development *every* R* studio was involved with it. There were no other games in production. There was no fallback plan, essentially. GTAV was risky every way you look at it. Mitigating that risk was the fact that it was GTA and that R* has a proven record of being able to deliver. While that's great for them it's only great for them. Take an extremely large random collection of game developers, give them $265M and five years to make a game. You won't see $1B in sales on the first day. Chances are depressingly better than average that you won't break even. Except for the large well established studios (studios, not publishers) it's a very risky industry. VCs are generally risk averse.

Yup. those Camrys were the death-knell of Toyota, that's for sure!

Exactly. I can almost forgive them for the mistake with the word 'encryption' in the metadata. The rest of the rejections were clearly for not following the rules. Disliking the rules is one thing. Complaining because you can't talk to someone to get a waiver for those rules is something completely different. The majority of this article can be summarized as "We did X, which we know wasn't allowed and were surprised when Apple rejected our poor little app. Then in order to fix X we did Y, which we also know wasn't allowed. Yet again we were surprised when our poor little app was rejected." I'm sorry, but if you want your app to run natively on the iPad/Pod/Phone you need to make it compliant to Apple's rules. That the developer was not following the guidelines while creating this app for a paying client speaks quite a bit towards the quality of work one can expect from that team.