"The federal government has *never* answered legitimate questions about how this will effect the environment long-term, particularly groundwater contamination."

Never answered legitimate questions? Oh, I get it. Never answered **legitimate** questions, meaning any answer to a question that differed from the answer you wanted to hear.

No true Scotsmen much?

"For the record, we are *currently* in an interglacial period of the ice age that started 2.6M years ago. When/as we exit the current ice age, it's going to warm up, period."

For the record, I'm going to repeat a cherry-picked fact that I picked up which matches all of my preconceptions on the matter, and that I will use to refute all of yours...

"The reason is components. The components are made in asia and shipping costs, export/import duties combined with labour expenses in US or Eu for that matter rises costs so much that it's not feasible to haul parts and build devices elsewhere."

Can't believe I'm responding to this but... wrong. Otherwise why Foxconn plants in Mexico and Brazil? Why does Corning make glass here and ship it to China?

I think the cheap-as-possible break-at-first-opportunity bloatware-ridden plastic pieces of **** produced by Dell and HP are indications of "total disregard for users".

Technically, the BASIC interpreter used all sorts of system variables for the program counter, evaluation stack, and so on. That said, such things would be considered metadata, and the statement is correct in that no variables were declared in the implementation language.

GOTO is a jump statement.

FOR...NEXT, LOOP...UNTIL, and WHILE...WEND are are the traditional "and more elegant" BASIC looping statements.

Well, if everyone is going to get all pedantic about it, then so will I.

In BASIC, the COLON (:) was the statement separator, not the SEMICOLON (;).

In the example code, "10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10", the colon is the statement separator. The semicolon was used to suppress the automatic CRLF the PRINT statement would have generated after outputting the above expression.

"No one is trying to get rid of Medicare or Social Security."

Uh huh. Tell that to Ryan.

Yep. We need to fire all of the teachers, police, and firemen. We need to fire health and safety inspectors.

Why? Because they're on the government payroll.

But, under no circumstances, can we fire all of the people working at the defense contractors, who make weapons and develop other systems that even the Pentagon doesn't want.

Even thought those people are also paid with taxpayer dollars.

Are you on Social Security? Medicare? Are you unemployed? A student? A veteran? Disabled? Do you work, but make so little that you're below the line and pay no Federal Income Tax? Are you a member of a family with two kids, one job, a mortgage, but make less than $45,000 a year?

Then you're part of the 47%.

Besides, income tax is not payroll tax. It isn't property taxes. It's not sales tax. It's not excise taxes. People pay plenty of taxes, even if they're not paying income tax.

“In 2007, the total volume of home sales in the United States was about $1.7 trillion—paltry when compared with the $40 trillion in stocks that are traded every year. But in contrast to the activity that was taking place on Main Street, Wall Street was making bets on housing at furious rates. In 2007, the total volume of trades in mortgage-backed securities was about $80 trillion. That meant that for every dollar that someone was willing to put in a mortgage, Wall Street was making almost $50 worth of bets on the side."

"Lehman Brothers had a leverage ratio of about 33 to 1, meaning that it had about $1 in capital for every $33 in financial positions that it held. This meant that if there was just a 3 to 4 percent decline in the value of its portfolio, Lehman Brothers would have negative equity and would potentially face bankruptcy."

Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

Build derivatives and CDOs and trade at 50-to-1. Leverage those trades at 33-to-1. Get the rating companies to give those securities AAA ratings, despite having nothing on which to base those estimates. Then add in hedge funds and trades like Magnetar, where brokers deliberately packed tranches with toxic loans and then made money when securities deliberately setup to fail actually failed.

The housing industry was lead to slaughter not by government, but by Wall Street. It's hard to generate trillions in CDOs if you don't have enough of the loans on which those securities are based.

From 3 days ago, "Now Samsung has responded in kind, adding the iPad mini, 4th generation iPad and 5th generation iPod touch to the mix."

"Samsung’s additions shouldn’t come as a surprise; when a judge ruled that Apple was indeed allowed to add Android 4.2 Jelly Bean as it pertains to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, as well as the Galaxy Note 10.1 and Galaxy S III to the proceedings, he specifically warned that in granting that alteration, Apple should be prepared for return amendments from Samsung. Specifically, he said that the iPad mini and latest iPad were likely additions."

"Samsung had previously moved to have the iPhone 5 added to the filing, and that motion was successful."

And back. And forth. And back again.

"You (or the marketing droids) are assuming that being aware of their existance will make people buy those brands more. But my reaction to being pissed off by intrusive adverts, and that of most other people I know, is to avoid those brands if at all possible. "

So you say. But psych and sociological profiles say otherwise.

I think I read elsewhere that this fits in with their existing infrastructure. They have a lot of iPads, apps, and they already have the back-end systems needed to manage iOS devices.

"If Android held 100 percent share, innovation would be alive and well. Every OEM's take on the OS is a bit different. Even devil's advocate arguing of the compatibility requirements being some impediment to innovation, an OEM would still be free emulate Amazon's strategy with the Kindle Fire completely eschewing Google's governance altogether."

Would it? Or would more people do as you suggest and emulate Amazon, forking off their own systems in order to differentiate themselves from one another and -- in the process -- leaving Google high and dry.