Because face time is important. Interacting with coworkers is important. Being able to go over a design at a whiteboard together rather than reading the same powerpoint slide separately is important. THe best ideas I've had in my career have been created as a result of talking to my coworkers over lunch/coffee break/tangent from another discussion. Telecommuting is a loss to productivity even if they are perfect about actually working (which having done it for a year- its not an easy thing to do, there's a lot of temptations). Its not only easily worth 15-30k, its worth 2-3 times that to have then onsite. That's ignoring the fact that a large number of people won't be on point when working from home- many without even meaning to cheat the system.

I doubt you paid much attention to this. I do, I've been developing keyboards for 5 years now. Some of those at Swype, some at a second startup (I left Swype a few months after the buyout and have had neither residuals nor stock in the company or its new owner since May 2012), and now well its still on keyboards but I'm under NDA preventing me from stating where. Do all Android users use continuous path input? Of course not. Not even a majority. But a very solid percentage do, and a majority of those wouldn't use a device without it for a phone sized device (answers differ on large tablets where swyping isn't as efficient). So no, I don't think I oversold the importance of the technology- its a blocking issue for millions of people moving to iOS. Would they have moved had it been available when they were making their OS choice? Some large percentage of them would have. Will they now? Who knows- now they're locked in by various apps and expected behavior. We'll see.

THe shift key changes state slightly- colors in blue when manually capped, outlines blue when in autocaps mode. But no, it doesn't show on the keys.

iOS terms of service prevent you from writing a service or daemon except under very specific circumstances. If you do, they'll reject your app from the store. So you have to do a lot of things that should run in the background only when you're in the foreground. Yes, its idiotic- in order to try and avoid a few badly written apps from draining battery power unnecessarily running in the background they've instead prevented entire categories of useful behavior.

Highly doubt it. I worked at Swype. We had deals at the OEM level and shipped preinstalled. That means we made money on every phone shipped. (Some of those deals fell apart post buyout, because the buyer was hard to deal with). They won't get that deal from Apple. So they may make more money per download, or get more paid downloads. But they won't make more money overall.

Did you know you're lieing? I have an Android phone, with Skype on it. Battery uneffected, lasts 2 days of moderate use or 1 day of heavy use including GPS. Skype does not take command of the camera like that, if it did then no other app would be able to claim it and you'd quickly see a problem.

Anyone who ever used an android phone. Swype, Swiftkey, and others do an amazing job. Apple lacks continuous path typing (Swype-like paths to type) which is in every major Android keyboard these days and used by hundreds of millions of people as a faster alternative to thumb typing. Apple's autocorrect is mediocre, Swiftkey and Swype/Nuance kick its ass. And the keyboard does matter- its the most used app on the phone- you use it in texting, emails, even browsing. If it isn't a good experience people will not use your device. Apple lost millions of users who wouldn't consider switching due to the lack of options on iOS. The question is if they're now to embedded into the Android world to be willing to change. I'm guessing Apple lost them permanently by being 4 or 5 years too late with opening up the keyboards api.

The US Constitution was an open declaration of treason against the Crown

Nonsense. The Revolution had been over for years when the Constitution was ratified.

I think you mean the Declaration of Independence, which didn't have any amendments, much less a second one. Now that was a suicide pact ("Live Free or Die!"). The Constitution on the other hand, was the result of many of those same authors figuring out how to create a government and maintain an orderly society. It was also a counter-revolutionary document, to rein in some of the more extremist notions of democracy and fairness that were going around at the time. It was also designed to preserve slavery, which is a discussion for a different day. And the Second Amendment, very specifically, was designed as a tool to maintain slavery. It had nothing to do with a personal right to own and carry It had nothing to do with making sure tyrants could be overthrown. It was meant to preserve the Southern slave patrols because they were worried that some abolitionist might become President and prevent slave patrols from forming their nasty little posses. The Second Amendment is an artifact of slavery and of a very ugly period in our history. It's something we should be ashamed of. I say this as someone who has owned a gun over 4 decades.

Tell that to conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who said he believes semi-automatic rifles are great for women because they don't have to worry so much about aiming.

Believe it or not, this is a common trope in the gun community. They need lots of bullets in case they miss.

You will find that all of those quotes except that of George Mason are fraudulent.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/w...

The actual Thomas Jefferson quote is, “No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands or tenements]“

The George Washington quote isn't found anywhere but on Second Amendment activist sites. It doesn't appear anywhere in Washington's papers. The first quote, which you attribute to Alexander Hamilton, is usually attributed to Samuel Adams. The only problem is, Adams never said it either.

That's the thing about this Second Amendment "movement", which as I said, started in the 1980s. They lie. They make stuff up. Maybe they don't realize that people can check these things, or maybe they don't care. As I said above, it tells you everything you need to know about the intellectual honesty of the pro-gun movement.

Though assuming you were Musk and were putting some stores out there for people to look around... how would you structure it?

Keep his idea of the slick showroom, but leave out the Apple geniuses.

Put all the data online and populate the store with the equivalent of well-trained booth-babes from both genders. Have a kiosk for payment. Low overhead. Have a couple of cars for test driving.

By the way, I finally drove a Tesla a little bit. They're really nice. The chair of my wife's department at the University bought one and he had us out to the house for a BBQ a few weeks ago. Let me cruise around his tony suburb for a little bit. I love driving a car without engine noise.

If you haven't known Christ, you haven't known liberty. Would that you knew what you're missing.

Judging by the ones who loudly proclaim their Christianity, he's not missing much.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/...

Ask the Europeans that constantly tell us Americans we are too enslaved to the notion that we all need our own car.

You just made that up. I don't know if you've ever driven around a European city, but car ownership is pretty widespread, at least judging by driving through Rome/London/Paris/etc.

It's funny what some Americans think about Europe. They've got this AM talk radio version of Europe knocking around in their heads. "Yeah, they're all dying in the streets because of socialized medicine and everybody's gay and you can't get a decent hamburger anywhere. And they're a bunch of carpoolers who don't realize that we fought and died so that people could drive their own 4500lb vehicle like God intended." "You betcha, Mack. Next up is Fred from Midland. So, what grinds your gears about Europeans, Fred?"

I guess that would be an answer if nobody ever took the time to show you how to defend yourself with your hands.

I think you have been listening to people, that have gleefully lied to you.

I think you are projecting.