It's enough to put them in the top five PC makers, worldwide. If you count iPads as computers, Apple is the largest computer manufacturer in the world with a 14% share.

Thank you for that explanation, which got me thinking: Apple Pay could remake the web, in some very good ways. Just expand Apple Pay into the micropayment system I've wanted for over 15 years.

If Apple can "scale this down" (even by losing some money on overhead and transaction costs) and make it painless and worthwhile for a website to charge as little as one cent for something, then many good things happen. I think a vast number of web users would happily click a "1 Cent Apple Pay" button to read the second half of an article or column, or hear a song or a podcast, or watch a funny cat video. If it's good, it's worth one cent. If it wasn't, it was only a penny.

Or think of it as $10 for every 1000 articles read/artworks viewed/songs heard: a trivial expense for weeks or months of web usage for most people, in exchange for the content without registrations, or subscriptions, or pay walls, and without advertising. You know, that annoying stuff you try to block. That stuff that Google sells. (Oh-oh...!)

But this would be much more than a way to drop a pipeline into Google's core revenue source. Creatives and publishers and entrepreneurs of all sorts could just add Apple Pay to a page like a social media button, and then sell or rent their work directly and affordably. One cent transactions may only add up to just a few dollars for some, but what are they making now? Web ads bring them little. Maybe they're happy selling songs for $1, but they might be thrilled by the number of people willing to pay one cent to listen to one song, once.

And it could scale up really well. Charities and activists could raise real money in tiny, painless increments. Even one cent per page view adds up to a big chunk of change for newspapers and magazines that now struggle to survive on advertising and/or subscriptions. I think the New York Times website would be thrilled if their 17 million page views a day made them one cent each: that's over $62 million a year. Or maybe some big players get "greedy," and decide to charge a whole five cents for that big story, or virtual art show, or for your first listen to that new song from your favorite band: a million nickels is $50,000.

Now think of ebook sellers who don't need Amazon any more. Think about PayPal, and streaming music services. And why not Bitcoin via Apple Pay....

I'm sure some of you will see this as a dystopian vision, but I think Apple could do a lot of good and (eventually) make a lot of money with my distributed digital free market daydream.

Absolutely true.

Now you're not being cynical enough. I think this challenge is likely to be the result of a direct White House request to come up with some good "news for nerds." I don't think it's a coincidence that we are weeks from an election that Democrats are dreading (publicly or not). It's aimed at a core voting/donating demographic that largely supported Obama but now is ticked off about the NSA, the IRS, government transparency, the Middle East, and a bunch of other things. There's no commitment, it costs little, there's little risk of a downside, and it's even legal and ethical. It's a small but perfect election-season ploy.

But regardless of the political motivation and the odds against a real project resulting from it, I'm still in favor, for all the standard nerd reasons.

Then what is OSHA for?

Of course research is generally good, but priorities must be decided. Right now, I suspect people would rather that money had been spent researching Ebola.

one could argue that the United States is hobbled by an outdated constitution in responding to epidemics

The USA has handled many epidemics in the past. The experience of Western Samoa vs. American Samoa during the Spanish Flu epidemic is an interesting example. The TL;DR: version: Western Samoa decided they couldn't stopping the importation of plantation laborers, and as a result 20-25% of the population died. American Samoa self-quarantined, and nobody died.

One of the core problems today is that the CDC has lost focus, and instead of controlling infectious disease, they spend money things like playground safety, workplace accidents, guns, and birth defects. And then there was the NIH grant to study why gay men are often thin and lesbians are often obese.

We don't need to change the Constitution, just the spending and research priorities of a bunch of bureaucracies.

What exactly is the point of this odd half-assed sort of category, a "no-fly list"? If the federal government suspects a citizen or resident might be a terrorist, OK, then get a friggin' warrant and bug their phone and search their house and get some real evidence. Since terrorists can do a lot more than hijack airplanes, what's the message here? "We want to prevent you from hijacking an airliner, but a bus is OK?" Either treat them like a suspected terrorist, or just stop hassling them.

I agree, but I dislike this whole "right to be forgotten" thing. Yes, for some people it sucks to have bad/old information on the internet, but in effect what's happening here is various people demanding censorship of information about themselves, and then Google deciding whether or not to comply. Are we sure we know what their standards are, and that they will be applied fairly? The opportunities for bias are obvious: will a request to remove (say) an old bit of dirt on someone associated with a cause or political party that Google likes will be treated the same way as dirt on someone associated with a cause or political party that Google doesn't like?

Plus, there's a slippery slope. Now that politicians know they can force Google to censor results, why not expand that for "the good of society"? How long before some politician decides that Google users shouldn't be able to search for things deemed to be "racist" or "sexist" or "hate speech" or "climate denial" or whatever?

There is a risk that HIV can spread orally to someone with gingivitis (bleeding gums), and I wonder if the jump from bush meat to humans in 1920s might have happened when someone with gingivitis ate some bloody bush meat.

What was the dental hygiene like in Kinshasa in the 1920s? Might not there have been some people with gingivitis (bleeding gums) who ate some bushmeat that was a bit rare/bloody?

I'm not sure what you are saying is "not true," because what you say supports my point: nobody thinks discrimination against women in tech has increased in recent decades, so this is more likely to be the result of a bunch of individual decisions.

Why must they get jobs that pay as much as the CS oriented jobs do? Maybe they'd rather have different jobs that pay less. Maybe they'd rather have kids and stay home. As long as they are making free choices, let them do what they want, and don't obsess over "inequalities" and "lack of diversity" that are purely statistical and based on a false conception of how humans behave.

But he had just arrived from an Ebola zone.

He did tell some people at the hospital he had just arrived from Liberia, but apparently everyone there didn't get the word.

You don't clean up Ebola-victim vomit by pressure-washing it, especially without a Hazmat suit, because one droplet landing on a mucus membrane can give you Ebola.