Essentially, the company refuses to ban subreddits for being âoemorally badâ but will if they break any laws or any of the websiteâ(TM)s own rules.

Basically, they treat Reddit like DNS. Setting up a subreddit is like registering a domain name. What that domain name is used for is up to the owner. I'm sure if you asked registrars, they wouldn't feel obliged to be the moral police for people who use their services either.

That's not right at all. I've had that article pointed out to me before. The author is clueless.

iPhone sales are highly seasonal. A new iPhone gets released towards the end of the year, there's a big spike in sales, which tails off throughout the following year until the next iPhone is released, when the cycle starts again.

What articles like that do is point to the spike at the end of the year, when new iPhones are out and holiday sales are boosting the numbers as well, then point to the following three quarters which are naturally lower (including immediately before a new iPhone is released), and say that sales are "tapering off".

It makes no sense to do that. You aren't comparing like to like. You're comparing the most profitable time of year to the least profitable time of year. Of course sales are going to be lower if you look at it that way - it's true of any product that's seasonal. Would you assume that a suncream company is failing because you looked at their sales in winter and realised that they were selling a fraction of what they do in the summer?

The only sensible way to evaluate sales for seasonal products is to compare year-over-year sales. You compare this year's busy period to last year's busy period. You compare this year's quiet period to last year's quiet period. When you look at the iPhone sales like that - i.e. in the only way that makes sense - sales have never fallen. They have grown every year.

Here's the real thing (read more on http://www.naturalnews.com/031...):

Why is some random naturalnews.com website I've never heard of and which is run by a single person more legitimate a source than Greenpeace?

More to the point, why haven't you read the sources I provided? Part of the point of the Greenpeace article I linked to is that Apple are making stronger pushes in this area and being more transparent. That article was published in 2014. Your article was published in 2011. So Greenpeace says that Apple are the leaders in the field and have strongly improved, and your article points out that they weren't always as good or open years ago. There's no contradiction there. All you are doing is showing that Apple have taken action and improved.

When somebody says 'the cloud', mentally replace it by 'somebody else's computer'.

Also, when somebody says "It's unclear how the images were obtained, but anonymous 4chan users said...", replace it with "It's unclear how the images were obtained."

Come on, since when are anonymous 4chan users a reliable source?

Supporting gay rights.

Almost everyone does that and it does not cost them a single cent.

They spent money commissioning a video celebrating gay pride.

They spent money on lawyers to petition the Californian government on Prop 8.

They donated $100K to the No to 8 campaign.

Their supplier responsibility reports have been auditing their suppliers for discrimination for years.

It is just public relations.

Again, like the other guy I responded to, you're setting up a no win situation. They don't support gay rights? They are unethical. They do support gay rights? It's just marketing.

Their CEO is widely believed to be gay and I'm sure a hell of a lot of their employees are gay as well. You're asking me to believe they aren't doing this out of principle at all? That's not the most plausible explanation here.

Enforcing worker rights in their contracts abroad.

Again, this is mainly a PR thing. People got upset (for the wrong reasons -- Apple's contract manufacturers may be bad employers by European or even American standards, but people in China appear to be happy to work for them) and Apple had to repair damage.

Nope, they actually started internal audits of their supply chain and generating public reports several years before all that happened. You can go and download them on their website and see for yourself.

Making their products environmentally friendly.

When will they be doing that?

They've been doing that for many years. Here's the info, specifically the products. Even Greenpeace are singing their praises, specifically, saying: Apple has put its money where its mouth is: Greenpeace's report, "Clicking Clean," found that the company's embrace of renewable energy is genuine, and is leading the technology sector.

Their entire product portfolio is based on planned obsolescence. They may be very proud of how much material they are saving by making critical parts as flimsy as possible, but in reality the reduced lifespan hurts the environment more than the minor savings help it.

This is just FUD. Apple hardware lasts a lot longer than the equivalent from their competitors. I've lost count of the number of laptops, PCs, and non-Apple smartphones I've seen people around me churn through while Apple users with the same needs just buy once or twice in the same time period.

Improving the privacy of their users

By storing all their personal data in a country that has effectively declared war on privacy? By secretly tracking their customers? Apple is doing the exact opposite of what you claim.

By forbidding abusive behaviour in the App Store. By removing application access to identifying information several times. By providing an alternative to third party analytics like Google Analytics that isn't driven by a market need to sell that data. By encrypting a whole bunch of things they aren't compelled to.

Apple has done many unethical things in recent years.

I won't argue with that. What I will argue with is somebody who says that their ethics are non-existent. They perform positive ethical acts on a regular basis. They clearly have ethics, even if they fail to live up to the standard you demand of them.

You're really setting up a no win situation here. If they don't perform positive ethical acts, then they are unethical. If they do, then it's just "brand management bullet points".

It's funny though, how we have two people here - one calling them unethical, and one pointing out ethical things that they have done - and you perceive this as "there's somebody here worshipping the brand". Not two people with different opinions. One person with a suspect opinion. That's an odd perception.

Also, if anybody is astroturfing, I'd lay my money on the anonymous coward and not the person with a Slashdot account that is several years old with excellent karma.

I hate apple (the corporation) because it seems their ethics are non-existent

Really? They seem to perform positive ethical acts quite regularly. Supporting gay rights. Enforcing worker rights in their contracts abroad. Making their products environmentally friendly. Improving the privacy of their users. Why do you think their ethics are non-existent?

Market share isn't the important factor though. iPhone sales have grown every year. Apple's profits have grown every year. They are the most profitable phone vendor by a long way. If that's failing, I'd love to fail as hard as Apple are.

Now on a mobile phone this would be a non-issue as the NFC could be configured to only respond under certain circumstances, e.g. entering a PIN number.

It's a safe bet that any new iPhones will have the fingerprint scanner built in that can be used for this purpose.

That's just 4chan rumours at the moment. No point in taking them seriously unless there's confirmation.

This is actually really interesting technical problem that the Tor and Debian people have spent some time working on. In practice, with most compilers today, if you compile a program twice you get different binaries. There are a variety of reasons for this, from embedded time stamps to non-deterministic shared library reference ordering to embedding the host name of the build machine.

Here's the Debian project's wiki page on the problem that goes into much more detail:
https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

Given the nature of the mission and power source (multi-year if not multi-decade operation on another planet with no hope of human intervention if something should go wrong)

Curiosity was intended to last two years, it's been going for almost three. It wasn't intended to last this long, and it definitely wasn't intended to operate for decades.

Yes, thanks for the reminder!

iOS seems to have been last to join the flat look crowd.

It's not really accurate to say that iOS 7's design is flat. It actually has more depth than the earlier design, it's just that the individual items in each layer are flat.

So, for example, the Apple application's icons on the home screen are flat, but they are floating over a parallax background that gives the feeling of depth. The buttons in the control centre are flat, but the translucent background of the control centre gives the impression that it's sitting on top of the home screen.

They even spell it out explicitly on their website when they talk about iOS 7's design:

Distinct and functional layers help create depth and establish hierarchy and order. The use of translucency provides a sense of context and place.

Isn't there a short story about a songwriter who kills himself after losing a court case for plagiarism because there aren't any original melodies left?