there's no way to tell if this is significant, or if it's a problem the average person is likely to run into.

I spent approximately 5-10 seconds typing phone theft statistics into Google and it led me to the Office of National Statistics, which says that 4% of 14-24 year-olds were victims of phone theft in the 2011/12 year.

It seems pretty obvious that this is being pursued because it gives the semblance of government helping consumers while at the same time giving government one more tool they can use to control the population.

It seems pretty obvious that people carrying small, expensive gadgets around with them are a prime target for thieves, that this is a legitimate, pervasive problem, and that this solution is effective in combating this crime.

Stop making excuses for a shitty UX. Android development is an utter pain in the arse in a lot of ways and as long as people like you make excuses instead of complaining about it, it's going to continue to be an utter pain the arse for years to come.

Consistent experiences across mobile platforms is not useful. You want consistency across the applications on the platform that the user actually uses. Normal iPhone users aren't going to care if Android users get a different UI to them, and normal Android users aren't going to care if iPhone users get a different UI to them. But both groups of users do care if the application they are using works differently to the other applications they use on their phone.

The point of the web is not so that resources are dynamically loaded from servers every time you access them. The point of the web is that you have a decentralised set of resources that are linked together.

This was clearly a tongue in cheek remark. He put a bit of mild ribbing in to get a laugh out of the audience. Calling it "berating" is a complete mischaracterisation. See for yourself, it's 45 minutes into the keynote video.

When you start comparing crime rates, violent crime rates, gun deaths, or any other socially important data, you really need to pay careful attention to terminology. It matters little that the UK may experience only 1% of our gun deaths, if they also experience 800% of our violent crime rate. After you are mutilated or dead, is it really going to matter to you that you were killed with a gun, or a knife, or a stone, or you were choked to death? Violent crime is violent crime.

You're half right. You are right in that you really need to pay attention to terminology. You are wrong when you say "violent crime is violent crime". Why? Terminology.

"Violent crime" in UK stats is a very wide term that covers a lot of things. "Violent crime" in USA stats is a very narrow term that doesn't cover a lot of things. The terminology means different things in the two countries, so what is being measured is different.

Read this for more details, including links to the definitions being used. The fact is that the UK is less violent than the USA once you look at what's being measured instead of assuming "violent crime" means the same thing in both cases.

What on earth is the point of publishing the story days before we know for sure what will happen?

That's nothing. In previous years, Slashdot has quite happily published stories about Apple products while the presenters were still on stage announcing them. Hence the discussion is useless because everybody is talking about things that are shown to be irrelevant five minutes later and the stories invariably leave a bunch of things out, necessitating updates and subsequent articles. It's a real clusterfuck sometimes.

The $649 iPhone 5S costs Apple about $199 to build. And of course, that doesn't account for things like the cost of developing the software, or operating the servers that supply service to these devices.

Also unaccounted for: royalties of around $120-$150. So in total, an iPhone doesn't cost Apple about $100, it costs them upwards of $350.

Apple sells phones with cheap hardware worth about $100 for $600.

The $649 iPhone 5S costs Apple about $199 to build. And of course, that doesn't account for things like the cost of developing the software, or operating the servers that supply service to these devices.

why is paying by phone so much better than with plastic?

One less thing to carry around. No need to hunt for the right card. Fingerprint sensors rather than having to enter a PIN. The ability to incorporate new features with a software update. The ability for your phone to keep track of your payment history instead of relying on what your bank tells you. All kinds of features that are possible with a proper CPU and data storage behind it.

Cards are essentially dumb custom hardware that do a job in the cheapest manner possible. If cards weren't already pervasive and somebody came along offering the choice between cards and phones, everybody would be questioning why on earth you would pick cards.

USB's installed base is in the billions. Thunderbolt's biggest problem is a relatively small installed base

If they are changing the connector type, there is absolutely no reason to consider the installed base of USB. USB-with-C-type-connectors has an installed base of zero, not billions.

Why are you ranting about Stallman's ideology preventing a stable API? Stallman's got no say over the Linux kernel. Torvalds decided on the Linux API policy, and it was for pragmatic reasons not ideological ones.

Any idea where the REST API documentation is? I can't seem to find it anywhere.

MailChimp? Campaign Monitor? Google Groups?

It may be the most popular open-source mailing list manager, but that's not what was claimed.

Actually iPhone sales have been falling.

They sold 37.4m iPhones in 2013Q2 and 43.7m iPhones in 2014Q2. That's a year-over-year increase of about 16%.

I'm afraid you fell for a classic misleading graph.

I didn't fall for anything, that article is just dumb. It makes no sense to compare quarterly reports with immediately preceding quarterly reports for highly seasonal products like the iPhone because different quarters perform differently.

Of course if you look at the numbers that way in early September 2013 you're going to see decline - that year's iPhone model was released in late September. iPhone sales spike after launch and during the holidays, tail off through the rest of the year, then spike again when the next model is released. You can only gauge trends properly if you compare year-over-year numbers. And the year-over-year numbers show that iPhone sales are continuing to grow.