"Actually, as many review comparisons have noted over the years, Apple's products are priced only a very little bit higher than what other PC manufacturers offer given the exact same hardware"

This is true. But give a PC buyer a choice between a PC that comes with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, thunderbolt, wireless 802.11ac, and 4 usb 3 ports at one price and another PC with the SAME CPU and RAM and harddrive but comes with wifi keyboard and mouse, no thunderbolt, wireless-n, and 2usb3 ports + 2usb2 ports that costs $300+ less and nearly all them will have no reason to justify the expense of the premium model.

That is the issue with Macs. They sell you stuff you don't need, don't care about, and can't use. Wireless-ac being forced down our throats for example... what home user cares about it? What is it going to talk to at 1.3GPs? Or bluetooth peripherals? wifi gear is half the price, tends to do better on battery -- hell logitech makes solar wifi keyboards now. Or thunderbolt?Why exactly is every imac user paying for two of them? I've yet to meet a single home user with a single thunderbolt peripheral.

Save one -- bunches of pissed of macbook pro owners who need a thunderbolt to ethernet dongle because apple didn't deign to give a pro laptop a built in network port.

It's already been pointed out to you that in the presentation they also compared with the last iPad. So the information you're whining about was there

Indeed. It turns out I'm only complaining about the slashdot summary, and reporting of the event, not the event itself.

I guess I'm not surprised. :)

I think what annoys people are lame reboots like Robocop

Crappy movies are crappy.

I liked the Dredd remake far more than the Stallone original. And I enjoy both Total Recall movies. I'm not of the opinion that once a book or franchise has been done, that it necessarily must never be done again. (Sure I'd be upset if that's ALL they did, but its not...so I'm not.)

Hell, I'm anxiously waiting for enough time to pass for them to considering doing another Minority Report adaptation because the one we have now utterly ruined it.

or the fact that they made three shit Spiderman movies and then decided to make another three that were only marginally better due to contractual obligations.

True. On the other hand nobody made me watch them all, and I only bothered with the first 2 of the six, and of those only thought the first was worth watching, and only then because of Molino and Dafoe .:)

" Lego movies are proof of the death of creativity."

Given that half the message of the movie was to encourage people to be creative I don't think your complaint holds a lot of water.

" Them little plastic bricks are expensive."

On the upside they seem to last pretty much forever, and buying assorted bulk on craigslist and ebay works well when you just want to add some 'mass' to your lego pile. :)

Lets see the last several movies I went to:

Lego movie -- creative and fun movie, based on lego, of course, but I didn't see that on your list of complaints.

Guardians of the Galaxy -- comic book inspired (although I'd never read nor heard of it before)

Edge of Tomorrow -- unless it was a Japanese remake this seemed pretty original. Sure it had elements of Groundhog day but to call it a reboot of groundhog day would be stretching it. ;)

Wreck-It-Ralph -- original, featured 2ndary characters from a variety of existing games

Hobbit II - based on the Hobbit and LotR appendixes + sequel

Hunger Games 2 - book adaptation / sequel? (or just adaptation of book 2?)

Looper - original work?

Django - original?

Star Trek Into Darkness - reboot/remake and sequel all in one

Despicable Me 2 - original sequel

Frozen - original (and ok, by now its probably clear I have kids)

Hugo - original?

Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy - apparently a book adaptation

Seriously -- while I don't dispute that there are a lot of reboots and sequels and such out there, there's lots of good original work and/or novel adaptations that aren't sequels and reboots. Overall I'd say this has been a great decade...

The original poster (me) didn't say that because it wasn't in the summary. That its twice as fast as the previous ipad air actually WOULD have been reasonably interesting. 12x as fast as the original ipad is meaningless marketing propaganda fluff.

The point is that its 12x faster than an ipad 1. That's several generations ago, and pretty much obsolete.

When a new Porsche 911 comes out, the interesting question for buyers is how it compares to last years 911, not the original one from 1963.

A big bunch of nothing exciting.

Oooo... an ipad 12x faster than the "original ipad" ... gee... what kind of bullshit marketing is that? Maybe Intel should do that, the recent i7 4770K wasn't impressively faster than the 3770K... maybe they should have compared it to the original Pentium D or something.

Oooo... an imac with a retina display... only reason its even theoretically interesting is that thanks to there being no way to buy a half decent desktop mac without buying that ridiculous tube is to get stuck with their lousy all-in-one form factor.

I'm not especially anti-apple, but this isn't really news. Oh, look, Dell announced an new 13" XPS laptop, and $20 off on Inspirons under $500 ... we should put that on the front page too.

There would be a LOT less of this if you simply enacted no-fault divorce.

A lot less of this sure, but I'm not sure that would be more equitable.

Now someone can betray your trust, maybe even give you an STD they picked up screwing around, get pregnant, become addicted to drugs or some combination of all that... and then when you leave them they take half your stuff, plus alimony, child support too (perhaps not even for your child)?

Is that equitable?

Oh and they've decided they want your dog too... the one they don't give a shit about but you love, and are just demanding it to be spiteful...

Yeah, divorce courts going to be ugly, even with no-fault as the reason.

It's going to happen regardless.

So is cheating at school, or plagiarism, or fishing without a license, or bullying, or vandalism, or gossiping about the neighbors. That doesn't mean we need or should celebrate apps to facilitate any of those.

Many argue that monogamy isn't a natural state for humans.

Nobody forcing people to get married and take vows of monogamous fidelity.

For many people, the mistake was in the decision to get married in the first place

Agreed. And the solution is to terminate the marriage not lie to and betray your partner.

When I see TV ads for websites which are pretty blatant about the fact that you're there to have an affair, it's pretty evident there's a market for it.

There being a market for it doesn't make it right, or moral, or even acceptable. If you want multiple partners, fine, but find partners who are ok with that arrangement. Don't find partners who aren't ok with that arrangement and then do it anyway behind their backs. Its really that simple.

Looney Tunes, Bugs, Elmer Road Runner etc...THOSE were cartoons.

And flinstones and jetsons... but while the looney toons violence is timeless... the flintstones humor hasn't aged well.

And Rocket Robin Hood and Hercules were from the same era and were shit.

Point is not everything pre-1970 was good, even if it was the golden age.

But yeah, the 70s and 80s had some hits ... smurfs, transformers, tom and jerry etc... but sure the end of the 80s was pretty bad... Smoggies remains fixed in my mind as the pinnacle of PC schlock.

But it rebounded, those died off, as even kids wouldn't watch them. And lots of 90s cartoons are solid ... from Tiny Toons and Animaniacs to Talespin, Darkwing Duck, The Tick, Dexters Lab....

And there's lots of good shows on today. Gravity Falls, Adventure Time, Phineas and Ferb to name a few...

Political correctness destroyed the Saturday morning cartoon

In a word no. What destroyed the "Saturday Morning Cartoon" is quite simply that the majority of people who want to watch cartoons have cable or satellite with 24 hour cartoon networks. It wasn't the internet or political correctness or streaming.

When I was a kid, saturday morning was about the only block of cartoons I could watch we lived around them in a sense. My kids? Have cartoon network, and ytv... they aren't going to even think to switch it to NBC or something for a 4 hour block once a week...

The internet and streaming, sure just more nails in the coffin, but it was already dead.

And Political correctness? Sure it set cartoons back in the late 80s, but its been 20 years since; and there are cartoons out now that are better than ever.

Voice recognition that runs locally will not be nearly as good as the cloud version.

I'm ok with that. There's really only a small subset of commands I want to be processed locally -- to send some canned responses when driving etc, call a contact or dial a number.

very Asimov too, as it turns out.

Not only is knowledge of the second foundation given to the first as a nudge, but later on the first is set up to eliminate a decoy second foundation as another nudge, while protecting the real second foundation.

In this instance, the more Google succeeds, the better the products are.

Hardly. I like Android. But I'm not such a big fan of Google.

The play store being installed is fine, and I'd actively like maps installed.

I readily accept that the phone should come with email and a browser but I prefer other browsers to chrome and actively despise the gmail app. So I'd like to be able to easily remove both once I've got something else in place.

I also have no use for hangouts, or google+, play newstand, and I'm not even sure what the other 10+ bloatware apps I've failed to think of entirely would be.

Plus I prefer the samsung calendar app to the google one. So the "bloatware" isn't all bloatware. And if google forces google apps including specifying their placement then that kills oems ability to innovate and differentiate.

For example, I don't want to say "ok google" for voice. The phrase itself irritates me -- but above that I don't want to talk to google. I want to talk to my phone, and I don't want my voice requests to be sent to google as a matter of course. So I'm in the market for alternative voice option that run locally, don't need to talk to google, and won't talk to google unless i specifically ask it to find something in google maps or to do a google search.

So no, the more google succeeds the more like an iphone the products are. If I wanted an iphone, I'd have bought one.

You guys make it sound like making millions in the stock market is dead simple. All your posts are missing is a link to an ebook that tell you all the secrets.

Its not dead simple at all I know this, and there aren't really any real secrets either. The point stands that if someone beats the market by a lot its probably more luck than brains.

Its like blackjack or poker. The people who 'win' are generally good players, understand the game, are disciplined, etc. I'm sure this guy is all of these things. But winning big? Its just luck. Every trade is a calculated risk -- and probability theory dictates that if you have a bunch of traders all doing this, some will break even, some will lose it all, and some will win big... even if they all play EXACTLY as well as each other. Its just math.

In fact, day trading as a profession is a fanscinating selection bias -- as some of them lose they stop trading so the ones that are still doing it are the ones who haven't lost yet so any survey of the field at any time is mostly people who are "doing ok or better". (Because anyone doing poorly has had to dropped out.)

Of course some are better at it than others, and the ones who aren't good at it are more likely to lose and be forced to drop. So the ones still doing it are at least 'good at it'. And as I said, I don't doubt that this person is good at it. But spectacular success is as much luck as anything.

To put it another way...

Lets say I put an opportunity in front of you and you correctly determine the risk as being 1% chance to quadruple your money, 20% chance of doubling your money, 20% chance to triple it, 49% chance of breaking just above even, 9% chance of losing 50%, 1% chance of losing it all.

Clearly this is a very good bet. 90% of the outcomes are positive, and overall its very net positive. It would be smart to take this bet. So if I present this to a few hundred traders... what happens?

A couple quadruple their money. Are they any smarter or more insightful than the few who lost it all? Why? They all correctly gauged the risk and made the best decision.

I've found that people fundamentally do NOT understand "risk". Whether its the stock market, gambling, their own health care, or IT related risks.

This guy is good at analyzing risk and making smart bets, and he's had good winning streak, but being right about the risk and making the best decisions based on it, doesn't mean the risk isn't there. That he didn't lose is just luck.

Poker is the same way. You can be smart, play well, know all the odds, make all the right calls, and still lose badly.

Even best advisors from open hedge and mutual funds average around 25%.

Hell no they don't. Lots of studies have shown that the top hedge funds don't even consistently beat index funds. And after the management expenses the investor usually ends up behind. Look it up.