Banks are happy because there is biometric auth for the transaction, meaning they can go in and say "oh, you're saying that there was fraud on your account, but this transaction came from your iPhone and was authenticated by your thumbprint... So, can you please explain how this is possible before we move forward with reversing this charge for you?" That's incredibly valuable for banks, hence the lower rates for transactions!

Than opening wallet, removing card and swiping it, entering a pin / signing a signature, returning it to your wallet versus just touching a device to a reader and having your device authenticate via your fingerprint / continuous biometrics?
Yeah, that is so much easier. Plus, there's the general liability concern with the transaction being biometric secured versus someone stealing your card. There's obviously some interest in why banks are interested in this detail for sure, hence why they even implemented single transaction card numbers.

Further, the "wage" payments were just the differences between their dollar and change an hour rate and minimum wage for technical work that would require a skilled employee. So, even that is a slap on the wrist. And there was no concept of "time and a half" or whatever else for the mandatory 120hr week slave conditions for these employees. As such, the lesson taught was very much a "just don't get caught next time" one.

Oh, good. My slow-clap processor made it into this thing. So we have that.

Not necessarily. There is the very limited section of the market for which a fitness tracker is an ideal device, and for them a device which has the capabilities like the Apple Watch actually looks like it could be pretty nice. There are even verticals such as those with diabetes where continual optical monitoring of blood glucose levels or heart arrhythmia through infrared pulses can be extremely positive. These considerations are things that have not yet been incorporated into a device like FitBit or Up, despite it being great functionality that could work very well in those areas! Frankly, the current state of assistive devices for those with legitimate medical conditions is a joke and largely has stalled in technological advancement since the late 90's. Smart watches and similar form factor devices can be immensely useful for improving the quality of lives for people who suffer with legitimate medical conditions who the market largely ignores due to existing technologies that are declared "good enough" by their respective research and development teams.

However, yes, as a communications device, a 1 inch screen is not a very practical form factor and as long as a device whether it be from Apple, Motorola, LG, Samsung, or any of the other companies for that matter that are releasing Smart Watches to the market continue to fall into that mindset of "this let's us sell people an 9" smartphone next year through overcoming the difficulty of removing it from one's pocket to see 'why did my phone just buzz'?" then these devices will continue to be largely ignored in the marketplace.

Except, there have been screen (or rather the lenses with digitizers) produced that were tested via optical spectroscopy and validated to be comprised of sapphire, and of the dimensions of the iPhone 6 displays. Those didn't just appear out of thin air, they were manufactured by *someone*, and as such it is reasonable make the leap that when Apple paid GTAT $578M upfront to ramp up large scale sapphire production through the addition of enough furnaces that it could produce enough sapphire that would enable the production of roughly 110M iPhone class displays per year by volume that GTAT would be the party *producing* said displays instead of *some unknown other party*, or that the speculation regarding the part in-hand was simply wrong.

More plausible explanations are that GTAT was either behind schedule and would have risked Apple pushing back their iPhone release date, or that the quality of the product offered was not of the level that had been promised, including the durability concerns / shatter resistances of Sapphire Crystal versus a more traditional silica glass.

Don't be daft. Everyone has at least a loose association with a government official, and that's what's being asserted here. A friend of a friend was a Russian Government official, thereby the whole thing must be their fault! Couldn't possibly be that it was "because we could", or "because it looked like easy money", or "because they were acting in a criminal syndicate"... Nope, we need a new enemy and ISIS isn't scary enough and China owns too much of our debt, so Russia it is!

Nissan Cube? Loved by a vocal minority, outside that group considered exceptionally stupid looking, boxy, and difficult to operate, and discontinued for 2015 citing poor sales?

Tesla made 750m in profits last year off of 40,000 Model S sales.
GM made 31.8m in profits last year off of 130,000 Nissan Leaf sales alone.

Tesla is generating 3 billion dollars per year in revenue, and of that 750 million is profit.
All of GM combined is generating 155.42 billion dollars per year in revenue, and of that 1.087 billion is profit.
If Tesla sells an additional 18,000 cars per year (58,000 total), they will surpass GM's Combined Yearly Profit.

That is why Tesla is doing well in the stock market, considering that they don't need much staff to build their products, they just build what is already sold, and they don't need to sell many cars to generate a lot of profit for their investors.

Tesla actually has a significant profit margin per car sold (25%) versus GM at 0.7% for this latest quarter across all of their divisions. That's where the massive disparity comes from. When you can sell luxury cars at a much higher price with much higher margins, volume doesn't mean dick.

Hence why it is the "good enough fallacy" as opposed to actually being a good solution.

The general consensus that Consumer Reports seems to be getting at here is that the results that they observed shows that while the iPhones do bend, the amount of force required to do so results in phones from other manufacturers simply breaking under the stresses involved. It also appears that Apple may have done some investigation into the engineering behind what is "good enough" behind the stresses that a phone needs to endure, much as traditional building codes have adopted. Looking back into the past, there have been great feats of engineering that have stood the tests of time and survived admirably, and a large part of that has been due to being "over engineered" than what was technically required, or from a simple lack of knowledge at the time of what really *needed* to be done to withstand the rigors of severe, gail force winds, earthquakes, or the like. Apple has fallen into the fallacy of "good enough" in an effort to reduce materials used, lower production costs, ease manufacturing, and all the while use those traits to leverage themselves as a positive for why the casing is thinner than ever before, lighter than ever before, and yet the product is now bigger than ever before. Less material, less weight, less volume, greater screen size... Uh. Something had to give *somewhere*, hence a product that is now less sturdy than it was a year ago. As such, they are likely going to have an increased number of warranty claims this year compared to previous years due to the folding potential at the structural weak point between the opposite inserts for the volume and power buttons.

Frankly, this is more a sign that they may have reached the point that using a highly malleable metal like Aluminum simply isn't a great choice and will ultimately lead to further structural issues like this in the future in the push for ever thinner, lighter devices that was exacerbated a little earlier than I expected due to the moving of the Power button. Long term though, there are ultimately ways around this through shifting to alloys, polycarbonates or carbon fiber and employing more complex geometry into the design, such as a honeycomb configuration as to allow for force to be dissipated through the surface rather than through a sudden catastrophic failure as they are seeing with the iPhone 6 Plus design due to the structural weak points of the recessed volume and power buttons on opposite sides of the casing that will itself only get worse over time. Should the buttons themselves been raised outwards so that they were not flush with the case or staggered so they were not adjacent with each other, while not being as aesthetically pleasing it would have resulted in a stronger, more durable product and I think that's ultimately the point for something that is intended to be with someone 24/7 for the next 2 years of their life.

End result is that life sure is easier for an armchair engineer to sit back and look in on why something failed than it is to see the forest when you're trying to make every branch on each tree "elegant".

Loan sharks no longer exist because they couldn't dream of getting the 350-1500+% APR interest rates depending on the loan size!!! Check cashing and payday loan places ARE the new legalized loan sharks and they're worse than ever!

Yes. That is how it "should" be! So why then did the contract on my new Ford Focus I bought direct from them a while back run 36 pages of impenitrable legalese? The contract with my builder to build my house wasn't that long! If one were to truly expected to understand said contracts and terms, they would be given additional paper to flowchart dependencies and several hours rather than a few minutes to sign and move on with everyone's day. These contracts are intentionally convoluted and difficult to understand by design. Creating plain text documents means that people would understand that they are agreeing to not sue the Manufacturer if theres a problem with the car that they don't agree is a problem.

Except when under such significant velocity, one experiences weightlessness. While yes, there is a gravity field nearby, the localized inertial forces counteract it's effects. As a result, the information obtained would be for all intents and purposes equivalent to that obtained when a significant distance away from a celestial body.