No, they produce lubricant - there is a difference.

So what exactly has been accomplished here?

Too bad you'll need to upgrade your TI-83 to about 1.2TB of storage space to manipulate the number! And I hope you have some AAs that can last a few years under load...

Sure, and then there's the fact that the iPhone didn't originally have a reasonable subsidy, meaning people had to pay a much higher price than they were used to paying for a subsidized phone. Oh, and the fact that the app store wasn't released until a year later with software 2.0.

Well, by that logic, it could be argued that Apple is being lazy because they don't want to write and support full-featured APIs which can provide a comparable syncing experience to that of an iPod. It could also be argued that Apple deliberately does so, in an effort to coerce buyers into purchasing the iPod because of the better experience. Of course, it would be difficult to put Apple at fault for such action, as iTunes is their own program with which they are free to code as they like - unless, of course, iTunes manages to dominate market share (which I don't think it has, but I'm not sure), in which case they would possess a monopoly of the Music Player and Portable Music Device Syncing software market, and could be at fault for an anti-trust case or unfair competition. But all that really matters at this point is which company has more money.

How about distributing the 25GB image accross 10 MLC SSD drives in a RAID 0 configuration and connecting them all to the computer via SATAII into a SAS card with 3 SAS-4xSATA adapters. With 10 drives, each distributed piece would be 2.5 GB, which should take about 12.5 seconds to transfer if each drive has a transfer speed of around 200MBps, followed by whatever amount of processing time was needed for the file to be rebuilt. It may be cumbersome and require a thick bundle of cables, but it is possible. Here's a similar experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Then you have 2Km of fiber connecting two separate commercial locations - the article is referring to consumer products. Your argument isn't even relevant to the topic at hand.

You do realize spdif is only a protocal and exists in multiple forms, including optical as well as coaxial (there are even rare forms that use BNC or XLR, similar to SMPTE) , and only accounts for 2 data streams (generally audio). If you were going down that path the least you could have said is ADAT - at least that accounts for 8 streams instead of 2.

Correction: You suck at iPhone games. Just because you are too lazy to learn a new control scheme and therefore fail at every attempt to play one of these games doesn't mean that they suck - it means that you suck at playing them.

That was my exact first reaction. It doesn't make sense to me either..

if you have an mp3 player (or an iPod particularly), you probably also have a camera phone

Didn't you hear? The nano can't shoot pictures, only video!