So what are VanRoekel and Park looking for? 'Bad a** innovators â" the baddest a** of the bad a**es out there,' Park explained (video), 'to design, create, and kick a** for America.'

They sound like teenagers.

Also, good job fucking up Unicode yet again, Slashdot. It's been how many years?

You don't know the exact dialogue between the journalist and the rep. I've been quoted in print in similarly stupid ways when what I said made absolute sense in context to what was asked. "Pressed if disks are accepted" could have been something like the rep telling them about a new CSV import tool they had built, the journalist saying "So if I mailed you a 5TB database on a disk, could you import that?", and the rep replying "Sure, but you'd need to export the data first...".

I have to chime in here. I think there's a lot of money to be made with outsourcing. I've seen a staggering amount of money spent on contractors who come in to rescue projects that have been outsourced.

It's okay, when they add the 101st station, the whole thing will spontaneously evolve to match the structure they describe.

Some of it probably went towards building Facebook apps. I've seen a lot of big brands build pointless Facebook apps to promote things via games, competitions, etc. They've got big advertising budgets and not much imagination, so they throw a tonne of it at digital agencies to come up with this crap. The agencies are more than happy to keep quiet and take their money instead of telling them they shouldn't be doing that.

I can't think of any company that has blown a lead as huge as Microsoft's in as short a time, or has missed so thoroughly a major trend (mobile computing) in the consumer portion of it's market.

I can think of a company that's done a lot worse than Microsoft missing the boat on mobile. Microsoft missing the boat on the Internet. They thought they could compete by providing their own network instead. Except it wasn't Ballmer in charge back then, it was Bill Gates. Was he a terrible CEO too?

The very last DVD I bought, years ago, had unstoppable trailers. I haven't bought a DVD since, on principle.

Good job, movie execs. You've made your products even less palatable compared to your black market competitors. Not only do the people downloading illegally not have to pay, they also get a better product that doesn't force them to sit through this crap. I'm sure this plan won't backfire at all.

So how the F%^& is FB going to be allowed to put an App store on iOS unless its jail broken?

Facebook aren't launching an App Center to sell iOS applications, they are launching an App Center to sell Facebook applications. Facebook applications are basically web applications that are presented through Facebook's interface. The only hurdles Facebook face with iOS are a) making sure their app developers present interfaces suitable for small screens and b) making sure there's no link to buy the apps from within their native application (or else give Apple a 30% cut).

Umm... Apple never quite succeeded in that "changing the living room" promise not because of any real failure on their own part, but because of the content industry's stubbornness.

Actually, it's because they never promised that in the first place. Apple's only product aimed specifically at the living room is AppleTV, which they have consistently referred to as a "hobby".

This is yet another case of people speculating about Apple's plans to give free puppy-pony-unicorn hybrids to everybody for free, and then turning around a year later and complaining that Apple didn't live up to the speculation.

Apple is not the one "selling" the apps and then charging with IAP, the software developers are.

No, Apple are the ones selling the applications. You download them from Apple, and you have to pay Apple. They act as a publisher.

Why would so many people buy free pay-to-play games?

What's confusing about this? It's just like a demo. You get some stuff for free to try it out, and if you like it, you pay for the rest. Or you can just keep playing the free version.

There should be an easy way in settings to ban all in-ap purchases

Settings > General > Restrictions > In-App Purchases > Off.

identify the in-ap enabled games on the ap browser so you'll never accidentally get one

If you look at an application in the App Store, you'll see "Top In App Purchases" for applications that have in-app purchases.

you could still end up buying based solely on the picture

That's your own damn fault then.

The game does not have to tell you that it is going to charge your account. It simply asks for a password.

That's not true. When a developer implements in-app purchases, he has to call out to Apple's code, which does the purchase. Apple's code prompts you for the purchase and tells you the cost at that point. Developers can't bypass that. Furthermore, Apple place restrictions on what developers can do leading up to that moment - you can't even hard-code the price, you have to retrieve the price from Apple and display that.

Then you would be forced to use safari, something that would be a bit monopolistic.

I said:

They should just integrate it with Safari and provide extensions/specifications for other browsers.

...specifically for this reason.

Secondary issue (or primary if you already use safari as your main browser) is that now Safari would be bloated.

Not really. The vast majority of memory and CPU usage for browsers is accounted for by the pages themselves. You could probably implement a web-based app store with a couple of pseudo-protocols and calling out to a system component, which isn't too far off how links to apps open in iTunes from your browser already. The "bloat" needed for something like that would be negligible.

I'd like to drop most of the applications altogether. The stores are just a dumb shell over WebKit. I've lost count of the number of times I've wanted to use a Safari feature in an app store like opening a bunch of apps in new tabs. They should just integrate it with Safari and provide extensions/specifications for other browsers. Same goes for Steam. Christ Adobe Air is terrible. You're only surfing a website under the hood, might as well not do a completely shitty job of it.

Who is to say this isn't a program of desensitisation

Sounds like a good thing, people are far too sensitive at the moment.

Anyway, what would the point of desensitisation be? If you want to blow someplace up and you don't want people to evacuate, you don't conduct a protracted campaign of desensitisation so that they'll ignore your bomb threat, you just don't issue the bomb threat.