It's not that complicated. Your personal sharp brake count can be compared to the average count of all drivers in the area. Random events happen to everybody, but if it somehow happens to you a lot more, then either you are extraordinarily unlucky, or you're a bad driver. Either way the insurance company would want you to pay more, assuming they can correlate this behavior with actual accident rates.

Prolonging the inevitable doesn't make it any less inevitable.

That's not actually true. Even just breaking even means that you don't have to lay off employees with important skills and knowledge, and watch them go work for competitors. It means buying yourself some time for R&D to catch up. It means time for a competitor or two to make a mistake. People forget how many years Apple struggled with "inevitable" bankruptcy, that as recently as 2003 you could've had a share of AAPL for $7.

It's not as if Obama has strayed at all from his predecessor's policies on war, executive supremacy, and foreign policy.

Obama got the Arab League* to endorse the no-fly zone over Libya, and got the Europeans flying many of the missions, for a final cost of about $2 billion and no known American lives. Does that sound even remotely like either of Bush's wars?

* Which, mind you, is not only Arab and Muslim like Libya, but also mostly dealing with internal dissent themselves, and are obviously wary of Western intervention themselves. How eager do you suppose they were to throw Libya under the bus?

A no-name company with a skeevy CEO, a custom OS instead of Android or something more well-supported? Maybe at $100, or possibly even $200.

I fear your expectations for a $100 tablet may be a bit high.

I really don't see how my reader could be significantly improved.

In no particular order:

1. The background color of e-ink is not ideal, and should be able to display something resembling white, if not actually a user-selectable color.
2. The resolution of e-ink can be improved, at least to 300 dpi or so.
3. While the flashing refresh is bearable, it's obviously not ideal.
4. Depending on what you're reading, rich color.

Yes, because the bleeding hearts couldn't stand seeing it locally, so they got rid of polluters, sweatshops, abusive management. IF we could export those guys to China, they would clean up China, which is pretty much a hellhole. Better than it was 10 years ago, but still a hellhole..

If that's the kind of country you want to live in, seems to me it'd be more efficient to move you to China than to send the "bleeding hearts" to transform China.

Can't we just face the reality that some races are actually better are certain things than others due to millions of years of evolution?

You misunderstand the reported problem entirely.

Even if we assume your assertion is correct, the average still means nothing in this context. Even if 2% of white people have IQ of 130 but only 1% of black people do (numbers entirely made up for illustration purposes), we would expect the 1% to be approximately as successful as the 2%. If they aren't, then we might reasonably want to understand why.

The tallest woman was 2.48m tall. Would you expect her to be shorter than a 2.48m-tall man, just because women are shorter than men on average?

Manned exploration may be really expensive, but if we can do it right I think it would be far far more efficient than robotic probes.

What about robotic probes that cost half or even about as much as manned exploration? The choice isn't just between tiny rovers and astronauts.

You mean the Xerox that "was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product", according to Wikipedia?

Make no mistake if they didn't have to - they wouldn't have.

WebKit was created in 2002 with IIRC about 400,000 lines of KHTML code. While this is a good chunk of code, let's not kid ourselves that this represents something Apple couldn't have written from scratch to keep closed. Still, Apple presumably saved some development effort, and the resulting code is enjoyed by many - including Nokia and later Android. How biased do you have to be to turn a win-win-win story for open source software into a snide comment?