Because it's a pain in the ass to have to keep the old console hooked up / get it out of the closet for those occasions when you want to play an old game.

The question is why. What has Yahoo actually done in the last year to justify a near doubling of their share price? Have they put out a new product that everyone loves which is making them gobs of money? Unless you consider canceling work-from-home and paying out a shitload of money for a half-assed content summarizing app stroke of genius ...

I think Harrison Ford would actually be in complete agreement with you. I recall an interview with him where he was recounting his early career and how he eventually became a big name actor. Basically, in a minor role as a bus boy, he had been pulled aside by a movie exec and told that he didn't have the 'star power' required to make it in Hollywood. The exec cited another popular actor of the era and said that he was easily recognizable as a star, even in a similar minor role. Ford replied something like "I thought the audience was supposed to be seeing a bus boy, not a movie star".

I managed to find part of the interview here:
http://www.biography.com/people/harrison-ford-9298701/videos
Relevant bit starts 40 seconds in, but unfortunately it does not include Ford's rebuttal to the exec.

Yea, I actually gave Apple too much credit by implying that these attributes were rolled into a single design patent. They were all distinct but asserted simultaneously against Samsung during the trial as a combination of design and utility patents.

Let me ask though, do you think that strengthens or weakens the validity of design patents? I mean, did you even look at the ornamental tablet design patent you're linking to above? Completely devoid of any specific or unique characteristics whatsoever .... just a drawing of a thin rectangular device with a screen, no buttons even.

Your post is the ejaculation of a frothing fanboy.

By asserting that the 'rounded corners' critique is invalidated simply by pointing to multiple claims in a design patent, you might be the one repeating an ignorant meme here. If NONE of the claimed attributes are unique on their own (rounded corners, beveling, device face comprised mostly of screen, small number of buttons, rectangular grid of icons, etc.) and various combinations of them have been widely used in other electronic devices over the past 50 years, how does one magically end up with a truly unique design? Piling up on dozens of commonplace look-and-feel features does not increase uniqueness. It seems more like an attempt to limit competition by monopolizing a basic design that the industry is already converging on.

Double-blind experiments are a tiny subset of the types of studies which happen in engineering and science. Yes, they do serve the useful purpose of mitigating 'fudging' of the results by the subjects and the researchers themselves, which is important when the chances of conflict of interest or bias are high (such as with drug trials).

As has been pointed out though, there are significant benefits to having researchers be more hands-on with their experiments. These range from making sure the experimental plan is being properly followed, sanity checks on the measured data (before weeks are wasted gathering bad data), revisions to the plans or equipment if required, coming up with additional tests in a slightly modified setup to verify any 'surprises' in the data, etc. You might be surprised at how often overlooked issues are discovered just by the person being there.

Of course, if you're one of those people who thinks every researcher is going to fudge data, compute a thousand different test statistics to fit their preconceived outcomes, modify the experiment in senseless ways until it gives them the outcomes they want, hide data that doesn't fit a certain model, etc., then I doubt any system of experimentation is going to be good enough for you.

You make a very strong point. There are often statistical and mathematical modeling assumptions that the researchers are aware of ahead of time, subtle pitfalls in the experimental setup that must be avoided to produce the type of data needed, etc., that the technicians/engineers will be unaware of unless the researchers themselves are directly involved in the experiments. By the same token, it's a good idea to have an engineer involved in the data collection review the research prior to publication to catch any obvious flaws in the modeling assumptions or misuse of the data (even if he doesn't understand everything in the paper). 'Separation of duties' is something that comes from laziness or time/budget constraints rather than being a template for solid scientific work.

You make the assumption that a long list of authors indicates a truly collaborative research effort. In practice, this is very rarely the case. From my experience, nine times out of ten the work is done completely by the primary author or the first two authors. The rest of the authors are supervisors, technical managers, those who secured the funding, possibly a technician who assisted with the experiments, etc., who never even lay eyes on the paper until it's basically finished.