Nonsense. Chinese workers aren't allowed to sleep at night, that's when they work their third 10-hour shift.

For cinema it makes sense, because you want to be immersed in the movie and (if you sit at the right distance) the sides of the movie screen will occupy your peripheral vision.

For computer monitors, OTOH, outside of games and video you are not usually using your peripheral vision much, so wide-screen displays don't make quite so much sense there. The main reason they are commonplace now is that manufacturers are making wide-screen LCD TV displays anyway, and this allows them to produce two different products from the same assembly line.

Why yes, one can -- of course, the exact examples you are looking for depend on what aspects of "Fukushima and Chernobyle" you are asking for coal-mining versions of.

Are you asking about examples of sudden, unexpected disasters causing mass death or destruction of nearby cities? Okay, here are some:

      Ok Tedi disaster
      Buffalo Creek Flood

Or perhaps you are asking about situations in which large numbers of industry workers were killed in an accident? Yep, we've got those too... thousands of coal workers die from accidents every year.

Or maybe you're wondering about if there are entire regions whose ecosystem has been destroyed by coal? Yes, there are.

Or perhaps you are asking about the slow-motion health and environmental damage caused by coal even when everything is working as designed? Yup, there's that as well.

Nuclear certainly has its problems, but coal is much, much, much worse.

Surely they are both? It's not like people go to an Apple store to buy clothes.

(Although come to think of it, a rack of black turtlenecks probably would sell like hotcakes)

Okay, Mr. O'Reilly, I'll give it a shot. Here's the cost breakdown:

$4.99 for the hardware
$30.00 for having someone (allegedly) knowledgable to bring it back to and ask for help when you can't figure out how to make it work.

Still a pretty bad deal IMO, but nobody ever said ignorance was cheap...

I wonder if there is a reason why it has to be so loud... are they running it on diesel or something? Perhaps they could replace its power source with something quieter, e.g. batteries or a fuel cell.

Not a whole lot, but Apple's done the Rosetta thing before, they could probably do it again if they felt it was worth the effort.

What I'd really like to see is a processor-agnostic fat-binary flavor, based on LLVM. That way a single flavor could run on any CPU type, albeit with perhaps a slight delay the first time you run the app, as the LLVM byte-code gets converted into your CPU's native flavor. Given Apple's heavy involvement in the LLVM project, that seems like the obvious way to go if you're going to support more than one or two CPU types. (The alternative, e.g. executable downloads that contain 6 binary flavors, 5 of which each downloader is never going to use, would be a huge waste of bandwidth and disk space)

If Apple wants to use it to differentiate their phones from the competition, then at a minimum it has to not suck -- which (given the sordid history of computer voice recognition) is a higher bar than you might think.

Maybe they did.