I was referring to the ibtimes.com article linked in the summary, where a good portion of the article talks about how Apple's margins are "low" compared to the $199 retail price. For a comparison, look at Canada's Apple Store website: http://store.apple.com/ca/

It's not fair to assume that the consumer is already being shafted and thus discount the base cost. I'm using an unlocked iPhone without data plan for about $15/month but it doesn't make sense to say that, for only $25/month more, I can get a subsidized AT&T iPhone.

Do these people still not know how cellphones are priced? A 8GB iPhone 3GS is about $530, and prices for the iPhone 4 are expected to be $600 to $700. The $199 price quoted in TFA is only after you agree to a ~$2000 contract.

Sounds a bit like Google Sky for Android: You just hold the phone up against the night sky, and it labels the stars in the sky based on your location (via GPS!) and time (sync'd with the cell network). Should you need to find something, the screen will tell you which way to turn.

http://www.google.com/sky/skymap.html

Or maybe you didn't have the gift of exploiting your "giftedness". Some people start a business or invent things or go into research. Maybe it's not that the world didn't know what to do with gifted people, but that these "gifted" people didn't figure out what to do with themselves.

Or blame the world. I'm sure that falls under some high-brow philosophical school of thinking.

That can be a dangerous way of thinking. Suppose that several years ago, you designed a system that relied on the MD5 algorithm for life-critical security on several fronts. After all, since there were no techniques at the time to compromise MD5, you didn't believe it could be done so it was perfectly safe.

Fast forward to 2005. MD5 is broken. Updating your system to use SHA1 is either impossible or would take far too long. Hackers exploit your high-profile system. Santa Claus falls down your chimney.

It's because that we expect that anybody can create new artistic works, so if a particular song you want is under copyright, then you can always create a new one. On the other hand, patents can be critical to industrial and technological progress, and nobody would tell you to simply make your own transistor to work around the original patent. When artistic copyrights start severely holding society back, then this will change. Until then, when was the last time society was severely hurt by a work being under copyright? This isn't an issue of entitlement because nobody will ever agree who's entitled to earn what.

Just name it the ReadsForSure.

You'd be surprised at how much you can do in a tiny amount of memory, and even cheap cellphones have a relatively huge amount of memory. Virus writers who know enough to exploit cellphones could code rings around your average cellphone app programmer. Just take a moment and compare your average cellphone's processing power to nineties-era computers and you'll see that memory-usage is the last thing a cellphone-virus writer needs to worry about.