Where did the PP state that apple gloss over new product models? I saw no such statement nor sentiment.
What I read between the lines was rather a compliment to Apple, namely that the PP speculated the reported R&D sum for Apple in the report might have been too low compared to the other company numbers. If improvement in OSX, IOS etc. are not counted towards the R&D budget for Apple, while the same kind of spending would be at another company (E.g. Windows 8 for Microsoft), then obviously the reported Apple figure would be too low.

However, speculations and specifics aside, the interesting message in the PP's comment, I think, was "Think about what the numbers mean and whether they are comparable or not to the other numbers in the set". Are apples being compares to other apples (no pun intended) or is the report showing a mixed fruit comparison?

No modpoints today, but I'd have awarded you a "+1 insightful".
Too seldom do people pause and reflect on what the numbers they see actually mean, myself included.

And yet developers are still treated like second class citizens in far too many organizations

Well IT is regarded as a supporting role, same as the girl servicing the coffee machine or the guy mopping the bathroom floor. They're all needed, just not viewed as part of the core business (which regardless of industry tend to be: selling more than last quarter, reducing expense compared to last year, coming up with new processes at least once a year and measuring KPIs for those processes).

I don't know why you would care as a linux user.
You do realize don't you, that when average Joe & Jane get fed up with Microsoft, they tend to move to the other platform with a usable desktop, the walled Apple garden and not Linux?

Rendering faster is cool and all, but for me Firefox 3 and now 4 .. I mean 5 is fast enough.
What I really yearn for is tab isolation. Are you guys doing anything to remedy the problems which surface once you open many tabs ?

The only reason I started using Google Chrome is because FF would simply stall once 30-50 pages were opened in tabs. I'd love to continue using FF due to it being far superior to Chrome in all regards but two; scalability and memory management. That chrome allegedly renders pages faster than FF isn't even in my radar of important factors when choosing between the two browsers. Scalability however is.

Doesn't Australia also have this decease ?

And this helps how?
If a site is overloaded, the service is denied to me. If *my* browser starts to "back off" it exacerbates the problem by increasing the outage I experience.
A site is placed in the net to serve users content and if a user can't access it, then that person is per definition subject to Denial Of Service. A browser constructed with the described mechanism has a defect built in by design.

Then you have nothing to complain about, do you?
Since you know the ad serving is a bottleneck, you must be valuing the advertisement important enough to warrant a slow internet experience...

Kickstarter seems like a very good idea and I'm glad I followed the links related to this particular post.
There are some great minds out there and I hope this sort of venue can help those people pursue what they excel at for the betterment of us all.
Thanks to the ./ post, this "One man's quest" received some additional coin from me as well, since I consider his track-record impressive enough to warrant belief in his next enterprise.

Are you seriously questioning the ethics of allowing patents describing *new*, ahead-of-their-time (non obvious) kind of stuff ?
That's precisely the kinds of patents I would like to see if we're to have a patent system at all, since ground breaking ideas pull civilization forward.
Not that I'm saying *this* particular pattern is ground breaking, I haven't read it, but your sentiment seems to be that since it was filed looong before most of us had a clue, then its somehow unethical !?.

What we do not want are patents which attempt to monopolize the obvious and the stuff of yesterday since those are the kinds that pull society in the other direction.

A 'White Hat' hacker is someone who aims to improve security

That statement leaves the definition up to a point of view.
From the US PoV this could well be seen as a white hat activity as the aim is to serve USGov interests, while from the targets PoV it would be deemed black hat. A Russian counterpart of this company would by your reasoning be a black-hat company from a US perspective but a white-hat (good) from Medvedev's, since it poses a threat to the USGov agenda and serves the RusGov's.

Well three actually: Data != Knowledge

Data processed may turn into information.
Information when consumed by an individual may turn into knowledge.

The sum of the world's knowledge is therefore not measurable since it resides in the minds of individuals, not in books or other recorded material.

Can you please elaborate on the problem you see?
I failed to see it (must be daft).

What is preventing you from sending in a patent application and then go talk to you colleagues / send papers to the academia press?
Wouldn't it be a good thing to be able to just "fire and forget" a patent application and then go on with your life and do all the academic stuff you enjoy, without having to worry about who might next emerge from under the bushes and make your life miserable?

Equates to my building and one of our neighboring ones. With 1 Gbps per apartment I fail to see the awe aspiring in the "accomplishment" from that perspective.
Assuming it wasn't my neighbors who got hacked and that the world's 500 million connected households have an average of 1Mbit/s uplink capacity, the feat might be interesting from another perspective than the consumed bandwidth; being able to orchestrate 100k drones without being traced. That's pretty cool since there must have been quite a couple of decoy routers and mechanisms in place to prevent tracing the origin of an orchestration like that. "Secret" command and control center of modern warfare, cloak and a 100k daggers.

Perhaps the USG should track these people down and recruit them in order to bolster the forces for their War On Internet (their goals seem aligned after all).

Fine Oracle, give Apache a JCK already !
Do that and they will have a reason to care about the future of Java.