What evidence do you have that Iran would almost certainly attempt a first strike?

Iran's rulers are well aware that any attack they launched on Israel would receive an overwhelming response. I don't buy into the idea that Iran's rulers are a bunch of manic religious nuts that will suicide their entire country just to kill a bunch of Israelis.

Sure, they don't like Israel, but their biggest concern is maintaining their own position of power. They see nukes as a deterrent to keep outside forces from removing them from power. That's not to say that it's a good idea to let them have them, but I don't think it's a doomsday scenario either.

Do you play a lot of console games with a mouse?

There are already machines that can 3D print out of various types of metal. I haven't heard of glass printers, but I'm sure they'll appear eventually.

They've been building a new billion dollar data center for the past couple years in North Carolina. I supposed they could've just decided to spend some money on a giant air conditioned building full of computers just for the heck of it, but it seems more likely that it was part of some bigger plan, maybe to provide some new online services or something like that.

And what exactly would Apple gain by doing this?

Why would Apple want to sell you just one thing when they can sell you two different things? They're both selling like crazy, and they're both selling at a profit.

Why would Apple want to significantly raise the barrier to entry for iOS development?

Because iOS sucks for certain types of tasks. There are some things that a touchscreen interface will never be that good for.

Why does a unified mobile and desktop OS seem logical? I mean, sure, it'd be awesome if there was one basic interface that worked great for everything. It'd also be great if my scissors could also staple, dispense tape, and make copies. But in reality, devices that try to do everything end up doing everything poorly.

Apple is going to keep OSX around and sell Macs for as long as people keep buying them, and they're selling them faster now than they ever have before. They sold 3.7 million macs last quarter, and their computers have some of the best profit margins in the industry.

Why would Apple want to just sell someone an iphone when they could sell them an iphone and a macbook?

Having MacOS as an option allows the iphone/ipad to get away with not doing everything. There are some things that a touchscreen will never do as well as a real keyboard and mouse, and there are lots of people who still need to do those things.

Because, for various reasons including the ones that the parent post described, a lot of games these days are not shipping with mod tools.

This isn't groundbreaking info by any means, but it is a nice thing, and I'm sure plenty of people who like playing around with game modding are happy to hear about it.

BC2 is a pretty great game, but I feel like the battlefield series has lost a little bit of its charm. In BF1942, there was just always the goofiest stuff happening, which I guess broke immersion a good bit, but it really amusing. Planes crashing into all manner of things, ships doing weird stuff, people getting run down by all manner of vehicles.

BC2 just seems to have way less of those unexpected moments, and when they do happen they seem to happen so fast that it's hard to tell what's going on. Plus a lot of people seem to take it more seriously, and are more likely to get pissed off when they should be laughing. Although the regular game play is definitely solid.

While Apple's making money hand over fist with it iOS devices, it's also selling macs as fast as it ever has, and making a healthy pile of money from selling full blown computers.

Right now Apple is selling people more limited iOS devices, and then selling a bunch of those same people real computers with OS X. Although there's obviously some savings to be had if they unified it all under just iOS, they'd also be killing an established, growing, and profitable line of products. Why would the want to just sell you an iOS device when they could sell you an iOS device and an OS X device too?

Apple's got some of the best selling hardware in the industry with the highest margins in the industry. There's no way they're going to risk killing that in exchange for maybe making 30% of 3rd party software sales on an app store that has generally been driving software prices down.

Since we got iPhones, and eventually an iPad, the real loser in my household has been the Nintendo DS, which went from being the usual way to wind down before sleep or to kill a little time on a lazy saturday afternoon, to being basically a paper weight.

Angry Birds and the like are just as compelling, well suited to short play times, offer about the same portability on similar or bigger screens, and way way cheaper. Even if you choose to ignore the many quality and totally free games on the App Store, you can still purchase 10-30 decent games for the price of a decent DS game. And all of this on a device that's significantly useful for a number of things besides gaming.

I still think there's plenty of space in the market for dedicated gaming machines, but that space is tethered to a big TV. I think smartphones are going to all but own the mobile gaming market in a few years.

It was not uncommon for retailers to refuse to take back any opened software products, because they were concerned about people copying the software to their computer and then returning it to get their money back.

Just like DRM for digital stuff, policies for physical products are often crafted for the dishonest, and the honest people sometimes get shafted as a side effect.

Much of the world works this way, and it's endlessly frustrating.

Sure you can do them on a phone, but they work much better on a tablet.

There's nothing you can accomplish on a 24" screen in Photoshop that you couldn't also accomplish on a 12" screen, but go ahead and try and switch out the monitor on the desk of your nearest graphic designer, and see how they react.

Add in the fact that with these devices you actually interact by touching the screen, and that increased size is even more useful.

Even if your argument is as basic as "Tablets are just a big phone", then I still don't see how that's a particularly damaging complaint. The biggest problem that I have with my phone is that the screen is too small. A tablet goes a long way to solve that.

They can't replace everything seriously, but they can replace many things seriously.

Web browsing on a tablet is good enough for 90% of the people out there.

Email on a tablet is good enough for 90% of the people out there.

Gaming on a tablet is good enough for 90% of the people out there.

Word processing on a tablet is good enough for maybe 50% of the people out there.

Programming on a tablet is good enough for maybe 1% of the people out there.

So they're not good at everything, but they're very decent at a lot of stuff. They are a credible replacement for desktop/laptop computers for a lot of people.

Expecting that you can use your property in any manner you choose is fine. Expecting a manufacturer to make significant design decisions based on your atypical anticipated usage is entitlement.