What a strange reply. As far as bang for one's buck goes, the US healthcare system is severely lagging and pretty much everyone knows this. Perhaps you should go back and read what he had to say instead of spouting nonsense about the need for facts without providing any.

You're gonna have to define "nobody much." Five million sold in 2012 seems like quite a few, especially when compared to the number of set top boxes everyone else has announced selling. Would be interesting to see Chromecast number, though. If Google would release them, of course.

The narrative around Apple has certainly shifted, and this is having a tremendous impact on how people view what Apple is doing. Especially hear on Slashdot, people seem anxious for any sign that Apple is failing. That said, I would argue that the iPhone 5s is just as "groundbreaking" as any phone that's been released in the last few years. The inclusion of a 64-bit processor and the fingerprint reader are sure to be huge selling points, even if most people don't understand what 64-bit means or why it's advantageous.

I agree with you, and disagree with the summary, in stating that the iPhone 5c is almost certainly not a low-margin device. In fact, the very existence of the iPhone 5c seems to be a response to the lower margins Apple has had in selling devices that are one and two years old. The iPhone 5c is an iPhone 5 in lower-cost packaging. This serves to increase Apple's margins. People here like to give Apple a hard time, but the reality is that the iPhone 5 remains not only a usable phone, but a phone that provide a tremendous customer experience. Instead of keeping the iPhone 5 in the lineup and selling it as one of their "cheap" phones (as Apple has done with the releases of their last two flagship phones), they designed a cheaper to manufacture version that has all of the same benefits.

It is true that selling two "new" phones instead of one this year will likely decrease the number of sales for either device individually. That said, I expect that next Monday (after the iPhone 5s has actually gone on sale) there will be a press release indicating that combined sales (and pre-orders) of these two new phones exceeds the initial sale of the iPhone 5. (I'm also prepared to eat crow if I'm wrong.)

Apple, Google, and Facebook have all denied involvement in this. While this does not entirely preclude their involvement, these three companies, much like the government, tend to keep their mouths shut when they're caught with their pants down. Their denial, therefore, should carry at least some weight.

Complete fucking nonsense rated insightful. Apple has an effective tax rate around 24% which I'd venture is higher than most companies. If course, that doesn't fit the anti-Apple narrative.

I think this touches on what is, in fact, the much bigger issue facing society today. While it's true that what you do in a public place is, by definition, a public act, the consequences of such an act have changed dramatically over the last few years. There is a tremendous difference between someone doing something stupid in public that is seen by maybe 10-100 people and then shared via word of mouth and someone doing something in public that is video taped and posted on the internet for countless millions to see. If I'm walking down the street and trip and fall and a few people see me that's going to be embarrassing, but it will be nowhere near as embarrassing as if my tripping and falling is recorded and ends up on YouTube.

The barriers to spontaneous recording like this have continued to fall, but barriers do still remain. If I see something happening on the streets right now I have to take out my phone (or camera), launch the camera app (which has become much easier), and begin recording. With glass, all I have to do is say something like, "OK Glass, record video" (or whatever the actual command is). This significantly lowers the barrier to capturing almost anything. There are certainly advantages to this when you're recording someone you're close to or who has consented to your recording (think capturing your kids first steps), but there are also tremendous disadvantages when it comes to privacy and strangers.

People on either side who are pretending that this is a simple issue are mistaken. Painting the issue as black and white, either everything is allowed or nothing is, ignores the intricacies of what's being discussed. Glass introduces an entirely new layer of complexity to the privacy debate that is separate from (but certainly related to) the debate about public webcams and government surveillance. I personally think that it's a good thing that people are at least thinking about these issues, as in the past they have largely been ignored. Maybe we can now start to return to an era where we appreciate the importance of privacy once again. The rules have to catch up to technology at some point.

Either you're lying or someone lied to you. There is not a single respected, widely-used IQ test that has an age cutoff of 13. All the tests that are in use (and have been for the last few decades) are normed for kids as well and even when they weren't, they were never normed to age 13 and not below, they were normed to maybe age 16 as the low end cutoff.

I'm not saying you're not smart or that everything else you said isn't right. I can't bring myself ot read the rest of your comment after this obviously false statement.

The only problem with your argument is that the head of the IRS at the time was a Bush appointee, not an Obama one. No one even lost their tax exempt status. Yes it was wrong. Very wrong. But this will be turned into yet another witch hunt which leads to ever more closed and secretive government. We've reached the point in this country where it truly is better to just try to hide things in perpetuity since admitting a mistake consistently leads to hyperbole and posturing by the other side. Both parties are guilty if this. It was, after all, the administration itself that admitted what had taken place.

It did take two whole years after all.

Just to be clear, there has been no "result" of any kind. Nothing has been won or lost by anyone. This is a front page story about an anonymous request that an Apple patent be reexamined. The summary clearly states that the USPTO won't even make a decision regarding whether to reexamine until next year. This is the definition if a non-story.

OK, seems to be some misinformation going around.

Syncing one account to multiple devices belonging to family members is almost certainly not Copyright Infringement. While I haven't read the Google Play TOS, I assume that it and iTunes are actually pretty similar with Apple likely being only slightly more restrictive if at all. You can authorize up to 5 different computers (or separate user accounts on a single computer) with an iTunes Store Account and any of these computers/separate user accounts will be able to play DRMed content (Books, Movies, TV Shows, etc.) purchased with the associated iTunes Store Account and sync that content to an unlimited (I think, definitely a bunch) number of iDevices for playback. This does not apply to music anymore though because it doesn't have DRM and so can, theoretically, be given to as many family members, or even complete strangers if you enjoy the pirating of music (which would be Copyright Infringement), as you'd like and no copy of iTunes nor any iDevice will have anything to say about it.

You can have up to 10 iDevices authorized for a single iTunes Store Account, and all of these devices will be able to download all of the same stuff (i.e., using "iTunes in the Cloud") for no additional cost. So, buy once and you're good.

Also, there's two ways to manually manage music. There's actual manual management where you drag and drop each item of media that gets added to the iDevice, and there's manual management of syncing which allows you to choose what will be automatically synced in a more flexible manner. So, you can have it sync only specific genres, artists, albums, or specific songs, as well as only unwatched movies or TV shows, or only the x newest episodes of a show. It's really pretty flexible and customizable, especially considering it comes from Apple. While you're right that the default is "Sync Everything," doing so is by no means the only option.

That wouldn't do what you claim it does. The reasons are a bit convoluted, but basically, there are two ways to manage an iDevice through iTunes: 1) Automatic Syncing and 2) Manually Managing it.

If you have it set to auto-sync, then it ties your device to a specific computer, and if you plug it into any other computer, a warning will pop up in iTunes that says, "Hey, this iDevice belongs to another computer, if you sync it here you lose everything and start over," and gives you options to cancel, sync & erase, or transfer over purchased songs that the computer is authorized to play (e.g., iTunes has the iTunes Store Account info for already) but that aren't already actually present on the computer. None of these would lead to duplicate tracks on your computer. Do nothing and the phone will charge while the dialog is up. Hit cancel and the phone will charge without syncing. It's simply not possible for the type of syncing you describe to happen in the "helpful" manner you describe. Also, in this scenario you can't transfer a single song to the user's iDevice since all syncing is automatic.

Then there's manual management. Here, it never syncs unless you tell it to. In this case, simply plugging in the device would not cause a sync operation at all. You could (on all devices except iPhones and Shuffles), copy over a single track from your library to there iDevice in this scenario, but it wouldn't copy anything to your computer without you manually dragging it from the iDevice to your Library in iTunes.

So basically, nothing you said makes much sense. Active intervention from the user is required to make their iDevice do anything at all with a copy of iTunes that is not their own, period. That's not to say that you didn't at some point run into a bug that led to multiple copies of tracks, but it's not happening the way you claim. iTunes just doesn't work that way.

I'm not sure where these numbers are coming from in general. Apple doesn't breakdown sales by device type, but did announce over 26 million iPhone sales in their fiscal Q3 2012 which ended in July, and 26.9 million in their fiscal Q4 2012 which ended a few weeks ago. Either way, the iPhone 4S number is pure analyst speculation since that data is not available.