Sorry, but the numbers back the other guy up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg

The iPod was averaging about 100,000 units per quarter until mid 2003. That's not so impressive, honestly. It didn't break 1,000,000 units per quarter until late 2004. So yeah, it was really the iTunes music store launch in April 2003 that made people interested in the iPod.

Ummm Tegra 2 was the fastest platform for Android for quite some time. The G Tablets are still pretty blazingly fast. The issue is just that Tegra 2 was released for such a short time before Tegra 3 came out that it never got much saturation, and then Tegra 3 came out with a bunch of faster options close on its heels.

NVidia has great hardware engineers, but awful software driver people on their mobile platform. They have done a terrible job supporting their chipsets after release with Android, or getting good manufacturers to adopt them.

You have obviously never opened a non-trivial spreadsheet in Calc and Excel. Excel is way faster. But yeah, for trivially simple docs they are comparable.

I'm fairly certain taking naked video of people in sexual encounters where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy isn't just bad manners, but probably illegal. Especially if you then go and publish said video to the world. I think the only reason this case might be murky is since they were roommates, Ravi had the right to be in the room and didn't have to break and enter to install a camera.

Still, just because you live in a house doesn't, say, give you the right to record people naked in the bathrooms or having sex in bedrooms and pubish that on the internet without their consent. This is illegal by itself. However, I suspect the penalties aren't particularly harsh.

This doesn't address the hate crime angle of things here. Any time you take naked pictures or sexual pictures of people without permission and post them on the internet to mock them, it's awful. If the video showed a naked guy with a small penis, or a girl fucking a horrendously ugly guy, that could be every bit as embarrassing for the small-dicked man or the woman in question as this was for the homosexual man. What makes the crime awful is that the man in question was obviously depressed and emotionally disturbed to begin with, and these actions resulted in so much embarrassment that they led to suicide. So really it's bullying an emotionally fragile person that's awful, not anything specific about the sexual orientations that makes it a "hate crime".

Still sounds crazy low. Banking fees for IPO deals are generally 7% for "normal" sized deals (a few hundred million), and around 3% for large deals. You'd expect the fees for a $5B IPO to be around $150M. If they are doing it for less, it's because the value of the prestige and marketing value they get from this deal is worth a fortune to them.

If the equities market worked the way you propose, it would be essentially lawless and there would be no participation by the majority of the public. This would then be effectively equivalent to the situation in China currently. The vast majority there invest their savings in real assets because there is no presumption of honesty or equality in public markets.

Whether you think this is good or bad, you have to realize this makes it much harder for companies to obtain equity financing from the free markets you are espousing the good of in the first place. In fact, in China, companies instead tend to obtain the vast majority of their financing from banks and government backed institutions, and those capital allocation decisions are more about job creation and political favor than about safety or efficiency of capital utilization or profit maximization.

So, in short, any libertarian who says insider trading should not be a crime is essentially supporting a Chinese-style equity market with rampant corruption and insider trading and completely dysfunctional equity markets. I assume that most libertarians would not find that to be ideal, thus they should probably reconsider their view on the topic.

While it's not on the scale of either of those events in terms of real world impact, the departure of Rob Malda is clearly one of the most significant stories of the year in terms of Slashdot itself. I don't think it feels the same here without him.

Correct - capital is overly abundant in China because the government has essentially been printing money to fuel economic growth. The problem is that this encourages massive amounts of malinvestment - Chinese companies doing things that are ultimately unprofitable simply to grow for its own sake. Well not just for its own sake - really, to generate more jobs, which gives the executives clout with the local party/government officials, allows them to extract political favors and raise their own pay because of the sheer scale of their businesses. I have seen this first hand, with companies competing head-to-head against Chinese competition (even though they are also manufacturing in China) being unable to match prices because the Chinese companies are pricing well under cost, simply to grow their topline, financing it all with government-underwritten bank debt, without a care as to the losses piling up, as long as they are within what their banking relationships permit.

So yeah, it clearly optimizes on different things than we optimize on in a more capitalist economic system. Growing your business unprofitably here in the US would not make you more popular with your banks and capital providers unless you are quickly building scale in order to make yourself massively more profitable in a few years.

The company that had split their factories 50/50 would already be out of business, because their competitors have a more efficient supply chain, are in a single facility, and thus have been undercutting *them* for the last dozen years. The geographic concentration problem of hard drive manufacturers is a result of cutthroat competition, not something that happened in spite of it.

In any manufacturing business where margins are incredibly tight (probably 2-3% net margins on average for hard drives and other pure commodity manufacturers of that sort), you can't spend a bit more than the next guy to buck the trend or you will get undercut for Dell's/HP's/etc. business, lose 20% of your gross sales one night, and find you can no longer cover your overhead and suddenly you're out of business.

BayStar took money from Microsoft, BayStar did a PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) in SCO.

http://slashdot.org/story/04/03/11/158214/baystar-confirms-microsoft-behind-sco-investment

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO-Linux_controversies#SCO_and_BayStar_Capital

also see below at that page under "Microsoft funding of SCO controversy".

Which leads to:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween10.html

So that's pretty much as much evidence as I can imagine needing.

I like Python not because it forces *me* to indent my code properly, but because it forces all the other morons out there to indent *their* code properly.

So far the one useful feature everybody seems to tout that Siri has that Voice Actions doesn't is that it can set timed notifications and alarms on the iPhone. I mean, that's cool and all, but really? That's not a killer feature and it could be added to Voice Actions in probably a matter of hours.

I don't understand the hype - Android had awesome voice actions before iPhone did. So Siri has one-upped that by being a bit more general purpose. Okay, but what are the use cases where Siri does something that Android voice actions doesn't? I use voice actions to do quick searches and text and email people regularly, especially when I'm in the car. It works great.

I don't really think that's realistic. A human would assume that those numbers from weather.com were right, so I don't get how you an expect a computer to do better.

That's all nice and true, but the reason people hold dollars is because they can predict with extremely high confidence that it won't buy half as much stuff in 2 days. That confidence is developed by governments over the course of decades, or even centuries. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has no such track record, nor pledges behind it, and it has demonstrated extreme volatility, and an exponential explosion in value (which is almost always the sign of a speculative bubble, to be followed by a crash).