I'm fascinated that you care that other people are buying "overpriced" stuff and enjoying it, do you walk around at the supermarket telling everyone how disgusted you are that they didn't buy the cheapest product on the shelf, or is this a special animosity you reserve for consumer electronics purchasers only?

The bottom line is that all companies are vile. They are compelled to behave in the manner of a prototypical psychopath, legally obliged to put the interests of its shareholders above all else. If you think a company is 'trustworthy' or 'not evil', you're wrong. Companies, just like human psychopaths, pretend to have certain morals and values because it is better for them if you believe the hype.

Just because you like what they're doing today, doesn't mean companies are under any obligation to keep doing things you like tomorrow. They could find out that it's unprofitable or that it brings bad publicity to keep doing what they've been doing for you all these years, and could start behaving completely differently... tomorrow, or today at noon. You never know.

No company is your friend, no company will show you any loyalty, and every company will screw you to the wall if there's a dollar in it. With all that in mind, I find it hard to single out any company or it's actions as reprehensible. Only people who are naïve about how companies are run and what the legal obligations of company principals are, could feel animosity toward Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM, etc. They are doing what they are made to do, you might as well get angry at sharks for eating fish.

Besides, it's not as though these companies care what we as individuals want as long as we are still handing our hard-earned cash to them.

What a load of bullshit. Corporates are running the software that came on their phone, not cooking up their own roms. They have no idea whether the software on their phones has rapemyassware 2.0 installed or not. An IT dept could audit the source code, but unless they want to compile their own roms and void the warranty on a whole fleet of phones, there's no way to guarantee that the source they're given to audit is the same that was used to build the rom on the phone.

Only an idiot would be swayed to go with a possibly untrustworthy vendor just because they give them access to something which they claim is the source to the rom on their device, and only an idiot would try to run a whole organization on roms they cooked up themselves, so while there are plenty of things that make Android good for enterprise, the availability of source code is not one of them.

In the immortal words of Wikipedia; "Citation needed"...

Very true

No no, you misunderstand... I'm disappointed that Obama wasn't able to handle getting a hard-on in public. Doesn't speak well of his ability to handle awkward situations.

Maybe I just don't have the full story, perhaps he was feeling ill from all the drug taking, or maybe his hooker arrived. But as things stand it sounds like Obama ran away afraid someone would notice how small his peenie is.

That's incredibly disappointing, my esteem for Obama has been decimated

Oh how I wish I could moderate and comment on the same topic....

You, my friend just made chocolate milk come out of my nostrils and tear-ducts. Congratulations on making me actually laugh out loud and not just "lol".

The last half of that quote isn't mine, and being a false dichotomy doesn't mean you can't compare the two problems in scope and magnitude which the OP was insinuating.

There's no need for a dichotomy in order for two things to be compared in magnitude. For example, "my feet are longer than my hands" is a valid comparative statement that needs no dichotomy.

You need to brush up on your comprehension skills and stop misquoting people.

Still, you'd have to admit that blowing trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars against people who pose very little credible military threat, while ignoring the true aggressors for years because finding them was a bit difficult is more of a problem than spending taxpayer dollars videoing Obama's personal brew kit. No?

Mmmm beerboarding.

What would be the point? Everyone knows the president doesn't inhale.

Apple's "so called computers" are made from the exact same components as all the other so-called computers out there using the x86 platform as you Apple trolls like to point out endlessly, so if most of the software-stack is made of commodity components, and if people are happy to pay for Apple's window-dressing, then what's the issue?

Personally, I've done the linux on laptop dance before, and found that regessions that break power management don't get much attention from kernel and driver developers. That unresponsiveness, piled on top of the giant steaming heap of shit that is acpi drove me away shrieking in terror. So while I use Linux for desktop and server machines, I've found OS X to be much more dependable on portable machines.

So as far as I'm concerned any "Apple tax" is a snip to pay for a portable Unix workstation which doesn't have twinkly blue lights all over it and which doesn't use the circuit board as a stressed member. The Macbook Pro is on a par with ThinkPads in terms of build quality, but Apple's power management and enclosure pretties sway me in their direction.

To each his own.

No it's true, they are destroying computers. Their servers have a shipping container for a case, and no power supplies, no displays. They're barely computators at all.

Of course, it's 1/25400000th of an inch.

To be fair, I think the "scanning" and "microscope" are the expensive part of a STM, and not really necessary to drive a motor. There are all sorts of devices that can generate streams of electrons cheaply, though it's unclear what the requirements are to drive the motor - in the worst case, it may require something similar in complexity to a STM for precision and a supercomputer to do the job of aiming and timing the power source that's done by a human with a STM in this instance. In that case, it's going to be a while before this sees use in an actual nanoscale device.