It only takes one wealthy wackjob to buy a chemical or nuclear weapon and use it to kill millions of people.

No, it also takes a seller of such weapons. And there aren't any, or we'd have been sweeping up the remains of some city, political center, or major chunk of infrastructure by now. The whole "terrorists and nuclear weapons" is a total mind job done on you and yours by your government. One thing to to keep in mind: Nukes are very difficult and expensive to manufacture, and pretty damned difficult to lose track of.

Civilization isn't likely to die due to nuclear weapons. We've set off well over a thousand of them already, and there's no particular notable effects other than the low hum of hysteria at the intersection of the set of the ill-informed and the paranoid.

Also, Chemical weapons are a lot less "mass" than nukes are, barring very sophisticated delivery systems, which again, aren't available to religious tools. Bacterial weapons are vaguely possible (although still very, very technical), but incorporate the downside of most likely eventually killing everyone everywhere instead of just the target(s), and so not even your average superstition-addled dingbat seriously considers them.

If you are a US citizen, If you want to worry about civilization, you should be worrying about the decay of our government from one authorized by the constitution into a form exclusively controlled by corporate and political groups. Because unlike the "nuclear threat", said decay is real and ongoing and has already screwed things up immensely: almost 100% loss of manufacturing capacity and so also jobs, crippling inflation, loss of citizen's rights, usurpation of article five powers by the judiciary, illegal legislation that spans almost the entire bill of rights to ex post facto laws to the complete inversion of the commerce clause, promulgation of multiple very expensive, ultimately useless wars... the problem isn't terrorists. The problem is our federal government. The whole terrorist thing is to keep the citizens looking the wrong way.

The NSA is doing everything it can to save your ass.

No. US citizens are not under any real threat, either short term or long -- at least, no threat that isn't in the end posed by our government itself. What the NSA is doing is attempting to shore up the government, which, frankly, I'm beginning to feel would be better off being replaced by people, almost *any* group of people, who simply understand that it is not acceptable to break one's oath, and that the oath to the constitution is designed to, and should, ultimately govern all of our legislation.

It ensures only the ideologically pure will come to work for them.

Very interesting, I stand corrected. I wasn't aware the consumer laws there were that generous.

Do you really have the ability to ask for a refund for a full two years?

Apple doesn't understand Software Libre at all

More like, you do not understand Apple, and the HUGE degree to which they have based success on top of open source.

BSD, and LLVM are but two of the largest and most obvious examples. But also Apple has used open standards when possible, like CalDav or VNC...

Yes Apple (like ALL companies currently) uses IP for competitive advantage. But they do so on top of a very thick layer of Free software...

the marketing dollars from Apple are just too tempting.

He got nothing from Apple for writing the article. What you and others misunderstand is the simple fact that many people LIKE using Apple products. That must go double for a guy like WM who tests many new electronic devices, you have to figure he gets a lot of stinkers and so more than most can appreciate something built well.

I don't understand this at all. I've never heard of Charles Stross and after skimming the Wikipedia article about him I fail to see why his opinion on Bitcoin is relevant.

It's relevant in the exact same way than whether some backwater somewhere teaches creationism as science is: it gets a flamewar going, which causes page views, which pays Slashdot's bills.

They're not being generous, it's what Australian law requires them to do.

Australian law requires Apple to fix the issue. That can be done (A) by just giving you a brand new device while you are in the store, or (B) by having you send it out for repair and wait a week...

As a consumer I'd rather have (A) than (B). Making Apple have to support longer warranties out of the gate means that they would be more likely to do (B), but Apple doesn't want that kind of poor user experience - so they would lean more to simply raising the price a bit to make up the difference.

The end effect I can see of countries forcing long warranties on products is that Apple essentially bakes in Applecare to the price.

There's no way a business can afford a longer warranty period without collecting for it somehow.

Another possibility is that Apple would become more stingy with repair/replacement, which would be a shame as it's really nice to go in and have them say "well, this just isn;t working, have a new one".

failing to allow access to ...sex education and sexual abuse... while also still allowing access to porn.

Confused - I thought you said the sexually educational materials were blocked? Then you say they are allowed.

P.S. plenty of abuse to be found in porn too if you try the right keywords.

A sliding cover to a camera does not adhere to KISS from a user's perspective. It's actually an annoying additional step to using the camera

I was going to say the same thing - that it makes the camera annoying to use and would probably confuse a lot of people if you ship it closed (and if you don't ship it closed, why even bother?)

There is one way you could make it covered and still not confuse users - have the sliding door activated by the computer when the camera is active. Then you could see when the camera was active, and the door could hard-wire an LED activation...

It would add cost and complexity though, and it does sound like a system that would be prone to failure rendering the camera useless. So there's still that issue.

There's a one-line fix you can apply to view controllers that stops it from sliding under the status bar:

self.edgesForExtendedLayout = UIRectEdgeNone

(don't forget to check for iOS7)

You really need to read the transition guide with a new OS...

I have to admit I forgot about onImage/offImage that was added in iOS6, and no longer does anything in iOS7... I have to support enough backwards compatible things that I never had a project in a state that could use that property and since it does nothing in iOS7 I never will.

But still, it's not like it stopped you compiling, it just gave the switch a different appearance. Like I said I work with a lot of different projects and didn't have to modify anything (except for iOS7 appearance changes) so I'm really not sure why you had the difficulties you did, it just makes no sense from what I have seen and from other developers I know.

I didn't "read a website once", I've been developing iOS applications full time since the App Store opened, and I've worked on a ton of different projects...

Religion from a Java server application development perspective. Spoiler, everyone else dies horrible deaths.

Well sure, but at least they are collected after.

Java - Rapture for everyone, eventually!

Walk by any Apple store. ... where you just see people using devices like like because they generally work. You can go in, or not, it's your choice.

If you keep on walking you get to the Apple Haters. Now there's a religion, meaning they fervently believe in Apple being bad no matter what, and will not let you past until YOU believe it also.

After I updated to XCode 5 I lost access to the old UISwitch.

So what? Why do you even need it if you are using custom graphics? Just resize the frame as I said to match what you are using.

Or use a UI button (arbitrary size) with custom graphics. Which is what you should have done anyway, as UISwitch was never meant to have custom images... why should Apple protect you from bad choices that don't use the right API to do what you want?