AAPL was elevated to stratospheric heights because of a bubble in their stock. Every hedge fund on the planet was buying it because the price was going up and the price was going up because every hedge fund on the planet was buying it. Its not really useful to compare to a time its stock was at stratospheric heights due to speculators.

On the other hand since Jobs died they do seem to be completely sucking. Hiring Kevin Lynch from Adobe was the most vivid illustration of that I can think of. I wager Jobs would have instantly fired anyone dumb enough to hire that guy.

Its probably an interesting question if those same hedge funds are pushing GOOG to heights greater than it deserves. Android is doing well but its a has a weird business model.

Japan has been using unmanned helicopters to spray crops for decades. Yamaha makes them, though they are a little expensive. They are extremely good at it, the down wash from the rotor helps spread the spray all through the plants.

UC Davis, if memory serves, has started trials on them in the U.S. recently but the restrictive drone regulatory climate needs to relax a little

What, that average global temperature is leveling off?

Justice is...

...a pirate!

This form of dissent is unpatriotic, Citizen. Report to the nearest NSA facility for rehabilitation.

What's a HAARP apparatus? That something that fires horrible retired people as rounds?

Netflix you are renting X files for the next 30 days.

No I'm not! I already said, I have a collection, including many of Chris Carter's TV shows!

Actually, Starbucks provides a service as all food service businesses do. Back in school a teacher in an economics class brought up a case where a man sued a restaurant that refused to provide him with any containers to take his leftovers home. The court ruled that restaurants provide a service, not a good, and that there was no requirement for them to provide him with any means by which to take unconsumed food home.

Assuming that precedent actually exists, you're paying for the service provided to you by Starbucks. Mind you, they intentionally provide the means by which to take the fruits of their service out of the facility as it makes a lot more sense business-wise, but you're buying being-served-coffee moreso than you're buying coffee.

And people wonder why I don't get rid of my movie collection in favor of netflix or some other streaming service...

Politicians would generally be clueless enough to not grasp that rapidly evolving technology has eliminated the need for human involvment in the analysis part most of the time. A crafty bureaucrat would let them restrict his human staff and point to this as proof for how our civil liberties are being protected.

Meanwhile in the server room the AI's are raping us.

Unless AC's are using Tor or a public computer, the NSA knows who you are.

Someday soon there will be no anonymity on the Internet.

I've been wondering, maybe the NSA's analysts are constrained from spying on American's but are there loopholes allowing AI's to spy on them instead?

Heh. All new meaning for "my computer went down on me"...

WOOSH!

That was a joke... I know they got off libc5, but it took enough that precompiled binaries from various hardware manufacturers at the time wouldn't run on slack since they were compiled against glibc2, so I ended up leaving slack for debian.

Even as militantly anti-non-free as Debian was and seems to still be, it was easier to get weird or rare hardware to work on it than on slack, or to get third-party non-free or grey-area apps to work. And I got lazy and Debian's package management once they got away from those early versions of dselect made it kick everyone elses' butts.

sudo make me a sandwich

Bad command or file name

Did they ever get off libc5?