most of those can be set to manual update, or at least a notification that an update is ready to download. i know that's got it's downside too.

You know that's complete bullshit, or are you so hopelessly in the ass of the right wing noise machine?

Actually, it means he's got the primary qualifications for a job on Fox News! You seem to have a very odd view of how journalism works. Here's a clue: all journalists are pigs. It's deep, deep down in the culture and it won't be going away.

With respect, can you quote an example of someone saying down with civilisation, etc? That sounds like the sort of hokey characterization that the denialists make of people who think global warming is man made. I have never met or even heard someone say that we must unravel civilisation as we know it back to something far far more simpler. A lot of technologies are massive net energy savers and require considerable infrastructure to maintain, so I don't see that being unwound.

Not relevant. The period between the Roman subjugation of Hispania and the Reconquista was over 1000 years. The population changed radically in that time, with North African populations moving in from the south, and Visigoths (originally from parts of eastern Europe) moving in in very large numbers. As a rule, the present populations of the countries of Europe as we know them today (or for the last thousand years) are very different from the people who live in those lands in Roman times, owing to massive migration shifts from the third to the seventh centuires CE.

Took the Romans two centuries to pacify the Iberian peninsula (present day Spain and Portugal). And that was without outside meddling (after they took it from the Carthaginians).

Good.

Antenna positioning in all mobile phones is driven by the testing procedure used by the FCC to measure RF power coupled into a user's head.

From memory BTX came out somewhat after micro-ATX, but never took off. None of the Taiwanese name-brand mobo makers went for it. It was meant to have better cool-ability (ie, air flow over the board and CPU). Don't most Dell designs use BTX or something very similar?

"Race to the bottom" is specifically about the business of making and selling PCs. The profitability is getting slowly lower as more and more of the hardware is commodified and produced at near zero cost. Similarly, fixed location network services (cable, ADSL, etc) are also low margin in the rich world. PC manufacturers have a hard time convincing customers to upgrade anymore.

For mobile devices, the hardware was long ago commodified, but the way in which profit is extracted from the whole device ecosystem is different, and, as you point out, also works well in the poor world. That's the key, and why service provision hasn't become a race to the bottom yet. There's still scope for expansion and innovation to keep prices high. For how long, I have no idea. But I think at least a decade while touch interface mobile devices up to A4 size mature.

Why should Apple give a shit about anything except extracting profits from well off people? It's not as though they are going away any time soon.

The PC business is a race to the bottom now, for everybody. High margins are never coming back on hardware, software is getting cheaper, and if it's not cheap, it's pirated. There are a few standout niches, but in overall terms, they are vanishing small.

Apple is betting the farm on pads and portable devices. Which is a bet worth taking. But it requires a way of thinking about computers as appliances, which is not the slashdot way.

You are right about that, but if it's the golden road to profit, why isn't anyone else doing their own OS and hardware combo?

That's easy to answer. Because if Dell or HP or someone tried it, Microsoft would jack up the price they charge for Windows (a Dell or an HP wouldn't give up it's windows based product lines). This is the long-term outcome of Microsoft's infamous business practices, which turns out to be great for Apple, leaving the road clear for them to be the only major alternative in the desktop/laptop space.

Apple are 7% of computers sold (by revenue), but they make 35% of the total profit made on computer sales. See

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-revenue-vs-operating-profit-share-of-top-pc-vendors-2010-3

True enough, but are there other carriers in those countries that aren't such rent seeking bastards?

Is it getting hotter, do you think? I'm thinking of general browsing as well as flash viewing. And can you turn off flash in the browser? (I could have said, "how are those flash ads working for you?" !)