Are your referring to Christmas, or Perl? ;)

The blackout window rules pre-dated SarbOx, but to answer a sibling post, yes, those rules are in place for employees of all publicly traded companies. The rules don't prevent trading other companies (although you'd be walking a fine line if you traded shares of a company your employer does business with), so one is not "locked out of the market" as one poster put it. Employees of public companies are also prohibited from shorting their company's stock.

One of the reasons Balmer's stock sale is such a big deal is that the top tier of employees in public corporations must publicly pre-announce their intention to sell (again, part of the same trading rules, another hedge against insider trading). I haven't looked at the announcement, but it may be something as simple as him cashing in the options CEOs are often paid with. Even if he just wished to convert his options to stock, some selling would necessarily be involved.

Of course you're right. But it's exactly the sort of loaded language used in the summary that will get the multiple-tiers pushed through--if the biased vocabulary succeeds, the providers have already won.

(And despite providers' increased revenue, don't expect the price to go down for end users.)

... yet I find insightful the quotation credited to Winston Churchill: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter"

... and no one will ever know. In order for write-ins to be counted, candidates must register as write-ins (in most jurisdictions).

Follow the parent's advice, and all we'll get is more "low percentage of citizens voted for president" articles.

If there is a ceiling to how much is enough, as you say, then I'm on the second or third floor.

I've felt more annoyed than safe every time I've flown since 2001. ("Annoyed" doesn't come close to capturing my response, but as I can't come up with a better word at the moment, it will have to do.)

I stopped believing the "they don't need math" argument years ago when it became necessary to give an impromptu lesson to my department on how to calculate period-over-period percentage sales growth. Half the group couldn't do it on their own.

As I understand, the income figures were culled from public filings. Estimation of income would only come into play when reconciling accounting rules between countries.

Since we're picking things apart, perhaps you should acknowledge that Apple is very definitely #1 in the most important facet of "market share," namely share of industry profits, beating out Nokia, Saumsung, and LG combined. I contend it's a metric they most certainly care about.

See the pretty graphs at
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/09/21/pie-chart-apples-outrageous-share-of-the-mobile-industrys-profits/

Uh-huh. Except my first tech job out of college paid more than that. It's not a horrible salary, but I wouldn't consider a full-time job with pay that "low" unless there was something else spectacular about it.

On the contrary, it isn't out yet, so condition 1 (it's not selling many copies on base) is most assuredly true. The RTFA zing is well deserved, though.

Long live print!

I concur.

And--to return to the summary--it's not that I (or my kids) have been reading less, or even buying fewer books. But we have, over the past decade, stopped buying books from B&N and mall stores. Something about lower prices and "free" two-day shipping at the other place (yes, I have Prime).

That's right. Only smart people should be allowed to use smart phones. Or any other technology. /sarc

You're complaining that users' competence is ... at times inadequate. You may be right, but who's responsibility is it to compensate for that? By definition, such users can't, as they don't know any better.

It's times like this where curated app stores start to make sense.

Sounds like just enough to pay the attorneys ...