I can't wrap my head around all the fuss about the iPad being a closed device. So what if you can't get root out of the box? This means that novice users can't break it easily. The Apple experience is an experience where "it just works." The Macintosh, the iMac, and OSX are all products of bringing users to wonderful applications, technologies, experiences, and opportunities in a method that "just works." You don't have to set dip switches, you hardly ever have to install a driver, you don't need to find a missing .dll and you don't need to compile anything. You just point, click, and use. There is a HUGE market for this, especially if you were born before 1970. I think cars are a good analogy - buy a 1969 Chevy with a 350 in it and when you open the hood, boom, you had all access. Swap headers, put in a better carb, even make the air intake stick out of the hood. But if you screwed up the timing chain or used the wrong alternator, you bricked your car. Buy a new BMW, look under the hood, and you see a nice clean BMW logo and a lot of plastic covers. They made it, they made it as well as they could, and if you mess with it you'll probably screw it up!!

Apple has always done the same thing by keeping its logo nice and shiny on top and engineering everything underneath so that it works. I'm not a drone and I like jailbreaking my phone so I can customize it, but most of the good ideas that were coded and created by other software engineers was eventually integrated into the Apple experience. Think Soundjam for iTunes. I'm sure Apple has future OS' for the phone and pad that lets you do whatever you wanted to when it was jailbroken but stock. They just can't think of everything the first time around OR they didn't want to release the device with those features since it cut down on performance (my jailbroken iPhone runs much slower than the stock version).

All I'm sayin is just 'cause they put out a great device without root access doesn't mean you don't have full ownership and it doesn't mean that they are creating more consumer drones. They are putting out a product that works to spec and their record shows that the keep improving in my opinion.

We can produce far more ethanol from sugar, switchgrass, and hemp. We need to re-organize our national priorities to explore these crops and keep corn as food, not as fuel. Sorry corn lobby. When you use E85 the difference in emissions in undeniable. Who cares about E10. Its time to do what Brazil has already done and get off Gas, and jump on a fuel we can create domestically and sustain a healthier world.