And the way they do that is by making products people want to buy. Running the same UI on both a Mac, tablet, and phone will result in a sub par experience on all three devices and will surely drive away users. iPhones have no business running a windowed GUI, and Macs need to be able to have multiple windows up due to their expanded screens space. Macs use indirect interaction with highly precise input devices, while iPhones and iPads are direct interaction and have a fairly imprecise input mechanism. So many fundamentals are so different that merging the two UIs would make their devices desirable to no one. Not to mention the fact that iPhones have many more sensors than a Mac. If Apple wanted to pursue your strategy, they wouldn't do it by merging their operating systems. They would do it by locking down OS X while still keeping it as a separate platform.

This is one of those moronic things that will never happen that are being continuously predicted by people who don't understand anything about usability. Apple knows you can't just shoehorn a "one size fits all" OS onto every device you make; that the ways people use different devices are fundamentally different. Keyboard and Mouse apps do not work well with a touchscreen, and vice versa. Just because Lion imported some of the UI features of iOS like hidden scrollbars and an application launcher does not mean they will merge; they are simply implementing ideas from one platform that have utility on another.

IANAPhysicist, but the object itself is not moving FTL with respect to the space around it, but the space itself is expanding. Here is some reading the corroborates this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Universal_expansion http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=575 "While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such theoretical constraint when space itself is expanding. It is thus possible for two very distant objects to be moving away from each other at a speed greater than the speed of light (meaning that one cannot be observed from the other). The size of the observable universe could thus be smaller than the entire universe."

Even light speed travel probably wouldn't help get you there. It is already moving away from us at more than twice the speed of light (moving at 275922km/s) due to universe expansion.

I wonder if a cosmologist could check the validity of that statement because it seems to neglect universe expansion. Looking online at APM 08279+5255, its redshift is 3.911. Plugging that into wolframalpha indicates the the lookback time is 12bn years, but that the "actual" distance at this time is nearly 23.7bn lightyears. Redshift: http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/bibobj?2008A%26A...479..703G&APM+08279%2B5255 Wolfram: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=redshift+z%3D3.911&a=FSelect_**LookbackTimeFromRedshift--

Even if that is the case, they have a cable internet monopoly in many areas, so they are obligated to carry them because they are the ONLY choice.