And how do you propose Apple would defy the Chinese government with no legal basis to do so? They can't fight a similar ruling in China but they can here.

Dead American citizens and residents are afforded these protections. What does that have to do with China.

Chinese citizens and American citizens are guaranteed different protections under each of their respective sets of laws. Asking why Apple wouldn't do the same thing for Chinese citizens as it has for American citizens is just silly. It's apples and oranges. Two completely different sets of regulations and two completely different sets of protections. I'm assuming that Apple would operate within the bounds of the law to protect Chinese users as much as the Chinese legal system allows.

Everything in life is a value exchange whether you see it or not. Would you start a moving company that moved people regardless of whether they paid or not? Of course you wouldn't. Information and functionality isn't free it takes time to compile and create, it takes money to deliver it to you.

I see alot of "The web was so much better comments" here and on the post that instigated this.

Do any of you actually remember the web in the mid-90s? I'm guessing most of you are younguns living in an idealism hidden in the haze of a hormonal youth.

Do you remember that it took less time to go to the library and find information there than search using the primitive internet indexes that were around at the time?

Do you remember the horrid experiences when you finally found the website you were looking for and half the information was missing and the other half was linked in at a page that was actually a picture of a construction worker digging, because it was under construction?

Do you remember server crashes? Our favorite sites being down for weeks rather than minutes? How about email that had latency in the range of hours or days?

Make no mistake, money makes things better. It allows people to invest in infrastructure and invest in people who are specialists in fields like user experience, data structure, and design. Money is why we can, for no more than the cost of your internet connection, interact with someone accross the world in hundreds of ways, instantly.

I will never block ads, and just because you can doesn't make it right. If I disagree with or dislike the method of advertising delivery I will simply not visit the site. Just because I don't like a site's implied contract doesn't make it right for me to steal from them. I don't like airport security, nor do I like the way we are treated once on an airplane any more, yet it doesn't make me feel like I have the right to barge onto a plane and fly for free.

Those of you blocking ads and complaining, grow up, realize that people need to be able to eat and that every business person is not a millionaire. Most business people are just like you, struggling to survive and trying to find a way to give their customers the things they want at the lowest price possilble, and when a site is ad supported that price is free, the least you can do is leave the ads in place.

I think both physical and digital formats have their place. What really chaps my arse though is when people talk about not switching because of smell or feel or some other nostalgic garbage. Nostalgia is not a durable value proposition. You like the smell of a book because your brain ties it to memories of your youth securely snuggled in a blanket or on a couch, this is good for you but is not a value proposition that you can sell to future generations. More and more their sensory experiences will be tied to the tactile experience of using a reader or a tablet.

There will always be someone who is willing to work harder then you and someone who is willing to work as little as possible. In the middle reside everyone else. Your accolades will depend on hard work and a little bit of luck. You can pass legislation preventing you from being required to work 80 hours a week, but its not going to stop that overacheiver we all hate from doing it. I learned this early on. First I worked my 40 and went home to my family and hobbies. Then I started working my ass off, 80 hour weeks, 100 hour weeks and even a 120 here and there where I ate at my desk and didn't sleep for three days straight. What did I gain? I gained EXPERIENCE. I didn't gain the approval of my employer who only cared about a deadline, I didn't gain the approval of my coworkers who worried I made them look bad. I certainly didn't gain the approval of the client who only sees total hours and not distribution. When you work 80 hours a week you gain experience faster than those who work 40. It's an investment. My long weeks are why I am now self-employed with a business that nearly runs itself. No magical "start your own business" scheme did it, no accolades or friends with money contributed in any way. It was purely experience and only experience, I have more of it because I worked harder. I got smarter faster because of the time I put in.

I have four kids, three are currently in school. They impress the teachers every year when they come back and its simple. For one hour of every day whether we are on vacation or at home they do age appropriate math and writing. The curriculum is free online and they progress rather than regress. The rest of the day they are free to swim, hike, play video games, build models, read etc in short be kids. We always try to fix the system, we fail to recognize that sometimes its us.

Ummmmmm... Hoover dam is an interesting argument. Back in the early 1900s industrialists would have died to be able to build a dam, however the rivers were public property. So here is a place where we could argue that government interference has quite potentially inhibited the growth of a technology. Hoover dam was certainly an impressive project and its power output is nothing short of amazing. The public loan was paid off only a few short years after its construction through the sale of the power that comes out of it. However government regulation has stifled growth and improvement in this sector, as public projects hydroelectric dams have not significantly changed their technology in almost a hundred years. Have you ever visited Hoover dam, as it happens I live very close to it. I've been their many many times and rarely are they running even one generator. They are allowed to create only enough power to pay their operating expenses and beyond that they are not allowed to compete with the public market. Is this the kind of innovation you are talking about because to me it seems this is the exact opposite of encouraging innovation. Having visited many operational dams the picture isn't any better throughout the US. Once the government has its mits on your industry you play by their rules and innovation is stifled. Early avenues that should have been explored in wind and solar power often times weren't because of government funding. Some startup wind companies wanted to explore combining wind and powercell technology to store energy at low demand times to be released at higher demand times. However due to the structure of public funding they had to choose one or the other and we missed out on a potentially beneficial technology that is now being brought to market by companies that don't have to care about public funding. Then there is the case of Nuclear power, do you truly think that nuclear would only have been developed through public funding. I would argue that had it been privately funded, the drive behind the development of nucleics would have been that of clean energy and not weaponization. Atomic theory was there prior to government funding of the Manhattan Project which was driven by weaponization goals. Private industry picked up the tab on nuclear energy development.

This of course is a completely false statement. The government has been involved in funding tech for many years but not as a altruistic endeavor. Instead every 'research' group has had its own lobbyists to try and shift legislation in a way that will allow them to pursue their path. While many call this supporting alternative energy and the environment, lets call it what it really is, misappropriation of public funds for private projects. So many of these projects have been dead-ends and lost funds, with most of our biggest technological gains in most energy tech coming from the private sector. While the government has shifted funding all around the map from geothermal to hydroelectric, to solar, to fuel cell, to wind yeilding little to no overall demonstrable benefit in the grand scheme of things, some of the United States' largest corporations have had ongoing, consistent, research programs with singular intent. To make money by providing what they feel will be the energy sources of the future. It's not rocket surgery, there are large companies that are poised to make billions as our energy economy shifts naturally and not through any urgings of the government. These companies are smarter than the alternative energy and global warming nuts. They know that nothing changes overnight, they know that the best way to be involved in new tech is to be there for the shift and be ready to fill demand with products as that demand exists. Make no mistake our energy economy is shifting slowly but surely. It is not because of the railing of the fanatics however, it is because of the conistency and persistence of some of our greatest minds. Companies and people who are often looked down upon because of their tremendous means and their ability to do things such as avoid taxation our are salvation in this matter. Some will call me a libertarian nut for these statements, others a Randian psychotic. But there is no denying the truth. Just because the government was there for a particular change doesn't mean that they played any significant role in it. Correlation is not causation, the corollary between the government and alternative energy is simply that it has provided a platform for our politicians to run on, in order to pretend they are doing something real. The facts are there but you'll need to examine them yourself or you will never believe.

Hold on so what this article is saying is that once again the free market is taking care of us where the government has failed miserably? But thats not what the democrats tell me. The liberals keep telling me how bad the free market is at responding to, well, anything.

I've run several engineering departments. Some have been good at documentation, others not so good. What's the difference? It's quite simple. Time When a company demands quick turnaround, its all the developer can do to get the code out the door. Good documentation falls by the wayside in these instances. In my experience its more about demands from the top than anything else.

You've gotta be more specific this describes every president since Teddy Roosevelt

Computers and redundancy are relatively cheap these days the engineers to set them up and maintain them are really expensive. Perfection isn't needed when you can afford redundancy and automation.

It's a superset of SQL with extra operators? So NoSQL has become SQL? {face palm}

Gesture based interfaces might not be perfect but they've sure expanded the use of smartphones well beyond the typical Treo and Blackberry crowd. The interface can't be that bad.