I have no Ax to grind

They would probably say I was holding it wrong anyway.

This is not hard

If you are a narco-kingpin there is a remote possibility that a nice DEA agent will help your kid get a kitten out of a tree.

When Apple "fixes" this problem they will send the DEA the bill. Your kid already has the freaking kitten.

Now be a good little kingpin and convert over to iMessage, because, you know, the DEA says they can't read it. I'm sure they'll send you an iMessage when the problem is fixed.

.

Working together.

""Developers want to use tools that make their life easy and allow them to go fast," he says."

32 ft per second squared (back of the envelope), huge traffic jam at the bottom you might want to avoid.

Fractional Pixel Banking

"How can you be in two places at once, when you are not anywhere at all ?" -- Firesign Theater

Advertising is a March 31st joke the value of which is only realized a day later.

Pricy though

Well of course they are smart enough,

do they work cheap ? (seriously, do I need to explain this one ?)

do they really like the torture of small animals ? (we like to promote from within, not train)

have they studied sociopathy ? (you can lead a horticulture, etc.)

Disapointment

"... hovering your mouse over an ad to see just where that link promising an ice-cold CokeTM will take now you seems more sensible that ever before."

Here I expected an expose of narco-kingpin Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and was shunted off to New Zealand to read about dead people. Seriously, El Reg, think of your readers once in a while.

The Emperor's New Clothes

When will the fashionistas on this rock give me an Emperor pleasent to see naked ?

Scientists are different from you and I

BEER FRIDGE BREAK THROUGH !!!!!!

Uses quantum something something, whatever. El Reg drops Boffin Bomb, again. etc., etc., etc.

"Ä$$hØle, tÆkÉ a fÜùkïÑ BRÈÃKKKKKKKK"

I say again, after upvoting the first post; Absolutely Brilliant (see title). Let me explain.

FB is only harmless if you don't know what FB is doing and are completely clueless about basic Physics.

1. History doesn't repeat itself, Historians repeat each other.

2. Hollywood Accounting 101. Every time a Historian speaks, they CREATE!

3. Knowlege += History

4. GOTO 1

What could possibly go wrong with that ? Well, for starters it's wildly inflationary, good when applied to Social Networks, not so good on stuff that doesn't move around, like communities and Work-Life Balance.

8 hours work + 8 hours sleep + 8 hours leisure = 25.8 hours in the US, (either that or HomePlace is slowly drifting way from WorkPlace).

Now be a good little robot and study for your Turing Test.

Weather Advisory

Hand waving wind gusts up to Gale Force.

How about you prove just one tiny little assumption correct ? Just one. "My Customers wear green socks on St. Patrick's Day unless they are wearing orange socks" or something like that ? Something small, doesn't have to involve black socks ... oh wait, yes it does because some do wear black socks. OK then, something useful like "My Customers wear socks" then. Companies will pay for that sort of fine grained certainty.

Explains it.

I always thought my abismal sense of direction meant I needed Apple Maps. Now I know I was creating Apple Maps.

At last.

This is that "do no evil" stuff Google is always prattling on about.

This explains ...

... why gangs of pickpockets do little in the way of Customer Satisfaction Surveys.

Fail indeed, Khaptain.

What ?

"Today's consumers frequently use a single device ... ordering tickets, tracking their friends with geolocation services, ... "

Stalking your friends is not a hobby of which I'd heard. That tells me a lot about what the FCC was told I as a customer want.

This is an OUTRAGE!

Consentual entanglements between quantums are nobody's business !!!! ... oh wait, didn't see "boffins" in the link, the subtitle says "experts". Good thing I speak "Reg". Never mind.

Cookie little girl ?

What ? You mean it's not just fine again ?

Just out of Curiosity ...

"If this is a surprise, where have you been for a decade? Mars?"

Hey, I've been on Mars way less than a decade and even I knew that.

P.S. Say hi to mom. Days are OK, nights a little chilly. Latest vacation pix ...

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/

Toto: So where *are* we then ?

This is interesting Social Engineering.

The first (very expensive) Telephone lines were Party Lines. The Telephone Exchange and the Telephone Booth were invented nearly simultaneously. Hmmmm ... So you have an expensive Party Line assuring that your well heeled competitors can listen in, but you "trust" them because they are well heeled like you, but you are relieved when the riff-raff can't listen in to one side of the business you are conducting.

I'm so glad to hear that the hip wired nerds are so much smarter than the elite used to be :-)

Easy, but "The Feds" won't do it.

This is "The Weatherman's Dilemma". Pictures from sattelittes can tell you with absolute certainty that there is NOT a hurricane in the space between your house and the neighbors'. You'd think Weathermen (Feds) would be thrilled at the certainty. Not quite. The Weathermen need to be able to say for sure there is not a hurricane in your kitchen, don't they ? No actually they don't because major storms normally start outdoors.

Enter Google.

The Feds are already pointing a camera at your house!!!!!!!! Weathermen have already invaded your back yard!!!! All your lawn furniture are belong to us!!!!!!

The simple solution is for the Weathermen (Feds) to say, "Yes, we look at, not under roofs and we never look at fewer than 100 roofs at a time so 1% of your lawn furniture are belong to us!!!! Some of it is quite ugly if you must know.". This is exactly what the US Census does with Industrial Surveys containing "confidential" information.

The Weathermen will never land jobs at Google after Government Service unless they preserve the fiction that there might be hurricanes hiding under your roof or under your Cell Phone.

I like it.

It has been years since HP made "instruments", you know the sort of stuff you have to have after you've noticed something unexpected ? I think they used to call it "Science and Engineering" and HP was very very good at it back in the day.

Here's the video ...

Apple also discovered eight facilities with "bonded labour" ...

http://video.pbs.org/program/slavery-another-name/

Damn Mayans Again

What's the Mayan angle ?

Well the Mayans practiced Human Sacrifice, albeit famously less than their neighbours to the North the Aztecs. Enter the Conquistadores who hunted gold and would have enslaved to get it. What did not happen is the incorporation of Human Sacrifice into European Culture.

The Silicon Valley Conquistadores offered slavery or iPhones to Asia and the deal was sealed. This is the Moral Hazard of celebrating CEO's who are clever, but !(educated people|moral people).

When all is said and done ...

The laptop Aaron Swartz used to download the files was no different than laptops sold by the millions every year.

The difference in sentence was not unlike "crack" cocaine posession by the lesser esteemed members of society versus cocaine hydrochloride (the hip sniff of choice) posession. Anybody with High School Chemistry can tell you the percent of cocaine (free) base in cocaine hydrochloride. That number never varies, and the "war on drugs" does not depend on it changing.

Here, you have a freely available man-made product (a laptop), and you commit crimes or not if you punch the right/wrong buttons on the thing, and are sentenced by the "severity" of the crime.

Where Ms. Ortiz goes monsterously wrong is in thinking the USA has an "official" Enemies of the State category of criminal. I am reminded that Josef Stalin first had to define "Kulaks" before he murdered them.

Massachuetts is not the Ukraine and Ms. Ortiz has not the policy making power of Stalin.