The previous article you refer to concerns Google owing $1B, not Amazon. I don't disagree with the rest of your screed.

Believe it or not, my Nissan Leaf has smooth, instant acceleration, at any speed under about 65 mph. The acceleration was a pleasant surprise. When you tromp on the accelerator (not the "gas pedal") the Leaf jumps. It's pretty awesome, even though the car doesn't look nearly as nice as a Tesla. But it is in the 30s, and leases are crazy cheap.

The point is also almost completely mythical: Of the people who are thoroughly devoted employees, only a tiny fraction of them will ever come remotely close to being the president of a major corporation.

Wow, that's completely missing the point. It's not that "John" made it to president, it's that the railroad job was just a job for Dave, but for John it was more.

There are clearly people with drive and ambition, and put together with actual ability, they tend to get ahead.

Get out of the house once in a while, and make a friend in your own timezone.

All they wanted was indicates a little bias towards Google's position.

It takes two to make a deal. Google and Apple couldn't agree on terms, so there was no deal. It's that simple.

If you don't like it, don't buy one. It's that simple.

For actual reasons why Apple didn't go with a micro-USB connector, check out Boom.

People keep asking why Apple didn’t opt for the micro-USB connector. The answer is simple: that connector isn’t smart enough. It has only 5 pins: +5V, Ground, 2 digital data pins, and a sense pin, so most of the dock connector functions wouldn’t work – only charging and syncing would. Also, the pins are so small that no current plug/connector manufacturer allows the 2A needed for iPad charging.

I'm not emptying my pool, but it's chlorinated, so that should be OK, shouldn't it?

Unfortunately, a lot of the wetlands in Massachusetts are protected areas, so they're huge mosquito breeding grounds. It'd be nice to drain them all, but that has side effects.

Please explain more. Why did you go for the Ph.D. at 52? How long ago was that? Were you doing CS work before that? What differences did you see after the Ph.D.?

the fact that Apple is releasing a "me too" smaller tablet

So, your theory is that Apple saw the Nexus 7, and told their engineering team to start working on a "smaller tablet" to go out the door in 3 months?

Yeah, that makes sense.

Assuming the DF is correct in its release-time guesses, it's (barely) possible that Apple has had a mini-iPad in the works for a year or two, but is pushing it out earlier than planned, or even that the good reception for the the Nexus 7 made Apple give the project the "go" for commercial sale, but I'm pretty sure that you can't ship any size tablet without a significant run-up in production across many parts providers, not to mention the R&D that is required before that.

Recommended to me by Vernor Vinge. Great "classic" SF, but not dated.

Also, Keith Laumer, and Mack Reynolds.

Palm pilots with phone functionality is basically exactly what newer model iPaqs were.

That's what the Palm Treos were too, and Apple ran them down as well.

It's the same reason that the likes of Netbooks sold hundreds of millions of units

Citation, please?

It's not that previous devices, whether smartphones or tablets, were business-oriented, it's that they sucked compared to what Apple came out with.

I worked for Palm in the early 2000s, and yeah, the Treo 650 (and later models, although the 650 was the most rock-solid IMO) was a very nicely integrated PDA and phone. But the iPhone left everything that came before it in the dust, especially when it came to browsing the web. I agree with the previous poster(s) who said that the web was the killer app for phones.

As for tablets, the pre-iPad Windows tablets were a joke. Very few apps were written for the tablet OS and UI, and overall the interface sucked ass. Try right-clicking with a stylus. You could do it, but it was like your fingers were playing Twister.

Saying that the iPad was nothing new is asinine. The iPhone and iPad clearly redefined their categories, and the proof is in the products that their competitors are making, all of which are very evidently modeled on the iOS devices.

37 Saddest Failed Kickstarters

I've no connection with buzzfeed. I am a backer of the Pebble Watch on Kickstarter.

There are some Kickstarter horror stories, like the Hanfree iPad stand. The project raised $35K, and never delivered. My uninformed guess is that they spent too much money on research, material selection, etc. and realized they didn't have enough left to actually fill the orders they had taken. The comments on the project page are brutal.