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So why is the economy of the People's Republic of China booming?

- because economically they are the freest market in the world today.

That's true by de-facto, as all the productive capacity shifted there for a reason. You can also ask these people.

Did Obama ever actually claim "the economy has recovered"?

Anyway, it's all about how you define "recovered" - some economists argued that the economy had "recovered" once it showed 3 months of consecutive growth. See this businessinsider article for an example of that usage. The man on the street may well argue that "recovered" means the jobless % returns to previous levels, but others are arguing that may not happen at all in the "jobless recovery". So, by what metric is "recovered" measured? Profitability? Employment? CEO salaries? Salaries for everyone else? Economic growth? Consumption? House sales? The deficit? And over what time period is this metric to be measured?

Wrong again. It's not that government is not effective.. actually it is too effective.. in furthering the military-industrial-financial establishment and transferring the wealth of the middle-classes to the rich...

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1

The only people the benefited from the increase in productivity in the past 30 years are the rich. That's what the OWS protesters are angry about.

It should be noted that Apple is publicly happy about the Amazon Fire and its rivals because it further contributes to Android fragmentation.

UPDATE: The San Francisco Police department has changed its story -- it now says that 4 officers accompanied 2 Apple investigators. The officers stayed outside while the investigators searched CalderÃn's home, which is presumably why there was no paperwork filed.

They still kind of do... most people don't realize Samsung admitted to copying Windows and OSX icons in 2006. http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-designs-2011-4?op=1

I'll just reply to you, since you're the only non-coward to reply. I agree that having a bunch of "too big to fail" banks is a bad idea, but I disagree the terminology: nothing is too big to fail. If the banks had failed, other banks would have bought up their assets, the FDIC would have made up the difference to account holders, and the people who made the bad decisions at those banks would be looking for new jobs.

Instead, the Feds bailed them out, incentivizing their behavior. Worse, they made it profitable. In the future, those banks and probably others will do the same thing, because they expect the Feds to bail them out again.

On the other hand, the bank "bailout" was forced on the banks as a way for the Executive Branch to make the banks look bad, because people will continue to talk about those greedy banks even though they had already paid back the loans.

However, this debit card transaction fee fiasco is not going to affect large banks at all. They will continue to make the same amount, because they are forced by their shareholders to do so. So every time the government artificially intervenes like this, the bank's customers will feel the pinch in the form of higher fees. And they won't move to "smaller" banks because they need national coverage, or the various other reasons that large banks are advantageous for their customers.

Don't think that I'm on the side of larger banks. I'm not. The entire consolidation of US banks was started by various assholes including J. P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, and the Rothschilds, who started rumors that Knickerbocker Trust would fail, and then sold it short. When it finally occurred, they stepped in and bought the failed trusts and other banks for pennies, even getting government loans to do it. They controlled the press (by owning most newspapers), so to this day are talked about as the savior of the financial system rather than the cause of the crisis they profited from.

The long and short is that the government needs to stop fucking with the financial system. If they hadn't assisted in the creation of a central bank, and assisted in the bailout of the "too big to fail" banks and every other smaller thing that they've done in between, we might not be in the mess we're in. While Dick Durban's intentions might be to help smaller banks (and it's more likely that his intentions are to *look* like he wants to help smaller banks), it will end up backfiring in some way. Because that's how these things happen. Every government intervention ends up backfiring in some way, and it always leads to increased costs in the long run. Recent examples off the top of my head are Sarbanes-Oxley and the "Affordable Care Act".

don't doubt. Last year, when the activations were on the 200000's and not 500000's they were already making money ( http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-08-05/tech/30018597_1_google-s-android-android-based-phones-search-revenue ).

They don't make as much as apple, in the end they don't sell the devices themselves, but they are making a lot of money ( and have been posting record quarters, even in a world in crisis )

Why, at a technical level, is this so bad?

Ok, for starters it's another innovation killer. By Apple bolstering it's control of the platform, in yet another authoritarian way, it raises the frustration level for the developer and many would-be developers. "Code. Build. Innovate.". Yeah, riiiight.

Secondly, if I'm a developer doing something new and cool, maybe I don't *want* to reveal how I'm doing it. Maybe I don't want to make it easy for anyone, including Apple, to copy my application. It's my code, not Apple's and there are several incidents where this has happened*.

Thirdly, when an entity controls the production, the platform and the software distribution, what you end up with is just monopoly. I'm sure Apple would love to be the only name in the game and that's exactly what they are shooting for. They want to be the Microsoft of the mobile world. If that happens you will have no choice but whatever choice is made by Apple for you. Obviously, some people really like being led around by a nose-ring or Apple wouldn't be so popular.

[0] - http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-06-10/tech/30007890_1_app-store-ios-idevices
[1] - http://www.itproportal.com/2011/06/11/apple-rips-off-developer-brands-app-as-its-own/

Is anyone outside m$ really considering letting them define what a freaking file is from now on after this?. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Surely once Microsoft has bullied their shit into everything once again, we can all trust them and no one will end up having to pay any kind of extortion racket like this, and this, this, this and this.

Apple does projections too in its quarterly reports.

For instance, this last October it projected it was going to sell 22 million iPhones, and it only sold 17 milllion.

So last quarter according to you Apple sold 17 million iPhones. According to the summery

Market research firm Canalys on Monday released country-level smartphone shipment estimates and according to its figures, HTC shipped 5.7 million own-brand smartphones and another 700,000 T-Mobile-branded handsets last quarter to take the top spot with 6.4 million total devices shipped."

Last I checked 17 > 6.4. How is HTC in the top spot?

Note that Apple always lists its sales in its SEC statements. And these are sales figures to the end consumer, not shipments.

Apple does projections too in its quarterly reports.

For instance, this last October it projected it was going to sell 22 million iPhones, and it only sold 17 milllion. In any case, everybody publishes their sales figures to their investors. It's just that most of us don't care about last October Sales figures, we care about future sales (or at least current sales), and that kind of information is hard-to-come by if we need it to be reliable.

Where do you think that extra money is going to? I'll give you a hint.

Models aren't equal to models, and even rough models of chaotic phenomena can be very useful and predictive, if they are the right ones. Read this for some acknowledgement of which brand of economics has been right during the last few years. Here is another account, including some pointers to predictions of the current crisis reaching as far back as 1999. Krugman even has a "model" of how good models get out of fashion.

Economics suffers from the manipulation by political interests, and by the wish of many practitioners to project their moral ideals onto the world. Many economists simply go and try to prove that the world works however they want it to work, and find funding for that from rich supporters. That makes the endeavour biased.

Here are some things attributed to Jobs by his official biographer that won't be appearing in any Slashdot stories:

Steve Jobs told President Obama he probably would not be re-elected [because] regulations and unions in the United States were crippling its ability to remain competitive. "You're headed for a one-term presidency," Jobs said to Obama.

[Jobs said] it was too difficult to build a factory in the U.S., which led the company to build manufacturing plants in countries like China.

Jobs also said teachers' unions "crippled" the education system in the United States. Among his requests to Obama were an 11-month school schedule, school days that last until 6 p.m. and a merit-based system for employing and firing teachers.

[Jobs] told Obama that the United States needed to become more business-friendly.

You may now resume your continuously scheduled iSpin.

On the other hand, note that

1. Jobs actually supported Obama pretty heavily ($$$) which is why Obama even bothers listening to him
2. Apple pulled out of the US COC over its stance advocating global warming denial.

Jobs is many, many things (and it seems like we'll be hearing about all of them over the next few weeks) but he's not a straight-line liberal or conservative.

Here are some things attributed to Jobs by his official biographer that won't be appearing in any Slashdot stories:

Steve Jobs told President Obama he probably would not be re-elected [because] regulations and unions in the United States were crippling its ability to remain competitive. "You're headed for a one-term presidency," Jobs said to Obama.

[Jobs said] it was too difficult to build a factory in the U.S., which led the company to build manufacturing plants in countries like China.

Jobs also said teachers' unions "crippled" the education system in the United States. Among his requests to Obama were an 11-month school schedule, school days that last until 6 p.m. and a merit-based system for employing and firing teachers.

[Jobs] told Obama that the United States needed to become more business-friendly.

You may now resume your continuously scheduled iSpin.

If you think this will make Slashdot readers think less of Jobs, you must have forgotten Slashdot's libertarian bent. If anything, you just turned Jobs-haters into Jobs-admirers.

Here are some things attributed to Jobs by his official biographer that won't be appearing in any Slashdot stories:

Steve Jobs told President Obama he probably would not be re-elected [because] regulations and unions in the United States were crippling its ability to remain competitive. "You're headed for a one-term presidency," Jobs said to Obama.

[Jobs said] it was too difficult to build a factory in the U.S., which led the company to build manufacturing plants in countries like China.

Jobs also said teachers' unions "crippled" the education system in the United States. Among his requests to Obama were an 11-month school schedule, school days that last until 6 p.m. and a merit-based system for employing and firing teachers.

[Jobs] told Obama that the United States needed to become more business-friendly.

You may now resume your continuously scheduled iSpin.

Oh, and it's not a coincidence that just like the Occupy Wall St protestors I'm talking about the 99% here. We can actually see this happening already and it has a good deal to do with why they're so pissed off, even if most of them don't know the exact figures. We've seen a massive increase in productivity due to technological advancements, but wages are at a record low percentage of the economy and corporate profits are nearly the highest percentage of the economy they've ever been. In fact, apparently hourly wages haven't increased in real terms for decades.

Oh, and it's not a coincidence that just like the Occupy Wall St protestors I'm talking about the 99% here. We can actually see this happening already and it has a good deal to do with why they're so pissed off, even if most of them don't know the exact figures. We've seen a massive increase in productivity due to technological advancements, but wages are at a record low percentage of the economy and corporate profits are nearly the highest percentage of the economy they've ever been. In fact, apparently hourly wages haven't increased in real terms for decades.

Oh, and it's not a coincidence that just like the Occupy Wall St protestors I'm talking about the 99% here. We can actually see this happening already and it has a good deal to do with why they're so pissed off, even if most of them don't know the exact figures. We've seen a massive increase in productivity due to technological advancements, but wages are at a record low percentage of the economy and corporate profits are nearly the highest percentage of the economy they've ever been. In fact, apparently hourly wages haven't increased in real terms for decades.

I forgot - the world ended Friday.

"It's not a lie or a scam, it's religion!"

This will be a big boost to "purchaseplusone.com", "googleplus1supply.com", "buyrealplusone.com" (a Google advertiser, no less) and "plusonehero.com", "buyplusoneservice.com", "buygoogleplus1.net", "buyplusonenow.com", and "plusonesbuilder.com". It will be even easier for them to acquire Google accounts and create "+1" value for their customers.

Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social. As soon as a social service provides a boost to search ranking, it gets spammed. Heavily. This has happened to Google Places., Yelp, Citysearch (really bad there), Twitter (this is why your Twitter feeds are full of spam links), Facebook "likes", and now Google +1. From a spammer perspective, social spamming is easy and cheap. Setting up a link farm requires web sites, unique content, and ongoing site maintenance. Social spam just requires phony free accounts. The social services host your spam for you, for free.

Presumably the smart people at Google have figured this out by now, but they've been told that 2011 employee bonuses depends on Google's success at social. So, from a Google employee perspective, sacrificing search quality for social features makes sense. Google top management got paranoid about Facebook, which is about 1/5 the size of Google and peaked a few months back. (Social networks grow and die like nightclubs, which have a limited lifetime of coolness. Remember AOL, Geocities, Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo 360, Myspace...)

Google search quality efforts are mostly "window dressing", as the U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island put it in his statement about Google's non-prosecution agreement. When ad revenue conflicts with search quality, ad revenue wins. Prof. Ben Eidelman of the Harvard Business School has analyzed this in detail.

The writing has been on the wall for sometime now but just as with the housing bubble, the U.S.higher education bubble has not yet worked its way onto primetime TV and therefore has not captured the public imagination. Just as with the housing, dot com, tulip and other bubbles, the higher education bubble starts with a plausible story-- that after you invest $XXXXXX and 4 years of your life, you'll come out ahead financially. But like these other bubbles, the story outgrows the basic reality. We have universities forgoing basic R&D, building high-priced gymnasiums, swimming pools, dormitories in order to attract tuition and alumni endowments. We have created courses in subjects which do very little for society or the individual and yet are attractive to students and therefore, keep the tuition flowing. And we have Sallie Mae, enabling us to pay far more for education than would otherwise be possible, thus performing the same role as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "affordable housing" programs did when they enabled house prices to rise far past anyone's ability to support them.

The University bubble does have some unique characteristics which might turn out to be good news for all of us:

• This bubble confined to the U.S. The cost of higher education in much of the free world is only a small fraction of what it costs here. For example, Oxford graduates pay only about 1/2 the tuition of your typical state-supported commuter college.
• There are alternatives such as free online courses. Unfortunately those with a vested interest in maintaining this bubble want to keep their oligopoly intact.
• These are recourse loans, no matter how hard they try banks can't repossess your education. But banks will try to pursue defaulters to the ends of the earth, bankruptcy will not help you avoid paying off a Sallie Mae loan.
• It's only $1 trillion!

The 360 finally starting showing some black in 2008. But they are just now getting to break-even, without considering inflation, interest, and net present value.

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-10/tech/29961217_1

Illegal according to the San Mateo DA's office. It would seem that the EFF and the DA's office are in agreement on that one.

EFF is interpreting the law incorrectly, I'm pretty sure having a press pass doesn't mean I get to steal your stuff and laugh at the police when they come looking for it.

Citation needed! Where do you see that anybody with a press pass stole anything at all from Apple? We know that Chen bought the phone from someone that said he found it in a bar and then contacted Apple to return it to them.

No where does it say the search was illegal, all it says is the search warrant was withdrawn and the items returned. "withdrawn" does not mean "illegal", and the only reason it was withdrawn is because Chen agreed to cooperate with investigators

If some guy showed up at my house with a prototype 2014 Mustang test mule and said "I'll sell it to you for $$$$$$" I can't buy it and tell the police to shove off just because I have a press pass, it's still stolen property.

eff.org are trolls, you need to pick your sources better

Deutsche Bank report

Apple *is* in fact making huge profits from its Mac division - about $5B last *quarter*

That figure is for all divisions, not just personal computers. Anyway, it terms of PC manufacturers, then yes, Apple is highly profitable compared to the likes of Asus, Fujitsu etc. You may find this interesting.

Apple take more than 50% of the profit in the phone industry by owning only 4% of the market-share.

4.6% is the Garner figure for all Apple phones globally. Nielsen says Apple's market-share of smartphones is 28%. I suppose it depends on whether you count smartphones as a distinct market segment or not. Most figures these days do seem to be presented in terms of smartphone market share rather than overall phone market share.

Since the HUD consolidated all of these bad loans in one place, it was like a bomb going off.

[...]

And now we have a bunch of protesters pissed off at Wall St. Huh? Perfect example of people being brainwashed by our government.

Duty calls.

Of all the misinformation you have in your post (ACORN? Really? Get thee to Glen Beck!) , these are the two most egregious, since they come from a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between government and investment banks.

First. The government does not create investment vehicles beyond government bonds. I 'm sorry, but it just doesn't. HUD did not create collateralized-debt-obligations / credit-default-swaps. That was the brain trusts on Wall Street. They were able to securitize and resecuritize these risky loans, due to deregulation of the banking industry. Actually, when it comes to the derivatives market, there aren't any regulations.

Second. No one forced anyone to buy the CDOs. While the first generation of CDOs probably was a good investments, the later generations weren't. They were so bad, that investment banks and hedge funds such as Magnatar Capital were knowingly creating CDOs that would fail, and were shorting them, all the while selling them to their clients as rock solid investments. That is fraud.

That is why people are pissed off. They're pissed off at Wall Street for crashing the economy while making billions on our troubles. They're pissed of at the government for putting policies in place since the 1980s and policies advocated by The Most Blessed, Saint Ronald of Hollywood, Peace Be Upon Him. Polices such as cutting the capital gains taxes. Removing regulations that stabilized the economy and set us on the path to become the preeminent economic power of the 20th century. Essentially, polices that punished work, and rewarded wealth. These are policies backed by Wall Street, and pushed by their lackys in Washington. These are the policies of the GOP. Just look at the charts. And while we're at it, I suggest you look at the national debt chart, and tell me who really cuts government spending.

And you know what I'm pissed off about? No one on Wall Street, is being prosecuted for fraud.

The French knew how to deal with our Wall Street problem.

I'd love to see something better, but the rhetoric sounds a WHOLE lot like the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

The biggest right-wing propaganda coup of the last twenty years has been convincing people like you that anyone to the left of the Republican Party wants a communist overthrow of the United States. It's just... not true. At all. In any way. Returning to the tax rates of the 1990s is not Bolshevism. Decoupling financial games from the productive economy is not Bolshevism. Pointing out that income inequality is widening is not Bolshevism. Yes, there are stupid college students in the protests. So what? There are stupid college students everywhere. What almost all of the protesters want is a sensible mixed economy.

If you want to look at history, you might try examining some recent data:

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10

You might also review the history of the Industrial Revolution, in which unchecked corporate power created hideous working conditions for the benefit of a tiny minority.

Good points! I think the overall message is actually pretty clear, they're just protesting that the growing income gap is unfair.
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1

I'm not really sure there is a solution for this, or whether there should be one. After all, if compared to the population in the rest of the world, a lot of these protesters probably are also in the top 1% . And I'd threaten to suggest that most of the ultra-rich did manage to get there legally, albeit by gaming the system. But that means there's not terribly much we could do to right things within the legal confines of the system. And I don't really mind having a few mega-rich people banging around, even if all they do is remind people why they don't like them, the same way we have some ultra-poor people around so we can show our kids what happens if they don't stay in school and keep off drugs. Oh, and I suppose without the ultra-rich, we wouldn't have luxury toys like Bugatti Veyrons and stuff to drool over. So I wouldn't advocate a system that simply redistributes the wealth so that no one can stay wealthy.

So that said, here's what I'd characterize as the main problem: unemployment and finance.

If everyone had jobs, they wouldn't really have time or energy to complain. But thanks to productivity increases, the world no longer needs so many workers to support the basic needs of the entire population. So I don't think we can rely on the corporations to provide jobs, social contract or no. It would be up to the government to provide things for people to do, even if it was just camping out digging holes and moving rocks like the Civilian Conservation Corps. So I'm a bit dismayed that there's nothing like this being proposed in any of the current solutions.

Finance... I am not an economist, but to the best of my understanding, the purpose of the finance sector is to provide a multiplicative effect on available currency. Put simply, by people storing money in banks, banks can use that money to lend out to people's mortgages and businesses, and more than double the available apparent money in an economy. So if 1000 people put $1000 in the bank so it can go and loan $100k to someone to buy a house, on paper, the bank "has" both $100k of people's savings accounts, plus a house worth $100k, for a total of $200k (not even including interest and fees). Then banks can turn around and do that sort of stuff with each other too, until they have that multiplier up to 15x or so. Then some regulation that had been holding that multiplier around 15x had expired, the financial sector quickly allowed it to balloon to 30x, then of course the slightest disturbance brought the house of cards crashing down. Spurred by low interest rates artificially brought down to spur the economy, people could no longer make money off of interest and started putting all of their money into the real estate bubble (whether they actually needed a house to live in, just to make a "safe" investment, or particularly to participate in loan fraud rings), which of course also crashed even more spectacularly. For some reason, no one could cope with having only half the money (corresponding to a 15x financial multiplier instead of the 30x) that they thought they had, and we tried to "stabilize" everything with these massive bailouts, that was unfortunately sold as a "do or die" proposition. I think all of these measures are just prolonging the inevitable and putting off a real recovery.

So I agree that the problems are entirely the financial sector's fault, and they should be forced to just eat it. It wasn't really much of a loss since it was all imaginary anyway... they became no longer able to convince others that they were worth 30x their actual currency, when 15x was a more believable number. The real crime was convincing people to throw actual bailout money at them to "fix" that discre

After reading this article http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10 and seeing Inside Job http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzrBurlJUNk I am tempted to join them!

Siri does look amazing, and will become really useful in a couple of years as developers outside of Apple operate on it.

...

Really, is Apple going to be the only company in the world that gets human interaction? It's staggering how much they've advanced society on their own and all their profound technical achievements.. Are there absolutely NO actual designers at any other tech company? Do they only hire engineers? Is that it?

...yada yada I love apple troll yada...

Uh... dude? You do understand that Apple bought Siri, right? It wasn't an internal black-box project that only Apple engineers could dream up - it was an external company making a product that Jobs liked and so Apple acquired it.

Have a Nice picture. And in a few days they report again.

Some inspirational speeches
"Focus is not about saying Yes, but about saying No"
http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-1997-video-2011-6

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

âoeThis was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and thatâ(TM)s what I had.â ...Steve Jobs, at home in 1982.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pacman3000/4042368287/

That's why the iPhone is the single best selling (and most profitable) individual smartphone out there. Because it works well.

Nice skew on the data ... Sure the iphone as a device may outsell a SINGLE android model, but in terms of market share of mobile OS devices, the market has spoken and Android outsells ios - http://www.businessinsider.com/android-versus-iphone-smartphone-share-2011-4

Top Gear has a record of out and out faking when "reviewing" Tesla cars. As an entertainment show, I am not sure how much credence I would give them for any brand, when it comes to Tesla they are on record as lying.

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2008-12-29/green_sheet/30080624_1_electric-car-drag-race-lotus-elise

Robert Llewellyn has pointed out that Top Gear's roadshows are sponsored by Shell (who are invested in hydrogen as the alternative fuel of the future) and that Top Gear has talked up the potential of hydrogen as superior to electric vehicles.

Robert Llewellyn is of course a very vocal electric car advocate. I recommend his web series Carpool: just as entertaining as Top Gear, but in a different way.

They are definitely getting smaller margins, but they aren't getting the volume they need to make it worthwhile (lower prices to not necessarily equate to higher volume.) Report from back in April :

"Global Equities analyst Trip Chowdry estimates that Motorola Mobility has manufactured between 500,000 and 800,000 Xooms, but has sold only 5 to 15 percent of them. Best case scenario then, according to Chowdry, is that Motorola has sold 120,000 Xooms; worse case scenario, it’s sold just 25,000."

And the Xoom is generally regarded as the best of the lot.

How long will these companies keep trying to get into a market where they aren't making any money ? Slashing prices reeks of desperation especially since components haven't gotten noticeably cheaper and they aren't making the volume to benefit from economies of scale. Like I said the best bet for real competition is probably the new Kindles. Amazon can sell these with an extremely low margin (or even a subsidized price) because unlike all the other tablet hopefuls they can make their money on media sales.

It's ironic that these books targeted for censorship are available for the Kindle, given the fact that Amazon engages in censorship of the Kindle store.

Zynga's revenues increased massively, but their profits shrunk because they invested so much into growth. That's what they're hoping people will believe, I think, because they want to look like they have some growth left, so they can get rich off an IPO and (presumably) abandon ship.

In reality, their revenue is propped up by amortized income from past quarters. If you look more closely at the numbers, as in the article I linked, it looks much worse: although revenue is up, bookings are down, and bookings represent the actual money taken in by the company in a given quarter. Active users are down, and haven't gone up significantly in half a year. Zynga is most likely a company without a future.

edit: revenue per month, not profit. However, this Jan. 5 2011 article suggests Facebooks' profits scale similarly to Google's. By which measure, Facebook is still a tenth or twelfth as valuable and 100% dependent on the success of their one property.

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-details-leaked-company-is-much-more-profitable-than-everyone-thought-2011-1

Except that their revenues are actually UP. They bought a lot of stuff and hired a lot of people. Profit money taken in, it's money AFTER you paid for everything they are doing. So, as of now, they are quite sustainable.

Regarding Zynga, how about doing as suggested and read the details? (I won't comment on Groupon, as I've never believed in their product at all)

Their quarterly revenue actually went up by more than $30M over the previous quarter; $279M vs $242M. They didn't launch a new game the entire year, until May 31st. (one month before the end of Q2) Since then, they have also launched a new Indiana Jones themed game, Adventure World. Keep in mind that Zynga will be one of the early players on Google's new social network, already launching their biggest game, Cityville, on the platform.

They had higher than normal hiring expenses, including a $10M payment as part of an executive's sign-on bonus. They also paid out $10.6M in a stock warrant. Both of these are quite likely to be one time events, and neither of them made many appearances in the media. If you take those two payments out, you are back at ~$22M in profit, which would be an increase in year over year, and almost double Q1 2011's profit of $11.8M. My source outlines most of this for you, in case you'd rather not read through the details yourself. I knew the Q2 2011 profit number, but here is another source for you to check out in case you don't believe me.

They aren't completely unorganized. This is only the beginning.

How do you Apple apologists argue with this and this?

I have a question that may or may not be related. I keep asking but haven't heard a good answer.

1. 1) Although many people own a little stock, most equities are owned by just 1% of the population. The bottom 50% owns 0.5%.
2. 2) Stocks went down overall in the 2000's.
3. 3) And yet, wealth inequality grew during the 2000's; the rich continued to get richer while everybody else got poorer.

How is that possible? Why hasn't the weakness of the stock market and real estate leveled the distribution of wealth? If high-frequency trading, or insider trading, or anything "unfair" has happened on a large scale, it should be detectable because the distribution of returns should be more skewed - that is, the best should be beating the market by a wider margin than before. Are they?

I think this is probably what the original poster was referring to.

http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-touch-screen-mac-2010-10

If so, then the OP mangled it a little as well.

Blaming Wallstreet for an "information blackout" (and ultimately for the current economic situation, while simultaneously giving the government a free pass

The housing crisis, caused by lending institutions granting mortgages to unqualified applicants, wasn't the fault of large banking corporations? They knew they could shove their losses off on Fannie and Freddie, so they had no risk, took the money and ran. Not that the govt wasn't complicit as well, dishing out TARP funds did nothing but encourage this anti-social behavior.

If the economy falters, companies are bringing in less revenue

Seriously? What planet are you on?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/business/economy/24econ.html"Corporate Profits Were the Highest on Record Last Quarter"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/23/corporate-profits-q3-2010-_n_787573.html"Corporate Profits Hit New Record, U.S. Workers Still Struggling "

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2011/performers/companies/profits/"Top companies: Most profitable" # Note, you have to go to #27 before you find one reporting a loss, and out of the top 50, only 5 report a loss

http://www.economist.com/node/18073369"How much longer can corporate America keep on delivering bumper increases in profits?"

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph"It's the Inequality, Stupid" Sorry, their title, not mine. Anyway, this gives an idea where that profit is going. If you are NOT in the top 1% of income earners, your after tax income has likely gone down since 1979. If you are in the top 1%, it has gone up more than 120%.

http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4#the-last-two-decades-were-greatif-you-were-a-ceo-or-owner-not-if-you-were-anyone-else-5"15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America" # CEO pay up 298% from 1990 to 2005, while the average workers pay is up 4.3%.

I would go on, but I have to get back to my wage-slave existence so I can have a roof over my head and something to eat tonight. Crying and/or going postal in the office would probably get me marked down on my performance review.

"Dat's an awful nice operating system youse gots dere. It'd be a shame if someone were to look too closely at your source code."

Microsoft has to do something to make money, considering the increasing losses from their world class search engine business. And by "world class", I mean losing $400 Million a quarter: http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-microsofts-bingmsn-results-truly-horrifying-quarterly-loss-balloons-to-713-million-2010-4

So apparently I might be wrong about patents' incentive to innovation after all. Today's slashdot post on patents has a link to this article: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-patent-overhaul-wont-help-innovators-2011-9

Some of the most rigorous research on U.S. patents has been conducted by Boston University's James Bessen and Michael Meurer. They have gone beyond the anecdotes that so often characterize discussions of patent reform and have studied in detail just how patents function, what incentives they create, and how the system could function better. What they found is that America's patent system only provides positive incentives for innovation in two industries: pharmaceuticals and chemicals. The value that a patent confers on its owner is outweighed by the cost of obtaining, asserting, and defending that patent for almost all American companies. Anyone innovating outside of those two industries would be better off if there were no patent system at all.

I will have to check out that book...

Have read several articles that suggest the 17k are not really that relevant to modern phone OS's, and were probably a waste of money.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/15/google_motorola_the_poker_chip_that_cant_be_redeemed/

http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-motorola-patents-are-crap-2011-8

Wonder how useful the next 1k are?