That is a better explanation of your position than other critics have presented (mindless zealots who are unable to control their impulse to purchase). I still think it suffers from a time scale perspective. I don't see how Apple can continue to introduce products that experience exponential growth (I mean that in the mathematical sense, not the uneducated hyperbolic sense). But they still have four categories (laptops, handheld media players/internet devices, cellphone capable internet devices, and tablets) that will continue to grow for as far as the eye can see (except maybe iPods and they remain a huge market). A few non-revolutionary products will do little to dampen the desire to buy always improved, hit products from a tech store that doesn't suck.
When and if those products become irrelevant, assuming nothing new and significant ever appears, Apple would have to adjust its Apple Store strategy but it would do so as a huge incumbent. This would be some twenty or thirty years in the future judging from the wintel life cycle. This suggests geopolitical forces that would apply to the US and West generally are more likely to matter than commercial forces. That is what I mean by time scale. Your speculation would better apply to an Apple that prospered greatly from the iPod but never ventured into new territory. Simple media players become commodities and Apple Stores whither on the vine. But that is not what happened. In any case betting that Apple will not produce a new hit product has already become a fools game.
Really? Did Sun create a multitouch API from the ground up like Apple? There were plenty of "smartphones" before the iPhone but what they had in common was that they all sucked. They had their little clicky keyboards and mouse substitutes and they ran like miniature laptop computers with interfaces from the 80's that were not even compelling on laptops. On top of all that you are putting forth a prototype as your example. Are you for real? A prototype? That's hilarious.
What is most amusing is touting the Apple Store as the seeds of Apples downfall. I remember how the idea was mocked as naive and incompetent by citing previous failed efforts like the Gateway stores. However, as the Apple Store has become possibly the most successful retail store in history the critics have quietly shuffled off and learned that their insights might be less than perfect. But not you. Impending disaster. Apple is Doomed!
By the way, the reason for Apple's success is that it is not Apple, It is Next Computer wearing an Apple skin. Apple acquired Next but it was actually a takeover of Apple by Next. The OS, NextStep, is the basis of the system software of all the Apple devices. Even as Next was fading it was acknowledged that it was a superb OS but it had arrived too late and lacked the critical mass of users needed to survive. The Apple acquisition and transition from MacOS changed that factor by stealth. There are other important factors, like the successful launch of the Apple Store, but Apple with MacOS would not be where it is today.
What? Apple didn't defend themselves against Psystar in the legal sense. They sued Psystar to prevent Psystar from selling computers with Mac OS X pre-installed. It took quite a while to successfully litigate (these cases can be drawn out) but Psystar did lose and it appears to no longer be in business. Are you thinking of some other case?
Apple in its earlier years, like Google more recently, seemed to be less interested in playing the copyright/patent game that established players tend to favor. In the 80's they saw what they considered their innovations pilfered by competitors and they were unprepared for the legal battles. If you recall the keynote speech by Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone, he spent considerable time making it clear Apple had applied for many patents to defend what he saw as Apple's innovations in this case. He also made clear that Apple was prepared to successfully defend its position this time. These sorts of battles are long and drawn out. Don't expect it to end anytime soon.
Personally I think this sort of activity is less than optimal but as long as the laws are in place I expect corporations to continue these battles. What is sorely needed is comprehensive patent reform. Expecting individual companies to abstain is naive. They know they will get eaten alive.
1977 - Consumer friendly complete computer out of the box Apple II 1983 - Mass market desktop metaphor computer and software Lisa 1984 - Macintosh 1987(?) - Small business affordable ($6000) PostScript laser printer LaserWriter... 2001 - iPod (hard drive based music player with easily purchased popular digital music, N.B. iTMS took some time to develop 2001 - Mac OS X first unix OS that allowed but did not require geek cred 2001 - Apple Store first tech store that didn't suck (usually) in contrast to Best Buy, Circuit City, etc 2007 - iPhone first modern multitouch based "smartphone" 2010 - iPad first tablet that is not a laptop wannabe due to same iPhone pioneered multitouch interface
Dates are off the top of my head so could be off slightly. You can contest all you want about "didn't exist before" but these things were not in stores available to buy from competitors
I don't think you understand the nature of Apple's litigation. Last I heard Apple was not interested in licensing any technology they claim (i.e. shakedown), they want to force competitors to find work arounds. It's a bit like the scene in Goldfinger when Bond has an industrial laser beam about to cut him in half. He says, "I suppose you expect me to talk" and Goldfinger replies "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!".
Use TOR for anonymous web browsing. If you use it for bit torrent it will probably fail if bit torrent is using UDP for file packet delivery which does not go through the TOR overlay which is for TCP packets. This may change eventually but it had not the last time I checked. Even if it does change the bandwidth requirements would make all the more important uses of TOR suffer as a result. Much better is to use an inexpensive VPN to a distant location. This has the added benefit of making all your internet activity opaque to big brother (or at least a lot less convenient).
I don't see how fair and reasonable come in to this specific case. That has already been used to determine a price which is available to other customers. The non-discriminatory part of the obligation means Samsung (in this case) is required to offer that same price to Apple, i.e. not discriminate depending on the customer. If I understand what little I have read, Samsung refuses to accept that option from Apple so Apple has no deal to close until Samsung lives up to the FRAND obligation they agreed to in order to have their patents accepted as part of a public standard. I'm pretty sure this is also the case of Nokia's patents.
I'm not a fan of the patent system but I don't see how Samsung and Nokia are sympathetic actors when they are trying to weasel out of their FRAND obligations which largely provide the reason why their patents have worth. I am frankly baffled that people seem to assume that Apple is simply unwilling to pay a licensing fee for use of patents. What I believe Apple is refusing to do is be treated in a discriminatory fashion by companies with FRAND patents. How is that sinister?
Where did you get the idea that cross licensing is "the right thing"? I'm glad that at least one of the leviathans is not playing the cross licensing game. Making cross licensing the normal course of events means that only large established corporations get to play the game. If you don't have a vast portfolio of patents, regardless of whether they are valid or even useful, means that new and possibly innovative entrants face a daunting prospect.
If only the smaller, less politically connected (i.e. no history of making repeated large political contributions) companies are subject to damaging legal proceedings what are the chances for patent reform? But if Samsung and similar titans are similarly vexed, maybe the politicians they own will do something about the ruinous patent system.
One exception to this is if a patent is proposed as part of an industry standard that is required to comply with the industry standard (like LTE and other communications standards). In that case the owner of the patent agrees to FRAND licensing terms (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory).
That is at the core of some of these disputes. For instance Samsung holds some FRAND patents for LTE. They license it to some companies for a specific price. When dealing with Apple they refuse to offer the same terms but insist on cross licensing of Apple patents that are not FRAND encumbered. This violates the non-discriminatory part of their agreement. But if you are a huge company with access to expensive legal resources it hardly matters if you violate terms of your agreements. I suppose that is what lawyers are for. Of course in this case although Samsung is a huge business conglomerate, Apple is also a huge company with vast legal resources. So we get to watch a sumo match that is rolling out worldwide.
In a sense it is almost satisfying to watch huge corporations caught up in the "intellectual property" tar baby of their own devising. It offers a contrast to the usual bullying of smaller players which is probably the more common case though not as easily visible.
...Imho, the reprehensible behaviors of our governments over the last decade has made encrypting our communications a moral imperative. I.e. I've nothing important enough to keep secret, but damn if I'm not gonna make their lives harder by making my unimportant information inaccessible to them.
Good luck with that. Some years back Charlie Rose (I think it was him) had an episode of his program about privacy and encryption including all the usual suspects like EFF, RSA and geek celebrities. After all the conversation about what was available and how it should be used Charlie asked the individuals about their habits. None of them actually used encryption for their own email usage. None of them.
One reason for that result is the process of bit rot. After setting encryption for your current needs, my experience is that over time it breaks in one fashion or another. Updating yourself and those with whom you hope to communicate is the usual slog and you continue until bit rot again takes its toll. The best chance (technically rather than politically speaking) is the encryption option built in to IPv6. This could allow all that you do over the net to be completely opaque to anyone who wants to snoop (particularly massive signal intercept). This was designed and built before the thugs with guns and money (governments, corporations, etc) decided they needed to rein in the geeks. Its chances of deployment are rather slim. Despite heroes like Phil Zimmermann it seems like encryption will be used against rather than for the masses. One can always hope.
Someone really needs to mention that there is often an issue of FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) patents. Companies that hold patents that they want to have adopted by a standards organization will usually agree to FRAND licensing of those patents. However, it appears this system is fraying around the edges. Companies, like Nokia and Samsung, will offer terms to some companies and then when dealing with Apple insist on cross licensing with Apple's patents that are not encumbered by FRAND terms.
Personally, I'm not convinced that patents have ever been an optimal idea for society going back as far as James Watt's steam engine. But given the reality of the legal system that is in place, I think it is rather dishonest for many of these companies to act as though they are victims when they are attempting to ignore that they had agreed to license in a non-discriminatory fashion.
So if we are going to start down this road, I think companies holding FRAND patents who have clearly failed to honor the terms as they had agreed, should be stripped of those patents. Also, instead of extending patents to ever new areas (business method, software, design) those "innovations" should be rolled back in recognition of what disasters they have become.
Install VPN to "virtually relocate" to a country that has not been bought and paid for by the media cartel. I'm not clear on whether DNS lookups are in the VPN pipe but if it becomes an issue the next step is to configure it so those packets are handled. In general it has always been a bad idea that encryption has not been deployed to keep private matters private but instead depend on "the kindness of strangers". Of course, there is also tor which can always benefit from more people adding to its nodes.
Well, one part of the original AT&T culture was not maintained by the company calling itself AT&T today. The original AT&T funded Bell Labs, one of the most significant research labs of the twentieth century which did research worthy of multiple Nobel Prizes. Nothing like that from the current company calling itself AT&T.
"had Verizon not been left out of the iPhone sales fest early on" That's an odd way to characterize what happened. The folklore is that Apple tried to recruit Verizon but insisted that the iPhone not be screwed up by the carrier and Apple would manage all the apps. Verizon told Apple to take a hike and AT&T got exclusivity in return for accepting Apple's unprecedented demands. Way too many people don't recall that the cellphone market was utterly controlled by the carriers before the iPhone was launched and how shitty it was as a result. The carriers still have way too much power to mess up the user experience (monthly charge for what an app could do for a one time charge - tethering, for example) but it is still so much better today.
In case anyone else does care the differences include that the iPad2 is thinner, lighter, has better battery life, much faster 3D graphics, better CPU, and a mediocre camera. It is simply brutal to compete with Apple in the iPad market because Apple has been working on this product for almost a decade (the design patents are from 2005-2006). Imagine how angry the managers at Samsung in charge of chip fabrication and LCD displays must be. A lazy executive elsewhere in the giant Samsung corporation gets lazy/careless assuming Apple will look the other way because of business relations and simply clones the look of the iPad and instead Apple chooses to play hardball. Apple takes its component acquisition business elsewhere and files lawsuits. I'm sure Samsung will survive but the managers who decided to cut corners should be looking for new opportunities.
The thing you are missing is that comedy is not so easy. Something isn't a 'joke' or 'funny' just because you claim it is. If Apple had some quality control problems with the iPad there might be a joke there. They didn't. One is just left scratching his head wondering what the joke was supposed to be. That is why comedy is usually best left to professionals rather than nerds with an axe to grind.
Well, yes and no. They are both "actually" infinite but from a measure theory standpoint they are not equal. The interval from 0 to 1 has measure 1 and if you remove all the rational numbers from that set it still has measure 1. The removed set, the rationals from 0 to 1 has measure 0. So the uncountable set has measure 1 and the countably infinite set has measure 0. In that sense uncountably infinite sets can be usefully thought of as "bigger" than countably infinite sets. It has literally been decades since I took Royden's course on this topic so I apologize if I've missed anything important.
No, the rational numbers and the real numbers are both infinite, but there is no one-to-one, onto mapping between them. There is an injective mapping of the rationals into the reals. There is even a one-to-one, onto mapping of the rationals to the algebraic numbers (a superset of the rationals containing most of the irrationals you usually encounter). In other words countable infinity (integers, rationals, algebraic) are all "the same" and smaller than uncountable infinity (the reals).
This digression has about as much relevence to Apple as the prattling about the architecture of Apple's new headquarters.
I'm not anxious to defend the bankers involved in creating the mess but I thought that much of the TARP fund was eventually repaid. Is that not the case?
If a small keyboard is a high priority, your decision is probably made for you. It might be worth mentioning that iOS devices work well with most bluetooth keyboards which come in a variety of shapes and sizes. I do tend to use my iPad rather than iPod because the onscreen keyboard is so much better (almost touch typing in landscape mode). In any case I do appreciate Android users since it keeps Apple from getting even more comfortable.
I wasn't a fan of the iPod touch either until I tried my son's first generation iPod touch and found that Apple had snuck a unix work station with an innovative interface onto a hand held device. Yes, you can play your music, watch porn, play games etc. You can also ssh into your server and accomplish useful work, the browser is actually useful and standards compliant and thousands (more?) of developers are applying their ingenuity to creating new tools for your use.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a better explanation of your position than other critics have presented (mindless zealots who are unable to control their impulse to purchase). I still think it suffers from a time scale perspective. I don't see how Apple can continue to introduce products that experience exponential growth (I mean that in the mathematical sense, not the uneducated hyperbolic sense). But they still have four categories (laptops, handheld media players/internet devices, cellphone capable internet devices, and tablets) that will continue to grow for as far as the eye can see (except maybe iPods and they remain a huge market). A few non-revolutionary products will do little to dampen the desire to buy always improved, hit products from a tech store that doesn't suck.
When and if those products become irrelevant, assuming nothing new and significant ever appears, Apple would have to adjust its Apple Store strategy but it would do so as a huge incumbent. This would be some twenty or thirty years in the future judging from the wintel life cycle. This suggests geopolitical forces that would apply to the US and West generally are more likely to matter than commercial forces. That is what I mean by time scale. Your speculation would better apply to an Apple that prospered greatly from the iPod but never ventured into new territory. Simple media players become commodities and Apple Stores whither on the vine. But that is not what happened. In any case betting that Apple will not produce a new hit product has already become a fools game.
Really? Did Sun create a multitouch API from the ground up like Apple? There were plenty of "smartphones" before the iPhone but what they had in common was that they all sucked. They had their little clicky keyboards and mouse substitutes and they ran like miniature laptop computers with interfaces from the 80's that were not even compelling on laptops. On top of all that you are putting forth a prototype as your example. Are you for real? A prototype? That's hilarious.
What is most amusing is touting the Apple Store as the seeds of Apples downfall. I remember how the idea was mocked as naive and incompetent by citing previous failed efforts like the Gateway stores. However, as the Apple Store has become possibly the most successful retail store in history the critics have quietly shuffled off and learned that their insights might be less than perfect. But not you. Impending disaster. Apple is Doomed!
By the way, the reason for Apple's success is that it is not Apple, It is Next Computer wearing an Apple skin. Apple acquired Next but it was actually a takeover of Apple by Next. The OS, NextStep, is the basis of the system software of all the Apple devices. Even as Next was fading it was acknowledged that it was a superb OS but it had arrived too late and lacked the critical mass of users needed to survive. The Apple acquisition and transition from MacOS changed that factor by stealth. There are other important factors, like the successful launch of the Apple Store, but Apple with MacOS would not be where it is today.
"When they defended themselves against psystar"
What? Apple didn't defend themselves against Psystar in the legal sense. They sued Psystar to prevent Psystar from selling computers with Mac OS X pre-installed. It took quite a while to successfully litigate (these cases can be drawn out) but Psystar did lose and it appears to no longer be in business. Are you thinking of some other case?
Apple in its earlier years, like Google more recently, seemed to be less interested in playing the copyright/patent game that established players tend to favor. In the 80's they saw what they considered their innovations pilfered by competitors and they were unprepared for the legal battles. If you recall the keynote speech by Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone, he spent considerable time making it clear Apple had applied for many patents to defend what he saw as Apple's innovations in this case. He also made clear that Apple was prepared to successfully defend its position this time. These sorts of battles are long and drawn out. Don't expect it to end anytime soon.
Personally I think this sort of activity is less than optimal but as long as the laws are in place I expect corporations to continue these battles. What is sorely needed is comprehensive patent reform. Expecting individual companies to abstain is naive. They know they will get eaten alive.
1977 - Consumer friendly complete computer out of the box Apple II ...
1983 - Mass market desktop metaphor computer and software Lisa
1984 - Macintosh
1987(?) - Small business affordable ($6000) PostScript laser printer LaserWriter
2001 - iPod (hard drive based music player with easily purchased popular digital music, N.B. iTMS took some time to develop
2001 - Mac OS X first unix OS that allowed but did not require geek cred
2001 - Apple Store first tech store that didn't suck (usually) in contrast to Best Buy, Circuit City, etc
2007 - iPhone first modern multitouch based "smartphone"
2010 - iPad first tablet that is not a laptop wannabe due to same iPhone pioneered multitouch interface
Dates are off the top of my head so could be off slightly. You can contest all you want about "didn't exist before" but these things were not in stores available to buy from competitors
I think they meant it was Apple's most profitable quarter ever and the second most profitable for any US company.
"...That's the nature of shakedown attempts."
I don't think you understand the nature of Apple's litigation. Last I heard Apple was not interested in licensing any technology they claim (i.e. shakedown), they want to force competitors to find work arounds. It's a bit like the scene in Goldfinger when Bond has an industrial laser beam about to cut him in half. He says, "I suppose you expect me to talk" and Goldfinger replies "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!".
Use TOR for anonymous web browsing. If you use it for bit torrent it will probably fail if bit torrent is using UDP for file packet delivery which does not go through the TOR overlay which is for TCP packets. This may change eventually but it had not the last time I checked. Even if it does change the bandwidth requirements would make all the more important uses of TOR suffer as a result. Much better is to use an inexpensive VPN to a distant location. This has the added benefit of making all your internet activity opaque to big brother (or at least a lot less convenient).
I don't see how fair and reasonable come in to this specific case. That has already been used to determine a price which is available to other customers. The non-discriminatory part of the obligation means Samsung (in this case) is required to offer that same price to Apple, i.e. not discriminate depending on the customer. If I understand what little I have read, Samsung refuses to accept that option from Apple so Apple has no deal to close until Samsung lives up to the FRAND obligation they agreed to in order to have their patents accepted as part of a public standard. I'm pretty sure this is also the case of Nokia's patents.
I'm not a fan of the patent system but I don't see how Samsung and Nokia are sympathetic actors when they are trying to weasel out of their FRAND obligations which largely provide the reason why their patents have worth. I am frankly baffled that people seem to assume that Apple is simply unwilling to pay a licensing fee for use of patents. What I believe Apple is refusing to do is be treated in a discriminatory fashion by companies with FRAND patents. How is that sinister?
Where did you get the idea that cross licensing is "the right thing"? I'm glad that at least one of the leviathans is not playing the cross licensing game. Making cross licensing the normal course of events means that only large established corporations get to play the game. If you don't have a vast portfolio of patents, regardless of whether they are valid or even useful, means that new and possibly innovative entrants face a daunting prospect.
If only the smaller, less politically connected (i.e. no history of making repeated large political contributions) companies are subject to damaging legal proceedings what are the chances for patent reform? But if Samsung and similar titans are similarly vexed, maybe the politicians they own will do something about the ruinous patent system.
One exception to this is if a patent is proposed as part of an industry standard that is required to comply with the industry standard (like LTE and other communications standards). In that case the owner of the patent agrees to FRAND licensing terms (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory).
That is at the core of some of these disputes. For instance Samsung holds some FRAND patents for LTE. They license it to some companies for a specific price. When dealing with Apple they refuse to offer the same terms but insist on cross licensing of Apple patents that are not FRAND encumbered. This violates the non-discriminatory part of their agreement. But if you are a huge company with access to expensive legal resources it hardly matters if you violate terms of your agreements. I suppose that is what lawyers are for. Of course in this case although Samsung is a huge business conglomerate, Apple is also a huge company with vast legal resources. So we get to watch a sumo match that is rolling out worldwide.
In a sense it is almost satisfying to watch huge corporations caught up in the "intellectual property" tar baby of their own devising. It offers a contrast to the usual bullying of smaller players which is probably the more common case though not as easily visible.
...Imho, the reprehensible behaviors of our governments over the last decade has made encrypting our communications a moral imperative. I.e. I've nothing important enough to keep secret, but damn if I'm not gonna make their lives harder by making my unimportant information inaccessible to them.
Good luck with that. Some years back Charlie Rose (I think it was him) had an episode of his program about privacy and encryption including all the usual suspects like EFF, RSA and geek celebrities. After all the conversation about what was available and how it should be used Charlie asked the individuals about their habits. None of them actually used encryption for their own email usage. None of them.
One reason for that result is the process of bit rot. After setting encryption for your current needs, my experience is that over time it breaks in one fashion or another. Updating yourself and those with whom you hope to communicate is the usual slog and you continue until bit rot again takes its toll. The best chance (technically rather than politically speaking) is the encryption option built in to IPv6. This could allow all that you do over the net to be completely opaque to anyone who wants to snoop (particularly massive signal intercept). This was designed and built before the thugs with guns and money (governments, corporations, etc) decided they needed to rein in the geeks. Its chances of deployment are rather slim. Despite heroes like Phil Zimmermann it seems like encryption will be used against rather than for the masses. One can always hope.
Someone really needs to mention that there is often an issue of FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) patents. Companies that hold patents that they want to have adopted by a standards organization will usually agree to FRAND licensing of those patents. However, it appears this system is fraying around the edges. Companies, like Nokia and Samsung, will offer terms to some companies and then when dealing with Apple insist on cross licensing with Apple's patents that are not encumbered by FRAND terms.
Personally, I'm not convinced that patents have ever been an optimal idea for society going back as far as James Watt's steam engine. But given the reality of the legal system that is in place, I think it is rather dishonest for many of these companies to act as though they are victims when they are attempting to ignore that they had agreed to license in a non-discriminatory fashion.
So if we are going to start down this road, I think companies holding FRAND patents who have clearly failed to honor the terms as they had agreed, should be stripped of those patents. Also, instead of extending patents to ever new areas (business method, software, design) those "innovations" should be rolled back in recognition of what disasters they have become.
Install VPN to "virtually relocate" to a country that has not been bought and paid for by the media cartel. I'm not clear on whether DNS lookups are in the VPN pipe but if it becomes an issue the next step is to configure it so those packets are handled. In general it has always been a bad idea that encryption has not been deployed to keep private matters private but instead depend on "the kindness of strangers". Of course, there is also tor which can always benefit from more people adding to its nodes.
Well, one part of the original AT&T culture was not maintained by the company calling itself AT&T today. The original AT&T funded Bell Labs, one of the most significant research labs of the twentieth century which did research worthy of multiple Nobel Prizes. Nothing like that from the current company calling itself AT&T.
"had Verizon not been left out of the iPhone sales fest early on" That's an odd way to characterize what happened. The folklore is that Apple tried to recruit Verizon but insisted that the iPhone not be screwed up by the carrier and Apple would manage all the apps. Verizon told Apple to take a hike and AT&T got exclusivity in return for accepting Apple's unprecedented demands. Way too many people don't recall that the cellphone market was utterly controlled by the carriers before the iPhone was launched and how shitty it was as a result. The carriers still have way too much power to mess up the user experience (monthly charge for what an app could do for a one time charge - tethering, for example) but it is still so much better today.
In case anyone else does care the differences include that the iPad2 is thinner, lighter, has better battery life, much faster 3D graphics, better CPU, and a mediocre camera. It is simply brutal to compete with Apple in the iPad market because Apple has been working on this product for almost a decade (the design patents are from 2005-2006). Imagine how angry the managers at Samsung in charge of chip fabrication and LCD displays must be. A lazy executive elsewhere in the giant Samsung corporation gets lazy/careless assuming Apple will look the other way because of business relations and simply clones the look of the iPad and instead Apple chooses to play hardball. Apple takes its component acquisition business elsewhere and files lawsuits. I'm sure Samsung will survive but the managers who decided to cut corners should be looking for new opportunities.
Now that's funny.
The thing you are missing is that comedy is not so easy. Something isn't a 'joke' or 'funny' just because you claim it is. If Apple had some quality control problems with the iPad there might be a joke there. They didn't. One is just left scratching his head wondering what the joke was supposed to be. That is why comedy is usually best left to professionals rather than nerds with an axe to grind.
Well, yes and no. They are both "actually" infinite but from a measure theory standpoint they are not equal. The interval from 0 to 1 has measure 1 and if you remove all the rational numbers from that set it still has measure 1. The removed set, the rationals from 0 to 1 has measure 0. So the uncountable set has measure 1 and the countably infinite set has measure 0. In that sense uncountably infinite sets can be usefully thought of as "bigger" than countably infinite sets. It has literally been decades since I took Royden's course on this topic so I apologize if I've missed anything important.
No, the rational numbers and the real numbers are both infinite, but there is no one-to-one, onto mapping between them. There is an injective mapping of the rationals into the reals. There is even a one-to-one, onto mapping of the rationals to the algebraic numbers (a superset of the rationals containing most of the irrationals you usually encounter). In other words countable infinity (integers, rationals, algebraic) are all "the same" and smaller than uncountable infinity (the reals).
This digression has about as much relevence to Apple as the prattling about the architecture of Apple's new headquarters.
How's that Amiga working for you now?
I'm not anxious to defend the bankers involved in creating the mess but I thought that much of the TARP fund was eventually repaid. Is that not the case?
If a small keyboard is a high priority, your decision is probably made for you. It might be worth mentioning that iOS devices work well with most bluetooth keyboards which come in a variety of shapes and sizes. I do tend to use my iPad rather than iPod because the onscreen keyboard is so much better (almost touch typing in landscape mode). In any case I do appreciate Android users since it keeps Apple from getting even more comfortable.
Apple has been relevant and innovative for more than thirty years. You probably haven't even been alive that long.
I wasn't a fan of the iPod touch either until I tried my son's first generation iPod touch and found that Apple had snuck a unix work station with an innovative interface onto a hand held device. Yes, you can play your music, watch porn, play games etc. You can also ssh into your server and accomplish useful work, the browser is actually useful and standards compliant and thousands (more?) of developers are applying their ingenuity to creating new tools for your use.