A truly great service. I'd even be willing to pay 3-4x. My apt building is from the early 1900s and my tiny mailbox overfills after 1-2 days -- it's been wonderful to not have to come back from vacation to a clogged box. Outbox has saved me all kinds of time and patience and am terribly sad to see them go. Best of luck to the team in their next project!
> Note the flat panel primary displays (color LCDs), that is the tip-off that this is pretty new.
Glass cockpits have been around for some time now. Also many older 737s (at least with US-based airlines) have been retrofitted with newer equipment. For example, all of SWA's 737-300 series aircraft (the oldest in their fleet) have been upgraded to glass cockpit controls.
The NSA spying program is horrible, yes. And I think it should be halted immediately. But we need the NSA—they do important things for this country despite the bad clout they've received because of this one domestic program. That program is minuscule in size compared to the sum of the important operations that are conducted in the agency.
I want to make myself clear. I think the domestic intercepts are 100% wrong and unconstitutional. That needs to stop. But that agency is home to smart people who do other necessary work to protect us.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
-- Steve Jobs, Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998
Most of Apple's innovations are not publishable as science papers. In contrast, IBMs innovations are routinely of publishable kind. Microsoft, HP, and Google also do a lot of "hard" computer science or engineering work.
Apple's UI and integration innovations not nearly in the same class as those of the others. That's not to say Apple doesn't help society, or that it's not creative. But it's certainly not doing the same type of work as the others. In fact, many of the technologies that Apple has purchased, such as Siri, would not exist without lots of funding into solving the harder problems.
IBM do invest in pure science with the expectation that something out there bring a totally new field or technology, Apple does not.
The transistor was invented in one of those large R&D units, Bell Labs from AT&T, maybe it did not brought money as the Mac or the iPhone but it was real innovation, you could always argue that it was all about people but I think without AT&T money it would have appeared much later in history.
