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I think a better reason than "not wanting to play fair" is that the Apple implementation preserves the correct operation of the mic even while the remote is being pressed. Apple does it using a custom chip within the remote that superimposes an ultrasonic tone on the mic signal which can be cleanly filtered out, whereas resistor-based signalling works by shorting the mic signal to ground which either mutes or attenuates the mic (depending on the specific button and resistance involved).

Cool, maybe now it'll be possible to obtain Atmel chips in quantity without ridiculous lead times.

Paranoia, maybe? But yeah, it's rather pointless. Even more so since GPS vendors have access to the algorithm.

Not quite the same thing, although they do have some similarities.

The Selective Availability "feature" of GPS worked by fuzzing the time readings output by the GPS satellites. The fuzz was time-varying but only changed every few seconds. Because it affected nearby receivers with similar amounts of error, if you had access to two receivers in the same area you could quite accurately measure their positions relative to each other.

The Chinese map obfuscation scheme is basically a secret map projection (it's not a constant offset, it varies over locations). GPS coordinates go into a black box and out come obfuscated coordinates, which you then use to plot on the map. Because there wouldn't be much point to GPS receivers that constantly show your location on the wrong point on the map, receivers sold in China actually incorporate the algorithm, and it probably wouldn't be too difficult to reverse engineer.

The offset is still there on ditu.google.cn, it's just that they've also munged the satellite imagery to have the same offset.

Interestingly, the Retina MBP has a combo Ethernet MAC/PHY + memory card reader chip of which they're only using the latter function. I would guess that either the decision to drop the Ethernet port was made pretty late in the process or the board designers were kept in the dark about the mechanical design until it was too late to pick a different part.

Also, a PCI-E lane actually is 4 pins :)

Edit: reply to dead - standalone memory card reader ICs are standard components. The USB SD ICs they used in earlier models would have been easier to route (than the PCI-E combo chip) and probably cheaper.

Proposals to fragment the Internet generally do not go down well, for obvious reasons.

The proposal is needlessly complicated, notwithstanding the poor quality of writing. The authors' rationale is to "realize autonomy", yet AIP suffixes are globally namespaced and still need IANA assignment, which is really no different to the current situation in relation to TLDs. It breaks backwards compatibility when applications need to cross AIP networks and also introduces the issue of conflicting AIP network-internal names. The authors make no attempt to discuss these obvious issues or any others, and also blindly wave off security considerations, saying "there is no additional security requirement".

Also, the authors are on Yahoo/QQ free webmail addresses, which isn't very professional.

It's not an RFC, it's an Internet Draft (which anyone can submit without review), and anyway it's offensive and incoherent enough that nobody will take it seriously, and it certainly won't make it as an actual RFC.

Yes, this is actually what they meant by "no glass layer".

The integrated display isn't really a miracle of engineering. In my opinion it's more a miracle of business that they convinced their display manufacturer to make the retina display modules in the shape of the MBP's display assembly. This sort of thing has actually shown up in smartphones for a while but this is the first time we've seen it in a notebook computer.

No, it's true. The possible geometry of visible GPS satellites at any given moment (namely that they're all above you and none are below) means that the vertical error is pretty bad in comparison to the horizontal error.