Apple Computer's market capitalization (that is, the total number of shares outstanding multiplied by the share price in $$) has surpassed Microsoft's. YAY!!!!! Steve Jobs is brilliant fellow, and I take my hat off to him...
Apple is the darling of Hollywood, the Media, the super cool, hip, techno wow, pro-choice, save the world folks that brought music to your pocket.
Only thing is, that's all a bunch of Horse Sh*t.
Apple, like Dell, IBM, Hewlett Packard and the rest of the techno-gentry... internalizes profits, and then pays taxes so that the U.S. can continue to overfund an absurd military budget in order to externalize costs across the rest of the planet.
Take a gander at the photo above (I lifted it from Sharon Astyk's excellent blog... I am sure she won't mind...). We (The U.S.) send our e-waste to India, Africa, the Caribbean and any country desperate enough to employ their people handling heavy metals and other nasties in the absence of a HazMat suit.
Believe you me, I am not the only Republican out there that sees this for what it is, contrary to what you read about in the papers... just follow the money... its the Democratic party, Pro-Choice groups, Liberal groups et al that are the beneficiaries of payola largess of the techno-gentry.
Hypocrisy knows no bounds, no party affiliation, no special interest group - it only knows money.
If the Techno-gentry had to pay for the environmental costs of disposing of their products they would not be worth 25% of their current market cap (IMHO), nor would their shareholders be paying all that capital gains tax (still believe in Corporate welfare? Get a grip.)... The costs easily surpass the profits - it ain't even close.
The "enlightened" are not merely blind... they are FOS.