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As I noted on Monday, Apple is rumored to be looking at sapphire as a replacement for Corning’s Gorilla Glass in its next-generation touchscreens. This deal with GT — and the company’s agreement to fast-track development of new high-volume sapphire-manufacturing equipment — could presage that. Or it could herald a new device entirely — the long-rumored iWatch, for example, or whatever gadget Apple has planned for our wrists.

Leo Laporte has shot to the top of the Twitterverse, at least according to the unofficial Twitterholic. This currently says he has 32,630 followers, which puts him ahead of Digg's Kevin Rose (32,524) and Barack Obama (31,431). Megatweeter Robert Scoble (24,091) is in fifth place.

In its IPO paperwork filed to regulators last month, Twitter stated its 230 million active users are producing 500 million tweets per day, noting, “We deliver more than 200 billion Tweets per day to our users.” Twitter appears to define a “delivered tweet” as any tweet seen by a follower of another user. If the 200 billion figure is to be believed, then each of the 500 million daily tweets is delivered to an average of 400 people. A $24.9 billion value divided by 200 billion tweet deliveries a day comes out to 12.45 cents per daily eyeball on the site.

Flextronics’s Brotherton declined to discuss details surrounding the fate of the 1,500 men flown to Malaysia. Brotherton added: “Please understand that Flextronics is unable to answer questions that are specific to our customers, and specific to what we do for them, due to confidentiality agreements.” She also said Flextronics was concerned about allegations of excessive fees and improper treatment of workers and that the company is “committed to the well-being of all of our employees. … We are thoroughly investigating the allegations to ensure that any cases of misconduct are immediately addressed and any necessary corrective actions are promptly implemented across Flextronics to avoid reoccurrences.”

A few writers are paid, with their work solicited by a small editing team, but most are not. Much ballyhooed by Medium is software that allows “collaboration” among writers by letting them share posts privately before publication, in pursuit of suggestions or edits. Posts then appear in collections, or channels, like “Adventures in Consumer Technology,” or “Best Thing I Found Online Today.”

In his experience using the system, he's confirmed the ability to play games once they're 50 percent installed with a store-bought copy of Ghosts. After humping around the system in multitasking, downloading another game, and watching TV, he came right back to the game in standby. It's also clear that the Xbox One will have rotating "featured challenges" for certain games (as seen above), tied to performing certain activities during the set time period. Also responsive is the new Kinect, although a friend could control his system by voice even while on a call over Skype.

First. Who knew and should have known about iWork’s bugs and undocumented idiosyncrasies? (I’ll add another: Beware the new autocorrect) Second. Why brag instead of calmly making a case for the long game and telling loyal customers about the dents they will inevitably discover? Last and most important, what does this new fiasco say about the Apple’s management culture? The new iPhones, iPad and iOS 7 speak well of the company’s justly acclaimed attention to both strategy and implementation. Perhaps there were no cycles, no neurons, no love left for iWork. Perhaps a wise general puts the best troops on the most important battles. Then, why not regroup, wait six months and come up with an April 2014 announcement worthy of Apple’s best work?

Cosmonauts Infect the ISS

Why Apple Bought $578M Worth Of Sapphire In Advance

iPhone users stay with Apple Maps

RT @gigaom: Why the Chromebook pundits are simply out of touch with reality

RT @newsyc20: Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won ()

RT @newsyc20: Apple maps: how Google lost when everyone thought it had won ()

RT @gigaom: New traffic data shows: Netflix and YouTube rule online video, Hulu and Amazon barely register

Google has won a resounding victory in its eight-year copyright battle with the Authors Guild over the search giant’s controversial decision to scan more than 20 million library and make the available on the internet. In a ruling issued Thursday morning in New York, US Circuit Judge Denny Chin said the book scanning amounted to fair use because it was “highly transformative” and because it didn’t harm the market for the original work.

As well as getting AOL’s own content, the app also delivers content from other syndicated partners such as the Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, Reuters, BBCNews, HuffPost Live, Newsy, E!, CNET, Engadget, ET, StoryHunter and globalpost.

Though Wolfram says that the language will be able to build standalone desktop apps, his company is also going to launch a Programming Cloud, which will allow developers to create and deploy apps over the web. The language will presumably be quite high level, and it's possible that Wolfram is hoping to take advantage of cloud computing to mitigate speed issues. "We intend to make [Wolfram Language] as widely accessible to everyone as possible," Wolfram writes. "The Wolfram Language is a wonderful first language to learn (and we've done some very successful experiments on this)."

The newspaper reported that one of the biggest reasons why Ballmer decided to leave the company was the fact that he realized that he was incapable of changing the corporate culture that he himself had helped create. While he led Microsoft to soaring profits since becoming CEO in 2000, the company has more recently lagged behind in sectors of the tech industry like phones, tablets, and wearable devices.

Now, both Google Play Music and All Access are available for iOS devices too. The free version of the app allows you to access your existing library stored through Google Play Music. This can either be done by purchasing singles and records through Google’s digital storefront – only available on Android and the web – or by syncing your local library with the Music Manager client.

The company says the game has now been installed over half a billion times across both Facebook and mobile devices, and has seen over 150 billion individual games played to date. Oh, and the level people get stuck on the most? Level 65, apparently. It’s one where you have to beat the chocolate and the licorice. (Non-players, feel free to roll your eyes right about now. But really, chocolate was hard.)

A local police department in Swansea, Massachusetts, has paid cybercrooks behind the CryptoLocker ransomware attack to decrypt files locked up by the malware on police computer systems, according to local press reports.

A US court has given the government 30 days to come up with a decent reason not to disclose its plan for a so-called internet kill switch. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has been trying to wrangle documents concerning the kill switch - officially known as Standard Operating Procedure 303 - from the tight grip of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) since filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in July 2012.

After the TV networks filed a petition to the high court last month, the NFL and MLB filed an amicus brief last week arguing that if Aereo prevails, it would mean sports programming would likely migrate to cable. Broadcasters argue that Aereo undermines their ability to collect retransmission fees from cable and satellite operators.

In that case, WB admitted that it filed a bunch of false takedowns, but said it was no big deal because it was all done by a computer. Of course, it then came out that at least one work was taken down by a WB employee, and that employee had done so on purpose, annoyed that JDownloader could help possible infringers download more quickly. As we've noted many times in the past, there is almost no real punishment for filing false takedowns. The "penalty of perjury" language appears to only apply to the question of whether or not the person filing the takedown actually represents the party they claim to represent -- and not whether the file is infringing at all, or even whether or not the file's copyright is held by the party being represented.

Apple Likes To Say Its Products Have The Best Displays; It Can Stop

RT @Techmeme: Overview: Here's how Skype will work on the Xbox One (@epro / The Next Web)

RT @Techmeme: Overview: Here's how Skype will work on the Xbox One (@epro / The Next Web)

RT @Techmeme: Windows Phone Now Sees 10M Transactions And 500 New Apps Daily, Has Served 3B Total Downloads

RT @Techmeme: Windows Phone Now Sees 10M Transactions And 500 New Apps Daily, Has Served 3B Total Downloads

Oxford Dictionaries Dubs “Selfie” as 2013′s Word of the Year