Mother nature can be scary.

Barbara Kyle, the ETBC’s National Coordinator, on Fortune:

“It’s important to understand that the manufacturers grade themselves against the EPEAT criteria first, and then EPEAT conducts a review of this grading. That EPEAT review has not yet occurred. They can require the manufacturers to remove any product from the registry if it is not found to conform to the IEEE standard.”

Okay, so Apple gave itself a gold rating. If the Retina MacBook Pro didn’t pass muster before, it certainly can’t pass now — nothing changed. If the gold rating sticks then we call bullshit. Maybe Apple saw the advantages of having the remainder of its product line on EPEAT even if the Retina models don’t make it. Seems odd though if you think that Retina is the future of the product.

The iPhone is now also the primary device for listening to music as 85 percent claim and as for alarm clocks, 57 percent say they no longer use one, other than alarm clock apps on their iPhone.

I never really thought about it like that. I use my iPhone for an alarm clock, GPS, phone, and sometimes even a mini computer. Soon maybe even a wallet.

Rene Ritchie posted a copy of the letter Apple lawyers were sending to retailers selling the Galaxy Nexus this week.

Dan and Jim talk about Apple’s departure and quick return to EPEAT certification, the Tweetbot for Mac alpha release, Android vs. iOS market share, business models for blogs, and much more!

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The sudden pullout — and subsequent return — of Apple from the EPEAT certification program it helped create increasingly appears to have been a dispute over the status that have been given to the Retina MacBook Pro if it were submitted, as the two 15-models with the high-resolution display may have been threatened with a lower-than-top ranking, a first for the company. The Retina models now appear on the EPEAT website with Gold rankings.

How is that possible?

A northern California jury directed Research in Motion Ltd to pay $147.2 million in patent litigation over a remote management system for wireless devices, according to an attorney for the plaintiff, Mformation Technologies Inc.

Just what they needed.

Disillusioned with repeated delays to RIM’s next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system and the company’s ebbing smartphone market share in the U.S., some are throwing up their hands and turning away from the platform.

That could be the final nail.

Apple:

We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.

A rare mea culpa from Apple.

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I just can’t put my finger on it.

Joseph Walker and Spencer E. Ante for the Wall Street Journal:

New York technology development firm Betaworks has agreed to buy news-sharing website Digg, in an attempt to revive a company that was early to social media but outmaneuvered by rivals like Facebook Inc. FB -0.52% and Twitter Inc.

Under the deal, which Digg confirmed closed Thursday, Betaworks is buying the Digg brand, website and technology. The price was just $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said—a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen.

Digg is a social news site that got its start in 2004 as a way for users to put together collections of news and information that interested them, with a voting system to determine the popularity of information. It’s been overshadowed by other social networks like Reddit.

Digg had already been carved up by the time Betaworks put its bid in – Social Code hired half the company’s staff in May. Sources told the Journal that other companies offered a higher price for Digg’s assets, but Betaworks offered the best plan to actually resuscitate the brand.

Jamai Abdi for the New York Times:

Apple has not been taken over by xenophobes. The discrimination is one result of trying to enforce flawed and haphazard United States export controls against countries, like Iran, that are under sanctions. Retail employees are left to interpret and implement federal policy, and racial profiling results.

I think Abdi’s conclusion here is reasonable. I live by a precept known in some circles as Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” and that’s exactly what this sounds like to me. Replace “stupidity” with “ignorance” if you want to soften the message a bit.

Abdi goes on to explain that this has happened, at least in part, because of “flawed and haphazard United States export controls.” What’s bizarre to me is that these retail store employees would take it upon themselves to try to enforce such regulations, which are clearly beyond their judgment or control. I’m unclear on whether this is just overzealous enforcement on their part, racial profiling or what. What I’m certain it’s not is any sort of corporate policy, spoken or unspoken, that says “if a tanned person speaking what sounds like Farsi comes in, don’t sell them anything.”

Abdi goes on to pontificate that Apple must “enact policies to prevent discrimination,” and this is where he goes off the rails. Apple already does a huge amount to prevent discrimination, and has a much better track record than most other companies its size, I would venture to guess.

I don’t think Apple deserves to be singled out for special scrutiny, or should be held to some higher standard than it already is, notwithstanding the misguided attempts of a a few of its retail store employees to protect national security, or whatever-the-heck they had it in their heads that they were trying to do.

The Apple tax, as it is commonly called, is the belief that Macs cost more than PCs. I won’t ruin it for you, but Harry Marks nailed it.

Mike Williams for Gamesindustry.biz:

[SkyVu Entertainment founder Ben] Vu explained that cross-promoting other developers’ games via services like Chartboost was his primary method of reaching users, but the rising costs are a big problem.

“This mismatch is insane,” Vu said. “You have to pay attention to this, down to the hour or the minute.”

[Machine Zone CEO Gabe] Leydon cited costs as high as $7 for acquiring users, up from 50 cents a year ago. He sees a number of “billionaries” coming into the market with large brands to sell, with Asian mobile developers close behind. Weber backed up Leydon’s claims, explaining that it’s difficult to find the top-end of user acquisition costs.

The problem is that some companies are turning the “free-to-play” game industry on its head by spending more to acquire customers than they’ll see in a lifetime of ad revenue for that title. While it sounds foolish – and by some measure it is – Leydon sees it as a side effect of those “billionaires” settling in for a long-term war of domination on the iOS App Store, Google Play and Windows Store.

Pixelmator 2.1 Cherry is already fully Retina-ready, including all of the user interface elements as well as the image editing engine itself. And, what can I say—Pixelmator on the new MacBook Pro with Retina display (we’ve got a few of those around the office) looks totally incredible.

Love Pixelmator. Check out the video too.

Salvador Rodriguez for the LA Times:

The company tweeted from its @BlackBerry account “Fill in the blank: BlackBerry helps me ________.” However, many of the people who responded didn’t find BlackBerry too helpful.

“Realize how thankful I am for my #iPhone,” said one user, in one of the tamest yet worst responses RIM could have received. Not to be outdone, though, another user said the same about Android.

It’s not surprising that nobody at RIM saw this coming.

Apple’s new $1 billion data center — one of the highest-profile new data centers in the world — has put the town of Maiden, North Carolina (population: just over 3,000) on the tech map. But it almost didn’t get built.

Maiden took a chance and it worked.

Americans’ confidence in television news is at a new low by one percentage point, with 21% of adults expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. This marks a decline from 27% last year and from 46% when Gallup started tracking confidence in television news in 1993.

Can’t say I blame them.

David Gewirtz:

For example, to connect to my corporate servers, I need a specialized VPN client that only runs on Windows. I can’t open a path to my servers unless I have a Windows computer, which means even if I took my iPad, I’d still need a laptop to open a gateway to do company work. A full Windows 8 Surface would be nice to carry and would eliminate needing to carry the laptop.

[Via Nate Boateng]

Some funny stuff like:

• Is wondering what an iPhone is
• Returning movies to Blockbuster
• Wondering how “Barack Hussein Obama” could ever hope to be president
• Working on my myspace profile

HP dropped -12.7 percent, Dell dropped -9.5 percent, Acer -14.1 percent and Toshiba -19.5 percent in the U.S. market for the second quarter of 2012.

Apple was up 4.3 percent.

Note that the numbers include “desk-based PCs and mobile PCs, including mini-notebooks but not media tablets such as the iPad.” So they included everything that would make the PC companies look as good as possible. Imagine if they included the iPad in Apple’s numbers.

I think that says it all.

Of course this model isn’t new either, we typically just call it a “paywall”. But a paywall in its basic form is ineffectual for what I want, because then it becomes a massive hurdle to gain new readers (since all my content would be hidden out of the public eye) — I don’t want that.

This is a bold move by Ben. It will be very interesting to see how it works out for him.

“We’re taking this issue very seriously,” he said. “I wish we had more to share at this time but I’ll be sure to share what comes down the line from the engineers relating to solutions or any workarounds they can find.”

Good for them for acknowledging the issue.