Friday Morning Links -- Apple Selling Ten iOS Devices (Phones, Tablets) Every Second

Union Center oil field has been updated.

Abuse of power: the president's "recess" appointments are/were illegal.  

Wow, wow, wow! The Democratic Senate does not have enough Democratic votes to pass the president's "assault on weapons" ban.

WTI/Bakken spread: $3.25 at Clearbrook, MN -- no change for several days.

Earnings: HAL surpassed expectations, and shares are surging pre-market

RBN Energy: return to sender -- natural gas pipelines in northeast US reversing flow; sending natural gas back to Canada; no longer needed in the US.

Active rigs: 188

It looks like another nice day for the market (I hope President Obama has not scheduled speeches on the economy); several companies I follow will hit new highs; others will trend higher, flirting with all-time highs. Good luck to all.

WSJ Links

Section M (Mansion): didn't read

Section D (Arena): 

To mark the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice, novelists, moviemakers and scholars are releasing a flood of new homages to cash in on the bottomless appetite for all things Austen. I went through a Jane Austen phase some years ago.

Sports page: a must read -- The Truth About Te'o's Truth. And it ends with one of my favorite tag lines -- "you cannot make this up."

Section C (Money & Investing): nothing except another article on Apple which I did not read. All I can think -- the pros are playing the retail investor like a fiddle. It's actually quite fascinating to watch.

Section B (Marketplace): rush to natural gas has coal-fired utilities seeing red.

Another article on the Dreamliner, and two men who bet big on it: Jim McNerney (Boeing's chairman and CEO since 2005) and Alan Mulally, now Ford/CEO. Mulally oversaw the plane's conception and early development as head of Boeing's commercial airplanes division before departing to Ford in 2006. An interesting read. But the tea leaves certain suggest a design flaw: batteries prone to catching fire being carried on commercial aircraft. Paraphrasing the government's spokesperson, yesterday,  involved in the grounding of the Dreamliner: "Fire on planes is not something we like to see." Lithium batteries, by their very nature, are more likely to catch fire than "conventional" batteries. See the science behind lithium batteries.

And there it is, on page B2: US sees extended 787 inquiry. I am often accused of (and plead guilty to) hyperbole, but I do believe this is going to be a real fine balancing act for regulators to allow lithium batteries on commercial aircraft. I suppose a fail-safe fire-suppressant (not fire-retardant) system might be a solution.

Also, another article on the iPhone. ATT activated 8.6 million iPhones in the fourth quarter. That is not trivial.

The iPhone ended the year with a blowout quarter in the U.S. market. But underneath the big numbers at the largest U.S. carriers are signs Apple Inc.  faces a rapidly changing marketplace that could erode its dominance.

AT&T Inc.  said Thursday it activated 8.6 million iPhones in the fourth quarter, while selling a total of 10.2 million smartphones. The popularity of the iPhone at the No. 2 carrier echoed a report this week from market leader Verizon Wireless, which said about two-thirds of the 9.8 million smartphones it activated in the fourth quarter were Apple devices.

Those results support recent surveys that show the iPhone remains the country's most popular smartphone. But Apple may have to do more to persuade shoppers to buy its priciest models.

No mention of the Apple ecosystem in the article, at least as far as I read. 

Microsoft playing catch-up: profit falls almost 4% -- Windows 8 gets off to a slow start. And this speaks volumes: "Microsoft didnt' disclose sales figures for Surface, the company's first homegrown computing device released in late October. UBS recently cut its estimate of Surface sales by 1 million units for the quarter ended Dec. 31."

How does a million Surface tablets compare to Apple's iPad?

Sales of the iPad also jumped, from 15.4 million in last year's quarter to 22.9 million in this year's. Apple sold 47.8 million iPhones, up significantly from last year's 37 million.Apple sold a total of 75 million iOS devices during the quarter. That breaks down to about 833,000 per day, or about 10 every second. 

Apple has a blow-out, record quarter; Microsoft's profit falls almost 4 percent. CNBC crawler suggesting that Bill Gates may return to the company. Later, a talking head suggests MSFT could cut prices on the Surface.

Starbucks enjoys sales jolt from its US, China stores. Link may require subscription. Profit umps 13% as company maintains growth where others have stumbled.

Nokia will scrap its dividend for the first time in 20 years.

Samsung rides phone wave; profit soars 76% but faces same worries as rival Apple.

Section A:
Op-ed: the real Obama climate deal -- LNG exports could be tied to a carbon tax. That's fine: the tax will be passed on to the consumer. Investors will do fine.

The Keystone XL objections wither away, but approval still iffy. Looks like the link is blocked without a subscription.

This is quite incredible: Spain's jobless rate hits 26% amid austerity -- no mention of the wind industry that has been scuttled by Spain. Wind was an expensive luxury; no redeeming features. The link appears to be blocked without a subscription.

Other links

It's all about spectrum:

AT&T Inc  said on Friday it has agreed to buy wireless airwaves from Verizon Wireless for $1.9 billion in cash, plus spectrum licenses in five markets, as it looks to expand its wireless network capacity.

AT&T said the licenses it is buying cover a population of 42 million people in 18 U.S. states.

From SeekingAlpha.com: ATT.

Interesting: CTL is now trading up (in the green). It started down (in the red) earlier this morning, but turned green after the ATT announcement: as noted -- it's all about spectrum.

Miscellaneous

I have never watched a full episode of the "new" Hawaii 5-0. I tried watching a couple of episodes but neither measured up to the "old" Hawaii 5-0 that I remember from years ago.  Lately I've been watching reruns of the "old" Hawaii 5-0 and I am still impressed. The "old" is not old.