Depth Perception is the operative phrase here.

In humans, visual depth perception emerges from a combination of cues:

1. monocular
2. binocular
3. motion

Traditional "2D" movies already have most of the monocular cues necessary for depth perception. Without them, you wouldn't be able to tell whether a car was driving towards or away from the camera. However, some monocular cues are missing. Within ~6 feet, "accommodation" can be used to tell you how near or far you are focusing, based on how your eye muscles are shaping your lens.

What most people consider "3D" is just stereopsis -- presenting a different image to each retina. This gets you much closer to "real" depth perception, and is enough of an improvement to be "worth it" for a lot of applications (CAD, Hollywood movies, etc). However, it is missing "convergence," which is how much your eyes have to point towards each other to see an object.

Read the Wikipedia article for the full list.

Steve says it's trifling because it is trifling! While certainly a design flaw, I would only consider it serious if:

1. • it causes lots of damage.
   • it's hard to fix or work around.

When I think "serious" product failures, it's something dangerous (Sony batteries), or renders the product useless in a way that the user can't fix (Droid X eFUSE). Dropping 1% more calls is a minor impact, and even my 95 year old grandfather can put a phone in a case.

It's a problem, and I'm glad Apple is addressing it with free bumpers. That said, schadenfreude is the only way I can make sense of the all the media hoopla against Apple. Will Consumer Reports change their recommendation once they receive their free bumpers?

You win the unintentionally hilarious award for the day. The iPad actually supports or will support every single thing you mentioned!

1. Printing support may come as a part of the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK. If not, Google's Cloud Print Service could fill the gap.
2. The iPad is such a good 3D game platform that Nintendo declared Apple the enemy of the future.
3. The iPad itself is a solid media player, but you can also hook it up to your TV with Component or VGA cables.
4. Apple sells a Camera Connector Kit for the iPad. You can upload photos from an SD stick, and edit them in an App on your iPad.
5. iPhone OS 4.0 supports background tasks and multi-tasking, to the extent that you would even want to do that on a 10" screen.

The only thing you can't do on an iPad is rip movies and music, but that's kinda what the iTunes store is for. I'm not saying that the way you do it on the iPad is for everyone, and you specifically are certainly better off with a PC. My mom, on the other hand, finds the iPad a much eaiser way to achieve every item you mentioned.

What are you so afraid of? (Completely sincere question--not trolling in the least.)

I understand using a fake persona if you're afraid of some company knowing information about you. However, with a fake name you're still going to see targeted advertising, and if you're doing anything illegal you're probably not obfuscating enough to hide your true identity.

I guess I just don't understand what privacy consequences you're actually avoiding.

Mod parent up (or mod GP down). Half of that ZDNet article was retracted because the iPad DOES support bluetooth keyboards, and the other half is BS because USB isn't even Apple's standard.

Apple has actually gotten rid of most proprietary connectors in the past 10 years. The ones they still have are either highly device-specific (e.g. iPod connector), or on their way to becoming standards (e.g. mini display port).

It's too early to say why Apple is prohibiting 3rd-party compilers. Today it looks like Apple is exerting a monopoly over software, but tomorrow we might learn that Apple was trying to prevent a monopoly in the hardware. Right now the entire iPhone ecosystem is locked into an ARM architecture.

By prohibiting 3rd party compilers, Apple can change chip architectures with only a simple update to XCode, and reasonably expect most apps to be recompiled for the new architecture. Conversely, Flash-compiled iPhone apps might have to wait a year for Adobe CS7 or whatever. Steve Jobs basically said this in his open letter:

It took Adobe ten years to release a fully MacOS X native version of Photoshop. I can't blame Steve Jobs for not wanting his platform to be dependent on Adobe.

The Tea Party gets flak because they come off as a bunch of whiny hypocrites.

Where was the Tea Party during Bush's huge expansion of Federal spending and power? Why are they only speaking out now that a democrat is trying to pay for Bush's spending and tax cuts? I'm serious -- I would appreciate any perspective that could keep me from having such a low opinion of people.

Deafness is a completely different issue from color-blindness (or even regular blindness) because LANGUAGE IS CULTURE. Almost every meaningful social experience you have is had in the context of language.

Think about losing every story, every song, every conversation you've had because your language has been rendered obsolete. On some level I'm sure everyone in deaf culture would like to be able to hear. But many of them won't trade hearing if it means their favorite songs, poems, and stories will not be passed on. There's a great movie about this called Sound and Fury

Good luck with that. Netflix is beholden to the content owners for that, and they are VERY particular with the who-what-when-where-how of content distribution.

I expect to see Hulu streaming to the Wii before I see a week-old TV show on Netflix.

I have heard the same regarding SLC, but I'm not sure if it applies to the cheaper MLC drives discussed in TFA. Any experts care to weigh in?

Mechanical failures can be predicted by SMART, and even prevented (e.g. sudden motion sensors that park the heads).

If you DO have a head crash, data recovery services can take the platters out and recover any data not directly affected by the head crash. Some companies offer NAND data recovery, but the current state-of-the-art appears to be more complex, expensive, and uncertain than conventional hard drives.

SSDs have a better MTBF, but I think you have the graceful decay backwards. Good SSDs do wear leveling and use SMART to tell you when your ten-thousandth write is approaching. But once they die, they're dead. Solid-state failures are a lot less predictable and more unforgiving than mechanical failures. (For reference, read up on the Poisson Process as it relates to solid-state failures.)

Insurers have new regulations. First, 85% of revenue must go towards providing care, which caps administrative costs (and profit) at 15%. This isn't a huge difference from the current system; most insurers keep similar margins, and grow revenue through volume. It sounds crazy, but insurers actually depend on doctors and hospitals doing too many tests and procedures.

Second, health insurers are no longer protected from anti-monopoly laws. This should actually help, because currently most regions are locked into 1 or 2 insurance choices.

The bill has pretty specific requirements for what plans can be eligible for assistance and/or tax credits. I.E. You can't start a health insurance company that just hands out band-aids. Additionally, there will be expanded eligibility for Medicare and insurance exchange programs; competing for customers will keep insurers from cutting too much.

That doesn't even happen in Canada--the wealthy can always turn to medical tourism if they want special treatment. The poor will still get inferior care, but inferior is better than non-existent or bankrupt.

"Fun" and "control" aren't mutually-exclusive. Accuracy and precision are characteristics of a specific control sensor, not a mode of control. You hold thumbsticks in such high esteem, but the joysticks of yore required frequent recalibration, and had issues with max ranges and zero deadzones. As the technology matures (e.g. WiiPlus), so will the precision.

Motion controllers are not very good for binary input; that's what buttons are for, and that's why the Wii has gotten so much flak for "waggle" games. Conversely, thumbsticks are not very good for 6-axis position/velocity/acceleration control. Tiger Woods 2010 with WiiPlus has AMAZING accuracy, performance and precision (I play the Disc Golf, but I hear the regular golf is also great). Try doing that with your thumbstick.