An iPhone 3GS running iOS 6 vs a phone stuck with Android 1.6? I'd take the iPhone.

Global menus

Mac OS has been like this since System 1. And it makes sense; whatever you're doing, its menu is going to be in the same place. Fitts' law indicates that the most quickly accessed targets on any computer display are the four corners of the screen.

Single mouse click

Mac OS has supported multiple mouse buttons for at least 16 years. Even when using a now-extinct one button mouse, control-click presented a dialogue box.

Left window controls (yay for all the left handed and left eye dominant people, boo for the other 95% of the world)

Because it's easier to move a mouse up/left with your right hand, and was developed in a country that reads left-to-right.

Launchpad (how is the start menu missing causing a revolt and launchpad even exist? Launchpad is the initial SIN!)

The start menu missing is causing a revolt because Microsoft removed something and replaced it with an abomination. Launchpad - and other questionable features like Dashboard - can be completely ignored.

Finder layout straight out of system commander circa 1988.

Column view in Finder is optional, with icon and list view still available. Also, Finder has had its sorting options greatly improved throughout OS X's history.

Crap loads of docked icons you never use be default.

If you go and buy a Mac today, this is in the Dock:
- Finder: File management
- Launchpad: Access to all apps not in the Dock (And easily ignored, as previously discussed)
- Safari: A web browser
- Mail: Email client
- Contacts: An address book
- Calendar: A calendar
- Notes: Short notes
- Maps: A map of the entire planet
- Messages: Text messaging and IM
- FaceTime: Video chat
- Photo Booth: Something fun to play with on your new computer
- iPhoto: Something to talk to your camera
- Pages: Word processing
- Numbers: Spreadsheets
- Keynote: Presentations
- iTunes: Play and purchase music and TV/movies
- iBooks: Read and purchase books
- App Store: Install and purchase software
- System Preferences: Change settings on your computer

The default Dock icons cover managing your computer, using the big two features of the Internet, syncing 'organisational' information with your phone, finding locations, messaging and video chatting with other people, photography, writing, processing numbers, creating presentations, watching media, reading, and installing an app to do anything else you want your computer to do. The default Dock is a slam-dunk for covering what the majority of people use computers for, points users in the right direction to add new capabilities to the computer, and is easily customised to remove the things you don't want. (Launchpad, again...)

The Dock is setup perfectly for you to get started with your computer. Anything else you need to get to can either be accessed through Spotlight (power users) or Launchpad (for people with more experience with iOS).

A separate contact and calendar app....

Just like iOS... but also NeXTSTEP; they have always been separate apps, which makes finding what are ultimately different tasks easier *and* they also seamlessly share the same databases behind the scenes.

General iOS crap

Integration with touchpads is great. Removing always-visible scrollbars removes needless clutter. Things like Launchpad - and pretty much anything else you don't like that reminds you of iOS - are easily disabled or ignored.

Hardwired application dependency locations (the whole point of application folders is to stop that!)

Wait, what? Apps install into /Applications by default, but the system works just fine with app in ~/Applications. Beyond that, moving apps around is making things needlessly complicated for yourself. Even then, the vast majority of apps are self-contained bundles and can be run from anywhere.

Scroll bars that disappear even if your mouse is near them and appear at the bottoms of pages OVERTOP content.

Touched on this in iOS; the scroll bars appear when moving the cursor or scrolling content. If you find this to be an issue, it can be disabled in System Preferences. Yes, Apple provided sensible options!

I could go on and complain about the apps, but lets say OSX is great for people who use a computer like they use iOS and leave it at that....

It's a mature system with 13 years of refinement, and is built for use on 'real' computers. iOS features have only gone "back to the Mac" since 10.7, and even then - as previously discussed - are all avoidable if found that unpalatable. OS X is also bundled with apps that over most use cases for a personal computer, and installing developer tools is simply a matter of typing 'Xcode' into the App Store.

OS X is the current gold standard in desktop operating systems. It's incredibly well thought out, and that's why Canonical, GNOME, and others keep looking to it for guidance. However, it was foolish for Ubuntu to unexpectedly drop application menus for global menus after nine years without presenting an option to switch back. And that's the difference between OS X and Ubuntu; Apple wouldn't make such a ridiculous and far-reaching change to the system without either an option to disable it or an incredibly good rationalisation.

I dunno about everywhere else, but where I live -- next door to the local water tower -- there isn't any sort of water pressure regulation mechanism. You pump water into the water tower, and it flows by gravity to all the houses that are lower than it. And, in the summer, when everyone down in the valley is running their sprinklers, my water pressure is low enough it's difficult to take a shower, so even if you did manage to regulate pressure it would have a disproportionately large effect on some of the people and very little on some others.

This is purely anecdotal, but the two indie framemakers I know who have worked with 3d printed lugs have both said the lugs broke very quickly and they only used them for prototypes, didn't consider them safe to ride. One said he thought he could make a 3d printed lug (this was stainless steel, through shapeways, silver-soldered to Reynolds SS tubing) that would be durable but he guessed it would weigh about 4x as much as equivalent forged columbus lugs.

My sons and daughters visited Beta, and we instantly incinerated.

I can't stand the new Slashdot. I hate being referred to as "Audience" when we are making this site happen. If I wanted CNET, I'd go to CNET.

What makes this complicated is that I think that's a reflection of America. My congressman _is_ a really good representative for me: he's a smart gay liberal who has started several successful tech companies. I vote for him because he's doing stuff I like. My aunt's congressman is a good representative for her: a pro-life, pro-gun conservative creationist pastor. She votes for him because he's doing stuff she likes.
We'd like to think that there's a logical disconnect between "congress is crazy" and "my congress person is awesome" but that's not necessarily true: we, as a country, have an extremely wide spectrum of opinion. Jim Hightower used to say there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. If congress is a dead armadillo, midway between what I want them to be and my aunt wants them to be, my aunt and I can both be contemptuous of congress while liking our personal representatives, and both of us can be logically consistent in doing so.

Lactose intolerance is complex. The Tuareg of Saharan Africa have lower lactose intolerance rates than Finnish people, for instance. It mostly has to do with whether a group has spent a long time as nomadic herders or not, and adult persistence of lactase activity appears to be caused by several different mutations, that arose spontaneously. http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthr... has a nice list of adult lactase activity in different ethnic groups.

There was a fairly interesting Radiolab podcast about a program that shipped New York City's biosolids to Colorado for use as fertilizer: http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
It includes a significant discussion of waste treatment, pathogens, and the economics of shipping what some municipalities call hazardous waste cross-country.

The problem is that Quanta (they build system boards for Apple's laptop division) has never been able to properly do a ball grid array. The problem is not the chips or cooling, it's the "good enough" techniques Quanta uses to attach them to to a system board. If a ball grid array is done properly, it can be quite robust-- Quanta doesn't seem to care about longevity of the product, and hasn't for a number of years.

Quanta's quality problems are even more dire when you see that they manufacture about one third of the world's laptop system boards.

Please see Quanta and ball grid array.

It's exactly this. You want your chip designers to be working right next to the mask layout people because layout needs designers to correctly optimize the layout. You want your test people to be able to walk through the whole test program design with the designers, who will be involved throughout the test hardware and program design, because test engineers know how testers work, and designers know how the chip works, and matching those is tricky. And you don't really want to be shipping tested wafers overseas for packaging and then waiting for them to come back to test packaged parts, and the product engineers need tester access and parts access to characterize the parts and produce the datasheet info, so at that point you have the whole silicon design team, from conception to finished parts, in one place. It can be done remotely but with a significant time adder or lots of evening/midnight phone meetings. It's easier to separate applications and project engineering from the design/manufacture group, but there's still some value in having them colocated. At that point, all that's left is middle management... and that's even easier to outsource.