I would say that it's close enough for the kind of scientific work where using non-metric units is acceptable.

The only reason to by a TI calculator is because your teacher tells you to.

When you need to get your math on (or your physics or engineering), you use an HP:

My HP-15C is a pocket-sized programmable scientific calculator capable of handling matrices, complex numbers, and numerical root finding and integration. Its battery life is 2-3 years under moderate use.

My graphing calculator is an HP-50g, which has a 200Mhz ARM9 processor (by default underclocked to 75Mhz), an SD card slot that enables you to store all the programs you might want including full source code and documentation, a more powerful computer algebra system than in the TI-89, and it costs less than the TI-89. Also, it can connect to the internet using a modem connected to the serial port or through an IrDA connection to a computer.

Most of Apple's USB stuff runs far beyond spec in terms of the power delivered, so that people won't have the unpleasant surprise on finding out their iPod didn't charge while it was plugged in to the computer.

It seems to me that the number one priority is probably to minimize the risk to actual people, and number two is to get rid of the explosives. Reducing collateral damage is a distant third. Given that, they've decided that the nearest people to the "controlled burn" will be about 5 times further away than their worst-case estimate for how far shrapnel would fly if the stuff starts detonating. It seems, if you presume a reasonable level of competence on the part of the people planning this operation (and with scientists from several national laboratories involved, this assumption is a safe one), that their plan will do a very good job of fulfilling their first two goals.

If they tried to keep people this far away while dismantling the house by robot, the whole process would probably take weeks. The manpower needed to operate and support the robots and keep the area safe, plus the cost of housing the displaced neighbors for an extended period of time probably far outweighs the potential damage the controlled burn could do, particularly given the measures they're taking to protect the adjacent houses.

Individually extracting the bombs requires real, live people to spend a lot of time moving around in and near a house full of explosives. If they start going off, people die. On the other hand, evacuating the neighborhood and setting up remote-controlled fire hoses allows you to get rid of the explosives quickly and without significant risk of people getting hurt. Yes, the risk of property damage beyond the house itself is probably higher this way, but the risk of people getting hurt is much lower, as is the duration of the evacuation of the neighborhood.

Try reading the article again. The 30 minutes is not how long they expect it to take for the house to burn down. 30 minutes is how long they expect it to take before the fire is hot enough to break down toxins before they can escape the house in the plume of smoke.

As for the detonation issue, a lot of explosives will merely burn quickly unless they are very hot and are triggered by a shock wave (such as from a blasting cap) to detonate. It's quite reasonable for them to expect to be able to burn a lot of the explosives without detonation occurring, and even if a lot of the stuff does detonate, they've calculated that debris would only be sent flying 60-70 feet.

From what I recall, all Macs for the past 2 years or so have supported much-higher-than-spec currents over USB so that they can charge iPods and iPhones more quickly.

I was referring more to the fact that there are a great many programmers developing apps for Apple platforms, but Ada and Eiffel programmers are harder to find. CL and Ocaml are probably too abstract to catch on in a market where the average programmer can handle Java and some of C++'s capabilities.

Are any of those good enough compared to obj-c to overcome the advantage obj-c has of being familiar to far more programmers? From what I've heard, CL might be, but I don't know any of those languages enough to judge.

Also, do any of those languages make it as easy to use C and C++ libraries as Obj-C does?

If you're not a fan of "gui driven development", why are you commenting on an article about a framework for making GUIs for consumer electronics?

You don't need to handpick criteria in order to make Apple products seem cheaper. All you really need to do is include some criteria other than clock speeds and memory capacities. Geeks have a tendency to ignore advantages that aren't trivially quantifiable, even when those advantages have real monetary value to most consumers.

When you look at Apple's product line, you find that many products have no true head-on competitors. Most obvious are the iPod Touch, the iMac, and the Mac Mini. Those are products that clearly have a large market and large margins for Apple, so you would expect there to be some competitors trying to undercut Apple while matching them for features and capabilities. Instead, what you see are companies that try to undercut Apple by offering products that have significant disadvantages, such as ultra-small form factor PCs that only offer Atom processors and crappy Intel graphics, while still being bigger than the Mac Mini, or slightly larger boxes that are as fast or faster than an iMac, but when you add in the price of a good monitor, it ends up being several hundred dollars more expensive than the iMac, while lacking the convenience and not really offering much more in the way of upgradeability.

The only reasonable way to explain this is that all would-be Apple competitors lack either the engineering talent or the scale necessary to compete head-on with Apple's offerings. But if that's the case, then the "Apple tax" is no longer arbitrary - it is supported at least in part by very narrow and apparently natural monopolies Apple has in some niches.

Only if you bought a shit PSU to begin with. A quick google search has turned up a Tom's Hardware test showing a system with 2 5770s running Furmark and drawing 324W from the wall. Any 400W PSU that can actually deliver 400W would be sufficient for such a system. Unless you think it is common or reasonable to buy an SLI-capable motherboard and a power supply that doesn't have two PCIe power connectors.

All I said is that the hardware you get is generally properly configured and the software works well with it. That, generally speaking, has nothing to do with how well suited the hardware is for your needs or how much choice you had in selecting the hardware.

If Apple makes a product that is targeted at your needs, it's usually a very compelling offering. If they don't, you usually end up being an Apple hater tinged with what looks suspiciously like jealousy.

This, even more than the issue of debugging hardware problems, separates Macs from PCs. The hardware on a Mac is properly configured. You don't need to worry about low-level power management settings for a MacBook Pro, because it's already been tuned to be the most efficient laptop on the market. I don't know for sure how Macs handle memory timings, but they don't do anything stupid with memory clock speeds. As for legacy ports, there are none around to hog IRQs.

Now, if it's overclocking you're after, you're out of luck, but that doesn't matter because Apple doesn't make a high-end desktop computer, which is what you want if you're an overclocker.

Try reading an EULA and then come back and tell me that English is sufficiently expressive as-is.