To really understand Woz's genius, you need to look at his floppy controller card for the Apple II... it is a stunning piece of simplification to achieve a high-performance device at low cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Woz_Machine

It's not arbitrary. There's actually a good reason for minimizing (y-yobs)^2, assuming that your observations have a Gaussian distribution. The resulting estimators provide a maximum likelihood estimator of the parameters of the distribution, if and only if it really was Gaussian. Thus, of course, if it isn't Gaussian (outliers of various sorts, et.c), the x^2 may not be the best bet. There is an entire field of 'robust estimators' of quantities, which are more resistant to outliers than least squares. There are also cases in which the underlying distribution is pathologically different from Gaussian; it could be Lorentzian (Cauchy), in which case it is so completely unlike a Gaussian, it doesn't even have a defined standard deviation (it is infinite). There are weighted methods which can fix this too.

So, in short, least squares is the right answer (in the sense that it yields results which provable have the maximum likelihood describing the data at hand) if you have a perfect Gaussian variate; otherwise, it may well not be.

You missed the good part of the T-Mobile PAYGO plan: once you have paid the $100 once (or accumulated it via smaller payments), all your future added minutes last a year. So if you haven't used $100, you can top off with $50, or even $10, at the end of the first year, and it roll the leftover minutes forward to the next year and add the new minutes. If you buy fewer minutes, you are paying a bit higher price per minute, but you never lose the old minutes as long as you top off. This is why the original purchase of $100 is worth it, since you get the best rate ($0.10/minute).

Also, T-Mobile has great deals on refurb phones often. I bought a Dart (not a great phone, but it works), For $90, which came with a $50 card for minutes. Thus, a useable Android phone for $40. It does support WiFi data tethering, so I can pay the $2 or $3 rate for a day when I need data, and have that for my other devices, too.

There are a number of issues with the calculations here.

First, you estimate that it takes about 1 gallon of gasoline equivalent per pound of aluminum (1800 gallons for 2000 pounds). This then seems to say that the energy cost for aluminum should hover around $3.00/pound (the price of the gasoline), or maybe half that since electricity is cheaper. Maybe $1.50/pound for the energy. It currently sells for $0.75/pound on the spot market, so the energy input is somehow wrong.

Also, if a truck gets 20 miles/gallon, it burns 5000 gallons in 100k miles. If it gets 25 MPG, it burns 4000 gallons in 100k miles, so the difference seems to be about a 1000 gallon improvement in consumption, not a 200 gallon improvement. If your original arithmetic is sound, you would still end up in the hole if you burned the truck at the end, but aluminum is highly recyclable with only a tiny fraction of the original energy, so in the long run I think it comes out ahead even if the original numbers are right. However, I think that with some mis-estimate of the original energy budget, it might come out ahead even on the first pass, without considering recycling.

This is not even close to correct about the policies of UCS. See:

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/
and
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear-power-and-our-energy-choices/nuclear-power-and-global-warming/house-testimony-on-nuclear.html

They are very strongly looking at nuclear safety issues, but specifically are neither pro-or-con on nuclear power itself. The organization does a great deal of research into all matters related to energy and safety and sustainability issues. They are well aware of the carbon-free nature of nuclear power, and that if it would be managed safely, it could be highly beneficial.

I know they are different things, but it was the camera access that got my attention. Disabling Control Panel access, I think, as I mentioned in the original post, avoids the issue. As far as I can tell, there is no way to get to anything on my iPad without unlocking.

The ad hominem about my lacking imagination and/or sense was not needed or polite.

As soon as I did the iOS7 update, I noticed that you could access the camera from the lock screen, and I didn't want someone taking inappropriate pictures on my iPad if they stole it. There is an option in the settings which controls what features are available from the lock screen. If you turn off the Control Panel access from the lock screen, and everything else, this goes away.

So, it's annoying but not fatal as a security issue. I can't imagine anyone wanting to have the device open for the camera when it is locked. I do wish the options were flexible enough that one could still adjust audio settings with it locked.

Well, that would be true if you couldn't get Python 2.7 for iOS. There are, in fact, two different full python implementations of python on the App store. I have used it to run my vxi-11 stack to talk to oscilloscopes and other data acquisition stuff. Works fine. The only annoyance is that you have to cut & paste large programs from email (for now) to get them in. You can edit code in the editor, though, so small programs can be done right in place.

Algol-60. RT-11. TECO. Hypercard (count this one twice!).

This is formally a perfectly acceptable way to present the discovery. Two events (points) in Minkowski 4-space which are connected by a ray of light have an invariant time separation tau = delta_t - delta_x /c = 0. To us, it did just happen.

I am a t-mobile prepaid customer, with one of their LG Android Optimus-T handsets, which I got for $130 refurb.
I can get legal tethering from them by setting up the phone as a mobile hotspot for $1.50 a day. If
you use it every day, it is quite expensive, but if you just use it a few days a month for travel or
whatever, it is great. They give you 30 MB of very high speed (I think I have seen 1 MB/sec peaks),
and unlimited 2G for the rest of the day. If you are just checking email, or doing bandwidth-restricted
video chat back home for a while, it is plenty.

I juts got back from a conference trip, where the hotel charged $10/day for internet and you
couldn't even get it in the main conference area, and they didn't even have free internet in the
lobby. I spent my $1.50/day, and was able to edit code via ssh, talk to my wife via video chat
for a while, and look at the web. I had to make sure I did the video chat at the beginning of the
session, while I still was under the 30 MB throttling limit.

You do know that the Union of Concerned Scientists has been around since 1969, not since Bush Jr., don't you? Did you read their history on their web site?

They (we, in this case) certainly have been more vocal during the most egregiously anti-scientific administrations, but Bush Jr. wasn't the first.

There is a truly excellent book, "Hitler's Uranium Club" which documents what the Germans themselves said about their efforts. It is edited by Jeremy Bernstein. It is a collection of transcriptions of conversations among the leading German scientists (Heisenberg, Laue, etc., not all of whom were actually doing nuclear physics), who were captured lat in the war and transferred to Farm Hall in England. They were recorded secretly, so what is said is very candid.

Anyone interested in this history should definitely read the book. The conversations run the gamut from very technical, to various fights over social issues.

OK, I'm in the process of debugging somebody else's 43,000 lines of FORTRAN code. (I hate FORTRAN...). What I see in here would require a number of offsets which would cost approximately the entire US GDP to buy. This is not the first time I have seen code like this, either.