Android has what, four versions in the wild? iOS has 3, 4 and 5 taking up something like 15, 20, and 65% roughly. Not a great deal of difference there.

Especially since carriers only advertise Android 4 devices, current models from "high-end" Android device manufacturers use Android 4 exclusively, and all Android 3 devices sold in the past year can run Android 4 with a free upgrade supported by both carriers and manufacturers.

Mobile-to-mobile is completely free on all major carriers. The lowest-minutes plan might as well be unlimited these days. And if you have a 3 or 4 people you trust to open a "family" plan together, it's dirt cheap.

These shenanigans are actually great examples of why American carriers suck. Quite a few of my calls are necessarily to and from land lines during business hours (talking to clients, waiting on hold for tech support, and so on), and, while I know more than "3 or 4 people" I trust, I don't know 3 or 4 people I care to collect payments from on a monthly basis. Not to mention, how do you fairly "invoice" your friends when shared no-charge "minutes" and data service are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis?

With that said, T-Mobile's $50 unlimited voice, text, and "2G" data service works great for me, because, for the very little data service I actually use, "3G" matters very little, but, last time I had occasion to check, I averaged well over 1,000 "non-mobile-to-mobile" minutes per month in voice calls. This sounds like a lot until you realize it's only about half an hour per day.

the new ipad ... Is literally the new name.

No, it's just "iPad". The Apple online store's product description is of the form "iPad with Wi-Fi 64GB - Black (3rd generation)." In other words, they're naming it pretty much exactly like they do iPods. They referred to it as "the new iPad" at the launch event for fairly obvious reasons.

"Marketing experts" are speaking out against this — and the device's design — in droves, because they believe Apple is foolish for not using superficial things like product renaming and cosmetic changes to compel otherwise happy customers to upgrade. In other words, Apple doesn't understand effective marketing...

I actually agree with this â" in fact, I purchased a few 96/24 recordings from HDTracks with no real purpose in mind beyond frequency analysis.

But there's a huge difference between honestly serving a niche market and "baffling with bullshit."

On the other hand, if the average iTunes customer is interested in Fourier analysis, that makes me very happy...

If what you're saying is true, you can find quite convincing "scientific proof" yourself: demonstrate a statistically significant ability to discriminate between your source files and copies that have been downsampled to 48KHz and then upsampled back to 96KHz with a high-quality sample rate conversion algorithm.

This last bit is important, as it takes neither "golden ears" nor supertweeters to hear the difference between a 96KHz recording and the same recording passed through a terrible sample rate converter.

If your 96KHz audio clearly sounds "lusher" and "deeper" to you, this test should be both easy and easily repeatable. Even so, success by no means implies the improvements are due to your perception of higher frequencies: other plausible culprits include be equipment functioning poorly at 48KHz â" perhaps due to multiple rounds of inadvertant lousy sample rate conversion â" or "euphonic" noise at audible frequencies generated by your equipment when fed high-frequency signals. But if your goal is the sound you prefer, this "why" is less important.

In fact, are you even sure your recording and playback equipment is reproducing frequencies much higher than 20-22KHz in the first place? I ask only because the overwhelming majority of my own does not. Well, that and to point out that you have a vested interest in knowing whether you need the higher frequencies, because merely using 96KHz file formats is the cheapest and easiest part.

The theory of the Laffer Curve is pretty accurate. It says, basically, that at some rate between 0% tax and 100% tax is how the government can maximize its revenues. It's trying to determine the actual (real life) rate that puts us at the maximum (slope = 0) that is a near-impossibility. That could be 1% or 99% or 43% or 17.5%. We really don't know.

Why not 43% AND 17.5%? The "Laffer Curve Argument" is either "a continuous, real-valued function on a closed, bounded interval has a maximum value" or "any real-valued function on a finite set has a maximum value." Both are true. Yet it's trivially false in either case to claim the unique maximum value is obtained at a unique point in the interval. Obvious counterexample: f(x) = a for any constant a.

Furthermore, why restrict admissible "tax functions" to constants? Perhaps we could maximize (multi-year) revenue by making the tax rate, say, a sinusoidal function of time?

In my (admittedly limited) experience, when scanning "assorted" documents like you plan to do, Fujitsu's $500 ScanSnap personal scanners aren't any more prone to jams than their $20,000 production scanners. If anything, they're somewhat less prone to mangling documents, simply because they run more slowly.

With that said, if a few years of tax returns and legal documents will truly take months to scan, you have a massive volume of paper, and you should probably look into outsourcing. Using a Fujitsu ScanSnap, I scanned five years of receipts, tax documents, and correspondence for both myself and my consulting business in a couple days. At the time, I was the IT director for an authorized Fujitsu reseller, so I had half a dozen different higher-end scanner models available for personal use at essentially no cost, but there was no compelling reason to use any of them.

The key to avoiding jams and double-feeds is simply a bit of document prep and paying attention to what you're doing. For instance, when a stack of papers is tri-folded into an envelope and the sheet feeder path is perpendicular to the folds, you will have problems if you expect to be able to absent-mindedly drop the (somewhat folded) stack into the feeder and walk away.

More generally, the key to productive scanning is to come up with a routine that, while you are scanning, is as uniform as possible. You absolutely don't want to be in a position where you have to adjust settings for each document, so, for instance, you should scan everything in duplex, enabling the scanner's blank-page removal if desired, and you should have an "exception pile" where you place any documents that require special handling (e.g., enabling color), so you don't have to interrupt your workflow to toggle settings. Here I'm assuming that the vast majority of your documents will use one "main" setting, while a small fraction will require "custom" settings; if this is not true in your case, adjust the process to suit. You also don't want toÂbottleneck the process with synchronous processing, so if "in-line" OCR and/or image processing is materially slowing down scanning, you're probably better off disabling it and doing these tasks by other means (in batch when you're done scanning, via tools that watch a folder and process documents as they arrive, etc.).

Finally, unless you have some form of robust automatic document classification, I've found it's far more efficient to separate "scanning" from "organization" — first, I scan everything into an "unfiled" folder with sequential, generic filenames, then once I've finished scanning, I use a combination of the OS X Finder's "quick look" feature and ad-hoc, keystroke-activated scripts to label and sort the documents. If you can enlist an extra pair of hands, you could clearly improve throughput by running an "assembly line" where one person scans and the other organizes.

You can't out of context say "a person has these inalienable rights" because it isn't always true. You can say "In the US, a person has these inalienable rights" because we as a society have decided to protect them. Replace US with Darfur or North Korea and you see it isn't true - because society doesn't have the strength to protect those rights.

False. In common usage, "inalienable rights" (also "unalienable rights") is a synonym for "natural rights," which are, by definition, rights that exist "by nature," even in the absence of political or legal institutions to grant or protect them.

Classic, if obvious, example: according to the US Declaration of Independence,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

In other words, people have the right to overthrow any government that violates their natural rights. Surely this right has never been granted or protected by law in any society, ever.

Your confusion may arise from another "self-evident truth": opinions differ widely as to what, if any, natural rights exist. Your example of North Korea is certainly correct, if unnecessarily stark: opinions differed even among the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, whence, e.g., Jefferson's "the pursuit of happiness" in place of John Locke's "property", as the nature and extent of "property rights" was (and remains) a highly contentious issue.

Let's get down to the brass tacks. If somebody has more power than you, what rights do you truly possess?

With respect to "inalienable" human rights, exactly the same ones you'd have if you were the most powerful person in the world. Your point, if I understand it correctly, is that "rights" (natural or otherwise) are often academic. This is a good point, very true, and well taken. In the words of G.B. Shaw, "he who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either."

Unlike Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc.: they have a decent inventory of stuff, and don't presume to be helpful. In other words, they cater to people who would buy online, if "online" were a fifteen minute drive. For those of us who generally know what we're looking for before going to the store, this is a godsend.

Note that this market isn't merely "techies": who wants "help" buying a particular movie or video game? Apple's iPhone 4 dock? A toaster? An electric razor? In the last two cases, I didn't know exactly what I wanted, but it's not as if Best Buy has helpful "toaster experts" on-site. And even if they did, they'd be "experts" in upselling unnecessarily fancy toasters with "performance guarantees."

(full disclosure: I ended up choosing an unnecessarily fancy toaster anyhow. I'm not at all sure why I'd ever need two simultaneous "temperature zones", but it looks nice, it's easy to clean, and it's outlasted the sum total of my previous three "cheapo" toasters, so I'm not complaining)

Sorry Dr Dre, but having you design speakers is like having an acoustics geek make a hip-hop record.

This is probably obvious, but if Beats are inexpensive to manufacture and sound evidently better than bundled iPod earbuds to the average consumer, the engineers have done their job. I doubt seriously that Dr. Dre had anything to do with the functional aspects of the design.

You want to tax people on something that can either be valuable or worthless, and you have absolutely no idea which it is until it's redeemed?

In sensible cases, "mark-to-market" implies the securities in question have a market value that can be reasonably approximated. In the case of a newly publically traded company like Facebook, it's asinine to claim that we have "absolutely no idea" what Zuckerberg's stake is worth merely because he's not sold it. The point is that it obviously won't be currently worthless on the day he becomes a "paper multibillionaire."

This is really more of a practical issue than a theoretical one, as similar "no idea what it's worth" arguments could be applied to currency, real estate, oil, or gold. Point being that the best way to avoid taxes is often to defer them, and sitting on large blocks of unexercised options is a great way to defer taxes indefinitely. Nice example from the article: Larry Ellison borrowed against unexercised options to buy a yacht. Why? Interest was cheaper than the estimated value of the tax deferral. The point is simply that the Zuckerbergs of the world have huge tax planning advantages over most Americans. Try claiming your salary has "no value" until you trade it for goods and services, and therefore, you only have to pay income taxes on money you spend, and see how far that gets you with the IRS.

Does anybody else use an iPhone as their primary work device?

No, but I certainly don't carry a laptop around merely to write email. In fact, I have no laptop smaller than a 17" MacBook Pro, as I've learned from long experience that, for my own applications at least, the delusion that laptops without "desktop-grade" keyboards and displays are reasonable "desktop replacements" is a real productivity-killer (c.f., e.g., an iPad, which is obviously not a reasonable desktop replacement, hence more likely to be used only "as intended").

More to the point, I find the iPhone's onscreen keyboard superior, for typing English prose, to every other "handheld" device I've used, from the HP 95LX to modern Blackberry-style keyboards on-screen keyboards on larger displays, and at least on par with crappy, cramped "netbook-sized" keyboards.

When you willingly believe in shit like this, you automatically lose all credibility with me. You say that you are immediately accepting of hateful beliefs, and you either do it without thinking or, even worse, do it consciously.

Unthinking adherence to any ethos, I agree, is dumb. But your passages don't sound "hateful" of anything but persecution. Mohammed was a warlord, born and raised amidst violent tribal warfare, and, taken in this context, these sound like a plea for a sort of moderation: once you have put down your oppressors, stop. In particular, don't seek revenge.

The trouble is with people who want to use the Quran, or, for that matter, the Bible, as an endorsement of rebuilding society on a model of violent, tribal warfare, only now we have nuclear bombs instead of swords. Which is both dumb, and certainly not the point of what Mohammed was saying.

Expecting the Quran to advocate nonviolent nonparticipation as a means of reform reminds me of the Catholic priest in Religilous who points out how stupid it is to look for science in the Bible, because the Bible was written hundreds of years before the dawn of science.

First, if you're interested in magazines, find a good newspaper/magazine shop, as bookstores — even those with seemingly largish "magazine sections" — can't compare in terms of either selection or knowledge.

As far as subscribing to foreign magazines, have you tried contacting the publisher? If they can't help you, then you're unlikely to find a significantly better price than the news shop.

With few exceptions, widely distributed US technology magazines tend to be very "advertiser friendly," and, consequently, even non-review feature articles in US technology magazines tend to be overwhelmingly "slanted" towards tools and technologies over, e.g., techniques and non-product-related news. As this has basically turned me off the genre, it's nice to hear that the situation might be better elsewhere.

Even outside technology, there seems to be a similar negative correlation between "commercialism" and quality in the magazine industry. Off the top of my head, examples of generally interesting and "not unabashedly commercial" magazines include Harpers , Foreign Affairs , and the Skeptical Inquirer .

With the mess of protocols (CDMA2000 vs. GSM/UMTS), bands (AWS vs. standard), and plans (no discount for not taking a subsidized phone) that is the U.S. cell phone market, do you have a plan for making this practical in the United States?

T-Mobile (prepaid and contract) allows arbitrary GSM phones on their network, and T-Mobile also offers discounted "no-phone" contract plans. While this certainly doesn't solve the problem of "carrier independence," it does, assuming you can get decent T-Mobile coverage, allow you to "vote with your wallet."

This is orthogonal to the jailbreaking issue, by the way: the "jailbreaking exemption" covers installing software, and the "unlocking exemption" covers only

Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network.

So it doesn't stop carriers (e.g., Verizon, Sprint) from disallowing unlocked third-party devices. As for AWS, it's a separate regulated frequency band, so even if you could modify a non-AWS device to support it, you'd still need to get the FCC to certify your modified phone — good luck with that.

A broader DMCA exemption wouldn't really help here, as the Librarian of Congress has no power to create exemptions to either carrier contracts or FCC regulations (obviously).

It'd never happen, but I'd personally like to see a "meta-exemption" that exempts "computer programs, when used solely for otherwise legal purposes, including the development and distribution of such programs that have substantial non-infringing uses." In other words, leave the anti-circumvention provisions on the books, but neuter them so they only apply to, well, actual cases of copyright infringement.