WebP, by Jeff Muizelaar.

I must have mis-represented myself in my original post. I am not talking about buying $1,000 speaker cables. I am talking about buying $25 RCA cables rather than $2 RCA cables. I don't have the willpower to endure an ebay/craigslist trawl for cables to save $10. I just go to amazon and find something that looks decent, and it's usually ~10x the price of the cheapest cable, and I buy that. It's not about the money, it's about the inevitable time and hassle that dealing with junk entails.

Yes, I've had cables that failed. They did not spontaneously combust, but I change the wiring in my stereo about 6 times a year, I have kids, and the crappy stuff breaks down surprisingly fast. I am not trying to make a financial case for this. I am just saying that, in my experience, it worth the extra couple $10s to get decent build quality such that the stuff will last a lifetime, and the stout stuff is inevitably marketed as "audiophile grade".

Thank you for that link, that place looks awesome. I will definitely return there the next time I need a cable.

Sorry if I wasn't clear -- I was not referring to speaker cables. I have plain 16 gauge copper for my speakers, and it works fine. I got it in 1993 or so for about $10 probably, and it's been perfectly durable and sounds great. I was referring to interconnects such as RCA or HDMI or VGA. Cheap RCA cables are junk and break easily. I will gladly pay the $20 premium for "audiophile" RCA cables if they will have superior build quality. I know they do not offer "higher resolution" or "increased dynamic range", but I still end up buying cables marketed as such.

Even if the financial calculus says that it is cheaper to just replace broken cables every 5 years, I just don't want that hassle.

Unfortunately, if you want cables et al that are not complete junk, you often have no choice except for the "audiophile" stuff. Not everyone who buys that stuff is an idiot, some just want a solid cable that will last for 20 years and will not break during normal use.

What flamebait. You may not agree with his politics, and his personal life may abhor you, but it seems perfectly valid to assess someone's intellectual capacity based on something like this. You don't have to vote for him, but this may be an interesting find for someone choosing between Sarah "I read them all" Palin and this guy. He clearly is a sharp man.

I have an Air from a couple months ago, and it came with Java right there in /usr/bin/. I haven't installed Lion yet, but I would be surprised if Java was absent. It's not impossible, but that would be a fairly sudden removal.

I keep a stack of maintenance records for my car, because I will probably sell it some day, and the future owner may want that. But I will never actually refer to any of these, even if there is a question about the state of my car. I will just have it re-evaluated at that time.

I don't get any financial statements in the mail, because the institutions store them as pdfs for me. I trust them to keep accurate records. Every day I throw out practically everything that arrives in my mailbox. Occasionally I will get a personal correspondence or an actually-informative message from a financial institution.

I don't keep the records of my interactions with the government (parking tickets, licences, etc). It just doesn't seem worth the effort compared to the potential risk of some misunderstanding occurring.

I don't keep medical bills or documents, because I trust my doctors to keep an accurate medical record. And even if they fail to do so, I don't see a strong reason to care about that.

I don't keep correspondences with my children's school, because I can't imagine a reason that I would ever need to refer to that. I read them, respond as appropriate, then they go straight into the trash.

I keep documents regarding real estate ownership, but in the ~10 years of doing so, I have never referred to any of these.

So I have a couple of unsorted write-only streams of files for certain things, but everything else is either digital or thrown away. I can imagine scenarios where magically having a certain document might make things easier or simpler for me, but none of these scenarios have ever occurred to me or anyone I know. Nor do I imagine that is worth the 1-2 hours per week it would take to maintain something like that. I would rather spend that time with my kids or my friends focusing on the present.

Is this unusual?

I don't think anyone would argue with your point.

This strikes me as something that you have to have work this way during the test phase of the phone. Possibly it's a "// TODO" that never got done. Possibly it's just a bug. It's not a huge surprise coming from Apple -- they seem to have one of the least rigorous coding practice in the industry.

In the scheme of things this doesn't seem like the end of the world. If you are in the habit of leaving your phone backups available on an unlocked workstation, I suspect you have bigger problems than revealing your location. For sure it should be fixed.

They didn't. Last June they said something to the effect of, "If users opt-in to location services, they are opting in us collecting that information. This is the only way for this system to work." This came up last week in the hubbub about the tower data being stored in perpetuity on the phone. But these are completely separate issues.

AFAIK, there is no evidence that the tower data is being transmitted anywhere, so it is reasonable for Apple to say that they don't track anyone. They made a device that privately stores this data. I don't think anyone thinks that the way this data is being stored is the right way to do it, but just because the device stores that data, that doesn't mean that Apple is "tracking" you.

It seems like he's complaining about a policy/protocol violation by the police. Similar in nature (but not in magnitude) to coming home and finding your house ransacked by the police and then getting arrested for having a joint on your coffee table. If the machines aren't supposed to be clocking him and taking his picture and mailing him a ticket, it seems perfectly legitimate to complain about that when they do.

Cloud computing is not a fad and it's not "a data center that someone else runs for you". It's a way to use resources using strategies that have emerged and become feasible only recently. Google, Amazon, and others have been running giant internal clouds for years, and recently have begun renting them out. For most folks, using these third-party off-site infrastructures is the best way to go. For others, it doesn't work but they don't have the in-house expertise or time/money/focus to roll their own. This is where VMware and Rackspace and Redhat come in -- they give you a simple way to create your own internal setup.

Would you care to expand on that? I was under the impression that both smime and key-pair encryption are pretty solid.

Every week more Android phones ship than all the XBoxes that ship in an entire year.

Your average iPhone user will, however, quickly realize that photos suck if the sensor is too small. Apple never makes stuff to compete in checklists, they make stuff they believe will be regarded as high-quality. Apple would never slap an "8 megapixels!" sticker on the iPhone in hopes that it would appeal to more people. Apple's stuff is nearly always the worst spec'ed stuff on the market, yet it is also the most coveted and they consistently have the highest customer satisfaction in the industry. They know how to put stuff together for real life.

I don't know enough about the technology to comment on whether a good-quality 8MP camera is feasible in this size, but Apple will never build something that sucks just so they can have a higher number in some feature table.