My 3 year old has had an iPad since she was 2, and it's been one of the best things we've ever gotten her. She plays with all sorts of educational apps, and we regularly read books to her on it before bed. Like anything else it's just a tool, and it's effect depends on how it is used. Personally for us it's been much cheaper than buying insanely overpriced childrens' books or educational toys. I mean really, have you seen the prices they charge for that stuff? It's ridiculous. The iPad plus the cost of the apps has more than paid for itself.

Yeah I started doing freelance programming on the side about a year ago. Eats up all my free time, about 20 hours a week, but it now accounts for a third of my income. Was finally able to put down enough money to buy a house.

Calling SUSY "all but dead" is overstating the case just a little. *Minimal* SUSY appears to not fit the data, but that doesn't mean another version of SUSY might be the right answer. SUSY is one of those things, like string theory, that I think a lot of physicists are going to have a tough time letting go of until they are thoroughly disproven, assuming that ever happens. The problem is we're kind of getting to the point where it's hard to test these theories since it requires energies we have no hope of ever achieving in order to investigate them experimentally, unless we are clever and find other consequences of the theory at lower energies, like the B-meson decay.

Yeah I know exactly what you mean. I get this all the time from my non-physicists friends, they seem to be the most skeptical not the actual working physicists and astronomers.

You know, there's a whole class of particles, called supersymmetric particles, that most extensions to the Standard Model practically *beg* to exist, so it's not such a stretch to think that dark matter might be these one of these stable, neutral massive SUSY particles that only interact through gravity and the weak force.

I should ask my friends if they're also skeptical of the Higgs boson.

Arcane is not really the right word there. There's nothing "arcane" about security through obscurity. Perhaps they meant "archaic"?

Ditto, no alcohol or coffee for me either. Or root beer for that matter. :)

Given Apple's cash reserves couldn't it just buy every major carrier in the country? I'm sure it could buy ATT, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, et al, with the loose change in the couches at the Apple campus. :) Given Internet access is pretty much already a local monopoly with no competition what would it matter? At least with Apple in charge they would have an incentive to get rid of the caps.

I hate even going to conventional theaters anymore since I moved to Austin. Reasonably priced actual meals served with the movie. What a ground breaking concept! No commercials before the movie, just little loops they specifically for the movie your watching that somehow related to it. All kinds of special events, like a secret premiere of the new Star Trek movie hidden as a showing of Wrath of Khan, or John Carpenter and Shepard Fairey showing up for a screening of They Live, it's just a cool place. I'm so glad they're building one down the street from me on Slaughter, so I don't have to shelp all the way to Lamar, except for the special events. When I'm in Dallas, I'll usually go to The Movie Tavern which functions as a fair replacement.

All you automatic Texas haters can go fuck off, because Austin is a nice little liberal enclave that somehow managed to create itself down here.

With the caveat that you also have to be in the 5% of people that don't have a natural immunity to it already.

https://alexlevinson.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/3-major-issues-with-the-latest-iphone-tracking-discovery/

A very interesting historical artifact. History/geography and most of the math questions would still be good for a modern day entrance exam, but translating into Latin and manual numeric math problems (cube root by hand, et al), who gives a shit?

That's what I did. I bought a super dinky POS tablet for $82 off of newegg just to have something to develop on since I could care less about actually using the thing. Since I'm primary an iPhone developer and user, it was a good way to get my feet wet. Personally I find it a horrible platform, but if my client's want a version of their mobile app I'll just slap something together with a cross platform API.

You're kidding, right? You do know that's like, uh, the cornerstone of capitalism?

Well it can't be that difficult to get around the ban for devices that use the technology for heating by just making the devices emit in the infrared instead of visible light. Like say painting the bulb black for instance?

Yeah, but that's exactly why they *are* profitable. ;)