This. Don't tell kids why they need to memorize this facts and formulas, teach them how to figure them out for themselves. Teach them the basics of how things interact and let them decide which things and interactions interest them; they will then seek out the facts and formulas that are relevant to those interests. Then, you have taught them how to learn. On their own.

Which is the best kind.

That's not to say you can't, or shouldn't learn from others. Quite the opposite, in fact. One of the most important things you can possibly learn is how to tell when your source is wrong, (optionally) call them out on it, and find another source. If you can't do that, you'll forever rely on others to tell you what should be important to you and spoon-feed you "facts" about those things. On the other hand, learning "on your own" is a matter of figuring out what's actually important to you, or at least how to discern a reliable source for "what's important" for a particular subject or goal, and seek out that information yourself. That shouldn't stop you from relying on the work and knowledge of others; it just doesn't require you to do so.

I made the switch about 15 months ago. However, as the M8 only came out this March, my most recent experience with them (the one where they talked me out of the upgrade) wasn't so far back; I can't pinpoint the exact date, but it was end of March, beginning of April. That is to say, roughly 4 months ago. Though, I was in store last month with a friend who needed to replace his damaged S3 and they tried to find every solution short of selling him a new phone, even in the face of him having already picked out what he wanted as a replacement and having cash in hand to pay for it.

Maybe the people at your T-Mobile store are just jerks? I've been in 4 different stores around here and they're always great.

All failures. Except, maybe, Visio, though I don't know anyone who actually uses it. I have a friend who own a Zune; he won it, used it once, and it's been holding down the bottom of his sock drawer ever since. You were trying to highlight OP's point, right?

Because it hasn't been for the XBox for quite some time now.

Xtreme sounds too much like Xfinity. In fact, Comcast's 105Mbps cable internet offering is named Xtreme. I'm sure they wouldn't care, though.

Funny, when I switched to T-Mobile, they were more than happy to get AT&T on the phone for me to get my HTC One X unlocked. Of course, AT&T refused to provide the correct unlock code (they pulled that "we'll text it to you within 24 hours" bullshit, then, when that code didn't work, insisted that they had to escalate it to "engineering", and that I'd hear back in 24 hours again, which I never did -- and I know it wasn't T-Mobile scamming, as I went into an AT&T store when the first code didn't work). In the end, I borrowed a friend's old HD2 and used that until the phone I was waiting for came out, at which point I did end up buying a phone, an HTC One (M7), from T-Mobile. Then the M8 came out and I went in to check it out, fully expecting them to pressure my into paying off my M7 and upgrading; instead, they highlighted some of the feature differences, pointed out that the two were mostly similar, then spoke of what they felt were the drawbacks (the M8 being slightly larger, the fact that I'd have to replace my desk and car docks, etc), eventually saying they'd be more than happy the help me upgrade, but advising me to hang on to the M7 for the time being.

Yes, such vicious salespeople.

It's worth mentioning that, even while paying off two phones, my T-Mobile bill, for unlimited EVERYTHING (with the upgrade to unlimited LTE data on both lines) is still $20/mo less than I was shelling out to AT&T for 2 lines sharing 700 minutes and 500 text messages, with 4GB of data each (before $10/GB overages kicked in). And, when both phones are paid for in 9 months, my bill will drop by an additional $25. Actually, it will probably drop by another $20 when I drop the insurance on both phones (what's the point, when I can just walk in to a T-Mobile store and get a brand new phone at that point?), so my bill ends up being $65 less than AT&T. Sure, that's assuming I keep the same phones for longer than two years, but where's that option with AT&T?

Unless your bill gets smaller 24 months after you get a new phone, you should be able to get one phone (bought under contract) unlocked for every 24 months of service. That is to say, if you bring your own phone initially, then upgrade, say, 12 months later, those first 12 months in which your bill was exactly the same as it was *after* you upgraded should cover half he cost of the new phone. You were paying for it before you even got it, and they should respect that.

My provider doesn't do service contracts, though; they finance phones. I have 2 phones on my plan currently, and I pay $12.50/mo for each of them. In 9 months, they'll be paid off and my bill will drop by $25 in total, unless I decide to upgrade at that time. Of course, I could pay the $112.50 balance owed on one (or both) of those phones right now and be allowed to upgrade. Or, I could just decide to live with the phones I have, both of which are working quite well and, being the high-end models of their day, should continue to do so until their batteries give out, and enjoy the reduced bill.

Honestly, we don't need a law for this; people just need to wake up, realize what they're signing up for, and just don't sign it if they don't like the terms. Yes, competition is reduced when everyone's locked in a contract. The solution? Don't sign. When they all start hemorrhaging customers, they'll first start competing on price (wherein the remaining customers win) and, when that doesn't work, they'll start competing on terms (wherein we all win). Or, you know, switch to one of the carriers who's already started competing in that manner; maybe you have to wait out your contract, maybe you have to pay a termination fee, whatever, just do it.

When you're doing graphics work (note that I didn't say photo editing), your graphics are being rasterized at your *display* resolution. If that's not the native resolution of the panel, or some resolution that divides cleanly into that resolution, then yes, there is interpolation, and if your work requires pixel-perfect accuracy (a lot of clients want that and will zoom in and attack your work with a ruler to make sure they're getting it -- on the upside, you can charge for it), that display has become useless. And even if we do limit it to photo editing as your description implies, you still have no clue what's actually happening. Am I cramming the whole image onto the screen (as you implied) or am I zooming to 1:1 to fit as many *actual* pixels of the image onto the screen as possible? In the first case, you're right, it doesn't matter; in the second, well, ... I've already explained, in this paragraph, why the display is useless except at two specific resolutions.

And now you're just being an ass, that much is clear. Good day, sir.

Actually... I can't pass this one up... it's actually more akin to leading with "I beat my wife" and leaving out "but only when she threatens me with a loaded gun pointed at my head". To be clear, *my position* is that I don't carry my 17" places I don't need to carry it, and you've just admitted that this position hasn't changed; you inferred, incorrectly, that this had *anything* to do with weight, when the reality is that it has to do with limiting my exposure to potential data theft by preferring to carry a machine that doesn't contain all of my financials and personal info when I don't need to. You can keep insisting that this is not a valid reason to leave the machine at home or tethered to my desk at work and, instead, carry another machine (that the machine is physically smaller is a factor of cost, not weight) that doesn't contain that data, but insistence does not make you right.

Oh? It's not my fault you didn't catch up on the entire thread before posting.

See above. This does, however, seem to quantify you fairly well, piping up about what someone who does graphics work needs in a display (which is *very* different from what your average user, gamer, or even someone doing video work, needs) when you clearly have no clue, then refusing to listen to sound explanations of why this is the case. Perhaps you'd find my posts more coherent if you actually read them with an open mind, rather than a staunch belief that what works for you must work for everyone else.

I married a Mac fanatic, I work for a Mac-centric company, and my two best friends are Mac nuts; and all of that is going quite well. I'd say I'm a damn good fit for that crowd. I'm not a part of it, though; I want a UNIX system with a well-supported UI; that's the crowd I'm in, and I'm loving it, thank you. I also never left Windows; I use it *a lot* for testing. Oh, I also use Linux, when it's the right tool for the job. I don't evangelize any platform, which is what you're doing here.

Peace be with you, friend.

I should have put this in the same post, but it was getting long...

That's fine. The machine works for you. However, the best Apple can do right now is a 15" machine with a *marginally* faster CPU, the same amount of RAM (yes, despite Apple's documentation, late 2011 MBPs can handle 16GB of RAM), and (thank you for prompting me to look at the disk performance of the current models, my previous benchmark was from 2012) a disk that's about 80% faster, but much smaller (unless I opt for the $500 upgrade). For a full list of my complaints on that front, see here and realize that the defects I see in Apple's current offering are more numerous than you seem to think. And no, your opinion isn't going to fix them, but 32GB of RAM and a physically larger display might.

When you're doing graphics work, you often find yourself looking *that* closely at your display. Clearly, you've never done any real graphics-intensive work, or you'd fully understand where I'm coming from. Enjoy your crisp text, that's what the hiDPI resolutions on the retina displays are meant to provide; it's not my fault you don't understand the implementation of the technology you are using, what it does, and what its limitations are and how those limitations affect certain use-cases where precision is paramount. You can't see the difference because the difference doesn't matter to you; I'm not faulting you for that, but I'm also not going to argue that the difference *does* matter to people it matters to.

If the pixels on your display are visible, you're sitting too close to it. Personally, I wear glasses when staring at a monitor, so I can probably bring mine a little closer than you can before I have that problem. My eyes are odd, one focuses +0.25 diopters and the other focuses -0.25 diopters, both eventually correcting themselves over time, so if I'm working on multiple displays (typically 3) at very slightly differing distances, I have to wear what most people would consider "dizzy" glasses or suffer a massive migraine within an hour or so.

When did I change my position? I did not. I did, however, clarify that position. You can insist, all you want, that I don't carry my 17" everywhere due to its size and weight, but insistence doesn't make you correct. I've given you the reasons for that, and it has nothing to do with weight.

It's dangerous to infer the motives of others who you do not know personally, because any such inferences will be based on your own preferences and experiences, which necessarily do differ from theirs; since you don't know them personally, you don't even have the slightest basis by which to compensate for this. Of course, we all do it, so I'm not judging you for that; however, when someone clarifies their reasoning, there is never a situation in which you are right to argue that; you are not them, you are not in their head, and you clearly don't know that person well enough to understand their reasoning, or you wouldn't have incorrectly inferred it in the first place.

Yes, you can *use* the display at that resolution; however, yes, it does certainly make a difference. Perhaps not for text, or vectors drawn by retina-aware applications, because the hiDPI subsystem will still render those at the native resolution, simply adjusting their sizes to scale; but for raster graphics, it most certainly does matter. With a raster, you either scale up by a multiple of the original or you lose sharpness. Why? Because when you scale up by a multiple (say 2:1, which is how hiDPI native scales), 1 pixel simply becomes 4, 2 in each direction; effectively, your pixels become bigger, but they don't change color or placement at all. The moment you start interpolating and antialiasing your output, you no longer have a display fit for graphics work.

If that's what you're using it for, then your resolution choices on a 2880x1800 display are, as I stated, 2880x1800 or 1440x1900. For everyday use, yea, fine, fuck it, run it at any damn resolution you want. If all you care about is the text on the screen, it'll still render at the native 2880x1800, size adjusted to match the hiDPI resolution of your choice.

And I never said the 17" was barely luggable, I simply said I have a smaller machine for travel. Before I had that and, in fact, before I had this 17" MBP, I used (and still have) a slightly larger, twice as heavy 17" PC as my primary machine. I lugged that fucker around with me *everywhere* I needed a computer without complaint. The 17" MBP is *light years* more luggable than that; I just see no need to take the machine that holds a decent amount of my personal data out in public, to potentially unsecure or unsafe locations where it may be stolen, so I take the smaller, cheaper, slightly less capable, but also devoid of personal data, machine with me instead. In a sense, though, I guess you're right; the weight of the potential data goldmine someone would find in this 17" MBP does weigh heavily enough so as to make it unluggable.

TL;DR: Don't infer people's reasons for things; you'll almost always be wrong.

Someone mod this guy up... he worked HARD for that joke!

I'm with you as one who actually uses a mac as intended. Pretty much any time I'm in front of it, at least 12GB of the 16GB of RAM in the machine is in use, and at least 2 of the 8 logical CPU cores are pegged, if not more; on not-rare occasions, I see 8 pegged cores and a ton of swapping as 16GB isn't really enough (though it's the max for this machine) for some of what I'm doing, which, of course, leads to a very non-responsive system. Budget woes and the unavailability if better-spec'd portables dictate that I have to make do, however. I could get a new rMBP with a marginally faster CPU and marginally slower SSD, which would actually make the situation worse as I can't get one with more than 16GB of RAM and, thus, would still swap... to a slower disk. Oh, and I don't have $3200 to drop on, essentially, a downgrade; and yes, to maintain the same amount of storage as my current MBP, I would have to upgrade the SSD size (the upside being that *all* of that 1TB would be SSD, but I really wouldn't see any benefit from moving bulk media storage off of a spinning disk).

Sadly, my current MBP is the last portable Apple made that I find interesting. If I could get an rMBP with 32 or 64GB of RAM, that might change. A Mac Pro would be nice, but falls outside of my budget and would be much less useful when traveling, as my internet connection (and, indeed, the best I can get where I live) doesn't have decent enough upstream to allow me to interact effectively with the applications I would use it for, when remote.

The 17" models were a niche when Apple stopped selling them, yes; however, so was every other model they sold at the time. Now that Apple has clout with an demographic that's a bit more savvy than broke college kids who want to look cool, they could sell a 17" model to a much wider audience. Part of the allure to the larger models is the ability to cool a faster CPU more effectively and allow for more hardware configuration options; it's not all about screen size. There is a reason the 13" model comes standard with half as much RAM and you can't order it with the same speed CPU you can put in a 15"; and a 17" would allow for a yet faster CPU, possibly a second drive bay (alternately filling that area with more battery), and maybe a couple RAM slots to augment the on-board 16GB.

As someone who uses their machine to its potential, I'm certain you understand this, so this post is more directed at others who may read it than it is at you.

Since light emanating from one point loses brightness exponentially as it spreads to cover an area, the backlight of a larger screen will draw exponentially more power than the backlight of a smaller screen, for the same given brightness. The bigger your screen gets, the more the ration of backlight power to panel power skews toward the backlight, so you can't really say a 3820x2160 display will always draw more power than a 1920x1080 display; it may be true at the panel level, but what use is the panel without the backlight? And no panel is drawing 120W by itself, period.

While a panel with 4x as many pixels can be expected to draw roughly *up to* 4x as much current, the switching voltage of each individual pixel drops as the pixels become smaller, so the wattage of the panel does not scale linearly with resolution, but it does scale with size. Since the brightness requirements of the backlight scale exponentially with size, a larger screen quickly begins to draw more power than a smaller screen, even if the smaller screen packs more pixels.

I'm sure I've made some factual error, here, and welcome someone who actually has an EE degree to step in and correct me; however, I'm certain I've gotten the basics correct.

Fuck yeah! I love Spinal Tap!