No.

I have a PhD in Zoology / Evolutionary Biology. I spent years in grad school teaching an undergrad-level comparative vertebrate anatomy lab and a developmental bio lab. I work with MDs and PhDs now in a neuroscience lab. None of the models we have heard of or have tried are in any way a suitable replacement for actual dissections. The times I have tried to teach anatomy with models or predissected specimens... well, let's just say that I wouldn't be willing at this point to take on a PhD student who hadn't ever laid hands on an actual animal, nor would I trust an MD who had never touched a specimen before medical school.

Why do you leave the program open for months? I mean, does it really take that long to fire it up again? Does it not remember and auto-load the last tabs you had open when relaunched? Do you never install updates requiring a reboot? Honestly interested in what you are thinking here - I can't understand why one would want to leave ANYTHING open for that long. I close things out when I am done for the day. If I want to reopen the same tabs, I bookmark them and relaunch or let the program reopen them for me. Even knowing that Lion reclaims memory from "inactive" apps I see no reason to leave anything running if I am not still using it.

There is no functional PDF plugin for Firefox on OS X. The one that worked in prior versions (PDF-Quartz) was broken by Fx 4 and only works if you use the right patched unofficial version, and force Fx to start in 32-bit mode. I look forward to a working, built-in PDF plugin. The goal here is a cross-platform plugin that eliminates the need for third party crap (I don't like having things open in a separate window, because that forces a local download whether I want the PDF on my disk or not, and every version of the Acrobat plugin I've ever used on Windows was dog-slow and laden with unnecessary features).

I welcome any software that makes it easier for me to be platform-agnostic in my daily computing tasks.

You're arguing this from the standpoint of someone who assumes all scientific papers are centered around MathML. You're ignoring humanities, for example, and behavioral sciences where images and graphs are a lot more common than equations. Anything that can be a vector should be a vector, in my mind, and PDF works very well for this. It's not new technology, it's mature, and it works on essentially any device and platform.

What is more, PDF works for papers already published. I need to access stuff from JStor, from pre-digital archives of Nature and Science, and so forth. If you want to go and retroactively convert millions of articles into XHTML, you go ahead. The rest of us will scan them into a PDF with OCR.

What you really NEED for scientific papers is a format that works on any device, including paper. We need to have the information available to anyone, anywhere, not just on 1st world computing devices. PDFs do this quite well.

You mean Arachnophilia? I used that ages ago but hated the Java version, so dumped it for Notepad++. These days TextWrangler does everything I need. WYSIWYG editors, feh. If you can't parse the code you shouldn't be building the page. If you are relying on a WYSIWYG editor you are not a designer, you are a hobbyist. And I say this as a definite hobbyist, even though I prefer a plain text editor. I have a site, I get lots of hits, but I know enough to know that I am not a pro. HTML, Javascript, CSS. That's my limit, aside from a few *nix command line tools. I am not fast enough or good enough to make more than a few bucks here and there helping others maintain sites. And I'm that good only because I've been hand-coding HTML since 1995 or so. If I made more money at it I'd be better, because I'd do it more often - but for a full-time research scientist I figure I do OK, and am happy with what I can do.

The UI is better than it used to be but it isn't all that. I've run into problems - things like "You need an administrator password to do this" but then no prompt for password. Which is f'ing stupid, any other OS would throw up an admin prompt when admin access is required or requested. Still takes way too damn long to get network properties when it used to be one or two clicks away from the system tray. Many other strange issues - we had a machine that refused to connect to the network until it was restarted (it could see all other networked PCs in the room, but stated it had no connectivity!), when on XP plugging in the cable gave it full connection immediately.

On the plus side, I started migrating our machines to Win7 specifically because managing malware and virus infections on the XP boxes was getting out of hand. Even the guy who had the most problems with his computer is now working happily virus-free. So a win for increased security, and I'll grudgingly give them a step forward on usability but there are still a lot of aggravations. But it certainly looks transparent and shiny, so that's all good. I might even upgrade my Boot Camp partition to 7...

Not coincidentally, upon reading this article I took two actions: First, I deleted the Last.fm app from my phone. Second, I decided that if I'm going to have to pay for music, I'll pay for something I want to hear - so I am about to renew my membership with my local NPR music station, which plays some killer stuff and incidentally has an iPhone app for free live streaming of their broadcasts.

Last.fm needs to know that if they are going to charge for it, they are going to have to be better than the other paid services. They aren't, from my experience.

"In fact, we've created tools that let our customers check their voice and data usage at any time during their billing cycle to help eliminate bill surprises."

Yep. And the total data usage shown by one of these tools does not match either the total data shown by the other, or the amount shown on my bill. Called customer service about it, and they had no answer. I think I just found out why, thanks to the article posted up top.

Not really. They've made it obvious over and over again that they really don't give a crap about the end users. If they did, there would be a simple way of offering feedback. Heck, even Microsoft has a simple, easy-to-find suggestion box on their site. Facebook tries damn hard NOT to allow you any chance to voice your opinion anywhere the people writing the code will see it.

I work in a research hospital. I recently had a conversation with our in-house shop guy, while he was doing a 3D build of a prototype part for me. He said this is a huge friggin' deal for people in the industry. He has had his finger on the pulse of this for quite some time now, and the big companies are very definitely worried about this. Right now, he can make anything he wants, and the only major issue is cost of materials. In the future, especially when metal forming rather than plastic is more easily done, who knows? His take is that the commercial-size 3D printers are quite likely going to come complete with DRM systems that will check specs and refuse to print anything that matches certain database flags. He doesn't like this, but he sees it on the horizon. As it is now, it's cheaper for us to do prototyping and then have a manufacturer mass-produce the part we designed; it won't be too much longer before it's just as cheap and fast to do it in-house. Manufacturers are worried. They won't sit idly by and let it happen without a huge fight.

Yes, agreed. 8000+ photos over the last year happens to coincide with the birth of my son, now a few weeks shy of 1. You don't get that time back, so why not take a few minutes to document it?

There's almost nothing available for download these days that doesn't try to package the Yahoo toolbar into the installer. I simply can't understand why so many companies are happy to have that that asinine, invasive, virus of a toolbar associated with their product. The only thing I can think of is that Yahoo might be hosting the download bandwidth for them.

And now this? My prediction: That damn toolbar will start showing up in MORE places, because now every Microsoft download will include it too.

The transparency roll is one of my favorites. I used to use it in concert with a slide projector; I'd black-screen the slide, reproduce on the transparency what was in the slide as I lectured, then switch the projector back on to emphasize what I'd just drawn or written. Seemed to work. Kept me at a normal pace, drawing things out meant students could follow along easily, and showing the image or concept again at the end reinforced it through repetition. Straight slides? Ick. I wouldn't want to do that. I need a chalkboard at the least, I like drawing as I lecture.

Let me get this straight: You want an institution where you are given an exam, and if you pass it you get the degree? No books, no classes, no labs, no instructors unless you ask for them specifically? I believe you are looking for The University of Phoenix at best, or a diploma mill at worst.

If you seriously think that your proposed approach would result in a quality education, you're delusional.

Well, there is a lot of DRM baggage associated with HDMI - so this could be Apple's attempt to do an end-run around the MPAA. In my mind this is a GOOD thing. We still get digital output, but we can use it as we see fit. Unless the Mini-DP also includes built-in DRM, in which case we're all screwed.