Wow, people still make calls on these things? How quaint...

We're talking about stability here. If I compare the Apple devices I have used (iPhone 3G up to 5s) to the Android devices (various tables, and a Samsung phone we bought to replace my mother-in-law's iPhone 4), Apple still comes out ahead. I've had some hardware issues on the Apple devices, most notably the AntennaGate issue (noticable but hardly a real issue) as well as WiFi dying on an iPhone 4s (pretty uch bricking it, and just after warranty expired, of course). I have had hardware issues on Android stuff as well, mainly home buttons breaking and a battery dying because it got undercharged... the battery was replaced easily enough, but the new battery will break just the same if I leave the tablet off the charger for too long.

Software wise, iPhones have been rock solid for me, a few minor issues asides. I have not had any major issues like I experienced on the Android devices, such as the browser getting hijacked somehow (with only a couple of regular apps installed), and one Samsung phone that at some point will just reboot every few minutes, with the only fix being a factory reset.

Apple stuff still "just works". Unless it does not do out of the box what you want it to do, then chances are that you're stuffed if you picked iOS. iOS is a walled garden, but sitting here in my comfort zone I can't even see the wall, much less feel it or be bothered by it. Never even considered jailbreaking my phone. I don't like Apple or their business practices all that much, and I wish they'd open up their OS a little, but there is no way I'll switch to Android anytime soon after the decidedly poor experiences I have had with Android. But that is just personal, I know plenty of people who switched from Apple to Android and haven't looked back. Some others have returned to Apple. So perhaps it is mostly a matter of taste after all.

Exactly. Why buy a locked down 4k bluray, when the Pirate Bay has a free copy that will play where I want when I want. I'll pay for content but not for digital restrictions added on.

Better: non-donors go to the bottom of the list when they need one themselves.

So Disney ensures that every quarter, at least one copy of Steamboat Willy is sold. Or they simply show it once a year on the Disney Channel, which means they are making money off it.

Better to specify a fixed term for copyright in the spirit of the US constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art...". Copyright should be about the public interest; the interests of creators are secondary to that. A copyright term should be short enough to ensure that all works enter the public domain in a meaningful time frame, but long enough to allow creators to cash in on successful works, and long enough to make sure publishers don't simply outwait creators so they don't have to pay them. 25 years ought to be ample.

Websites DEMANDING that nothing interferes in the process of displaying their page as they intended.

It's those ads that most often interfere with "displaying the page as intended" in the first place. If a page doesn't load or hangs or whatever, it's usually due to a failed ad script.

The difference is in the "when". Broadly adopted standards do not get dropped all that quickly; in this case the content or hardware providers tend to be followers rather than leaders. Apple is a bit of an exception, they like to come up with their own standards and are a bit quicker to drop stuff they think is becoming obsolete. But where a single provider owns the standard, things tend to change a whole lot quicker. And where standards change quickly, older versions of the standard get dropped faster; it would be too expensive to maintain backward compatibility. This is what businesses are discovering in the world of SAAS (software as a service) as well, especially on multi-tenant systems. Providers like these want to remain on the leading edge and are forcing everyone to follow along, even if theirs are paying customers.

If use of such drugs becomes the norm, you'll have to take them if you are to keep up with your coworkers; that's one of the points the article makes.

Yep. A physicist trying to explain a balanced line to other physicists, without knowing the word for it.

Haldane would be spinning in his grave.

If the end of the coil that is hanging is grounded (earthed), it becomes an autotransformer. As it's shown, it's a variable inductor and the disconnected end is irrelevant and has no meaningful physical effect at the frequency a spark transmitter could have reached.

This comment seems to get closer to what they actually mean in their scientific paper. But the article about it is garble and the paper might suffer from second-language issues, and a lack of familiarity with the terms used in RF engineering.

Sorry, I was being sarcastic. I happen have built more than one counterpoise.

The point they're missing is grounding of the "asymmetric" half of the antenna, and that's to keep a static charge from building in the antenna that'll zap through your electronics (or you) for safety reasons.

Sometimes. But you're missing what a Counterpoise does.

Damn, I wish I would have patented that and all its quantum magic...

I noticed that my vertical transmitting antenna often works better if I connect a horizontal wire about the same length as the antenna to ground at its base! The wire isn't connected to the transmitting side of the circuit at all! And how well it works varies depending on the length! Obviously there is some deus ex machina at work here...

Clearly you missed the bit where they invoked quantum mechanics, surely that explains away all the inaccuracies, like the fact you can already buy chip scale dielectric antennas

The thing that I really hate about Innovation Stories is that the reporter invariably doesn't understand what's going on, and invariably is easily convinced that The Obviiously Very Technical People have some very valuable invention.

Marconi's connection to the center tap of a coil with one end not connected worked by broken symmetry? Really? It wasn't just a method of tuning a coil to the correct reactance for a particular frequency?