Stop referring to all people as taxpayers. It's creepy.

I was pretty excited when I heard that Apple was releasing a new 12-ish inch laptop.

Back in the day, my 12" Powerbook was a full-featured, state-of-the-art machine crammed into a teeny-tiny lightweight chassis that also happened to have great battery life. I still own one, and use it regularly -- it's an absolutely fantastic, and very capable little machine; arguably the best small laptop ever produced.

5 years later, it's back, and.....the processor has a lower clock speed, there's less built-in storage, fewer ports (no Ethernet!), no optical drive, and the standard amount of RAM is barely sufficient for a modern OS. The battery is only (barely) better, and can't even begin to compete with the truly awesome battery life on the MacBook Pro line.

Yes, I get that it's thinner, lighter, and that the loss of the Firewire port and optical drive are not exactly a dealbreaker today. And although the Core2Duo is indeed a better processor than a G4, it's also not anywhere remotely near state-of-the-art, and 1.4GHz is the slowest-clocked machine I've ever seen to carry that architecture.

Good design is a very big deal in laptops for portability, durability, and usability, which is why I've been buying from Apple for so long. They have virtually no competition in this regard. However, the tech specs keep slipping further and further, and I'm finding it difficult to take Apple seriously as a hardware manufacturer. The 13" Macbook Pro is a beautiful machine, but is similarly anemic in terms of performance and features. I also own a Mac Mini, the current lineup of which is inexcusably overpriced and underpowered. Apple's also gotten into the habit of putting incredibly low memory caps on their machines. The new Airs go up to 4GB, which is adequate for today, but definitely not the future. My 2006 Mac Mini maxes out at 2GB, which is killing the performance of an otherwise great machine.

There's a difference between publicly refusing to speculate on the future, and reneging on previous promises. If Apple locked down OS X, there would be one hell of a lawsuit.

Or they could start buying them off of IBM, MIT, GE, Apple, Ford, Boeing, or any of the other companies who have at least 16.7 million addresses allocated to them.

I'll bite: The Zune was fine, and way better than the equivalent Apple products at the time. Microsoft's only misstep was attaching their own name to it. (And I say this as a happy Mac/iPod user)

Ronald Rivest might be an incredibly intelligent person, but he's still just one guy. Just because he thinks that internet voting is currently a bad idea does not make it a "fact"

(Also, the summary is light on details: The system was only being used for DC's ~900 registered overseas voters. Overseas voting is already notoriously insecure, as it's impossible to establish a legally-liable chain of custody of the ballot as it proceeds through the international postal system in a big fluorescent-yellow envelope marked "ELECTION MAIL" . Having done it once, I can also say that it's an incredible hassle.

The fact that DC put the system online a week before the election to test for flaws, openly acknowledged a successful attack, and took the system down suggests that they did the right thing. We should be cheering them, and helping to make sure that the thing is secure the next time they put it up.)

I definitely agree with you, although I do think that they seem to be losing their way somewhat -- they're letting their "traditional" computer hardware and software lines languish and become bloated in some areas.

Meanwhile, Microsoft finally do seem to be getting it. Although Win7 still mostly sucks from an IT Professional's standpoint, they've paid a lot of attention to the end-user experience.

Concur. The Sun's source for the "banned from the US" claim is the word of the kid, allegedly based off of what some local cop told him.

So, yeah. I'd actually be willing to bet money that this story is fabricated.

Huh? Quicktime is a movie container, and probably the most popular one in the business. The Windows quicktime player could use some work, but the format itself is just fine.

In fact, Apple rewrote the player and the underlying frameworks for the iPhone from their standards documents. The rewrite was so successful that it got ported back to the desktop, and is gradually replacing the legacy MacOS QT libraries.

Referring to an EMC system as "one SAN" is (probably) a gross oversimplification. EMC are the storage vendor you go to when money is no object, and you cannot, absolutely cannot have downtime. If Northrop had the system configured correctly, this is a huge black mark against EMC.

I used to have a pretty poor opinion of the big lecture/small discussion group paradigm, because the big lecture was usually led by some hotshot researcher who had better things to do with his time, and the discussions were led by apathetic grad students. (This was at a very highly-regarded public university)

Eventually, I did a year abroad in the UK, and found their model considerably better. Whereas the department did have an excellent reputation for research, "teaching" was listed first in its mission statement -- and it showed. Specifically, there was never an expectation for undergrads to immediately proceed into a PhD program, which was a huge breath of fresh air, coming from an American Physics program, where one was essentially considered a failure unless they secured a PhD fellowship during his senior year.

Lectures followed a similar format, but were executed far more gracefully. Instead of being led by a hotshot researcher, they were led by a fucking good lecturer -- not necessarily a leader in their field, but an excellent instructor with a passion for teaching. Unsurprisingly, many of them spent a few years teaching before returning to academia (something that would be considered the kiss of death in an American program; publish or perish). Discussion groups also existed, but were smaller, and led by full-fledged faculty members -- sometimes those "hotshot researchers," sometimes fresh new faculty. The groups were small enough that this distinction didn't matter, and there was never any negative backlash from asking the instructor to repeat a particularly confusing portion of a lecture.

In hindsight, I wish I'd stayed to finish out my degree. Upon returning to the US, I immediately regretted it.

Oh, the Lincoln Memorial? It's on J St.

Right now, there aren't any HTML5 methods of embedding live video. Apple's got HTTP Live Streaming, but it isn't a standard or universally supported.

HTML5 is great, but we need to be very, very, very careful of fragmentation and non-standard features.

Whisky accounts for approximately £2bn of Scotland's £86.3bn GDP.

Nice try though. Check your references before making absurd generalizations like this one. (I'll bet you also didn't know that there are also large swaths of the country that neither produce nor consume Whisky in meaningful quantities. )

It's a very expensive car, but not necessarily I-can-afford-a-chauffeur-expensive.