While I understand that the world *does* revolve around you and your device, once you are shipping more than one or two of them, you have to start considering packaging more carefully. Better packaging allows you to ship more units in less space, reducing cost and carbon footprint. Apple's high-end packaging is not only about protecting the product, but is engineered to work into their supply chain management as well - an area in which Apple is silently a world leader. This efficiency is good for the business and good for the customer. Apple's dedication to over-engineering drives innovation in this space, and motivates improvement among competitors. It's a good thing that Apple isn't as thoughtless as you are about product design, and specifically package design, because it ultimately leads to cost savings, reliable and green shipping, whether or not you buy Apple products.

Apple engineers their packaging to be recyclable, sturdy, and compact, and are pioneers in minimal packaging. They use more expensive packaging because it lets them use less materials, pack more units per shipping crate, and reduce their carbon footprint. When I see other consumer electronics' companies packaging, I'm astonished by how flimsy, oversized, and non-functional it is compared to Apples, how much space and material is wasted. Apple has done more to move toward your platonic ideal than pretty much any other electronics company to date. It's profoundly telling that you cannot properly recognize the thing that you purportedly want. This isn't a flame, just pointing out how wrong you are.

Apple has 30+ years in the consumer electronics field, and Google has, what, a phone, a netbook, and now a tablet? They'll learn fast, but they've got three decades of catchup to do before they can hang with the world's undisputed champion of shiny-making and pretty-boxing.

I don't know why solar isn't being used, but on the burning of natural gas, it sounds like the purpose of a compressed air reservoir is that it can generate large amounts of power on demand, so it acts like a large battery that helps to ease peak demand spikes. From the article:

According to Apex’ website, compressed air energy storage (CAES) is unique in its ability to efficiently store and redeploy energy on a large scale in order to provide low-cost energy and enhance grid reliability.

Makes it sound more like a giant on-demand battery, which is why it would be preferable to leaving the energy in natural gas, which cannot be converted into usable electricity as rapidly. It's obviously less efficient, but natural gas perhaps simply cannot generate the output they need.

Actually, prominent evolutionary biologist Ken Miller rigorously debunked all of Behe's "challenges" to evolution, from irreducible complexity, the bacterial flagellum, and so forth. Absolutely rigorously debunked. Notably, NONE of Behe's arguments were actual flaws in evolution, but merely appeals to ignorance - arguing that particular observations were inconsistent with evolution without any proof as to why.

Here it is! Here is your precise misunderstanding. The fact that you cannot prove Intelligent Design is PRECISELY why it is not a scientific theory. A theory in science is a framework of knowledge that harmonizes an observable, testable body of empirical results. The key here is you must start with observations, testing, and consistent results. Once you have developed a body of results, you can harmonize those into a theory that explains the whole.

Take for example Germ Theory, which is the framework for understanding the operation of microscopic organisms that enter our bodies causing illness and infection. It is based on observations of the bodies immune system, microscopy, bacterial cultures. Those observations are tested with medical research, treatments, drugs and antigens. From those tests, we derived consistent results that have withstood rigorous scrutiny. After all of that, we were able to formulate Germ Theory.

Evolution Theory has taken an analogous path. We observed comparative biology, anatomy, genetic drift, embryology, and from those observations, we fashioned experiments on heredity, phenotype expression, population changes, and many more, resulting in repeatable, consistent results. From these scientific facts, we fashioned Evolution Theory to explain the mechanisms of observable scientific facts we had previously discovered.

The fact that you cannot observe, test, quantify, ID is exactly why it is not a theory. There are no observations of intelligent design. From those nonexistent observations, there are no tests of intelligent design. From those nonexistent tests of intelligent design, there are no consistent, repeatable results, or facts, of intelligent design. Without those facts, there can be no theory. As you can see, Intelligent Design is many, many, many, many steps away from constituting a theory. It is not slightly deficient, but iteratively deficient, having not the precursors, or even the precursors to the precursors, of a scientific theory.

You do not get to use that word. You clearly do not understand what science is.

This is not remotely true. But even if it were, how can you fashion "an argument they understand," when they have fundamentally rejected logic? In such cases, it cannot be said that you are advancing an argument, merely regurgitating something that religious adherents have already assumed to be true, that is also consistent with global warming. That's not an argument, but mere rhetoric.

How can you justify teaching creationism in cosmology? Assertions that cannot be tested, proven, or falsified have no place in science. What we know about cosmology is based on observation, experimentation, and testable data related to the universe's formation. Creationism, on the other hand, is as inapplicable as Shakespeare's plays, or the number of virgins promised by Allah when entering heaven.

As an unprovable assertion, creationism falls strictly outside of the realm of logic, and even fails to satisfy the most basic tenets of philosophy. Creationism has no bearing on the limits of human knowledge, falling far beyond the boundary of what is knowable. It's like studying the coastal region of the eastern seaboard by probing the surface of Mars.

I had a moment of doubt when i had to remember which axis was vertically oriented when dealing with an x/y plot. I've been playing too many video games where x, y are compass axes, z is vertical.

The SCOTUS did no such thing. In People v. Diaz, the California Supreme Court held that warrantless searches of a cellphone was consistent with the protections of the U.S. Constitution and the CA State constitution. In other words, they interpreted a Police Procedure in light of State and Federal Constitutions. There was no statute involved.

In saying the SCOTUS 'let stand' that decision, this merely means that they chose not to grant certiorari. This is not affirming the decision, this is not striking down something similar, this is merely REFUSING to consider the question to begin with. There are numerous reasons the Court might do this: First, the issue involved a matter of State constitutional interpretation - a matter best left to individual states. This is because the California State Constitution recognizes more privacy protections than the U.S. Constitution. Second, the SCOTUS may be waiting for more opinions from other courts before they take on the issue. The search of cellphones is still relatively immature across the states and circuits. Third, alternately, the facts of Diaz may be unambiguous under federal protections, rendering intervention unnecessary.

OP is correct that Gov. Brown has this exactly backwards. A bill requiring heightened protections for cell phones does nothing to "overturn" the Cal. Sup. court's decision, as it does not change the way the court applies and interprets Constitutional protections. It instead, by legislative powers, creates a circumstance under which the State may provide more protections than the Constitution requires. This is explicitly and unambiguously allowed under the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. A State may ALWAYS choose to provide more protections than the Constitution requires, it simply may not provide less.

I don't know how you did it, but you seem to have forgotten about this device called the iPod. Yeah, it brought PMPs to the mainstream. Apple sold a metric butt-load of them and made a mint in the process. Oh yeah, they also created an iTunes store, sold over 10,000,000,000 songs and other related media, and now sells more music than anyone else on the planet, including Walmart.

iOS and iPhone didn't save Apple, it catapulted them from ludicrously successful to can't-talk-I'm-having-too-many-orgasms-all-the-time successful.

It's not Carly Fiorina coming in and fucking up HP for a few years and leaving - Steve Jobs started the company, worked there ~10 years, left for a few, then came back and was CEO for 14 more. No other CEO on the planet is so closely associated with their company. As a pillar of the tech industry, his input drove the state of the art forward. It is a loss for the tech world when any big name leaves for good. By the way, this website is called Slashdot, and its a place for "News for Nerds," you know, people who generally care about technology.

Good thing that's not the standard for obviousness.

The standard is that the patent would have been obvious to try for one of ordinary skill in the art (here, the art is product design of some kind).

Even if you could prove your "one out of any 10 geeks" assertion, which you absolutely can't, it would be of no weight in determining obviousness.

You do realize that Apple reduced the price of the upgrade by 75% while moving to App Store distribution, right? I'm not crazy about distributing a new OS over the App Store, but keep in mind Apple could have *EASILY* charged $129 for Lion and people would have paid for it.

Also, pressing one DVD may cost pennies, but the screen printing costs several times that. Add in mastering costs, packaging, manufacturing, distribution, retail, suddenly you have half a dozen vertical chains to organize. That doesn't cost pennies.

The display capabilities, strain, and technology for consumer-grade LCDs still provides for a vastly inferior reading experience than ordinary quality print media. I can read paper faster, annotate faster, and save my eyes strain and effort, and save myself time by simply printing documents out. I read thousands of pages of documents for a grad school, and I will print out anything around 10,000 words, and anything I need for personal research because I'll be reading it 3-5x. I can't imagine why you'd think current LCD technology solves these issues.