The effect of attentuation drops off exponentially as you remove the attenuating obstruction from the antenna. However, there is reason to believe that there is a different problem besides attenuation affecting a very small number of handsets. Personally I suspect some kind of ground fault in the casing leading to a magnetic field interfering with the radio itself. This wouldn't demonstrate itself as the loss of a couple bars, it would be complete or nearly complete loss of signal.

That said, I have an iPhone 4 and cannot reproduce any of the reported problems at all no matter what I do. I have to put my phone in what almost amounts to a faraday cage (a steel lock box) just to see any signal degradation. But a friend of mine has seen the problem occur with nothing but the tip of his finger placed over the antenna on the left side, specifically when touching the metal. The metal plates are not the antenna, the black lines are, so what this tells me is that there is some issue with grounding of the body in that phone. But until I can have him try his "magic finger" on my own iPhone, I wouldn't jump to any real conclusions. None of the reports so far have been remotely scientific. There are numerous variables and without any cross checking it's all guesses for now. Attenuation will definitely occur but it's usually not so dramatic as to go from five bars to "Searching..." like this friend of mine is seeing.

That link is unrelated to this post. The referenced scientific/numeric libraries for python are implemented in C as native modules. They are not just as fast as the equivalent code written in C, they *ARE* the equivalent code written in C, merely interfaced to with python. You might lose a meaningless tiny fraction of time preparing your vectors for processing in python, but you'll save several orders of magnitude more time not worrying so much about malloc corruption.

Well that's great, it's nice to be able to see distant objects.

But what if you want to SMELL distant objects! yeah! That's why it's no match for my smell-o-scope here. Now that I've perfected the stench coils and installed an automatic lens-cheese remover, you can rest easy knowing you'll soon be smelling astronomical odors thanks to me! // Yay Futurama is back!

News media has always been heavily biased one way or another. There's nothing wrong with this. The problem comes with the source of the bias. It used to be small news outlets trying to stick it to the community's most apparent "bad guys" like big business or the government. They were small and independent. However now, the largest and most influential companies in the world are the owners of the mainstream news media. Disney or Murdoch or it doesn't matter, most people know by now that the companies funding mainstream media are doing it for profit only, and have only that interest in mind. If you see something seemingly controversial on the news it's only because that organization feels everyone agrees (or at least, everyone they think watches their show.)

However, I find it worrying that people trust google. They are just as rabidly chomping at the bit of profit as Disney or NBC, or whatever. They don't have an altruistic plank in their yachts. They pretend to "not be evil" but regularly exert their dominance in public exposure via the web to piss all over other markets in an effort to clear a path for their own business strategy. They make things "free" so nobody can compete in conventional terms, forcing them into advertising revenue or similar structures and guess who has a huge monopoly on advertising online? Yeah... so before you go suckling the teet of google or similar companies, remember what it is they are after in the end.

That said, it's still more understandable to view a source like google as more trustworthy, but the problem is that google does not report on the news, they only repeat it from the other, less trusted sources, so it's sort of pointless to compare them.

When it comes to trusting information, it is acceptable to think the official source will be more truthful, even if occasionally they are not. News media gets a pass for some reason, maybe citing bad information, but authoritative organizations get panned for any lies, even accidental unimportant ones. So when an organization like MS or Apple or Google lies about something, it's either well known right away or it's well hidden, and the latter is much more common in my experience.

Not trusting social networking sites ... well that's just a surprisingly, unusually rational position to hold by the general public. Personally I "trust" twitter itself more than facebook, but trust the information less. I trust facebook to constantly try to screw me the way I described google doing it, subversively, for their own profit, under the guise of helping. Just see the constant quiet changes made to their privacy policies as cases where they didn't get away with it. Twitter is easier to trust just because they don't promise anything. You can protect your tweets, but that's about it. You can block followers but you know your tweets and most info is public. Twitter hasn't changed these policies, there is barely anything to change anyway. When I use twitter, I feel it's very obvious what my privacy expectations are. However, the information coming via twitter is less trustworthy than overhearing gabby women at the local mall. It's the same thing, really, except with infinitely more anonymity to hide your lies and innuendo behind.

If you read some of the other articles that compare capabilities you'd see that though this chip is a little dated, it blows away both iPhone 4 and PSP in pixel fill rate. It may be that this factor is important for good 3D performance. It really stands out in pixel fill rate, like double the competition.

Everything else though yeah... it's old. But also, this is Nintendo, they have to sell cheap and they won't sell for a loss like their competition, which isn't profiting, so I can't really knock their strategy.

This comment is exemplary of a common misconception in patents. They are not covering the results! They are covering the mechanism and methodology. The "machine" if you will. The patent would cover a specific method for interpreting/receiving/whatever the gesture and passing it along to the service so it would do the expected thing. There could be a thousand ways to do this, and thus, a thousand different patents that all accomplished the same thing, and that's okay. Reality is, there are usually only a handful of effective ways to accomplish tasks like these and so you end up with patent lawsuits, and preemptive licensing. Woo.

Indeed. However it's worth noting that almost all of this information is based on reinterpreted rumor. I wouldn't be surprised to see a clarification within the next week or so that changes some of these details for the iPad.

iPhone though... well sure. This was a long time coming. I consider myself a moderate data user on 3G (lots of data but no streaming video/audio) and my usage has peaked at 540mb in a month, but usually sits around 300mb. I do all my email, push from work as well, so it's not as though I'm really a light user in disguise. Even better, with the $15 option I can cut my bill because my wife peaks at about 100mb a month usually sitting at about 50mb as she is home most of the time, well in range of Wi-Fi.

In the end I'll save $20 cutting down plan costs, just enough to enable tethering if I ever need it... though so far, I've never needed such a feature (Wi-Fi is everywhere around here and I don't travel.)

I do hope there is a clarification on iPad 3G. I can imagine Stevie's inbox is packed with "WTF" letters right now. Given the way the data plans were announced alongside the iPad, I would be surprised if Apple is happy about this change. In fact, one could construe this as an act by AT&T against Apple, supporting the rumors that Apple is going to produce iPhones for competing networks.

Exciting times!

I'm not sure which revisionist idiot informed the general OSS/Google fanboy world that selling unlocked phones directly to consumers was somehow innovating. Nokia has been doing this for years. I bought my last Nokia phone, the E70, well before even the iPhone was out directly via Nokia's website. You can still buy many Nokia products this way, including the venerable N900.

The prices may not always be the very best you can find but at least they are a trusted source.

I realize these ideas, of tracking, id, etc. are not popular in the slashdot crowd. What I am not aware of is any well thought out, well grounded, and generally objective essays, or perhaps more importantly, concrete and real historical examples of why compulsory identification is bad or wrong.

I mean, I can use my imagination to come up with some random nightmare scenarios but almost universally I eventually see how those situations either happen anyway or are ridiculously unlikely.

So, I ask you slashdotters who are already fuming at my interrogation :) Where's the beef? Please respond with some resources so that, if any are actually convincing, I can finally have something to back up my own disdain for this sort of identification and potentially monitoring.

Also as a special request, please don't respond with pointers at fictional works, no matter how compelling or convincing they are.

I have to disagree very strongly as someone who supports the concept of first sale doctrine in a highly service-oriented economy. All that EA is effectively doing here is representing what they offer in terms of a service that has classically been silently included in the price of a title. So, in effect, this action is making it clear that they are not just selling a game but additional service offered through the internet of some sort. Whether you feel it's worth the $10 or not is your choice, you still get the game to play and sell as you see fit. No violation or circumvention of first sale is made, and what's more, there is better transparency about what you are purchasing when you pay full price vs. used.

If anything should come of this, it really ought to be stores like Gamestop selling used copies for greater than 5 stupid dollars difference from the retail price. Not that I would have before, but I certainly wouldn't pay for any used game with this sort of secondary service offering if it was not at least $15 cheaper than current MSRP.

I have a lot of responsibilities as well as interests besides gaming. It has been over 10 years since I could, say, spend a whole weekend diving through a Final Fantasy title. I love the epic game style, 60 hour game? yes please. But please, let me play it in 120 30 minute increments and feel good about it. Even if you can only break it down to as small as 2 hours, that is a healthy compromise. I'm a big, big fan of the idea of serialized/episodic games, especially if I know it will eventually reach a conclusion. It's not about getting the game sooner or whatever, it's about having smaller less intimidating nuggets of joy that each have their own temporary conclusion between instances like a good multi-novel sci-fi series. On top of that, if after a few episodes I find it's awful? I am sick of it? I can save my cash not buying the rest.

Unfortunately I have no idea how long I'll want to stick around for the story in a game these days. I am afraid to start into an arc that's going to strongly draw me in for more than an hour or so, and all too often I opt for a bite-size chunk of far less satisfying gaming because I'm sure I have the time. Even if, ironically, I end up doing that for over 2 hours.

Even if a game is sold all at once, I'd really appreciate if a developer wrote the story in well defined chunks and actually told me the estimated time to completion of the upcoming chunk before I started it so I could plan my time. Just like I plan time to watch movies or tv shows, and I can always find out the times for those.

This is probably good advice... for someone. I don't think it's what the OP is wondering about. I don't think they want to make the game, they just want to write it, so to speak.

There is no market for this because there is no market for well-vetted game ideas. There's no need. People will be whatever garbage rolls off the truck that day as long as it vaguely resembles something familiar. There are maybe 10 visionaries in terms of overall game design in the industry at any one time and that's enough to consume all available major investments that are based on an idea, rather than an iteration.

That said, if someone really wants to make their game idea come to fruition, a solid business plan and the intention that you will make it yourself, or at least, hire people and produce the game, is probably the best bet. This is especially true if your idea can target the booming iPad audience as multiple VC firms have capital just waiting to be spent specifically on iPad development. Any similar market situation would do as well.

What you won't see is a company like Valve or EA taking nothing more than a mockup and making a game. Even in the case of Portal, the game existed, playably, before Valve got involved.

We have this going on already. The apartment complex where I live opted everyone in. The choice to override the system is not one of going and hitting a button but one of calling the power company and opting back out. That might not be the same as this article but that's not really the point.

The real significance with the setup we have is that it's meant to replace rolling blackouts in that, instead of a full blackout, they will do rolling AC shutoffs instead. This is the first year we'll have it in place, so it remains to be seen if I will care. The facts support the suggestion that we won't even notice, though. For one, we use central air and when used properly it's maintaining temperatures all day, not just at peak times. Though it works harder at peak times, the power company's strategy is to shut it off for 10 or 15 minutes a day. The realities here are two-fold, one is, the house will not turn super hot in that time. The other is, the cooling unit for the central air is in the shade during peak hours, chances are, it will continue to remain cold. The fans are NOT disabled, and thus, the coolant will continue to do its job, probably for a good five minutes. There's also a chance that during the off time, it won't even be in use.

All of those factors, as well as some others add up to my belief that it won't impact our comfort noticeably, and if it helps out the ailing power grid, then fine. I'm all for it. I have experienced summer heat-induced power outages before and I'd rather avoid that.

Well that's because they realized it was actually 300,000 iPads searching desperately for the nearest WiFi hotspot all at once :)

It was the collission of electromagnetic energy from 300,000 iPads being turned on next to 700,000 people pretending they don't want one.