I find it interesting how much private information is exposed in that screenshot of the lab report. I would probably have cropped it differently or blurred it out before plastering it all over the interwebs...

Many of the better note-taking apps have a palm-rest/palm-detection mode for writing with a stylus.

My vehicle is demonstrably superior to your car. It's heavier, louder, has bigger tires, more storage space, doesn't have any of those "closed" computer things in it that make it so you can't work on it yourself and is way cheaper than yours. Why would you ever consider buying something as stupid as the one you chose? Any fool can compare the two objectively and see mine is clearly superior in every way...

As someone who grew up in a "3rd-world country" I have news for you. Most people are finished with school by age 12. A 15-year-old is considered an adult and often is married and has at least one kid by then. We treat teen-agers like children in the US and Canada and they fulfill that expectation spectacularly - in fact, you aren't a "real" adult until 21 and then insurance companies rape you and you can't rent a car, etc., until you are 25. We put up with and even encourage infantile behavior by our teens and young-adults. And then we impose our beliefs on the rest of the world.

If Apple wants to make it's world-wide policy match our expectations, fine. They talk about these companies hiring workers "as young as 15". Well, that 15-year-old, who very possibly is married with a family and obviously wanted the job (I didn't hear that they were rounding up workers at gun-point) and obviously capable of doing the job (what job was that? Taking out the garbage? Putting the manual and CD in it's sleeve?) otherwise they wouldn't have been hired.

I would applaud Apple for standing up for what they believe in, but I fear that it's more to appease the ignorant, myopic American public and their America-centric world-view than any real conviction on the subject. And I feel bad for the young adults who were fortunate to land an excellent, high-paying job (for that part of the world) who will now be unemployed.

I do some "Angel" investing on occasion (I'm not at VC stage yet), meaning that I invest some of my money in promising startups. As much as it may seem that "the kids" have all the tech-saavy and good ideas, I look for startups that are lead by people with fairly extensive experience in both "tech" and business. That means that I'd be hard pressed to put my hard-earned money into a new company that's being run by a 25-year-old who is probably right out of college and has never run a business before. Now, I know that many of the great companies were started by kids with no business experience and I'm probably missing out on a good thing here. However, when I am presented with two competing proposals of otherwise equal potential where the difference is that one company is lead by a kid with no "real-world" experience and the other is lead by someone who's been in the field for 10-20 years, has run other businesses (even failed ones), I'll probably go for the experience - if all other factors are equal. In fact, I believe the youngest person I've ever funded was around 33 at the time.

So, how does this fit in with the gender issue? I've been in the IT field since 1984 and I can tell you that girls were almost entirely absent from my field. What this means in terms of total experience today is that those in the high-tech field with the most experience tend to be predominately men. It would also follow that those with enough experience in their field who are seriously ready to both run a business that requires funding at the VC-level (i.e. millions of dollars) and have enough of a portfolio and background to attract VC would tend to be predominately men. Think about the ages of people running *most* large, successful companies; they tend to be in their 50's or older. Look back at how many women were in the workforce, getting management and "technical" experience in the 70's and 80's. Keeping in mind that during that time women really didn't have the same opportunities as men in the workplace and they tended toward more "traditional" positions - thus further reducing their potential experience in roles that would lead to high-level executive positions.

Is this *fair* to women? Not really. They've always had to fight harder to be accepted into non-traditional roles in business. Is it *fair* to men for women to get moved into positions of authority simply because there aren't enough women in positions of authority? No. However, as someone who puts my money out there on the line, I'm looking for the best chance of a return that I can find. I don't care about the race, creed, color or gender of who's leading the company. I care about their chances of leading the company to success and my getting a return on my investment. Generally that will tend to lean toward those with experience, and in the technical fields that *tends* to be populated with males.

Now, I'm always on the lookout for the exceptions...

No. Quicktime uses the API's exposed by the core-graphics system. Adobe doesn't want to use them. They want to write their own and address hardware directly. Apple doesn't allow this - for many reasons.

Try this site for some examples.

It's an Alan Sherman quote (despite what some people claim) from "Peter and the Commissar" (with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops). [dig] You are obviously too young and lacking in culture [/dig] (despite your low /. ID) to have heard it. So, to you, I give a quote you must certainly have heard: "Whoosh!"

Don't take the bait. You bought what was right for you and were willing to pay for it. What you are hearing from them is jealousy, sour grapes or some other mental disorder. Let them scrabble around together at the bottom, congratulating themselves on how little they spent for their cheap plastic boxes. It obviously works for them. They think everything should be free or cheap, that they're somehow owed it. Great! There's a market there and Dell, Gateway & MS, et al are there to fill it. That's what they want, that's what they deserve, that's what they're happy with. Why they feel so strongly about our preferences and why they feel the need to attack us so vehemently is a question they probably don't want an answer to. Be true to yourself. Don't be ashamed that you can distinguish, prefer and afford quality. They're just trying to drag you down to their level, thinking it will somehow validate them and make them better. They are wrong.

But the client was envisioning Secretariat and a Triple-Crown win.

I'm as much a fan of open-source as the next guy and I've contributed to some projects and asked for features, etc. However, I find that the whole "designed by committee" that *many* open source apps have reduces the overall quality. Those OSS apps that truly shine generally have either a strong leader or a single author. You know the old saying, which is true, as well as witty; that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.

As far as openness goes, Apple doesn't announce vaporware like most other companies do. This means when they announce something, they are going to sell it. Usually their products have taken old ideas and looked at them from a different angle opting for being very good at a few things rather than poor and many things. Let's face it, Cmdr Tacos' famous assessment of the original iPod is a classic example of how "the masses" would design a similar product. If Apple would release an "alpha" product to "test the waters" like so many other companies do, the iPod (and iPhone, for that matter) would have died at birth or would be so hideously deformed that it would be unrecognizable.

Let's see, 5 seconds of googling returned pages of results with the first one being this: Failure to tackle global warming could spell the end for humanity, warns UN report.

Don't you EVER tell my what I have and haven't heard. And don't try to claim that the scaremongering is coming from denialists! The science on the root cause of "climate change" is not in and it's the scientists with a vested political and monetary interest in AGW who are doing the scaremongering.

The climate may be changing. Humans may be contributing to it to some degree. How much, I don't know and you don't either. Also, no one has convinced me that moving the temperate zone north a bit will be a bad thing for humanity. So Russia and Canadaand Alaska become the world's bread-basket. Is that a bad thing? Yes, it's change. Yes, there MAY be some coastal changes (slowly over hundreds of years). Yes, there might be an Island or two that currently sits a few feet above sea-level that will have to be evacuated. Sad, but things change. Not a global catastrophe by any means. Simply the fact that your side has switched from calling it Global Warming to "Climate Change" is very telling.

The climate has always changed. In fact it has historically changed much faster than it is now in swings that mage even the worst projections seem insignificant. And it has done it over and over and over again. We will adapt.

Seems to me the same arguments could be made for the "expert witnesses" (and if you take the Climate-Change-will-destroy-humanity crowd at their word, the cost-benefit analysis as well) in the AGW debate.

Ahem! Some of us like it up here in Alaska. Of course, if there's a decent chance that it would warm things up a bit, I think we can deal. We're a tough bunch, after all.