There's a flip side. I brought in an iPhone 5, almost out of warranty, with a broken sleep button, to the Genius Bar on my way to work. The guy said "yep," 5 minutes later I walked away with a fully functioning replacement, no questions asked; got to my office, and it was like having a brand new phone.

Then I was at an AT&T store. I saw a I guy with a Windows Phone; same thing---button issues, still under warranty. He got told to ship his phone somewhere. He needed his phone so he couldn't ship it off. So he got told to haul is ass somewhere thirty minutes away to a depot, and maybe after they looked at it there would get a replacement. The look of confused frustration on his face made me feel like I was taping an apple commercial.

Bottom line is: everyone says Apple is more expensive. Well, first of all, it's not. Same price for the top-tier Apple and Android phones. OK, so the cables are more expensive and proprietary. True that stinks, but maybe that pays for stuff like the Genius bar where they go out of their way to make life easier for you.

No issues on an iPhone 5. It's been a joy to use and a breath of fresh air---the UI was 5 years old and getting really stale.

I'd been really getting bored of my iPhone and *gasp* using it only in a very utilitarian manner for quite some years. Now I actually turn it on again because all the fades and swimming bubbles and blurs are actually quite damned cool to look at. It's fun using it again.

You don't even need a Fourier transform to get an intuition for the principle. Both the Fourier transform and the uncertainty principle are consequences of the Cauchy-Schwarz integral inequality:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy%E2%80%93Schwarz_inequality#Physics

So like everything else in physics, it's a consequence of math, not incomprehensible magic.

Is there a tweak that brings back Aero?

Is joke, right? The whole idea of dethorning MS is passe now. MS is dethroning itself.

The ones I found aren't OSS and cost $3-$5. Are we really crossing over to the OS X realm of finding paid tweaks to provide much needed system functionality?

Do these tweaks really restore the FULL start menu? Including the part of it that searches inside your documents and launches the appropriate software to read the documents when clicked on or hit return?

Oh wait, do I really want to trust some third party to search inside my documents? In Win7, it was Microsoft that searched inside the documents and despite all their faults I semi-trusted Microsoft to respect my privacy... but now whoever runs some random tweak is searching inside my files?

You fail to understand many things.

Most importantly, you fail to understand the idea of "increased variance." The predictions of global warming period is not that it will get hotter all the time; or that it will get cooler all the time; but that there will be an increased frequency of oscillations between cooling and warming at rates not previously observed. It is this oscillation, this switching back and forth between heating and cooling too rapidly, that is the evidence for the global warming hypothesis (same goes for tornado strength). This is called "scatter."

Second, you fail to understand that "testable predictions" means reproducing past events. Global climate models cannot reproduce the temperature record for the past without including man-made heating during the industrial revolution. These same models, when run into the future, predict increased scatter and increasing mean temperature, with a scatter level that's high and a mean increase that's slow.

These two points continually have been mis-explained to the public, and the advocates for policy change to reverse climate change have failed miserably at getting these points through to the public---hence your post.

I think his comments on FTL and all the hype about interstellar space exploration are totally spot-on. All the Alcubierre drive news that had NASA's name attached to it was traceable to one guy there who doesn't even really understand general relativity. What you have to understand about NASA is that they tend to write blank checks as far as exaggerations in press releases go; so while the work actually being done (building an interferometer) is valid, the hype attached to it about this and that could be extremely overblown (interferometer will be used to test FTL travel). The end result is "NASA working on warp drive" headlines where the real headline should be something much more humble and limited.

Perhaps this will convince NVIDIA not to underclock their GPUs. Now that the baseline is much higher, they will have to deliver awesome performance to be relevant in the notebook scene.

Not sure you can rule out the possibility that the gravitational mass is negative. Sure, the inertial mass may still be positive (e.g. merely defined as the absolute value of the gravitational mass), but if the gravitational mass is negative, then you can build an antimatter Alcubierre drive with it---so you can propel something *else* (regular matter that has positive gravitational mass) at high speed.

Or am I mistaken? Can you make an argument based on GR that it should be positive?

Quite the opposite here. I haven't listened to most of the 200+ CDs I own for years now. The newness offered by the tweaked Pandora experience is just too irresistible.

In 10 years when every single interactive product runs server-side only, your comment will seem charming and quaint. We will remember with melancholy the simpler, freer days the days when software ran on machines that we owned.

Physical storage devices (books, CDs, DVDs) were inconvenient necessities required for publishers to make sale.

Wide availability of broadband means such storage devices are no longer required. They will be done away with, and everything wil be kept on the server. And licensed.

In another decade, this idea of "owning" software and books and music will seem quaint and antiquated, much like the idea of gold-backed currency.

So they'll stop saying "own it now." Everything will be licensed. End of story.

Who'll stop buying? Me? You? Maybe. Most people? Nah, they've already been convinced to switch away from "own it."

Just pay the rent, pay the rent, and we'll keep on streaming to you.

It's more than a rhetorical tactic. It's an intellectual fail that was inherited from the GNOME project. The fail goes like this: "We must have a good default UI. Instead of giving advanced users the ability to tweak that interface via an 'Advanced' button, let us just take away their ability to tweak. Because noobs are so noobish they will click on Advanced, screw things up, and then complain to us."

False and Wrong, idiots. And a big fail. There is plenty of software (especially a lot of Apple software, which I hear is quite popular), with preference dialogs that have "Advanced..." buttons, and guess what, noone on the forums is complaining of stuff that was misconfigured. (They are complaining of actual Apple fails, but that is another story).

That one epic fail---that one decision that you can't have both a simple UI, and a button somewhere in the preferences that caters to your advanced users, is the root of all the backlash against GNOME and Ubuntu. Your hubris is costing you dearly.

Put an effing advanced button on all your preferences. And no, gconf-editor or dconf-editor or any of that garbage doesn't cut it. It needs to be COMPREHENSIBLE to be useful.