The camera in Glass is there for one reason only: to violate privacy.

Oakley's goggles don't have a camera.

Glasses are for the user to see, not to let another person look out of those glasses.

This woman got what she deserved. Out of all the places it is unacceptable to use Google Glass, a bar is in the top few. People are in there to enjoy a drink and social time, not to be part of your home movie.

The thing he is missing is that I don't hate Microsoft anymore. Today, I just don't think about them at all because they are totally irrelevant to me in every way. Hate gave way to forgetting.

In 1999, a publisher forced me to write in MS Word in order to use their template. Today, I can't remember the last time somebody even mentioned Microsoft to me.

It doesn't matter what codec a publisher likes. This is not an area where you get to express yourself. You publish in MP4 because it is the only universal video codec. Anything else might as well be encrypted and the user has no key. They are not going to see any video.

They are talking about credit card PIN's, not debit card PIN's. All the debit cards in the US have PIN's.

Yes. It is illegal to do this on BART. The ticket you use to enter the station is the same one you use as you exit the station.

The idea that trading tickets is some kind of “hacking” is absurd. It's basic fraud.

BART is a public transit system run by the people of the SF Bay Area. So even worse, you're defrauding your fellow citizens. You're not defrauding a Wall Street corporation or getting back at the man or something.

There have never been quality user discussions on Slashdot. Not ever.

You got what you paid for: a disposable laptop. The way it works is you just buy another now. Or you get tired of it and get some Apple gear because that is the only manufacturer who hasn't switched to disposable laptops.

Same reason.

No, everybody should not learn to code. Instead, all coders should learn to dance. That will be more productive. Also, it will teach the coders to STFU about everybody else learning to code.

This is sad nerd semantics, even for Slashdot. A rational human can tell by the context that Phil Schiller was talking about “personal computers” when he said “computers.” Today, Ford makes “computers” but Ford has never made PC's. Same with HP in 1984.

Further, what was HP in 1984 was sold off around 2000 or so. Trying to say there is continuity between the 1984 HP and today's HP is a real stretch. It's like today's AT&T — same name, totally different company.

And the stupidest part of this is that Steve Wozniak used to work for HP, and offered the Apple II to HP and was turned down. HP took a pass on PC's and that didn't change until the 1990's when HP was just another Mac cloner.

We are much closer to transferring a human consciousness into a robot and sending that robot to Mars than we are to sending a human to Mars. The entire population of Mars is robots, and that will probably always be true. Each one that shows up is slightly more evolved than the last and that may go on for a long time.

When you combine the infinite opportunity of space with how badly we are treating our environment on Earth, there is a lot of evolutionary pressure for us to become robots. Notice the 21st century human doesn't travel in space like we thought they would many years ago, but instead we have a partial robot brain (we always have a certain number of gigaflops and gigabytes with them,) with partial robot senses (4G, Wi-Fi, GPS, etc.) We're closer right now to being robots than being spacemen.

You don't even have to look to space — just look at the dream of flying cars versus the reality of flying robots (aka drones.) Even just flying around in our own atmosphere is so foreign to us that robots are ahead at that, too.

Get a Mac. Or get dedicated hardware, like a mixer with an SD slot and basic recording. The Mac is the one and only general purpose system that is built for what you want to do. Not just at the application software level or user interface level, but in the OS subsystems and developer API's and hardware. Basically, I'm telling you to buy a computer with CoreAudio and CoreMIDI in it — you can't bolt those onto another system. A Mac comes out of the box doing what you want to do, and you can then optionally replace GarageBand with Logic (or Pro Tools or Performer or Ableton Live) and optionally replace the built-in (24/96) hardware with accessory hardware via USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt. Even where you plan to run something like Ableton Live which is on both Mac and Windows, you will have a dramatically better experience on the Mac because you can do things like run AudioUnits plug-ins instead of VST to improve stability, and you can combine multiple audio interfaces into one, and you get reliable hardware connections through CoreAudio out-of-the-box.

Also, consider getting an iPad mini as a remote control. It runs MIDI mixer controls, pianos, drums, guitars — most of which can output MIDI over Wi-Fi to your Mac. Logic X has its own iPad app that runs it from the iPad and adds transport controls and mixer faders and so on and just works. The iPad will cost you $299, yet it will replace thousands of dollars of MIDI gear. And when you only have the iPad by itself, it becomes a complete pocket studio if you add an Apogee MiC or Jam. A7-based iPads can do 32 stereo tracks in GarageBand (earlier iPads do 8 stereo tracks.)

A big thing is that the Mac is where the user community is that is also doing what you want to do. So when you struggle with something, there will be someone who can help you dig out of that hole. But the struggles you have on the Mac will be creative, they will be musical, and there will be creative musicians who are fellow users and can help you out. The struggles on other platforms for musicians are often technical — you struggle just to get a timing or stability issue worked out and get the basic functionality that every single Mac user already has when the system comes out of the box. It is one of the most embarrassing things in computing — the lack of music and audio infrastructure in any operating systems other than Apple's. I wish it were not so — I would love to be able to tell you that any computer is good for music. But only Apple has ever made music and audio a priority on their systems. Only Apple built the infrastructure. Only Apple systems come out of the box as functioning music studios that you can then customize while maintaining that existing functionality.

Keep in mind that recording audio is a really high-stress computing task. You have to plug-in to audio interfaces with 96000 frames per second timing, you have to plug-in to 20 year old MIDI instruments, you have to run the CPU's under heavy load for hours and hours and hours without every crashing. There cannot be any crashes or you lose takes. No crashes at all can be tolerated. In many years in music, I've only ever seen Macs, iPads, iPhones do that amongst general purpose computers. To get that reliability otherwise, you need dedicated hardware.

I've worked at a few studio complexes where almost everybody is on Macs and a few guys for whatever reason are on PC's. It is embarrassing for Microsoft and PC hardware makers to see the difference side-by-side. You see a band of hardcore stoners who don't have a high school diploma between them and have barely ever touched a computer go into a room and successfully record their own original album with a $500 Mac mini, and next door to them is a guy who has a college degree who is paying another guy with a college degree $500 to get his $3000 Windows PC setup to stop crashing during recordings. Again and again, over and over, I've seen this. Don't be that guy. Don't bring a typewriter into a music studio and try to hook it up to a piano.

One other thing is there are Mac-based tools for mastering for iTunes, making iTunes LP, and other post-production music-related tasks. You will miss those things on another platform.

Finally, you said it wasn't important, but the Mac is also more open source than 99.9% of its competition. You can get CoreAudio, CoreMIDI, AudioUnits, and so on without giving up Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Apache, BSD, WebKit, LLVM, Clang, and so on.

You can put money into schools in Detroit and create Detroit-native high tech workers. That is actually the responsibility of the Detroit-area governments. No innovation is necessary.

> The strongest conceptually similarity between PCs and phones is that they both contain microprocessors

That is true only if you are talking about generic PC's and generic phones, not iOS devices, which are PC's, with PC heritage, from the oldest PC company, that run PC apps (native C/C++.)

The strongest conceptual similarity between PC's and iOS devices is that they both contain OS X — the xnu kernel, OS X subsystems and libraries — and they both run Cocoa apps, which are native C/C++, the standard for PC apps. iOS runs many of the exact same apps from the Mac, like Pages and GarageBand and iMovie, as well as PC apps from Windows, Unix, Xbox, PlayStation, and even DOS PC's. That is much more similarity than “has a microprocessor.”

I have an iPad here that runs Pages most of the time, and it replaced a Mac that ran Pages most of the time. The microprocessor in the iPad is ARM and in the Mac it was Intel and I never cared at all about that. The first time I ran Pages, it was on a Mac with PowerPC microprocessor. So the microprocessors are not nearly as similar between my Mac PC's and iOS PC's as are the apps and operating system, which are the same.

> Apple's OS X and iOS are considered to be separate products

No. OS X and iOS are not products. MacBooks and iMacs and iPads and iPhones are products. OS X and iOS are components that are used in various products. MacBook and iMac both use OS X, while iPad and iPhone both use iOS.

OS X is Apple's operating system with a mouse-based user/app interface. iOS is Apple's operating system with touch-based user/app interface. Underneath the user/app interface, they are the same operating system, with the same kernel, libraries, and subsystems.

If you're saying that an iMac running Pages on OS X is a PC and an iPad running (the exact same) Pages on iOS is not, I think that is crazy talk.

Are you saying that Apple is closed and that Apple and Microsoft are both the same? Because neither of those ring true to me.

You *might* be able to argue that Google is open, Apple is less open, and Microsoft is closed. That has at least the ring of truth. However, a lot of Google's open source comes with strings that make it unusable by anybody but Google partners. Apple's open source stuff like LLVM and Clang and WebKit are truly open and we know that because they have all been used by Apple competitors, not just partners. Android includes Apple WebKit. I'm unaware of any Google open source that is inside iOS. Google also uses LLVM and Clang. Not to mention the entire interface paradigm of Android is from Apple.

I think you are just thinking “open good — closed bad” and then assigning open to your favorite platform and closed to the ones you don't like. Maybe you are not doing that. In that case, cite some examples of open source projects from all 3 companies and how they are relatively open and closed.