Reminds me of when I call places like my ISP and other companies. I always get the message "We're experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment, please bear with us."

Really, unusually high? Why does it *always* seem to be "unusually" high? I would love to set up some automated system to call these companies and see how often I get that message. I bet that even if you called every hour for weeks, you would always get that message. Seems to me that you can't call something unusual if its always the case.

As far as bandwidth - yeah, its normally a crock of shit. Though currently I've gotten a great connection. I think my plan is only 20 or 25 Mb/s but I usually get over 30 on speed tests. This is Comcast in Silicon Valley (Campbell).
-Taylor

Well, the Xoom has two cameras, a bunch more RAM, a dual core processor, will get a free upgrade to 4G "when its ready", and is only $70 more than the equivalent iPad. Plus Android Honeycomb looks like a solid OS, so that should be fine.

Where that reasoning falls apart though is that Apple isn't going to sell the same iPad forever. They have got to have a new one coming out soon, and they will certainly either keep pricing the same or lower it.

Also, as you stated, Motorola is not Apple, and no matter how good your product is, you cannot compete on features alone with Apple. Most people don't care if they get something "better" than an iPad or iPhone. If they have the money for the apple product, they'll be totally happy with it. They'll only look at something else if its cheaper. Then they might be very happy with the purchase if its good. But I just think regular people don't bother trying to absolutely maximize their purchase. They go for good enough, which apple tends to satisfy safely. (note that i don't expect you all to be these "regular" people i speak of)

So I guess I agree with you. I think their pricing is dumb as hell. But I also think it makes sense from a value perspective. Its just that the market isn't operating on a pure value perspective (or they put lots of value in the "Apple" name).

-Taylor

I dunno, for me the killer app has always been the browser. I just want something thin and light and easy that I can browse the web on. My laptop is a big fast beast for CAD, and is pretty heavy. It also rests in my workshop downstairs most of the time. I do a *lot* of browsing on my phone, so I wish I just had a "bigger phone" more or less. Tablets seem to fill that niche.

I haven't got an iPad though. I've been waiting for Android tablet as that is my OS of choice. Luckily between LG, Moto and Samsung (with Honeycomb looking awesome), I have some good options. I'm not happy about Motorola's pricing, but I might go for the wifi model (my Nexus One has wifi tethering builtin for free). They haven't said when the wifi model comes out though, sadly.

They're all expensive and I'd much rather have them be $200-300, but they still satisfy a need (or want, whatever) that I have, so I might put up the money when the right one comes along.
-Taylor

This just in: this morning a FLAMING BALL OF GAS OVER 1 MILLION TIMES THE SIZE OF THE EARTH APPEARED OVER THE HORIZON! IT IS ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN THAT IT WILL ENGULF THE EARTH IN FLAMES AND DESTROY THE ENTIRE PLANET.*

*this is technically true.

Better still might be to build flash memory chips with a built-in fuse that cannot be reset. Wipe the data (just in case) and then have some command that physically blows the fuse on every actual flash memory chip onboard. Then someone would have to dissolve the chip and somehow repair the fuse just to get to the data, which would have been erased anyway.

That could make one hell of a virus though if expensive SSD's could be destroyed from software alone. Maybe have it be a (clearly labeled!) jumper on the drive that does the fuse blowing.
-Taylor

Actually as someone pointed out above, the wear leveling algorithms in SSD's can cause problems for effective encryption.

http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=wear-leveling

So as always, the answer is "Physically completely destroy the drive".
-Taylor

That's always been my problem. My trust was accidentally configured as a floating input.

Well... its a little more complicated than that, on the ratings system. The rating impacts money - for example no one wants to have an NC-17 movie because it won't even get distribution - and the ratings board has this arbitrary system with no transparency. Its not censorship outright, but it amounts to a very similar thing. If you're genuinely curious, you really should watch This Film is Not Yet Rated. Its really interesting.

Thirded. Never read a comic book in my life. Loved Watchmen. So did my girlfriend, and she's picky.

Well, while they both technically are capable, I don't think we're currently able to sense the one electron that came off of the CCD, are we? Don't we need many electrons before we can sense them?

Yeah I was wondering about that. Some of the other replies cleared that up earlier.

I still imagine that investing in those sensors would have a great payoff.

Ah. Yeah, I was wondering about optics.

Well, it would still allow much smaller mirrors to be used, right? So something like a (relatively cheap) 30" mirror with an S-CAM sensor would be able to outperform a much larger telescope with a CCD?

Even if there are optics involved, making the sensor 18000 times more sensitive seems like it would be immensely more helpful than just making bigger optics.

The real future of telescopes will have no mirrors.

I'm not sure why no one has made a big deal out of this, but superconducting cameras have the potential to completely replace mirrors in telescopes, making them more robust and essentially eliminating complex alignment.

Why do I say this? Well, I reasoned this out myself, so maybe I'm wrong, but basically superconducting cameras are able to register every photon that sees them, sending off ~18000 electrons per photon hit. CCDs, on the other hand, send off 1 electron for every photon hit (I read that a while ago but I think those are the numbers).

Since CCD sensors are so much less sensitive, we use massive mirrors to magnify the amount of light hitting the sensor.

Well, it seems to me that if we had high resolution functional S-CAM sensors, we wouldn't need mirrors. We could just point them straight to the sky, and even if 18000 times fewer photons hit them, they'd have roughly the same or better output as a CCD.

Or, you could just lay out a giant array of S-CAM pixels, say, 10 meters in diameter. Then you'd basically have a ten meter telescope without the mirrors, *and* it would be vastly more sensitive.

I understand that using superconductors is currently an enormous pain in the ass, and I'm not expecting us to find a room-temp one any time soon, but even with the complexities of keeping the sensor cool, wouldn't that have enough advantages over a traditional system that it might be worth it? Maybe not yet, as the sensors currently have to be 0.3K, which seems to me to make it extremely challenging. But if we could make them with something warmer - say, liquid nitrogen cooled - then they might be viable.

Is there any flaw in my basic reasoning? I mean, maybe it would be more expensive than I imagine, but I feel like we should be looking into it. Imagine a football-field sized array of S-CAM sensors. I feel like we could pretty much see license plates on alien worlds at that point. And it wouldn't be nearly as fragile as something with a mirror.

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=36685

That is the third generation superconducting camera sensor that the ESA is working on. It only has 120 pixels, but I really believe we should be putting way more money into researching these...
-Taylor

Yeah, I noticed this. Not a good coincidence for the guy, heh. He really should get a picture that doesn't look like it was taken in a basement.

Wow, you really don't get it. Apple tests iOS with every device they release it for, because, uh, there's only like 10 of them, and they created them all.

And actually, I checked and what you said isn't even fucking true. iOS 4 came out last summer for phones and ipod touches, but not until fall for iPads. And it wasn't compatible with anything made before the iPhone 3GS - so, half of the iPhone models got left behind. So you're full of shit.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/iphone-os-4-0-unveiled-shipping-this-summer/

And yes, the nice thing about apple controlling every piece of hardware is that they can release for many devices at once, but that's not how Android works and I hardly consider that broken. If you want to work with multiple manufacturers using open source code, you have to accept that not everyone will jump on a release immediately. I'd much rather have many manufacturers than one, so like I said, I hardly consider it broken.
-Taylor