Actually, I'd call it anything but simple.

Back in the day, any machine that could run Photoshop competently cost about as much as a Mac. Mac OS classic was about on par with Windows 9x, with a few tradeoffs here and there -- I won't defend either operating system because their successors were so much better. ...which brings me to my next point. Adobe was one of the very last vendors to port its software to Mac OS X. Even Microsoft had a head start on them.

Similarly, nobody misses the "Mac Classic" mindset of software development. Apple was largely correct to "clean house" and depreciate many of their old and dated libraries.

Might not quite be there yet, but it's well on its way.

From the abominable performance/security of the Flash player to the ever-increasing bloat of Photoshop, Adobe's users are pretty much fed up with the company.

At one point, it would have been heresy to criticize Photoshop. Now the design community is practically screaming for a replacement. (It's twice as bad if you're a mac user. Nobody's quite sure what prompted the Apple/Adobe divorce, but it's been ugly)

Add this all up, and you end up with a device very similar to the one that the UPS guys carry around, minus any imaging capabilities.

I briefly worked at UPS last year, and was amazed by how capable those little devices were, in addition to how insanely rugged they were (you could literally throw one against a brick wall without damaging it -- a few of my colleagues had anger issues, and I got to witness this fairly regularly)

Of course, the UI left much to be desired. Nevertheless, I could easily see how such a device would be very successful in a medical environment, provided it had the infrastructure to support it.

Going through this one point at a time:

1) E-Ink displays are still in their infancy. Putting a monochrome e-ink display in the apple tablet would make it a glorified kindle. LED-based LCD displays are extremely efficient.

2) Speaking of battery power, Apple's had very good success with the lithium polymer batteries being used in the current generation Macbook Pro. The battery life on these full-featured machines exceeds that of most Netbooks, and leads the industry by a very wide margin. Li-Pol batteries can be molded and extruded to fit within empty spaces in the chassis, hence the fact that they are not user-replaceable. However, you can indeed replace it yourself in under 10 minutes with a screwdriver and no PC repair experience -- it's about as difficult as a RAM upgrade.

3) Minimal UIs have worked well for Apple. (This is being discussed elsewhere in this thread, so I won't delve into it here)

4) No argument about iTunes and the app store. Apple needs to divorce the iPhone from iTunes as the only conduit for synchronization of non-musical content. iTunes should also have been rewritten in Cocoa by now.

That's more a complaint with touchscreens in general, rather than Apple's design philosophy. Haptic feedback can also be used to improve the tactile response of touchscreens.

The touchwheel iPod is a great example of how Apple's minimalism worked extremely well. The user interface blends in seamlessly with the device, and only provides the most necessary controls. My only complaint is that the "shuffle" option was buried deep in a settings menu until some of the more recent models.

Prior to the iPod, portable audio players were *loaded* to the brim with superfluous buttons, which added unnecessary bulk and complexity.

Actually, it was something more like this.

This role hasn't always strictly fallen on the President. For one, the past several presidents have delegated most of these responsibilities to the Secretary of State -- Hillary Clinton has been one of the most active diplomats in American history.

The first lady and vice president have also, on occasion, played strong diplomatic roles depending on the administration.

I'd also concur with this view of the Queen. She has been invaluable to the prestige and perception of the British government over the past half-century.

Although most Americans balk at it, RIPA isn't particularly out of character for the British government. The UK government has done a decent job of upholding civil liberties while appeasing the public's demand for a nanny state.

The Queen's veto power is reserved for profoundly insane pieces of legislation (ie. invading Poland and initiating a genocide). The Queen uses her power sparingly, theoretically making the public far more likely to support her, should she ever choose to invoke this privilege. It is literally a last resort.

Engadget mentions that the TiBooks solidified the presence of the widescreen display in notebook computers.

This isn't particularly accurate or true, as the TiBook's screen was only slightly wider (1.5:1) than the standard 4:3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio that has been ubiquitous on NTSC TVs and computer monitors for decades. These laptops appeared fairly square and unremarkable.

For whatever reason, the 15" aluminum PowerBook appeared a bit wider, particularly in the final generation of the model, although the aspect ratio evidently stayed the same. The 17" version always had a wide screen (1.6:1), although all of these fell short of the cinematic 16:9 (1.77:1) ratio also used in 1080p displays.

The 12" PowerBooks always had a 4:3 display, and were IMO some of the most impressive laptops Apple's ever produced, as they were the first laptops to successfully cram a full-featured machine into a tiny chassis without any major compromises. I might be biased, of course, as I'm typing this comment from one such machine -- even for an Apple product, the 12" Powerbooks retain a cult-like following.

If you wanted to ascribe any one model for being a forebearer to widescreen laptops, you'd have to go with the 17" Aluminum powerbook, the MacBook, or any of the PC industry's less-successful early experiments in this field.

If you hate snow, I'd strongly advise leaving Russia.

I'm not arguing that Microsoft doesn't have an unusually good long-term support system -- they're second to none.

However, it's important to consider that Windows 2000 was pretty much only supported on paper for the past few years.

It's also notable that Microsoft's release cycle has been extremely slow since the release of Windows 2000. XP was an unnecessary upgrade for many business customers, and was really only adopted in the enterprise as Win2k-era hardware became obsolete (it also helped that the two operating systems were extremely similar -- most of XP's extra features could easily be disabled)

As we all know, Vista was crap, and Win7 only barely made it into the decade (still missing a handful of features that were originally slated for Vista).

Ubuntu, on the other hand, has made a dozen stable releases since 2005, most of which have been fairly painless upgrades. In fact, I'd call a Ubuntu distribution upgrade fairly comparable to a Windows service pack update in terms of time, difficulty, and compatibility.

In that regard, Ubuntu and Windows occupy a fairly level playing field (AFAIK, Microsoft don't support old service pack releases). Ubuntu releases are timed roughly equivalently to Service Pack updates.

Honestly, I always thought Knuth was kind of arrogant to ascribe this status to TeX, given that TeX is an absolute nightmare to use on a modern machine.

A modern TeX distribution is usually a 1.3gb download, doesn't support modern typefaces, and produces some of the most unintelligible error messages I've ever seen. To get other "modern" features (ie. embedding a .png or adding hyperlinks), you have to rely on unofficial extensions to the language.

There's a lot to like about TeX. I still use it for any large documents I work on, and nothing even comes remotely close for typesetting equations. However, the user experience isn't pretty at all.

And they say Unix isn't user-friendly!

Ubuntu LTS releases are supported for 3 years on the desktop, and 5 years on the server.

The project has also been doing an admirable job of reigning in bloat, and new releases generally run fine on old hardware (particularly with the Xubuntu/Xfce combination).

$250? Try $25,000 (and this isn't a jab at government inefficiency)

Sure, a small ARM board and low-resolution camera would probably cost about $250. However, you'd need to make it able to withstand a harsh outdoor environment, and also consider things such as visibility in the rain and at night (otherwise, people would just wait until these times to cross). Also make sure your field of view is sufficient to legibly capture an eighth of a mile in both directions.

Next, factor in power and connectivity at a location that is effectively in the middle of nowhere. Solar would work, but you'd need batteries for at night. Any cellular network would have to be built, and might not even be worthwhile if the cameras are going to be spaced so far apart.

Finally, make sure these things are nailed down sufficiently to not be stolen (as well as the copper in the power lines you go that route), and find somebody to install and maintain this network.

$250 per camera isn't even remotely close to what it'd cost to build such a system.