Mod parent up. The Facebook iPhone app is terrible.

I use all three: Windows 7, OS X Lion and various flavors of Linux. Windows 7 is pretty nice, but is still much needier in terms of routine maintenance, updating, & so on than OS X.

For a total newbie, I'd have to concur with the grandparent. Unless someone's already got a specific requirement to use Windows (in terms of needing to use a piece of Windows-only software, substantial pervious investment in Wndows-only software or simply already being solely very familiar with Windows and not wanting to relearn everything), I'd have to say that Mac OS has the edge in terms of overall newbie approachability. Anecdotally, it's the OS that got my mother past the "just e-mail and the odd website" stage, and the one I prefer to use daily (as a techie).

With all due respect, I would probably be able to plausibly argue as an astrophysicist (but not a SETI-affiliated one) that I do have "an appreciation of the scale of the universe, the limitations that Einsteinian physics places on communication and exploration of it, the incredible odds of finding coincidental intelligent life in close proximity to us on the kind of time scale and size scale of a 14 billion year old, 14 billion light year diameter universe". After 35 years in the field, Jill Tarter probably does, too.

Your position is not an unreasonable one to adopt, even if I think that characterizing SETI as "just a time sink for big children" is unfair, sounds fairly juvenile itself and makes your argument sound weaker than it actually is.

I personally feel, however, that while the SETI effort is like looking for a nearby needle in universe full of haystacks (and the SETI folk have never claimed otherwise), the cultural, philosophical and other implications of scoring an admittedly spectacularly unlikely "hit" are worth the relatively modest investment. A big chunk of SETI's money already comes from private donations these days, anyway, and a lot more public money has been wasted on totally pointless things totally lacking the world-changing implications of something like SETI.

And in the meantime, they've (at the very least) been able to do some interesting things in terms of radio telescope technology and other research, and inspired a bunch of kids and adults to think enthusiastically about science.

By whom? And on whose authority? (Not trying to be needlessly argumentative, just genuinely curious).

Not this again...

Last time I was speccing a laptop (admittedly a few years ago now), I ran through the Dell site & configured something as close to the MacBook Pro I was using as my reference baseline, and the price of the comparable business-class Dell was only $50 less than that of the Mac. The Dell was also a nice machine, but it had less full software bundled (there was nothing like the iLife suite, for example), and lacked a couple of the hardware bells & whistles such as the backlit keyboard. Overall, though, it was basically a draw.

Now, I grant you that I could have started off with a specific Dell model instead, tried to find a matching Mac and simply not been able to find one, but that's a different issue. The Apple product matrix is much sparser, particularly as they don't target the low-priced end of the market, but like for like, Macs really aren't all that overpriced compared to the Dells.

Off the top of my head, I could think of a few musical applications for this:

- Virtual theremin-type things.Jean Michel Jarre wannabes could have a field day with this: you could use it for the introduction of additional expression, modulation, etc. for non-contact instruments such as laser harps.

- Training orchestra conductors. We could have software that plays multitracked orchestral music, and the gesture tracking could control the balance, etc. between the various sections of the orchestra. I believe that EPCOT used to have something along these lines many years ago (albeit much more primitive) involving a set of light beams.

- Quick switching between electric guitar effects setups, etc.

There are probably many others too.

Also noted for his uniformly spectacular headwear:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IKBrunelChains.jpg

I'll see your Rube Goldberg and raise you a Heath Robinson! :-)

Mod parent "Insightful".

Indeed. Edison's business practices are one of the big reasons the MPAA exists: to attempt to stop someone else doing to Hollywood what Edison/proto-Hollywood did to Méliès:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon#Distribution