I know there are anonymous cowards that have pointed this out already, but the linked comic has nothing to do with email. Can you point us to something relevant?

Maybe you are underestimating how troublesome "helicopter parents" can be. At a research institution, the path of least resistance (particularly for assistant professors) often involves simply pleasing all the students regardless of how stupid/lazy they may be. Incidentally, I learned this because I tried (as a TA) to fail students that had cheated on their term paper. None of them faced any negative consequences for their academic dishonesty. I cannot think of a good solution to the problem, but maybe you can.

Except that in that case the brilliant jerk was the business person. Woz was the brilliant nice guy who created the technology during the startup phase.

Madrake --> Xandros --> Libranet --> Debian --> Gentoo --> Arch I didn't care for Mandrake, and in fact stopped using Linux after trying it out for a few monhts. A year later I tried some Debian derivatives before settling on vanilla Debian. I used Gentoo and Arch for several years each; only a few years with Debian. I've sampled variations of Ubuntu on occasion (usually when I get a new laptop), but it's never stuck more than a day.

I know why arch doesn't include an aur helper in any of their repos. If you don't want to check your pkgbuilds before using them, that's on you. And I don't really care what other people use. I just said that this is what I use and it works for me. If you like something else that's fine with me too. There are so many aur helpers these days, just pick one that suits you.

Hmm. I use yaourt. "yaourt -S package_name" and it just installs what you want, period. "yaourt -Syua" updates everything, including your aur packages. I have something like 50 packages from aur installed, and I don't have any problems. Day-to-day, it has taken almost no effort on my part for the last 5 years. There were some big updates that took some care to do correctly (udev and filesystem come to mind), but most distros have things like that and arch's documentation is always great.

But I was running Gentoo before I switched to Arch, so maybe my perspective is just skewed. Also, it's been several years since my last OS install; my memory of it may be a bit fuzzy by now.

Does not change my point that the size of the phone has an effect on its usefulness, and that is a functional problem. I have a hiking backpack I have used for a long time and if the phone doesn't fit where I want it to I don't want that phone. I also don't like a phone (or anything, really) that prints in my pants, whether or not it technically fits in my pockets because I don't like the way it pulls on the fabric when I walk and sit. It has nothing to do with appearance. My wife has a hard enough time finding clothes that fit at all to bother limiting herself to pants with pockets big enough for her giant phone. Besides, even if the goal isn't to "get laid" at the anonymous coward suggests, appearance is still a functional part of the lives of the majority of adults. Not all of us can show up for work in cargo pants and a T-shirt.

It's not really as simple as "appearance vs function". Size is part of the function of any portable device. If the phone is big enough that you have to make concessions to accomodate it, then that's a problem. There is always give and take between portability and usability. As photographers like to say, the best camera for the shot is the one you have with you. And my dislike of holsters is not simply due to my (non-existant) fashion sense.

I guess my hands are just on the small side (although I wear medium size gloves) because a 4.5" screen is too big for me. I have a difficult time swyping one-handed on my wife's Galaxy SII. The same task is considerably easier on my Bravo, which even has a higher resolution screen than the SII. Personally, I find having to hold the phone with both hands to be an annoyance, but maybe that's just me.

No point in testing their lab skills, if they haven't spent any time in a lab. Not sure how you can spend time in a lab online, but maybe someone clever will figure it out.

One of my degrees is a non-thesis master's and I always thought a degree like that (without any lab experience) basically just a pretty piece of paper. More or less everything useful I learned in grad school, I either learned in the lab or from the people I met at conferences.

Wavefronts will reflect off of any surface where there is a change in wave speed. If the lens works as a lens, then it's hard to remove the reflections. Coatings work by reflecting the light back through the lens element (in a manner of speaking), so it still works well. If I understand the article correctly, some lab at MIT came up with a surface texture that causes water to bead. Probably the fact that it is very finely textured is the reason that reflections aren't a big problem. That is fine in the same way that matte screens are fine, but this isn't going to work if you want clear pictures. It might be ok on consumer lenses, though.

I not convinced that increased testing would do anything about the problem. I doubt people would drive in tests the way they drive normally. They'd have to be retarded not to.

Considering that I have no interest in using any of Amazon's cloud services, I'm not sure why I would choose this over a Nook Color. Maybe I'm just weird.