It's very easy to mistake any critical question for raw snark when it's written in text on a forum full of strangers, especially a place like Slashdot. I find that it's *usually* worth the effort to resist that impulse.

I don't record on the iPad. It's more like a Swiss-Army peripheral device than anything else. When recording, it's a control surface. When rehearsing and learning new material, it saves me the trouble of printing charts on paper. When performing, it runs the board wirelessly, saving me the trouble of a cable snake and allowing the sound tech to sit ANYWHERE while having total control over our road rig. These are just a few of the uses I've found for it, and it seems like every week I find more.

Except for the story we're commenting on, you mean.

Good thinking, but a Mac mini is even safer from spear attacks than a PC tower, especially if you rack-mount it, leaving only a 2" by 5" target made of hard metal.

Although if your machine is at all in danger of getting hit by a fisherman's spear, you probably have even bigger problems due to water damage.

This old myth has never been true.

Apache is more popular than the Windows web server, yet gets hacked less, which completely debunks the idea that being a market leader is the only reason Microsoft products are so shockingly vulnerable to attacks.

OS X is a GUI shell on a BSD layer on a Mach engine. Like any flavor of *nix, it was designed from the ground up to live safely in networked, multi-user environments.

It's an order of magnitude harder to hack than a Windows box, because of superior design. This has been demonstrated over and over for nearly a decade now, yet the MS fanboys continue with the silly drumbeat that Macs are only enjoying security via obscurity.

Really? I find it EXTREMELY useful in the music studio. I guess I missed the memo that this is not supposed to be the case.

Yeah, he's from the country that the "pawns" played Chess with for over half a century.

Tens of thousands of ex-Cubans currently living in Florida (after risking their lives to get there) would beg to differ.

I don't see many people trying to cross the Gulf on makeshift rafts to get IN to your communist paradise. Why do you s'pose that is?

You can't. They're dead.

Also, notice that nobody announces how old George Washington is every year.

You know who never says that Jobs stole it all from Woz?

Woz.

Yes he did. What have you done that's so much better?

Yeah, the idea of apps tying somebody to a phone platform is beyond silly.

I've had an iPhone for about two years now, and intend to wait at least another year before bothering to upgrade.

At that point, if the Android is the best phone on the market (or if I've simply had it with AT&T's weaksauce network), a collection of easily-replaced $1.99 apps is not going to stop me from getting the phone I want.

Don't be silly. There's no camera on an iPad.

That would be true if Flash was EVER a good way to develop cross-platform products. Anybody who has ever experienced Flash on a Mac laptop knows better. Nothing like having the whirring of the cooling fan completely drown out the sound of the YouTube video you were trying to watch.

Oddly, watching h.264 files via VLC or QuickTime doesn't have the same problem, even at much higher data rates.

When it comes to the two-term administrations of Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton, the first question one must ask any critic is, "what didn't you like, the peace or the prosperity?"