I'm not a materials engineer (or any kind of engineer for that matter) but I think the issue is a little more complex than that. First of all, though laypeople like us refer to a material as "glass" or "plastic" each of these terms describes a large class of particular materials with sometimes widely divergent properties. The iPhone 4's "glass" isn't the same as the glass in your drinking glass. (I guess they call it "aluminosilicate glass" but I don't know what that means.) And who knows if the glass on the back is the same as the glass on the front.

Unless an Apple engineer shows up it's hard to guess at the exact reasons they would use one material over another, but we can guess. For one, they say this material is stronger than plastic, though obviously it may be more prone to shattering when dropped. That's an interesting trade-off; maybe using the glass improved the structural integrity overall, reducing the need for internal structural components and thus increasing the space available for the battery. Maybe Apple's testing showed that dropped phones were likely to break regardless, and the glass back didn't increase the average damage per drop much. Maybe testing found that people were naturally more careful with glass objects.

I think it's too easy for Slashdot types to have this reaction that some product design decision was completely stupid because they see some obvious downside, and the advantages are sometimes harder to see. But there are a lot of products which seem to have no obvious flaws, but completely suck because the designers never take any risks (see: Microsoft Word). I don't like to use those kinds of products.

It's sort of a malfunction, in that the algorithms malfunctioned, but the exchanges did not experience any malfunction. Typically if your algorithm malfunctions, tough -- you lose.

They only busted trades for PR reasons.

You know, after Starcraft II I actually forgot that most games didn't release on the Mac until months later. I've noticed that the third suggestion on Google for "civ 5" is "civ 5 mac", beating out even "civ 5 torrent". Just sayin'.

Most atheists in real life don't have some "belief" that there is no God. What most of us believe is that belief in God is detrimental. Agnostics seem to think it doesn't matter whether someone believes in God or not. This is untrue.

Sorta OT, but this is a poll thread anyway, so who cares?

Medical science has found "cures" for some things that used to remove people from society (either by death or institutionalization), but for many other conditions we have "treatments" instead of cures.

One basic consequence of that is that over the last 20 years there's been a substantial increase in people living normal lives with chronic conditions. So yeah, we're here, we're sick, and we're sick of people acting like there's something wrong with us just because there's something wrong with us!

So get over it.

You don't get anywhere by suing companies that decide not to use your product. The Google situation is not at all similar -- the allegation is that Google PREVENTED Motorola from using Skyhook's product.

I see a lot of dumb comments above about how Google shouldn't be forced to integrate Skyhook's location services, but this isn't about Google integrating Skyhook's location services. This is about Motorola choosing to use Skyhook on Android, and Google refusing to allow it.

That's funny, I just found a new rule that good Slashdot commenters are separated from the bad by their ability to see the world as shades of grey and fine distinctions, rather than dumping everything into buckets of "good" and "bad".

Also, the ending was perfect.

These large-sensor interchangeable-lens cameras (like Micro Four-Thirds as well as some others) are better seen as a miniaturized DSLR than a point-and-shoot. They will never be as small or pocketable as current point-and-shoots, since covering their large sensors requires a much larger lens (though not quite as large as in a DSLR). They are also just as expensive as DSLRs and are likely to remain so.

The focus speed issue is not easy to solve, since DLSRs use a submirror to direct light to a phase detection system, which can be very fast. Since the MFT camera has a sensor size comparable to a DSLR, longer focal lengths are required than those used in point-and-shoot cameras, which has the effect that focus accuracy is crucial. The lack of a mirror assembly for phase-detect autofocus, combined with the large sensor, means that these in-between cameras will be the slowest to focus. That can easily cost you the "moment".

All that being said, they ARE a lot smaller and I want one.

Sort of funny to see someone write about how the "shield law" is "much needed" and complain that it won't apply to everyone in the same paragraph. The whole point of a "shield law" is to provide special rights for a limited set of people.

For regular folks, if the cops have reason to believe that you know something about a crime, you'll get subpoenaed and required to testify, under penalty of perjury, potentially against your will. Journalists seem to think they ought to be exempt from the regular laws.

You can't give everyone an exemption or they'll claim they were "reporting" when they drunkenly bragged that they knew who killed Mr. Body. That's the problem with the shield law idea.

The Apple TV hasn't ever done 1080p. Anyone who cares already knows that. And very few people have the bandwidth to stream 1080p anyway, so who cares?

Yeah, 2008 sure does want that 5750 bad, but does she want it badly enough to wait until late 2009?

But tell me, what in the world do those other techniques have to do with detecting a jailbreak?

No, the items you keep quoting are obviously merely members of a long list of example techniques for evaluating the likelihood that a phone has been stolen.

There's no conspiracy theory here. Imagine that you were a phone. Someone enters the wrong unlock password a dozen times? Maybe your owner forgot it. You haven't been back to your home a couple days? Maybe your owner is on vacation. But when, IN ADDITION to all that, someone starts trying to unlock you, you'd have a pretty good notion that you're about to be hawked on ebay.

Well, I have one, and I don't use a case. I'm not sure if I can tell you how bad the problem really is, since I don't make many phone calls, and even though I do use my left hand when I do, my natural grip doesn't touch the weak spot.

Using data, it seems like it's slower when I touch the weak spot, so I don't do that. It's not my natural grip when using it for Web browsing either. And usually I'm using wi-fi anyway, in which case it doesn't seem to matter at all.

Not sure if that answers your question. I think it depends a lot on the user.

Because it's become political. It's the new nationalism, now. Later we'll have a war between the iNation Party and the Android People's Alliance.

More seriously, it's just the way the brain works. Once you disagree with some claim of fact, those making it seem disagreeable. Like how the media has been calling certain government figures "czars" for years, but then someone from the other party gets elected and some people start to think that "czar" means the government is taking over the country.