In addition to the lack of retina display, there are some underlying technical issues which prevent professional photographers from using the iPad. Many photographers would like to use an app related to Adobe's Lightroom for immediate importing, tagging, and initial review and screening of photos from a photoshoot. But because of Apple's restrictions on direct writing of files and a few other technical issues, this is not apparently possible at this time, according to Adobe. If Apple and Adobe were to find a way to resolve these issues, the iPad would be a perfect device for a photographer to use in conjunction with his existing work-flow. As it stands now, though, the iPad is only really useful for displaying work that's been reviewed and edited on other machines, or for doing the very simple manipulations and organization allowed by Apple's own apps.

Fair enough. I do note that my coming out of sleep time is about 5 seconds, compared to your 30-40. And you said you're running Ubuntu. As I said, I can't run the software I need on Ubuntu. If all I did was web surfing and some office document work, fine. But for the photography work I do, the Adobe tools are the fastest, easiest tools to use available, and they're not on Linux.

But your main points are perfectly valid. I just get peeved when some /.ers wildly assert that Mac users are just distracted by pretty things, rather than recogniziting that at least a few of us are simply willing to pay more for a product which does in fact go that extra 10%.

Amen. First thing I thought of was, did anybody do a similar study of crime rates with anonymous classified ads posted in the newspapers and the PennySavers? People were inviting strangers into their homes to look at crappy old pieces of furniture to sell for $10 long before there was a Craigslist.

Well, I bought my MacBook Pro 17" last year because it was lighter and thinner than my previous comparably equipped Dell, had a longer battery life, and had a much more reliable and speedy OS than the Dell. Is a "good" OS worth several hundred extra dollars? To me, you bet. For me, the price premium is justified simply because I don't have to wait a minute for the machine to wake up from sleep every time I lug it from home to the office or vice versa, or when I come back from lunch. Not having to reboot at least once a week (usually much more often) is also worth some of that cost. And I didn't have to spend hours of my life digging into obscure settings and learning how to set everything just right to make that happen. Also, on my Dell laptop, I often found that I'd be in the middle of typing, in a browser or on the word processor, and some other high priority task would kick in for unknown reasons, and what I typed wouldn't be displayed for several seconds. That hasn't happened with the Mac. Also worth a good chunk of money to me.

As for your Linux PC, please. As another responder noted, Lightroom is THE easiest to use, most powerful photo-editing and photo-organizing software out there. Photography is my major hobby, and switching to Lightroom has drastically reduced the time it takes me to sort, select, and edit my photos. That caliber of software is not available on Linux at the current time.

So thank you, I think my choice of the MacBook Pro was quite rationale given my needs and what's currently available on the market. A pretty case had very, very little to do with it. If Dell or somebody else could make a Windows machine function this well, I can assure you I'd be happy to buy it... and then there would be real competition, and Apple would have to lower its prices some and no longer make more money per PC than anybody else. Apple decided to compete on performance... REAL performance, not tech spec porn performance... and it's winning, and thus making more money.

I can get a nominally better-equipped laptop for cheaper, but it doesn't actually perform better. I've never found a Windows-based laptop yet that doesn't take at LEAST 30 seconds to wake up from sleep or hibernation, and it's usually a minute or more (especially after a system gets gunked up with all the usual crappy drivers at auto start programs). My MacBook Pro wakes up in the time it takes me to type my password. As soon as the screen appears (which is immediately after typing my password), it's ready to use. This fact alone has saved me hours of annoyance in the past year I've had it.

Also on Windows machines, I've had plenty of problems with little glitches here and there, unexplained slowdowns, screen freezes, you name it. With the Mac, those problems have been drastically reduced. Yeah, the Windows machine specs out nicer, but that doesn't mean much outside of test-bed environments, looking at performance from a clean install on a pristine new computer.

Hacking is the least of the concerns. This DESTROYS the guaranteed secret ballot. What wife or husband will tell their spouse: "no, you can't watch me internet vote"? How many union members or church goers will refuse the offer of their union or church to "help" them vote? How many employees will risk their job when their supervisor quietly expresses a desire to look over his shoulder while casts his ballot from the work computer?

If this becomes the rule, we will no longer have secret ballots in this country.

Except that the Vatican DIDN'T say that this app is bad or impermissible. That's TFA's conclusion from the Vatican's statement, not what the Vatican actually said. The Vatican did not, as best I can tell from TFA, condemn this app. It said only that it's not possible to confess by iPhone. Since this app does not allow for confession by iPhone, the Vatican has not condemned it. They didn't mention the app by name. They didn't say that [app name] can't be used.

Some of the data itself is from the public record, but compiling all of it yourself would be prohibitively expensive. It would take many trips to various libraries, churches, courthouses, etc. in lots of far-flung places in different cities, states, and countries. And that's all before you start indexing, searching, copying, or scanning any records.

Then consider they're hosting all those billions of records, have developed decent software for both building family trees and documenting them with their database of sources, and continually improve their software and increase their database holdings. The only reason they can charge so little is the economy of scale based on their huge userbase.

For me it's mostly just a hobby. I love history to begin with, and my family history is specifically interesting to me personally. Finding out where my ancestors lived, what their lives would have been like, and why they immigrated to America is fascinating to me.

I've read that genealogy is the second most common hobby in America, after gardening. Of course, that depends on how a hobby is defined. I consider reading my favorite hobby. However, for some people, i.e. Mormons, genealogy has religious significance. That's why Salt Lake City, Utah is the biggest destination for many people doing genealogical research.

I've also read that, which really interests me. Don't you find it fascinating that your (or at least some modern Turks) ancestors possibly spoke Hittite or another Indo-European or even Semitic language? I recently paid for a genealogical DNA test, which will tell me more specifically where my ancestors came from. My paternal ancestors immigrated to America from Germany in the 1880s (then Prussia), but there are several clues which point to them actually being ethnically Lithuanian. The area where they lived has been part of Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Germany in just the last few hundred years.

Actually, every person on the planet is descended from immigrants if you go back far enough.

Census records are released 72 years later, to be exact. Also, although the US Census isn't available until then, many state listings of much more recent births, marriages, divorces, and deaths are available.

Too much data is far more preferable than too little. Back in the old days, before many sources were available online, most searching had to be done by hand, paging through entire paper records until you found a possible match. The earliest online sources were often just indexes to paper records. It made it much easier to find the records, but then you still had to travel to a library, courthouse, church, etc. that might be in another state or even country.

The reason the algorithm is so promiscuous is that it's probably using Soundex to match names. That's a good thing though, as I've found some of my ancestors names spelled in lots of different ways.

Definitely agree, the anonymous reader didn't try very hard. And records for living people are necessarily scarce because of privacy issues.

Actually, just creating and editing your family tree on Ancestry is completely free. And there's no limit to the number of people, AFAIK. The paid service is just for accessing their database of sources and connecting with other users who might have overlapping family trees.

I pay for ancestry.com because they have a huge database of sources online, and probably the largest number of users out of any other family tree websites. It's much more convenient for me to search and view their literally billions of records from the comfort of my own home than going to my local library or LDS center. If I did that, I'd have to copy their records and scan them myself. Ancestry's already done the legwork for me. Also, since they have so many users, I've connected to several other people doing research along the same family lines, which saved my quite a bit of time.

But that's really a non-starter with ancestry.com, they let you export your family tree as a GEDCOM file any time you want, which is the de facto standard file format for genealogy.