I have to agree with you, I actually think the opposite of the original poster (that Mac Laptops are a waste of money). I think that the savings you can get (versus the reliability of the resulting computer) are much greater on a desktop, which you can build using high quality parts, and then conceivably make a hackintosh at home. Their laptops are quite expensive, but if you compare them with other high-specced laptops, they are not that much more expensive, while the useful life of a MacBook tends to be much longer than an equivalent computer from Dell (Alienware), HP and other big manufacturers.
I switched to a Mac Book Pro in late 2008, and I have had no issue with the computer to this day (I am only considering buying a new Mac out of vanity now), whereas the Fujitsu laptop I had before was dying on me, both processor and battery. That particular laptop had the same spec as an Alienware computer of the time, the chassis was the same, motherboard and video card was the same, with the only difference being the display (without a webcam and of lower resolution). My brother bought an Alienware computer around the same time as I bought my current MBP, and his computer did not last more than a year and a half (with the video card dying and needing the "baking trick" to get back to life). He is now in his second Alienware. I have been using my Mac for pretty much everything from work to entertainment, keeping it on and working for at least 12 hours a day.

So, in my experience, if you intend to use the computer heavily and keep it for a long time, I think the investment is worth it (it's much cheaper than two Alienware computers with the same spec). Of course, I have my misgivings about Apple's attitude to overarching control of everything, from content distribution to the use of their hardware, and this might eventually turn me off their products. But then I can install Windows on the computer :-D.

The problem with developing countries is that many of the things you take for granted as dirt cheap in consumer societies are much more expensive in these countries (for various factors including government red-tape, lacking infrastructure, etc), and you have lots of people who have an extremely low income.
In these countries, you have gangs of people specializing in stealing copper wire from the power/phone lines, which would seem even less rational for somebody from an industrialized country.

I'm not sure that is so, I've been using Steam for a while now, and I have never had issues buying, downloading, playing and updating any of the games I bought with them. I also know for a fact that Steam works flawlessly in countries like Brazil (where my brother lives) which are notorious for having multiple barriers to the importation of computer stuff (and heavy taxation, e.g. a Mac there costs 2.5 times what it costs in the US), to the point that most of his friends no longer buy boxed PC games anymore.
So presumably, if local legislation was the barrier in the iTunes store, then Steam would also necessarily be affected.

One thing that concerns me regarding the App Store is whether they will continue with artificial national boundaries for their content. I am quite mobile regarding country, having lived in the UK and now in the US, and one thing that really pissed me off regarding my purchases for my iPod touch is that when I moved here and moved my account to the US, I can no longer get updates for most of the apps I bought in the UK. Moreover, the couple of books I bought while in the UK are not accessible to me while my account information says I am in the US. The main advantage of the previous Mac Software was that if you bought the DVD at the store, you could move country and reinstall your app. Does anybody know if there is any restriction about country for this App store then?

I wish I had mod points to give you. Your comment is spot on! I personally believe that what is keeping Brazil from breaking into the real tech players is the red tape involved with any company and the lack of investment into research and innovation. Companies in Brazil truly think that R&D is a huge waste of money, and I feel bad that in the US, the country that has (or had) the greatest innovators in computer science when I was growing up is now spending less and less money on R&D.

Please mod this guy up, if I had the mod points I'd do it, this is the most insightful piece of advice one can write. The research should be easy for you to grasp (if not, you are not going to the right area), but in finding a good supervisor lies the "art" of a successful PhD.

I don't want to be an argument killer, but if you had read the article and saw the names and descriptions of the group members, you'd have seen that the main developers of this project are two Indians and two Brazilians, so my guess is that they have been to a lot more than a single village in the middle of the African jungle (well, maybe not in Africa, but in India and Brazil), and that they do have a, shall we say, decent grip on the resource limitations of the developing world.
But then again I might be wrong, but last time I checked, India and Brazil were still considered developing world, weren't they?

Well, it pretty much depends on where these republicans graduated is it not? If they graduated from any religious institutions like, say Bob Jones University, then I would consider them no different than somebody who did not even finish high-school.

Well, this might be an exaggeration, but many of these features already exist in XSL-FO (animation and sound at least, and arbitrarily shaped text areas). http://www.w3.org/TR/xslfo20-req/#N65820

And once the Apollo program was over and the space race was "won", much of the technological and engineering advances made by that team in rocketry have been readily forgotten (I saw a documentary the other day saying the today's engineers sometimes reverse-engineer Apollo parts to find out how they solved all sorts of problems). With international cooperation, the need to share the designs and have things fit together with other countries components at least ensures that they are properly documented and reusable in the future.

I am reluctant to adopt this upgrade on day zero and the only thing that would make me do the upgrade is improved support for BT audio, which pretty much sucks in my iPod touch 2g. I also use the same BT headphones in my Android phone and it works brilliantly, so I wonder, has anybody done this upgrade and tested it with BT headphones like these ones? (http://www.sennheiserusa.com/private_headsets_mobile_bluetooth-wireless_music_502413)

Also, let me mention that the grants in the US are mostly given to people with big names, which often sell the same project to multiple agencies, do no research whatsoever and spend most of their time churning out new proposals, while the Postdocs who work for them have to be constantly working on the grants and on delivering stuff completely unrelated to their job description. I think there should be a cap on the number of projects any professor is entitled to be a PI, I mean, seriously, how many different projects can a scientist contribute meaningfully?

My personal website is hosted by a Norwegian provider (great service).

I'm sure most people here have heard about the Documentaries made by Peter Kuran, but in case you have not, I suggest watching this movie http://www.vce.com/nuc911.html (Nuclear 911) about nuclear weapons accidents, and also the other films from the same director. All of them have superb scenes and music.

The view I collected from most Chinese I know (which might be slanted since I met most of them in the west) is that they are willing to put up with censorship and all that crap as long as the party keeps providing economic growth. And this is true for most countries, U.S. included, most people won't want to change the system even if it's full of shit, while they have a decent job and can provide for their families. That was why Clinton was always so popular (even if he was one of those responsible for the Bank deregulation and the shit that came with it); Bush was reelected (because the economic woes only started to bite in his second term); and why Bush senior was not reelected (because the effects of Reagonomics started to screw the country, and the tax raises) even though he is one of the few republicans that I respect. And that was why Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter were not reelected regardless of policies that benefitted a large portion of America socially.