Very well, then I will accuse BoingBoing and any other sites who reported on this to be grossly incompetent at basic first-year electrical engineering.

Anyone can figure this, even yours truly (who isn't even trained as an electrical engineer: Apple has added extra pins to the headphone jack in order to support things as simple as a single-button headset control on the iPhone. Clearly it was not feasible for Apple to keep just adding pins onto a short headphone jack in the hopes of cramming more buttons in.

It's patently obvious that in this case, given the number of buttons and gestures that the Shuffle supports, there needs to be more complex signals than merely having button-mapped pins into the device. And lo and behold, this is exactly what it turned out to be - an encoder chip so that the input signals can be fed into the Shuffle.

Anyone even familiar with rudimentary electronics would come to this conclusion at first glance. To go the "OMG DRM" route was either trolling, or sheer incompetence.

I don't know how you got modded insightful - if you truly believe that our economy is third world, or that our health is third world, or that our education is third world, you are delusional.

While there are plenty wrong with the US economy, health care, education, etc etc... To claim that we are in a third world state (or even close to it) is an insult to people who actually live in third-world countries.

Nailed it on the head. This isn't just media also, but other highly technical and "science-y" fields like software are not immune. There is a tremendous belief that businesses have to be run from the "gut", as opposed to being guided by metrics.

I'm a huge fan of the Ace Combat series (despite the boneheaded stories they have) - how does HAWX compare to, say, AC6?

I've been desperately wanting a good arcade flight sim for a long time now, and may pick this up if the non-expert mode is fun to play. How does the regular flying mechanic stand up to the normal fly mode in hawx?

I wish I had mod points. I've had some console DVDs scratch on me, and it's always a pain. With Steam I never have to worry about the longevity of the physical media. I can burn it to a disc, or put it on a USB drive, or do anything with it that has a helluva better chance of being there in 5 years than a frigging disc.

Use a 20-dollar Logitech mouse. More comfortable than the Mighty Mouse and the scroll wheel doesn't have an effective lifetime of 3 months.

Oh, and you can right click without lifting your other finger :)

Seriously, who designed that mouse? It's time for Apple to just get with the times and make a proper mouse. It's embarrassing.

Not to mention the "full size bluetooth mouse" is a completely underserved market. The big shiny aluminum Microsoft mouse is the only one that fits the bill... but it's mighty expensive.

That makes no sense. Public health care has nothing to do with an advanced IT system; up here in Canada we didn't have anything that can even share files between doctors until relatively recently (less than a decade). The public health care system works without it.

The GP's point is that given this sort of system in a private health care environment, abuse is not only probable, but inevitable.

Nice straw man YOU got there.

There's a difference between infanticide (i.e. killing someone) vs. designer babies (i.e. preventing a hypothetical person from existing). By your logic it's also abhorrent for people carrying genetically transmission illnesses to abstain from having children.

Except that information often has a very real *production* cost that needs to be recouped. People do need to, like, eat and stuff you know?

Hell, Epic is not even interested in solving exploits and network issues with their *latest* game. What are the odds they'll care about anything they released before?

Seriously. There are companies that do great post-sale game support (Infinity Ward, Bungie, Valve... etc), and then there are ones that seem to stop caring as soon as they slap the gold label on a disc.

Good luck. Even completely open specifications like CSS don't have uniform implementations across the board.

Blah blah blah. Yes, chargers are expensive, but there's no need to get into the "pennies to make" argument, because you simply haven't given anything to substantiate that argument.

I've worked in manufacturing, and for a while was in charge of plastics. Consumer-grade plastics are *really expensive* to mould, and that rubbery stuff that cables are made from? Even more so. So yeah, a charger might not be a bargain at $30 a pop, but it cost a lot more than "a few pennies" to make.

Trains are the new luxury Greyhounds, up here in Canada anyway. Okay, so no scantily-clad stewardesses or free booze, but you do get *massive* seats, tons of legroom, no real luggage limits, and on-board WiFi. It doesn't get much better than that.

Oh, and the air is at sea-pressure level, as opposed to 8000 feet like standard passenger craft.

I used to travel from Toronto to Ottawa by train. Easily the most pleasant moving vehicle I have ever been in.

But they *do*. It's called first class! I know people who *do* pamper themselves when flying to their vacations, and it's a wonderful way to fly - but it's not for everyone, or indeed even a large portion of the traveling public.

I think you're suggesting that the cost of first class be lowered - and perhaps it can, I'm certainly not privy to the finances of major airlines. I would like to point out, though, that most people I know only consider spending good money on *the vacation*, and not the means of getting there. I don't know about you guys in the US, but up here in Canada we have "vacation airlines" that service only popular vacation routes, and completely redefine "cattle class" (in the bad way). Consumers are clearly more about cheap than comfort, and unfortunately the airlines are giving them precisely what they want.

Not only that, we have advanced in ways invisible to the public. The type of engineering that took hundreds of engineers with slide rules months of work and calculations is now possible with a single engineer sitting at a workstation. The kinds of tests and analyses we can perform without even manufacturing a single physical prototype is immense and incredible.

Engineering, in general, is now cheaper to perform than ever. This has opened the door for smaller players to be competitive with the Big Boys, and this can only be a good thing. We are now able to go through so many more design iterations and optimizations than we ever have before.