I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you iPad fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an iPad (a 1GHz A4 w/32 Gigs of flash) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on .Mac to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Motorola Xoom running Android, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this iPad, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Angry Birds will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various iOS devices, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen an iOS device that has run faster than its Windows Phone counterpart, despite iOS' faster chip architecture. My brown Zune runs faster than this iPad at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the iPad is a superior machine.

Apple addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an iPad over other faster, cheaper, more stable tablets.

No, "has overtaken" is the _present_ perfect of "overtake." The _past_ perfect (or pluperfect) is "had overtaken."

Jesus, I had to know these things to get through 2nd grade. Just what are they teaching in schools nowadays?

Only if you want DC-area bathrooms to be flooded with, er, wide-stanced Republican congressmen.

When asked for comment, outgoing CEO Steve Jobs replied, "I would cut off the more disreputable parts of the body, and use the space for playing fields."

"Prior manipulations and plans" which were covered up in an almost laughably poor way, involved single drug companies and usually just a peppering of bureaucrats within those companies, and concerned "blockbuster drugs" covered by a litany of patents. Vaccines are manufactured by every major drug firm, have a proven track record of success in preventing illness extending back to the 18th century, have mostly long since disappeared from patent territory, and are prescribed by more or less every pediatrician with an MD.

Parents of children with autism want someone to blame. I can't really say I'm surprised considering how insanely difficult it is to raise an autistic person, and how they're constantly bombarded by dirty looks from other people and badly-concealed hints that the child would be better-behaved if they had better parenting. In short, up until recently our culture blamed them for their children. So they jump on any opportunity to displace that moral burden.

I hope that someday we discover there's some supplement or medicine (like folic acid for neural tube defects) that will prevent autism. Until then, don't blame the parents and don't blame the doctors and don't blame the suppliers of useful medicines.

Everyone knows how conspiracy theories work. All the wingnuts will just claim this is a political chop job designed to cover up Big Brother/Big Pharma's Big Evil plan. The BBC could play video next week of Wakefield snorting coke and doing an underage hooker, all the while shouting that he had falsified his results, and it wouldn't matter. At some point they'd probably decide that Wakefield was a deep-cover government plant intended to discredit the movement.

The marginalization of long-term data storage can only be a good thing -- the big advertising and other firms get the analytical data that actually matters to their bottom line, and to the extent that the average joe's privacy is being invaded at the very least the fruits of that invasion will become increasingly accessible.

Pretty soon the world will be just like Firefly!

Mal: Petty?
Inara: I didn't mean petty.
Mal: What did you mean?
Inara: Suo xie?
Mal: That's Chinese for petty.

See, you have three checkout lines to choose from. You can't see the register from where you are, but at two of the three lines the cashier is a goat...

Much as I enjoyed Tron: Legacy, young Flynn/Clu was just wrong enough to seriously creep me out. I think it was because some parts of his face didn't move right when he talked and smiled (cheeks and eyes).

Encryption is only as strong as the idiots who implement it. The Soviets learned that the hard way during the early part of the Cold War, when they accidentally reused random one-time pad encryptors. That led to the NSA's VENONA project, and we decrypted a pretty good amount of Soviet diplomatic and spy traffic before they were tipped off.

Yeah, but Goddard's work never went anywhere until German scientists working under the Nazis recognized its military potential, and then Uncle Sam figured out these rocket thingies might be a cool thing and spent a bundle on them. Of course Goddard died before he could see what his rockets could really do because private interests with money refused to support him in the 30s, but hey, you can't make a soulless capitalist dystopia without crushing a few souls, or something.

Try to name one private rocket manufacturer not beholden to Uncle Sam between 1950 and 1990 and you'll see what I mean.

Sorry, the Republicans only fight government intrusion if it lacks the magic words "national security" and your annual income is above $250,000.

In this instance what they can do for you is a visit from Ann Coulter, who will shriek "why do you hate America SO MUCH" loud and shrill enough to shatter all the glass in your house.