However they did it 6 times and only succeeded 5 times doing that.
The Russians used it to extinguish gas, which sounds harder to me.
The only problem is that if it does NOT work or even makes the situation worse
Well, BP is interested in making money, the administration is interested in getting reelected, which gives me some confidence that they'll try to avoid making things worse. And they could still drill a relief well, as before.
I'm sorry, but I don't see a big problem with the "nuclear option". Underground nuclear explosions have been used quite a bit and they are not a significant radiation hazard. The geology of the area is presumably also fairly well understood. I wonder, though, if they even need a nuclear bomb. The drill hole is tiny compared to the 3 miles of rock it goes through. I would think even a conventional explosive placed some distance to the drill hole about a mile or so down into the rock might be enough to shift the rock and seal it off with little risk of making things worse. In any case, it's good to see people besides BP employees are on the case.
Google have repeatedly demonstrated some sketchy regard for privacy of others.
Google recorded open, unencrypted WiFi packets. Tons of tools do that. It's not an invasion of privacy.
However officially Google now admit to collecting snippets of payload data which is something they expressly ruled out in the original blog. They say this was a mistake...I have my doubts.
No, it wasn't a mistake, in the sense that the programmer who did it probably didn't think twice about it. Why wouldn't you record open, unencrypted WLAN packets?
I think there is a real difference between data that is public to your neighbors and then someone posting that data on a billboard in the the main street.
Google didn't post the packets that they collected. Even if they had, so what?
Clearly here is an example of data that is not private, in the public domain but is not intended to be distributed to strangers.
If our assumption becomes that data is private unless explicitly marked as public, democracy becomes impossible, because any scoundrel can evade public scrutiny by declaring their behavior to be private.
Privacy is pretty simple: if you don't want people to see what you're doing, don't do it in a public place.
and ensuring my network is buttoned up even tighter the ever.
You're a jerk for implying that Google has been trying to break into anybody's network. In fact, all you need to do as far as Google or anybody else is concerned is to indicate that your network is intended to be private. A minimum level of encryption is sufficient to do that. If you don't encrypt, don't complain if people listen.
causes that harm is exactly the same, whether we are discussing invasion of privacy
If you broadcast unencrypted transmission over your neighborhood, it's not an "invasion of privacy" if people listen in. If the default assumption were that all unencrypted transmission are private and the government can punish you for listening in, the consequence would be that nobody can make public broadcasts other than the government.
But presumably that fits your world view just fine: only the government can broadcast, only government media or licensed media outlets can take and publish photographs, etc. All communications need to be registered, de-anonymized, and potentially subject to legal review. Any private company or individual that tries to publish or listen outside the approved government channels will be punished, one way or another.
You've been trained to be a good little totalitarian by your government, and you don't even realize it. Stupidity like yours will kill democracy and liberty.
It's a long-standing principle that if you broadcast information publicly, other people can legitimately listen in. That's why Google Streetview (or anybody else) can legally take pictures of you in public, and why amateur radio and CB transmissions are not private. Trying to place restrictions on the recording of unencrypted wireless transmissions is wrong.
FWIW, the actions described would probably be criminal and carry jail time if they occurred in the UK (e.g., under the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006).
Then the UK law is wrong as well (hardly a surprise given their history).
most of the world is enlightened enough
Most of the world consists of undemocratic police states.
They captured a few packets from open WLANs as they were driving around. Lots of tools do that. European privacy regulators are using that to beat Google over the head with for political reason, nothing more.
Multitouch is significant to the mobile battle because it enables the use of gestures, which allows for sophisticated interactions on small devices
You don't need multitouch for gestures; in fact, gestures are an alternative to multitouch. And it's also not needed; even software on iPhone and iPad doesn't use multitouch consistently, with some applications only using it for scrolling, others only for zooming, and few applications supporting rotation or more complex gestures. Someone has had too much of Jobs's cool-aid.
And, besides, Apple didn't invent multitouch, and neither did the multitouch company they bought. What Apple did is what Apple always does: they pick some technology, try to get exclusive use of it somehow, and then hype it up, creating the impression that their products are unique and must-have devices.
You can see their m.o. illustrated nicely in their negotiations with Swype: they were quite interested in Swype when they thought they could get an exclusive deal and dropped it like a hot potato when it turned out they couldn't. Apple isn't about choosing the best technology, they are about choosing something that's different from everybody else and creating the belief that it is better through marketing.
The oil isn't mainly leaking from the drill hole, it's leaking from a pipe; that's why the flow rate is considerably lower than what the platform would have yielded. And the drill hole is not 5 ft in diameter anyway.
Furthermore, we're not talking about a thin layer of rock, we're talking about 3 miles of rock (under 1 mile of water). That's not going to just collapse because there's a small hole in it.
Yes, the oil spill is bad, and, yes, it will kill many animals. BP was careless and should be held responsible. And people should be prudent while stopping it. But it isn't the end of the world.
I think manned space exploration is a waste of money right now. We need to develop better propulsion systems first and work on space biology, and neither of those is going to be advanced cost-effectively by shooting people into space.
Projects like the Mars rover and Cassini have yielded enormous amounts of material. Let's blanket the moon, Mars, Titan, and asteroids with rovers and automated labs. Let's send gliders to Venus and the gas giants. Let's watch it all in HD stereo, create virtual worlds that allow 3D walkthroughs, etc.
Let's give schools, universities, and anybody who wants to pay a little money telepresence on the moon. Let's develop the robotic technology to prepare a moon base, and the propulsion technology to get to the outer planets fast.
In a few decades, manned exploration will be easy. But if we make it our focus now, all the science and engineering that we should be doing will be put on hold and we'll end up with the same situation that we have been in for the last half century: we may get a man to Mars, but we won't be able to do it again for a long time.
If you're going to punish people for things they do on the Internet, then holding operators of open WiFi spots liable is really the only logical consequence--otherwise you could rarely prosecute.
Germany is somewhat ahead of the curve since Germany effectively has no anonymous speech anyway as far as the government is concerned (phone, internet connections, etc. are all registered with the government). But the same kind of liability is likely going to start appearing in the US if we aren't careful.
It's the same thing with a lot of other dangerous things: nuclear materials, poison, explosives, etc.: you need to store them reasonably securely, both to prevent accidental use and to prevent theft.
There are some excellent IDEs for Python. They don't "come with" Python because they are big and somewhat platform dependent. Python IDEs that are useful for scientific work include Python(x,y), Sage, reInteract, and DrPython (you can find them on Google).
You're right that Python syntax is not perfectly adapted to scientific use, but I haven't found it to be a big deal. By being based on a general purpose language, however, you get a huge set of libraries that you simply can't get for MATLAB. And maybe Python will eventually adopt a couple more infix operators for common matrix operations.
I don't want to load 20 modules before I can begin coding. I just want to input my algorithm and get a result I expect
In the real world of scientific programming, that's often not enough. A lot of scientific software needs to collect data from instruments, parse, format, deal with databases, perform visualizations, present user interfaces to lab assistants, interface with foreign libraries, etc. It needs to be unit tested, regression tested, maintained, reused, refactored, etc. Scientific libraries often become big and complex with hundreds of modules and tons of name conflicts.
A language that just loads everything into a global environment and lets you code some matrix multiplications is fine for classroom use, and it's also fine for graduate students who come up with an algorithm, publish a paper, and move on. But that's not good enough for a lot of real-world scientific applications. Another big problem with MATLAB is its licensing and pricing (Octave and Freemat don't address that issue because they aren't fully MATLAB compatible, meaning many libraries just don't run in them).
As a VHLL, Python strikes a good balance between software engineering support and support for scientific programming. And its libraries have long surpassed MATLAB's, except for some specific domains. One could probably design an even better language for serious scientific programming than Python, but until someone does, people are likely going to stick with Python.
If MATLAB works for you, fine, stick with it. But don't presume based on your very limited needs to talk about what "scientific programming" is all about.
Nazi Germany was overwhelmingly Christian and voted to deprive non-Christians of their civil rights and later kill them; tyranny of the majority is not democracy.
The US Constitution has the non-establishment clause; you can vote as much as you want, it's not going away. You probably can't even eliminate it with a Constitutional amendment.
Few if any industries could withstand the theft of $51 billion worth of their products
I can think of one: mafia protection rackets. And they survive such rampant rip-offs of their products for pretty much the same reasons software companies like Microsoft do.
The seniors can pray all they want, wherever and whenever they want. But the organization providing the meals cannot ask them or encourage them to pray, and a lout group prayer is not acceptable either. The organization can hold a moment of silence during which everybody can pray or do whatever else they like.
Pray on your own time, not during federally funded events.
Terms don't just have dictionary definitions, they also have political, historical, and emotional significance. The term "liberal" has a specific political meaning when applied to someone nominated for the US supreme court justice.
Basically, if you insist that "fair use" is a "liberal" cause, you are hostile to fair use rights because you are trying to associate them with the left wing of the Democratic party, which doesn't have the power to defend such rights.
If you care about "fair use", then it's important to ensure that everybody understands that fair use rights are as much a conservative as a liberal cause.
So, tell me, which is it? Are you trying to kill fair use rights? Or are you such a pedant that you insist on reciting dictionary definitions even if it hurts your cause?
She is a US judge going for a political confirmation hearing. Of course, the term "liberal" has US political connotations. The word "liberal" in the US has the connotation of "libertine", and when journalists start describing people facing confirmation hearings that way, it's often an attempt to kill the confirmation.
(What "non-American speakers" think about her confirmation doesn't matter.)
Of course they are not, a number of the apps on the phone already run in the background. It's all about battery preservation and helping the user not have to manage tasks. It's about design, not technical ability.
Android is multi-tasking and there is nothing to "manage"; you switch to applications by tapping on their icons and they behave as if they are always running. Behind the scenes, the OS stops inactive tasks. And on Android, it's easy to see where the battery is going, and it is not multitasking, it's the screen and wireless. Furthermore, the iPhone doesn't get better battery life than other 3G smartphones.
In different words, Apple and Jobs are lying through their teeth.
Also, those examples are pretty fiddly
There's nothing "fiddly" about being able to sync music wirelessly to any server you want, or being able to share all your on-device files wirelessly with your laptop.
again the iPhone OS multitasking changes are about making 90%+ of desired multitasking uses possible
They're only "90%+" because iPhone users are so controlled by Apple that they don't even know what a smartphone should be able to do.
Hierarchical models of object recognition are decades old, as are attempts to implement them. This work doesn't yet work better than other engineering solutions, and it isn't obviously any more plausible than other approaches. So, it's a nice start, but it isn't a breakthrough.
I don't get it; are you trying to be sarcastic? In any case, some Flash games are free, some cost money. But the point is that they are not iPhone-specific and don't tie developers to the iPhone platform. If Flash games become predominant, then iPhone becomes just one of many platforms, and not a very competitive one. And making it easy to port Flash would alienate many of their current developers.
The big advantage iPhone has in many people's minds is that it has many apps that other platforms don't have. That's an advantage Apple wants to preserve. And that means keeping their current developers happy and forcing developers to invest extra money if they want to support platforms other than iPhone as well.
I think the iPhone 4G is going to have 960x640, which is twice the linear resolution of the original iPhone and matches the iFrame video format. Of course, the likely reason is that many iPhone apps aren't resolution independent and Apple wants a simple way of scaling up their existing apps. In that regard, iPhone is catching up with Android (nominally, surpassing it, but whether 960x640 is better than 800x480 on a 3" screen is debatable).
No, notifications haven't changed (I have both). There are lots of other UI problems on the iPhone. But the biggest differences are architecturally: Android makes it much easier to integrate apps. Android apps have barely scratched the surface, but you already see that in things like barcode readers and Facebook uploaders that are automatically consistent between multiple apps.
Actually my main problem with Android is that it uses Dalvik as its VM and not actual Java.
Yes, that does make it slower. But it also has advantages over Apple's use of native code. The differences are going to become unnoticeable as Android gets a JIT and as hardware gets faster.
Our phones are of similar age. His phone is more responsive.
All true, but not a practically relevant difference. In one or two generations, hardware is going to be so fast that this is going to be unnoticeable.
His virtual keyboard works better than mine.
It's faster, but whether it's more usable is debatable. And for Android, you can get third party keyboards, while with iPhone, you're stuck with Apple's fast-but-substandard virtual keyboard.
His selection of apps dwarf mine,
Yes, but many of the iPhone apps are poor clones of each other. And there are entire categories of apps missing from the iPhone store because Apple doesn't approve them.
and one more cool thing about iTunes is that all of the apps he can buy are listed in US dollars,
Yeah, but there are also lots of uncool things about iTunes, like the fact that some things, you simply can't do on the phone without plugging it into iTunes, and then there are the endless "Backing up" messages.
iPhone is like the original Mac: Jobs cut a lot of corners and messed up the architecture, but made it look pretty nonetheless. This time, however, we have a real, technically superior alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
However they did it 6 times and only succeeded 5 times doing that.
The Russians used it to extinguish gas, which sounds harder to me.
The only problem is that if it does NOT work or even makes the situation worse
Well, BP is interested in making money, the administration is interested in getting reelected, which gives me some confidence that they'll try to avoid making things worse. And they could still drill a relief well, as before.
I'm sorry, but I don't see a big problem with the "nuclear option". Underground nuclear explosions have been used quite a bit and they are not a significant radiation hazard. The geology of the area is presumably also fairly well understood. I wonder, though, if they even need a nuclear bomb. The drill hole is tiny compared to the 3 miles of rock it goes through. I would think even a conventional explosive placed some distance to the drill hole about a mile or so down into the rock might be enough to shift the rock and seal it off with little risk of making things worse. In any case, it's good to see people besides BP employees are on the case.
Google have repeatedly demonstrated some sketchy regard for privacy of others.
Google recorded open, unencrypted WiFi packets. Tons of tools do that. It's not an invasion of privacy.
However officially Google now admit to collecting snippets of payload data which is something they expressly ruled out in the original blog. They say this was a mistake...I have my doubts.
No, it wasn't a mistake, in the sense that the programmer who did it probably didn't think twice about it. Why wouldn't you record open, unencrypted WLAN packets?
I think there is a real difference between data that is public to your neighbors and then someone posting that data on a billboard in the the main street.
Google didn't post the packets that they collected. Even if they had, so what?
Clearly here is an example of data that is not private, in the public domain but is not intended to be distributed to strangers.
If our assumption becomes that data is private unless explicitly marked as public, democracy becomes impossible, because any scoundrel can evade public scrutiny by declaring their behavior to be private.
Privacy is pretty simple: if you don't want people to see what you're doing, don't do it in a public place.
and ensuring my network is buttoned up even tighter the ever.
You're a jerk for implying that Google has been trying to break into anybody's network. In fact, all you need to do as far as Google or anybody else is concerned is to indicate that your network is intended to be private. A minimum level of encryption is sufficient to do that. If you don't encrypt, don't complain if people listen.
causes that harm is exactly the same, whether we are discussing invasion of privacy
If you broadcast unencrypted transmission over your neighborhood, it's not an "invasion of privacy" if people listen in. If the default assumption were that all unencrypted transmission are private and the government can punish you for listening in, the consequence would be that nobody can make public broadcasts other than the government.
But presumably that fits your world view just fine: only the government can broadcast, only government media or licensed media outlets can take and publish photographs, etc. All communications need to be registered, de-anonymized, and potentially subject to legal review. Any private company or individual that tries to publish or listen outside the approved government channels will be punished, one way or another.
You've been trained to be a good little totalitarian by your government, and you don't even realize it. Stupidity like yours will kill democracy and liberty.
It's a long-standing principle that if you broadcast information publicly, other people can legitimately listen in. That's why Google Streetview (or anybody else) can legally take pictures of you in public, and why amateur radio and CB transmissions are not private. Trying to place restrictions on the recording of unencrypted wireless transmissions is wrong.
FWIW, the actions described would probably be criminal and carry jail time if they occurred in the UK (e.g., under the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006).
Then the UK law is wrong as well (hardly a surprise given their history).
most of the world is enlightened enough
Most of the world consists of undemocratic police states.
They captured a few packets from open WLANs as they were driving around. Lots of tools do that. European privacy regulators are using that to beat Google over the head with for political reason, nothing more.
You don't need multitouch for gestures; in fact, gestures are an alternative to multitouch. And it's also not needed; even software on iPhone and iPad doesn't use multitouch consistently, with some applications only using it for scrolling, others only for zooming, and few applications supporting rotation or more complex gestures. Someone has had too much of Jobs's cool-aid.
And, besides, Apple didn't invent multitouch, and neither did the multitouch company they bought. What Apple did is what Apple always does: they pick some technology, try to get exclusive use of it somehow, and then hype it up, creating the impression that their products are unique and must-have devices.
You can see their m.o. illustrated nicely in their negotiations with Swype: they were quite interested in Swype when they thought they could get an exclusive deal and dropped it like a hot potato when it turned out they couldn't. Apple isn't about choosing the best technology, they are about choosing something that's different from everybody else and creating the belief that it is better through marketing.
The oil isn't mainly leaking from the drill hole, it's leaking from a pipe; that's why the flow rate is considerably lower than what the platform would have yielded. And the drill hole is not 5 ft in diameter anyway.
Furthermore, we're not talking about a thin layer of rock, we're talking about 3 miles of rock (under 1 mile of water). That's not going to just collapse because there's a small hole in it.
Yes, the oil spill is bad, and, yes, it will kill many animals. BP was careless and should be held responsible. And people should be prudent while stopping it. But it isn't the end of the world.
I think manned space exploration is a waste of money right now. We need to develop better propulsion systems first and work on space biology, and neither of those is going to be advanced cost-effectively by shooting people into space.
Projects like the Mars rover and Cassini have yielded enormous amounts of material. Let's blanket the moon, Mars, Titan, and asteroids with rovers and automated labs. Let's send gliders to Venus and the gas giants. Let's watch it all in HD stereo, create virtual worlds that allow 3D walkthroughs, etc.
Let's give schools, universities, and anybody who wants to pay a little money telepresence on the moon. Let's develop the robotic technology to prepare a moon base, and the propulsion technology to get to the outer planets fast.
In a few decades, manned exploration will be easy. But if we make it our focus now, all the science and engineering that we should be doing will be put on hold and we'll end up with the same situation that we have been in for the last half century: we may get a man to Mars, but we won't be able to do it again for a long time.
If you're going to punish people for things they do on the Internet, then holding operators of open WiFi spots liable is really the only logical consequence--otherwise you could rarely prosecute.
Germany is somewhat ahead of the curve since Germany effectively has no anonymous speech anyway as far as the government is concerned (phone, internet connections, etc. are all registered with the government). But the same kind of liability is likely going to start appearing in the US if we aren't careful.
You wouldn't be charged for "aiding" a criminal (which requires intent), but you might be liable for negligent entrustment:
http://injury.findlaw.com/defective-dangerous-products/defective-dangerous-products-law/firearms(1).html
It's the same thing with a lot of other dangerous things: nuclear materials, poison, explosives, etc.: you need to store them reasonably securely, both to prevent accidental use and to prevent theft.
There are some excellent IDEs for Python. They don't "come with" Python because they are big and somewhat platform dependent. Python IDEs that are useful for scientific work include Python(x,y), Sage, reInteract, and DrPython (you can find them on Google).
You're right that Python syntax is not perfectly adapted to scientific use, but I haven't found it to be a big deal. By being based on a general purpose language, however, you get a huge set of libraries that you simply can't get for MATLAB. And maybe Python will eventually adopt a couple more infix operators for common matrix operations.
I don't want to load 20 modules before I can begin coding. I just want to input my algorithm and get a result I expect
In the real world of scientific programming, that's often not enough. A lot of scientific software needs to collect data from instruments, parse, format, deal with databases, perform visualizations, present user interfaces to lab assistants, interface with foreign libraries, etc. It needs to be unit tested, regression tested, maintained, reused, refactored, etc. Scientific libraries often become big and complex with hundreds of modules and tons of name conflicts.
A language that just loads everything into a global environment and lets you code some matrix multiplications is fine for classroom use, and it's also fine for graduate students who come up with an algorithm, publish a paper, and move on. But that's not good enough for a lot of real-world scientific applications. Another big problem with MATLAB is its licensing and pricing (Octave and Freemat don't address that issue because they aren't fully MATLAB compatible, meaning many libraries just don't run in them).
As a VHLL, Python strikes a good balance between software engineering support and support for scientific programming. And its libraries have long surpassed MATLAB's, except for some specific domains. One could probably design an even better language for serious scientific programming than Python, but until someone does, people are likely going to stick with Python.
If MATLAB works for you, fine, stick with it. But don't presume based on your very limited needs to talk about what "scientific programming" is all about.
It is very simple to solve this democratically.
Nazi Germany was overwhelmingly Christian and voted to deprive non-Christians of their civil rights and later kill them; tyranny of the majority is not democracy.
The US Constitution has the non-establishment clause; you can vote as much as you want, it's not going away. You probably can't even eliminate it with a Constitutional amendment.
Few if any industries could withstand the theft of $51 billion worth of their products
I can think of one: mafia protection rackets. And they survive such rampant rip-offs of their products for pretty much the same reasons software companies like Microsoft do.
The seniors can pray all they want, wherever and whenever they want. But the organization providing the meals cannot ask them or encourage them to pray, and a lout group prayer is not acceptable either. The organization can hold a moment of silence during which everybody can pray or do whatever else they like.
Pray on your own time, not during federally funded events.
Terms don't just have dictionary definitions, they also have political, historical, and emotional significance. The term "liberal" has a specific political meaning when applied to someone nominated for the US supreme court justice.
Basically, if you insist that "fair use" is a "liberal" cause, you are hostile to fair use rights because you are trying to associate them with the left wing of the Democratic party, which doesn't have the power to defend such rights.
If you care about "fair use", then it's important to ensure that everybody understands that fair use rights are as much a conservative as a liberal cause.
So, tell me, which is it? Are you trying to kill fair use rights? Or are you such a pedant that you insist on reciting dictionary definitions even if it hurts your cause?
She is a US judge going for a political confirmation hearing. Of course, the term "liberal" has US political connotations. The word "liberal" in the US has the connotation of "libertine", and when journalists start describing people facing confirmation hearings that way, it's often an attempt to kill the confirmation.
(What "non-American speakers" think about her confirmation doesn't matter.)
Of course they are not, a number of the apps on the phone already run in the background. It's all about battery preservation and helping the user not have to manage tasks. It's about design, not technical ability.
Android is multi-tasking and there is nothing to "manage"; you switch to applications by tapping on their icons and they behave as if they are always running. Behind the scenes, the OS stops inactive tasks. And on Android, it's easy to see where the battery is going, and it is not multitasking, it's the screen and wireless. Furthermore, the iPhone doesn't get better battery life than other 3G smartphones.
In different words, Apple and Jobs are lying through their teeth.
Also, those examples are pretty fiddly
There's nothing "fiddly" about being able to sync music wirelessly to any server you want, or being able to share all your on-device files wirelessly with your laptop.
again the iPhone OS multitasking changes are about making 90%+ of desired multitasking uses possible
They're only "90%+" because iPhone users are so controlled by Apple that they don't even know what a smartphone should be able to do.
The safe harbor only applies to sites that don't actually publish anything! How could we have been so stupid not to realize that!
Hierarchical models of object recognition are decades old, as are attempts to implement them. This work doesn't yet work better than other engineering solutions, and it isn't obviously any more plausible than other approaches. So, it's a nice start, but it isn't a breakthrough.
I don't see what's "liberal" about fair use.
I think people should stop trying to shoe-horn every single issue into a liberal/conservative spectrum.
I don't get it; are you trying to be sarcastic? In any case, some Flash games are free, some cost money. But the point is that they are not iPhone-specific and don't tie developers to the iPhone platform. If Flash games become predominant, then iPhone becomes just one of many platforms, and not a very competitive one. And making it easy to port Flash would alienate many of their current developers.
The big advantage iPhone has in many people's minds is that it has many apps that other platforms don't have. That's an advantage Apple wants to preserve. And that means keeping their current developers happy and forcing developers to invest extra money if they want to support platforms other than iPhone as well.
I think the iPhone 4G is going to have 960x640, which is twice the linear resolution of the original iPhone and matches the iFrame video format. Of course, the likely reason is that many iPhone apps aren't resolution independent and Apple wants a simple way of scaling up their existing apps. In that regard, iPhone is catching up with Android (nominally, surpassing it, but whether 960x640 is better than 800x480 on a 3" screen is debatable).
No, notifications haven't changed (I have both). There are lots of other UI problems on the iPhone. But the biggest differences are architecturally: Android makes it much easier to integrate apps. Android apps have barely scratched the surface, but you already see that in things like barcode readers and Facebook uploaders that are automatically consistent between multiple apps.
Actually my main problem with Android is that it uses Dalvik as its VM and not actual Java.
Yes, that does make it slower. But it also has advantages over Apple's use of native code. The differences are going to become unnoticeable as Android gets a JIT and as hardware gets faster.
Our phones are of similar age. His phone is more responsive.
All true, but not a practically relevant difference. In one or two generations, hardware is going to be so fast that this is going to be unnoticeable.
His virtual keyboard works better than mine.
It's faster, but whether it's more usable is debatable. And for Android, you can get third party keyboards, while with iPhone, you're stuck with Apple's fast-but-substandard virtual keyboard.
His selection of apps dwarf mine,
Yes, but many of the iPhone apps are poor clones of each other. And there are entire categories of apps missing from the iPhone store because Apple doesn't approve them.
and one more cool thing about iTunes is that all of the apps he can buy are listed in US dollars,
Yeah, but there are also lots of uncool things about iTunes, like the fact that some things, you simply can't do on the phone without plugging it into iTunes, and then there are the endless "Backing up" messages.
iPhone is like the original Mac: Jobs cut a lot of corners and messed up the architecture, but made it look pretty nonetheless. This time, however, we have a real, technically superior alternative.