However, it needs to sync with Exchange notes. No obvious reason it couldn't, they only mention sync via itunes. We use a lot of notes in our work that are updated frequently (who to call for x so you don't have to call the help desk, etc...)
The thing is advertised on national TV frequently, and half the bus stops in town have a MBA ad on them. It's been covered in the national press, etc... I understand if this was an obscure machine from an obscure manufacturer, but this is Apple. It seems like some of the fellow passengers could also have pointed out the same thing... The lack of ports thing seems a tad ridiculous, since all you have to do is flip down the door, and many PC laptops have little doors over their ports... I have no idea what a SDD looks like on XRAY, so it may look like a block of C4. All that being said, who shows up that close to a flight and is surprised that he didn't make it (I mean the line could have been longer for goodness sake, would he have blogged about that?)...
as mentioned above, if you had read the whole transcript, at the end the press asked the not-using-itunes question specifically, and schiller said that there would be an in-house solution (admittedly he did not elaborate, but it is likely still under development).
It's true my "n=1" is not a valid statistical sample, but merely an anecdotal example. And yes homeschooling in the 80's was pretty crude, and it seems the definition of home schooled is changing (seems some really are just alternative schools run by non-professional teachers at homes in smaller groups of kids, which to me seems like a very small private school under a different name)
Homeschooling is a poor choice because homeschoolers end up only socializing with people like them and so they can't deal with people who are different from them I was not making the point of relating to adults, as that is a different skill set (and in fact is not something that one learns in school anyway, as the adult/child relationship in a school is weirdly authoritarian [the point of the OP]) but rather relating to peers who are very different from you. Relating to adults is a skill taught by parents to children during growing up (or as many have commented "should be taught").
It is hard to believe a home schooled child would have exposure to people from many countries and cultures as well as socioeconomic backgrounds (unless you have bussing to your house). We live in a suburb, but inner city kids are bussed to the school, as well as immigrants who have settled locally. About 1/2 of my kids' friends are 1st generation americans (many with English as the second language), varied religions (I at least can count Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Russian orthodox, Buddhist, Muslim and Shinto off the top of my head), white, black, latino and asian and span very rich to poor and in fact my kids think this is a totally normal situation, and have learned to see past culture and socioeconomic status to the child within (not that this can't be done with a very large effort from home schooling parents, but it's a stretch).
Homeschooling is a poor choice because it produces people who are too different from us and we can't relate to them
The point of the "us" is that the us is a "melting pot" rather than a homogenous "us" which really is point 1 above.
One thing they do not get is a large exposure to diversity (unless you as the parent artificially bring it in). In college in the 80's we had a person in our suite that had been home schooled up through high school. We were the first Jews, Blacks, Gays, non-americans, etc... he had ever met. His total exposure had been white-christians at his home. Now he was plenty smart academically, but couldn't carry on a cultural conversation for some time; in trying to have religious discussions, social debates, etc he came up empty since everything he knew came from a book (if he had read anything at all). His total reference to jews was from the old testament. Also the social faux-pas were embarrassing, making us less likely to bring him along on social events.
You're right that not having TV's, etc may help and not being totally commercialized may seem to be a plus, until you try to talk with other people. We can all bemoan the dependency of high-culture, but seriously, if you can't have a common frame of reference with other people in the room, you can get ostracized pretty quickly. All in all, I think the plusses outweigh the minuses on community schooling (not necessarily public schools, I am including private schools as well, as in some places public schools are appalling).
It can bridge the caronas (see eagles in the western US) and if this is a high-tension line (such as 400kv+) and you bridge the caronas, you get a spectacular arc (and UAV vapor). In the midwest you will see towers with bird platforms on top to try and prevent this, as a bald eagle may have a up to a 2 meter wignspan. The distance is related to the voltage and wignspan. For "low" voltage lines that go around the neighborhood, there are often twisted together, so it is possible to encounter both conductors, but they should be insulated from each other.
There are life rafts on the aircraft as well. The ramps can detach to form flotation rafts. Agree that they are not great rafts, and I wouldn't want to go in the north atlantic with one, but in rescue diver training I did ride on a detached ramp in a half frozen lagoon (in a dry suit of course) and it was remarkable in its stability and weight carrying capacity. They now even sell them detached from an airplane as instant docks for rescue (picture a box with the ramp and gas cylinder which dumps all the gas in a few seconds to inflate the thing [can't remember the brand name]). You could walk around on the thing. This might buy you an hour or 2 (depending on ambient temperature, but if you are dressed and dry you can go much longer in cold), wet you're dead as you mentioned.
Centralizing is often highly-advantageous in health care, because you need the records RIGHT NOW and the patients are allowed to go to any VA medical center in the country. I had a VA patient who lost his medications from Alaska while on vacation on the east coast, and I was able to retrieve his medication list push to our clinic's pharmacy in minutes, but it took 5 minutes to pull his records. Now I know most folks laugh, that 5 minutes is considered a long time, but anyone who works in a very busy walk-in clinic where you see patients every 15 minutes, realizes that a 5 minute hit is a giant wrench in to the works.
You also need to realize that these system use a hierarchical database for speed, so "joins" are much more complicated after the fact, than simply centralizing onto regional servers. Also regionalization is how the VA works as well with local integrated delivery networks (sort of hub-and-spoke with clinics, small and large medical centers) where the patients are often going between institutions in the region.
I recently left the VA system, and have to say their system is better than almost anyone else's, and has a similar failure rate to those at other institutions; as someone pointed out, it is just that this makes bigger press. In general there are very few health systems which have a single pervasive medical record of this scale (heck most places don't have electronic medical records at all) such as Kaiser Permanente here in the US, and the NHS in the UK, so these stories seem all the more spectacular since they are so rare.
Many network IT folks just understand how to change settings on routers (what you learn to do in a "certification" course on a router) and understanding networking. Networking is more than just some router settings, and understanding the organic interdependent flowing nature of a network is critical to debugging problems. Just knowing something is causing a problem, and blaming the most recent change as the cause (as opposed to some underlying problem that this change simply brings to light). A senior IT official should, even if he doesn't know the exact problem, know that weird entworking problems are often way more complex than they seem, and should not jump to knee-jerk conclusions (especially based on some 1994 anti-mac bias about networking)
...except the drivers for OEM boards may be different than the ones that ship from the vendor to consumers. There are many apple drivers (which ship with the OS) for boards that ship with the machines, which do not work on consumer boards and vice-versa. It is completely appropriate to go to apple for this. One could take your argument further in either analogy: if your antilock brakes fail, do you go back to Bosch or Ford? if your cpu fries in your mac pro do you go back to apple or intel... In your car, there is often a seperate warranty on tires (at least my honda came with a bridgestone warranty card). If apple includes a seperate warranty for the nvidia card, then the presumption is that it belongs to nvidia, without it, it is just another subcomponent of the computer made by a subcontractor for apple.
Again this is "pre-alpha" announcing in/,. speak. The technique certainly sounds like it is based on sound science, but that doesn't mean it works. This has been tried essentially on a sheet of cells in a dish. The problem is there isn't a liver to fail or heart to get myocarditis or blood to clot, etc... The complexity of a whole organism is staggering and the interactions are impossible to predict without testing in vivo. The other problem is long-term effects. As we discovered (most famously with hormone replacement in women or Vioxx) many times that a seeming "cure" often has long term effects which can be worse than the cure (and yes there are worse things than cancer - Cancer with heart failure from your chemo for instance). We have learned to proceed cautiously (a blue screen of death in medicine, is generally draped over the corpse rather than appearing on your monitor).
I do work in the health care industry (I am a practicing physician) and the parent post is absolutely correct. I fact I will expand that the primary problem is that "Cancer" is not one thing, but a collection of many, many diseases each with unique biological pathways. It is remarkable how resistant many cancers are to even In-Vitro killing, let alone In-Vivo killing. Remember we are essentially giving poisons (whether direct poisons, immunologic or genetic inhibitors) which go after slightly altered human cells, without killing "good" cells. Anyone who works with oncology patients knows that every day we read about "miracle" meds for a given cancer, which later cause horrible long-term (or short-term) side effects which are worse than the disease.
Everyone who is whining FUD about there being a money grubbing axis of evil, clearly doesn't work in the real world. Having been completely federal grant funded for 2 years at a university, I can tell you, the lights don't stay on by themselves, the phone bills don't get paid, failed trials still cost the same as succesful ones... Even "non-profit" organizations can't lose money continously (and grants are being slashed every day), especially when conducting trials which can take years to conduct and hundreds of millions to complete. I'm not saying big-pharma is the least bit altruistic (and yes, they would sell their grandmother in a heartbeat) but since we don't live in the era of star-trek-the-next-generation where poverty has apparently been eliminated, and work and funding is apparently universal, one must make money to stay in business.
There is not a conspiracy for chemotherapeutic drugs to hold-down cures (as those would be the "new" drugs for sale by big pharma if they became useful therapies), but a conspiracy by cancer cells to continue living despite our best efforts. I have heard the same FUD about big-pharma sitting on miracle antibiotics, but in truth those would be huge sellers, it's just that bacteria have gotten very good at living over the last several billion years.
Re:Not a resource they can download and process?
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HTML Encoded Captchas
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I tested it on my core-duo mac mini (with the crappy IMA graphics) in Safari and it was essentially instant. I will admit it was over FIOS so download speed was 15mbit, but it didn't slow down at all.
I happily watch 1080i over DVI and over component all the time. No reason you can't do this without HDMI. HDMI does offer additional advantages, but 1080i is not one of them.
Actually the Bells already had to lug telephone cable out to the XK Ranch on old dirt road #1, while the cable companies rarely had to if the person was far from a public right of way. The cable companies also got relatively unrestricted access to offer phone (for instance they were under very few of the restrictions that the bells were for their phone service) and directly compete against the bells, without the bells being able to offer tv in return.
I have very little sympathy for the large cable companies (in my town we have 3 providers of all services comcast, RCN and Verizon). This is not david vs. goliath, as comcast is a huge corporation as well. Verizon ran fiber all the way to my house when I called, their FIOS tv is cheaper than comcast was, the broadband is faster, and their customer service was better, so I switched. Comcast could have cared enough to fix the cable draped over my back fence and across my backyard for months (oh, they're supposed to be underground?), but they didn't despite repeated calls (including 1 to the utilities board); when my fios had problems verizon was more than happy to come out, so I changed; I didn't feel forced to by some evil monopoly.
How about making a chemical bomb on a plane? Much simpler, and can still kill everyone on the plane (let's thank recirculating ventilation systems for that). How about a bottle of good old chlorine bleach and ammonia? 2 guys could sit across the isle from each other, pour their bottles onto the floor together in a puddle and give everyone a nice dose of gas... A few guys doing that would probably overwhelm the ventilations system before the cockpit could turn up the recirculation (kept down for efficiency). It might not get the pilots, but would certainly hurt a bunch of passengers in the mean time. A few changes to the mix, and voila even hydrazine...
Heck just pouring fuming nitric acid or hydroflouric on the floor would be horrible enough. We don't need explosives in a contained space with limited ventilation.
My DVD player (a higher end Sony) has SACD as well (of course not DVD-Audio also, why converge?). I was going to try it out, back when I bought it, until I discovered that due to copy concerns the SACD only worked over 6 ANALOG CABLES!!! So let me get this straight, my video DVD's will come through on the digital link to my receiver, but if I shove a SACD in, I have to switch inputs (even though it's the same device with essentially the same media [yes I know, just making a point]) but it won't play the same way... And I have a large bundle of cables now, instead of one elegant fiber-optic cable. I know some of the newer players can do it all over digital, but it's too little too late...
Re:There is also a MySQL Cookbook
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SQL Cookbook
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The nice thing about the MySQL cookbook, is they demostrate database recipes from the major web programming CGI languages (not exhaustive, please don't flame) such as Python, Java, PHP and PERL (and shell scripts for that matter) which is a handy quick reference, when I forget how to do basic connectivity in the language I haven't used in a while... I don't need this for day-to-day programming in MySQL, but when the recipe fits, it is generally a huge time saver (like database validating of email or URL, or XML to MySQL connectivity)...
Apple used to use IBM chips for their CPU's while competing against IBM in the desktop and laptop markets, they have also used Sony components while competing in the MP3 and computer markets. These large corporations are heavily segmented (the chip business is often a seperate business unit from the consumer product devisions) so this is not as crazy as it seems.
Uh, what if the music industry stopped making CD's and switched to holographic cubes or something. Although this wouldn't immediately invalidate your CD's (just like you can still play records/tapes), but the consumer electronics industry would switch production, and your entire music collection would become "obsolete". New music would only be produced after a switchover period on the new media/format. This is exactly what happened with tapes. Yes you can still get cassette players, (and for some reason my car which has a DVD and CD player still came with one!), they are hardly the forefront of music, and little new is being released on tape. You had to repurchase anything you used to have (or suffer on the old media).
According to the apple page: AirTunes ReadyiPod Hi-Fi is the ideal speaker system for AirTunes. To ensure optimum sound quality, simply connect it to an AirPort Express with a digital optical audio cable(1). The music is then sent from iTunes on your computer over the network to the iPod Hi-Fi using only digital signals. Control your music from the computer in your den, but enjoy the sounds anywhere else in the house.
yeah, no kidding, using this logic it's anything with an audio out compatible. I totally agree, that integrating a airtunes (wired & wireless) into the box would have been sweet.
I actually question this, missles fired from a supersonic jet, which are often super/hypersonic (such as a 3+ mach pheonix missle, or 2+ mach sidewinder, etc...) is itself a precision guided weapon (forget that it is designed to hit an air target, that's just software). Or the HARM missle can be launched at supersonic speed, which hits ground targets. I assume there is a limit to how fast you can hang objects out in the slipstream, before you tear the mounts off or cause too much drag for the jet, but the weapons themselves probably don't have a problem being started at supersonic speeds.
You are probably right that unguided weapons may have trouble launching at those speeds, but guided propelled weapons shouldn't. Any munitions engineers have an opinion?
Most computer companies have specific price points. Apple always charges the same amount for a specific level of machine. It's what you get at that price point. If you look at prices over the last several years, the professional desktop's (3 levels) haven't changed prices, just the speed and memory, etc... The same it true in the laptops. Dell, etc. do the same thing (although they have more models so can span a greater gamut of prices), and their XPS is the same price as the one I bought in the office last year (just better).
The key to these studies, which we teach all the residents and medical students, is that you have to look at the incidence of liver disease (especially when they specifically excluded viral hepatitis which is the overwhelming majority) in the population. If the incidence is one in 100,000 and you get a 50% reduction (sounds impressive) you only change it to 1 in 200,000. This is why pharmaceutical firms use the relative risk (ignoring incidence, just using the percentage) in advertising.
The incidence of liver disease among non-hepatitis infected people is incredibly small. If you take all comers it is 12th among cause of death (lower than suicde) according to the NIH (pdf of causes of death).
Because even if the result is statistically significant, if not that many people die of it (~2500 in 2003), then the harm caused by this drug (caffine) may not outway the rare case it saves (and yes, I understand if you're the one it is significant, but this is public health)
For instance "Zipia reduces aliens ripping out of your abdomen by 99%" sounds very impressive, until you look at how many people this would affect (there were the 4 alien movies plus spaceballs). So everyone should not start using zipia, which undoubtably will cause some bad side effect, versus those few actors who would be saved.
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However, it needs to sync with Exchange notes. No obvious reason it couldn't, they only mention sync via itunes. We use a lot of notes in our work that are updated frequently (who to call for x so you don't have to call the help desk, etc...)
The thing is advertised on national TV frequently, and half the bus stops in town have a MBA ad on them. It's been covered in the national press, etc... I understand if this was an obscure machine from an obscure manufacturer, but this is Apple. It seems like some of the fellow passengers could also have pointed out the same thing... The lack of ports thing seems a tad ridiculous, since all you have to do is flip down the door, and many PC laptops have little doors over their ports... I have no idea what a SDD looks like on XRAY, so it may look like a block of C4. All that being said, who shows up that close to a flight and is surprised that he didn't make it (I mean the line could have been longer for goodness sake, would he have blogged about that?)...
as mentioned above, if you had read the whole transcript, at the end the press asked the not-using-itunes question specifically, and schiller said that there would be an in-house solution (admittedly he did not elaborate, but it is likely still under development).
Homeschooling is a poor choice because homeschoolers end up only socializing with people like them and so they can't deal with people who are different from them
I was not making the point of relating to adults, as that is a different skill set (and in fact is not something that one learns in school anyway, as the adult/child relationship in a school is weirdly authoritarian [the point of the OP]) but rather relating to peers who are very different from you. Relating to adults is a skill taught by parents to children during growing up (or as many have commented "should be taught").
It is hard to believe a home schooled child would have exposure to people from many countries and cultures as well as socioeconomic backgrounds (unless you have bussing to your house). We live in a suburb, but inner city kids are bussed to the school, as well as immigrants who have settled locally. About 1/2 of my kids' friends are 1st generation americans (many with English as the second language), varied religions (I at least can count Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Russian orthodox, Buddhist, Muslim and Shinto off the top of my head), white, black, latino and asian and span very rich to poor and in fact my kids think this is a totally normal situation, and have learned to see past culture and socioeconomic status to the child within (not that this can't be done with a very large effort from home schooling parents, but it's a stretch).
Homeschooling is a poor choice because it produces people who are too different from us and we can't relate to themThe point of the "us" is that the us is a "melting pot" rather than a homogenous "us" which really is point 1 above.
One thing they do not get is a large exposure to diversity (unless you as the parent artificially bring it in). In college in the 80's we had a person in our suite that had been home schooled up through high school. We were the first Jews, Blacks, Gays, non-americans, etc... he had ever met. His total exposure had been white-christians at his home. Now he was plenty smart academically, but couldn't carry on a cultural conversation for some time; in trying to have religious discussions, social debates, etc he came up empty since everything he knew came from a book (if he had read anything at all). His total reference to jews was from the old testament. Also the social faux-pas were embarrassing, making us less likely to bring him along on social events.
You're right that not having TV's, etc may help and not being totally commercialized may seem to be a plus, until you try to talk with other people. We can all bemoan the dependency of high-culture, but seriously, if you can't have a common frame of reference with other people in the room, you can get ostracized pretty quickly. All in all, I think the plusses outweigh the minuses on community schooling (not necessarily public schools, I am including private schools as well, as in some places public schools are appalling).
It can bridge the caronas (see eagles in the western US) and if this is a high-tension line (such as 400kv+) and you bridge the caronas, you get a spectacular arc (and UAV vapor). In the midwest you will see towers with bird platforms on top to try and prevent this, as a bald eagle may have a up to a 2 meter wignspan. The distance is related to the voltage and wignspan. For "low" voltage lines that go around the neighborhood, there are often twisted together, so it is possible to encounter both conductors, but they should be insulated from each other.
There are life rafts on the aircraft as well. The ramps can detach to form flotation rafts. Agree that they are not great rafts, and I wouldn't want to go in the north atlantic with one, but in rescue diver training I did ride on a detached ramp in a half frozen lagoon (in a dry suit of course) and it was remarkable in its stability and weight carrying capacity. They now even sell them detached from an airplane as instant docks for rescue (picture a box with the ramp and gas cylinder which dumps all the gas in a few seconds to inflate the thing [can't remember the brand name]). You could walk around on the thing. This might buy you an hour or 2 (depending on ambient temperature, but if you are dressed and dry you can go much longer in cold), wet you're dead as you mentioned.
You also need to realize that these system use a hierarchical database for speed, so "joins" are much more complicated after the fact, than simply centralizing onto regional servers. Also regionalization is how the VA works as well with local integrated delivery networks (sort of hub-and-spoke with clinics, small and large medical centers) where the patients are often going between institutions in the region.
I recently left the VA system, and have to say their system is better than almost anyone else's, and has a similar failure rate to those at other institutions; as someone pointed out, it is just that this makes bigger press. In general there are very few health systems which have a single pervasive medical record of this scale (heck most places don't have electronic medical records at all) such as Kaiser Permanente here in the US, and the NHS in the UK, so these stories seem all the more spectacular since they are so rare.
Many network IT folks just understand how to change settings on routers (what you learn to do in a "certification" course on a router) and understanding networking. Networking is more than just some router settings, and understanding the organic interdependent flowing nature of a network is critical to debugging problems. Just knowing something is causing a problem, and blaming the most recent change as the cause (as opposed to some underlying problem that this change simply brings to light). A senior IT official should, even if he doesn't know the exact problem, know that weird entworking problems are often way more complex than they seem, and should not jump to knee-jerk conclusions (especially based on some 1994 anti-mac bias about networking)
...except the drivers for OEM boards may be different than the ones that ship from the vendor to consumers. There are many apple drivers (which ship with the OS) for boards that ship with the machines, which do not work on consumer boards and vice-versa. It is completely appropriate to go to apple for this. One could take your argument further in either analogy: if your antilock brakes fail, do you go back to Bosch or Ford? if your cpu fries in your mac pro do you go back to apple or intel... In your car, there is often a seperate warranty on tires (at least my honda came with a bridgestone warranty card). If apple includes a seperate warranty for the nvidia card, then the presumption is that it belongs to nvidia, without it, it is just another subcomponent of the computer made by a subcontractor for apple.
Again this is "pre-alpha" announcing in /,. speak. The technique certainly sounds like it is based on sound science, but that doesn't mean it works. This has been tried essentially on a sheet of cells in a dish. The problem is there isn't a liver to fail or heart to get myocarditis or blood to clot, etc... The complexity of a whole organism is staggering and the interactions are impossible to predict without testing in vivo. The other problem is long-term effects. As we discovered (most famously with hormone replacement in women or Vioxx) many times that a seeming "cure" often has long term effects which can be worse than the cure (and yes there are worse things than cancer - Cancer with heart failure from your chemo for instance). We have learned to proceed cautiously (a blue screen of death in medicine, is generally draped over the corpse rather than appearing on your monitor).
Everyone who is whining FUD about there being a money grubbing axis of evil, clearly doesn't work in the real world. Having been completely federal grant funded for 2 years at a university, I can tell you, the lights don't stay on by themselves, the phone bills don't get paid, failed trials still cost the same as succesful ones... Even "non-profit" organizations can't lose money continously (and grants are being slashed every day), especially when conducting trials which can take years to conduct and hundreds of millions to complete. I'm not saying big-pharma is the least bit altruistic (and yes, they would sell their grandmother in a heartbeat) but since we don't live in the era of star-trek-the-next-generation where poverty has apparently been eliminated, and work and funding is apparently universal, one must make money to stay in business.
There is not a conspiracy for chemotherapeutic drugs to hold-down cures (as those would be the "new" drugs for sale by big pharma if they became useful therapies), but a conspiracy by cancer cells to continue living despite our best efforts. I have heard the same FUD about big-pharma sitting on miracle antibiotics, but in truth those would be huge sellers, it's just that bacteria have gotten very good at living over the last several billion years.
I tested it on my core-duo mac mini (with the crappy IMA graphics) in Safari and it was essentially instant. I will admit it was over FIOS so download speed was 15mbit, but it didn't slow down at all.
I happily watch 1080i over DVI and over component all the time. No reason you can't do this without HDMI. HDMI does offer additional advantages, but 1080i is not one of them.
I have very little sympathy for the large cable companies (in my town we have 3 providers of all services comcast, RCN and Verizon). This is not david vs. goliath, as comcast is a huge corporation as well. Verizon ran fiber all the way to my house when I called, their FIOS tv is cheaper than comcast was, the broadband is faster, and their customer service was better, so I switched. Comcast could have cared enough to fix the cable draped over my back fence and across my backyard for months (oh, they're supposed to be underground?), but they didn't despite repeated calls (including 1 to the utilities board); when my fios had problems verizon was more than happy to come out, so I changed; I didn't feel forced to by some evil monopoly.
Heck just pouring fuming nitric acid or hydroflouric on the floor would be horrible enough. We don't need explosives in a contained space with limited ventilation.
My DVD player (a higher end Sony) has SACD as well (of course not DVD-Audio also, why converge?). I was going to try it out, back when I bought it, until I discovered that due to copy concerns the SACD only worked over 6 ANALOG CABLES!!! So let me get this straight, my video DVD's will come through on the digital link to my receiver, but if I shove a SACD in, I have to switch inputs (even though it's the same device with essentially the same media [yes I know, just making a point]) but it won't play the same way... And I have a large bundle of cables now, instead of one elegant fiber-optic cable. I know some of the newer players can do it all over digital, but it's too little too late...
The nice thing about the MySQL cookbook, is they demostrate database recipes from the major web programming CGI languages (not exhaustive, please don't flame) such as Python, Java, PHP and PERL (and shell scripts for that matter) which is a handy quick reference, when I forget how to do basic connectivity in the language I haven't used in a while... I don't need this for day-to-day programming in MySQL, but when the recipe fits, it is generally a huge time saver (like database validating of email or URL, or XML to MySQL connectivity)...
Because they used the old Apple PowerBook 540 batteries from the mid nineties which got really hot and burned...
Apple used to use IBM chips for their CPU's while competing against IBM in the desktop and laptop markets, they have also used Sony components while competing in the MP3 and computer markets. These large corporations are heavily segmented (the chip business is often a seperate business unit from the consumer product devisions) so this is not as crazy as it seems.
Uh, what if the music industry stopped making CD's and switched to holographic cubes or something. Although this wouldn't immediately invalidate your CD's (just like you can still play records/tapes), but the consumer electronics industry would switch production, and your entire music collection would become "obsolete". New music would only be produced after a switchover period on the new media/format. This is exactly what happened with tapes. Yes you can still get cassette players, (and for some reason my car which has a DVD and CD player still came with one!), they are hardly the forefront of music, and little new is being released on tape. You had to repurchase anything you used to have (or suffer on the old media).
According to the apple page:
AirTunes Ready iPod Hi-Fi is the ideal speaker system for AirTunes. To ensure optimum sound quality, simply connect it to an AirPort Express with a digital optical audio cable(1). The music is then sent from iTunes on your computer over the network to the iPod Hi-Fi using only digital signals. Control your music from the computer in your den, but enjoy the sounds anywhere else in the house.
yeah, no kidding, using this logic it's anything with an audio out compatible. I totally agree, that integrating a airtunes (wired & wireless) into the box would have been sweet.
You are probably right that unguided weapons may have trouble launching at those speeds, but guided propelled weapons shouldn't. Any munitions engineers have an opinion?
Most computer companies have specific price points. Apple always charges the same amount for a specific level of machine. It's what you get at that price point. If you look at prices over the last several years, the professional desktop's (3 levels) haven't changed prices, just the speed and memory, etc... The same it true in the laptops. Dell, etc. do the same thing (although they have more models so can span a greater gamut of prices), and their XPS is the same price as the one I bought in the office last year (just better).
The incidence of liver disease among non-hepatitis infected people is incredibly small. If you take all comers it is 12th among cause of death (lower than suicde) according to the NIH (pdf of causes of death).
Because even if the result is statistically significant, if not that many people die of it (~2500 in 2003), then the harm caused by this drug (caffine) may not outway the rare case it saves (and yes, I understand if you're the one it is significant, but this is public health)
For instance "Zipia reduces aliens ripping out of your abdomen by 99%" sounds very impressive, until you look at how many people this would affect (there were the 4 alien movies plus spaceballs). So everyone should not start using zipia, which undoubtably will cause some bad side effect, versus those few actors who would be saved.