He should the sound input as a fourth data stream. It might help get a bit more resolution for those hard-to-distinguish letters ("the" vs "end", for instance).

So by this logic, it's a toss-up whether I prefer the iPhone screen to the iPad 2, since they both display about the same number of pixels?

So is my all-aluminum MacBook Pro not a faraday cage? I guess the wifi needs to get out somewhere, but I wonder how much the rest of it being aluminum reduces the vulnerability to emp's.

You could not easily write something as good as Harry Potter. It's full of very specific ideas, ideas that are not just due to a broad knowledge of the genre. Either these are specific ideas that she invented on her own, or they are specific ideas she borrowed from specific books. There is much evidence of the…

Either she makes claims for originality, or she just says her books are generic stories about wizards. I think she usually claims the former. But when you examine the specific claims for originality, you tend to find quite specific precedents. I'm not saying she isn't as original as anyone else, but to claim that…

If she doesn't read books about magic, the only other explanation is that she herself is magic. One or the other; there's no other way her books could have lifted so much from earlier fantasists.

It's true I didn't finish it, and might have missed some good parts. Another thing the literary establishment tends to do — which I don't stand by — is judge people by their worst. See, for instance, this review. There are certainly a lot of inadvertant-truth moments just in the first few pages "The Puritans gaze…

She's not going to convince many people on the far side of the literary divide if she can't see why Pynchon is regarded as a better novelist than Stephenson. High literary culture privileges beautiful, complex prose and nuanced portraits of interior psychology — both qualities Stephenson profoundly lacks, whatever…

I love how fake that first shot looks. Like something straight out of Space: 1999.

It's always odd to read these essays through an SF blog. It's like driving a Hyundai — a perfectly nice knock-off, but if we've already driven the real thing — the SF years or decades ago that already worked this all through — there's not much point. Heck, even Person of Interest has a deeper understanding of this! …

Why doesn't someone like iFixit just remove the sapphire covering and take the same pictures with and without? Surely at this point the traffic from the article would warrant the cost of another phone.

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to figure out the subset of episodes to watch from that website without revealing all the plot developments I'm supposed to be enjoying the show for.

This is my desktop. However, I use Desktopple to hide everything when I need to. Usually there are windows covering it all, so it's moot anyway. But it is useful to have a centralized dashboard with all of my projects visible at once, when I want it.

As usual, I'm not willing to watch a series of stand-alone episodes unless they're *really* good, which obviously this isn't. But my standards are much lower for episodes that move an SF or soapy plot along. So if someone wants to provide a list of the plot-moving (plus occasional really good stand-alone) episodes,…

My understanding based on what most people in various forums say is that you can't just swap in a sim card from a non-iPhone handset. It will work for a while, but eventually AT&T checks the IMEI, recognizes that you are using an iPhone, and automatically tacks on a data plan. This is what everyone says happens, and…

Details: it's a 3G, chugging along fine at 3.1.3, jailbroken and unlocked already. So why not just put a T-Mobile or AT&T paygo sim in there? Because we have a family plan already with shared minutes. Swapping out a family member's dumbphone for the iPhone would cost nothing but the ongoing $10 extra phone fee,…

I don't know what to do with my old one; it's incredibly annoying that AT&T refuses to let anyone I give my old iPhone to use it as a no-data phone. I know various people who might be quite happy with the iPhone's apps but have no particular need for non-wifi data, or at least, no desire to pay what it costs. The…

Can we get a performance of him reading the great JG Ballard short story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan"?

Shame how little attention Misfits gets around here. io9 must review or discuss hundreds of TV shows, and future historians will be mystified that the best SF series of its time (assuming you stop after season 2!) got so little discussion.

There's a long tradition of action, horror, and spectacle movies whose main point (if you read closely) is that if you're enjoying this, you're a bad person. Some of them are even pretty good movies in themselves (Gladiator, Rear Window, Blow Out, Talented Mr Ripley), but many are like this one, the director…