Well said, Casey. USB chargers are a dime a dozen (and are conveniently built into most computers; I haven't actually used a stand-alone charger for months and months) and Micro-USB cables are cheap. It's the height of laziness, selfishness, and wastefulness to demand that a company give every single customer a part…

Many people wouldn't need them —> There would be less demand —> Factories manufacture less —> Environment and common sense win.

Unfortunately, because Apple are a bunch of profiteering scammers, Apple wall plugs use a bizarre biasing of the data pins to disable the 500mA USB limit, whereas EVERY OTHER PHONE COMPANY has agreed to use a shorting-together of the data pins to signal the same thing. This means that a decent standard USB wall plug…

Until you plug the wrong plug into the wrong socket and your phone gets overvolted and killed?

It's the original server (www.google.com, www.microsoft.com) that does the retransmitting. Cell towers/telco has no part or knowledge of the retransmission process.

Except for the past many years, Micro USB has become the standard for any half-decent phone. Just because dumb phones of decades past had this problem (the voltages were different as well, so having the same plug would have been a disaster btw), is no excuse for a brand new plug even being proposed in 2012.

"...tweak the measurement system!?..." They'd have to either:

Based on my first reading of this work, these lenses are still diffraction-limited — they "only" correct spherical aberration it seems. To claim that this will turn every phone into a DSLR is kind of bizarre to me; the reasons that phone cameras suck is that the pixels have to be tiny so they have to amplify like…

This is fantastic, thank you!

...as opposed to a male egg?

The whole ink-is-cheaper-than-printers situation is ridiculous, but it's just a tragedy of the commons of printer company built upon a tragedy of the commons of commoners... random consumers are idiots. They won't consider outlaying $50 more dollars on a printer, even if it saves them $50 a year on ink — they don't…

I'm sure you can just find the switch that the printer uses to tell whether the lid's down, and do whatever it takes to trick it. Tape the little feeler bit down, jam a screwdriver in it, cut the wires, solder the wires together, etc?

This seems strangely out of date... Pentiums? Microsoft is just _suggesting_ multi-core processors? Or am I missing something?

It's simple to explain, and is indeed explained in the quote shown in the article. If the truck travelling up the west coast was already full, then one option is to send a whole extra truck to go up the west coast. Which is a massive cost for one letter.

How much standby power does it consume? How does it stack up when left on 24/7/365? Since you presumably can't switch it off, that's going to add up, especially if you have several in the house...

Minor correction — the energy that goes towards processing *always* ends up as heat — there's no such thing as an ultra efficient processor that consumes 1 watt but "converts it to information." 1 watt electricity in = 1 watt heat out.

I wonder if this is to do with the fact that the iPad has twice as many backlight LEDs as the iPad2? It would appear that high-res screen has so much black-border-between-tiny-pixels that it has to pump through double the light just to get a useable image out. All those LEDs have to be powered by something...

I don't know, although Karl's answers were pretty weak, most of Sam's arguments were pretty weak as well.

@repugnant2k Exactly. In short, the idea of trying to encrypt passwords on the same machine that needs to read them is about as likely to succeed as DRM protection on DVDs and Blu-rays... oh wait.

The point is that if you take a pixel and split it into two, the noise on the two subpixels will be so much worse that you can't recover the quality of the original large pixel, even if you sacrifice the newfound resolution by combining the two pixels in software (i.e. "shrinking it down.")