This brings a whole new meaning to "get off my lawn!"

Mod Up! These are exactly my feelings about the (sort of) iPad market. It's unfortunate that resistive (stylus) and capacitive (touch) screens are mutually exclusive (as far as I know). What I envision is being able to walk around a factory, scribbling notes into my electronic pad (which get converted to text), and then splitting my screen to use half of it to operate or run diagnostics on equipment remotely. Then later I can prop it up and connect it to a bluetooth keyboard (and mouse?) to type up a report. Also cool would be for it to automatically synch with several light, thin display devices, allowing us to do away with the mess of paper/textbooks that comes from studying.

TFA is actually quite convincing; however, might I suggest another possibility? It could be that short or elderly drivers are less easily able to react/respond to the unintended acceleration, and as a result are more likely to get in an accident as the result of the problem. Perhaps the author of this study could compare his data to the demographic/height distributions of various types of traffic accidents to test this hypothesis.

AFM = Atomic Force Microscope, which is a tiny cantilever that probes a surface down to the atomic scale. I highly doubt this process is high throughput enough to service the electronics industry.

Spelling might be getting better due to the fact that in order to use the T9 rapid entry mode for texting, one must know how to spell the desired word.

This rig is where the final fight scene in the next James Bond movie will occur, and you can guess how it might end.

I have a sad looking 9 inches or so of 6 books on my bookshelf. It's kinda depressing.

Apple creates new products and new demand for them simultaneously through secrecy and good marketing. And I imagine there are many people at Apple working their asses off to try to find a way to do desktop multitouch. Not saying they will, but I wouldn't write off Apple.

Lived in a basement recently?

I used to do terrain and geophysical data processing: to me it looks like a particular ship that was scanning one day had a miscalibrated sensor, resulting in all the data along the path it scanned that day stand out. This can be corrected for with a process called leveling, where sections are scanned in a criss-cross grid, but evidently this data scanning was not so systematic.

Rather than flickering on and off, alternating polarization might be used.

Indeed, when they go and murder their children.