for the best sound, we do everything!

I share some of the critics that not all information is visible on the website: The cruising speed is 70 km/h as can be seen in the technical data sheet. But I also did not find information on how much the batteries are loaded by take off.

For such projects, optimism and vision is important. Most people do not have that. Concerns like these would have killed any previous challenges. There were for example proofs that it is impossible to fly to the moon. They did not predict that one can build rockets with stages for example. One a few people of a million have the vision and the energy to go after such a project and that is why we admire it. Pessimism is poison in this game. Fortunately, there are some who do it nevertheless, even if it looks impossible.

Imagine to have solar powered tanking stations between continents, which solar powered planes could use to boost their batteries. Imagine much better solar panels, much better motors, better materials. Imagine many many planes, which constantly take off and land, day and night. No noise, silent transportation. Airports could be built closer to places where people live. This is technology which might be used in 50 years and which might be needed then.

Swell, botnets can even operate with computers which had been turned off.

> Convergence doesn't happen. Technologies diverge, for the most part.

That is exactly the reason why I ordered an iPad. The iPod is great to read nontechnical books, write quick emails or have a glance at news while away from the office. It does not replace the desktop, where I can program, develop, write comfortably, where things are backed up and synced with other computers, where I have reliability and openness of the operating system and complete control, what process is running.

But I do not like to read technical books on the PC, nor on the iPod. I want to have my library with me, on a different device. I imagine having the iPod in my pocket, write on my laptop and have a tablet as a reference.

Yes, the interface will be key. The article very well describes why tablet PCs have failed so far: they had crappy, sucking interfaces so far. It does not have to be Apple: also "Courier" from Microsoft looks as if it is going to be a winner: because the interface looks nice. Whether Apple or Microsoft will succeed is not yet clear. It is no question for me that there will be something between a smart phone and a laptop, which will stay to read journals, newspapers, books or articles.

Divergence will occur also naturally because smart phones and tablets will be locked down pretty heavily. Nobody who minds the future will bet entirely on a platform which is closed. As for a book reader, I do not care as long as it displays PDFs and Djvu files nicely, and in high quality.

Weird. The story made me suddenly phobic of close-ups of Mars mooning.

It is a bad idea to hand over email responsibilities to an external company:

• A university email is often used as a verification that a person is affiliated with the place. This is useful for example for site licences.
• Google could change privacy settings in the future. Imagine that external parties could buy lists of "names" or "grades".
• Once hooked, it is difficult to switch back. Once, the IT culture has been outsourced, also the IT talent has disappeared and higher education becomes dependent on external companies.
• There is a lot of research and confidential information going over email. If I were a researcher working in a cutting edge field, I would be worried to have information about the projects safe.
• Google delivers now. Will it in 10 years? What happens if Sergey and Larry have moved on completely and accountants eying primarily the stock market have taken over? It might become more expensive for a university in the future. Or, due to lack of other possibilities, one is forced to accept a partner which is less careful about privacy settings.
• A lot of students and faculty already use gmail now. But they do not have to. If somebody wants, it is possible to have all benefits from external email providers. Why force it?
• Some redundancy is nice. Its can be beneficial to have different email addresses and use them for different things. If one provider does not deliver, one can use an other one. Being forced to use an external email provider leave less options and adds more dependencies.

Its not the "Iranian Cyber Army", it is the "Cyber Army of Iran"!

the new technology with color, faster page build and better energy efficiency is welcome. My biggest complaint with electronic ink is the "flicking" before a page turn. I was told that it is necessary to remove any traces from the previous text. Its certainly a personal thing, but I find this annoying. Every page flip reminds on how unfinished the current e-ink technology is.

The biggest challenge today with electronic texts is that page build needs to be fast. PDF does not perform well. DJVU texts perform much better, are smaller in general and can be read more comfortablly. An ebook reader should be able to read both formats comfortably. Browsing through a book should be fast. I don't see the need for a new format. Give me a reader which can read PDF and DJVU with a decent resolution and page build speed and I'm sold. It is definitely also a software issue because on my Ipod Touch, I can read PDFs more comfortably than with the acrobat hog on the desktop. The Blio looks like a step in the right direction (no OSX nor linux support however for now and I do not see it on the app store neither for the iphone).

obvious questions: if it is browser based, can one read the book without being online? Can one download the book temporarily or for good? Are records kept from where and how long a reader reads a book and what kind of books are read? Will this be tied to your online profile and get you reader specific ads?

There is only one sad thing: that websites force mobile devices to versions which are tailored for mobile devices. Usually, the mobile versions of websites are very limited. Especially, in news sites, one does not find things any more. Worse still is to get automatically redirected to mobile pages which do not work.

The infoworld article mentions scalability as a problem. This could be the crux since it is difficult to maintain different scaled versions at the same time, especially for web applications. So, better keep one, but one which can run nicely on mobile devices i.e. avoid flash if possible.

Mobile devices have got very powerful already. While desktop performance gains have flattened, it is amazing what can be packed into a phone today. This is likely to continue and in the long term, one might not have to worry too much about differences between mobile and desktop any more.

The nice thing about QT pro is that it is fast and small. I can edit and trim a movie in the time final cut etc has started up. I like small, minimal and powerful tools. Anyway, the QT episode had the effect that the transition from Leopard to Snow Leopard had a rather chilly effect on me ...

This is especially annoying with Quicktime. The new quicktime in Snow Leopard is no match in comparison with the old Quicktime 7 Pro:

The editing features are now limited to trimming for example, the export possibilities rudimentary.

Fortunately, one can still reinstall Quicktime 7 additionally in Snow Leopard, but one can not change the default application binding for Quicktime. This is a serious problem.

For me, Quicktime pro is half the reason to use a Mac. Changes like this from Leopard to Snow leopard always make me nervous and I'm glad to have Linux catching up. Even apple might screw things up in future, possibly due to pressure of the movie and music industry.

One can for example suspect that the lack of cut and paste ability or export of sound only etc is due to such industry pressure. The average user can no more cut out advertisements for example. I do not see any technical reason why the new limitations are in place if quicktime pro is ditched. An other reason for the current limitations could be that a new QT pro is in the making. I hope this is the case. Still, one should be able to change the default application binding to an old version of quicktime!

Maybe social networks need to become "friends" first to allow mutual aggregation of customers ...

yes, latex is nice, but it would be even better, if basic TeX would
be understood by browsers.  About 10 years ago, IBM had a cool plugin called texexplorer.
The plugin would compile latex on the fly. No need to publish a PDF. It worked
pretty well for basic documents which would not rely on macros.

Still, to address the question of the submitter, it would be nice to have something like

<latex>
$\int_0^1  \frac{\sqrt{\sin(x)}}{1+x^2} \; dx$.
</latex>

It would not have to be the full latex stack but the ability to place mini latex pages into
HTML documents. Its a pity techexplorer technology seems have disappeared. If IBM would
opensource it, it could become an add-on for firefox.