Anyway "ping" already has some well established (and very specific) meaning in the computer world. I'm surprised Apple would choose that specific word for their newest gimmick. Especially since it is already loaded with such uncool, geeky history.
You can also put some pure hydrogen in a more solid container with not chance of a leak introducing oxygen, rig up a spark plug or something, and nomatter how hard you try, it won't go off unless there is a leak for air to get in.
Same thing goes for gasoline. Put some in a bowl and light it on fire and you get a nice slow flame. Get some gasoline vapors and mix them with stoicheometric amounts of oxygen and you will get an explosion.
There's more to combustion than just thermodynamics, kinetics matters too.
I agree with you about the hydrogen powered car having lots of issues though.
There may be better tools out there if you have a big budget, but I'd have to agree. I got sick of word and its quirks when writing my thesis (sort of a technical book if you want to think of it like that). Emacs and LaTeX were a life-saving combination. Bibtex took some getting used to for the indexing, but that was the hardest thing to learn.
Formatting is easy. Large projects are easy. It copes with all the major image formats. And if using a text editor is not your thing, there are pseudo-wysiwyg gui's available.
On a side note, there are also (problematic) tools to convert your document to html and many other formats once you have it in tex.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker