The Macbook Air and the ultrabooks aren't just thinner than the ultraportables of two or three years ago, they're just as small, are more powerful and have fantastic battery life at about half the price. I see no reason to complain about the price tag. The market is flooded with alternatives if you want something cheaper and thicker, but the trade-off is always lower quality parts. No, you can't have that 8 GB quad core i7 at netbook prices. You can, however, have an ultrabookish i3 with 4 GB of RAM for $450. No wonder the netbook is dying.

Google does not have a Macbook Air-like Ultrabook. Asus, Sony, Acer, Samsung and a few more do. Telvin_3d's claim that Apple is the only one is patently untrue, yet he's still at +5, insightful. There's no insight in his comment, it's just fraudulent marketing.

My bicycle light weighs a quarter of that and gets even longer battery life, and is more useful. It's still no laptop replacement.

Oh wow. Another Apple shill modded up for no reason. I thought Slashdot was supposed to have an anti-Apple bias.

Yeah, except if you want a keyboard (mandatory for actual work: touch screens still suck and always will) it becomes as expensive as a good, cheap Lenovo laptop with much more power and storage, and a much better keyboard and a real OS as well.

Slightly wrong: Advertising has such an effect that the voters don't care. It's a system that makes propaganda mandatory but inaccessible outside the corporate loop, but it also makes it independent of the state, and as such it is yet another example of your great freedom. Of course the voters won't think of it as a big deal. That would be anti-American.

That might be true, but Obama is just as easy to attack from the left.

Er, the election is rigged before it gets to the vote. You can't win a U.S. election without tons of money for TV ads, and you won't get that kind of money without corporate support.

American satirists must be in a sad state if that's the best they can come up with.

Most of the West, the U.S. included, was big on this kind of "experimentation" (i.e. lobotomies as a kind of medical treatment) a few decades ago. No need for Hitler here.

On a positive note, much of our current knowledge of how the human brain works comes from destruction of various kinds, either from intentional and misguided treatment or from strokes. The side effects are often interesting.

So the major tech gaffes of the year, according to the LA Times, are mainly advertising fiascos.

Er, you just listed how you make an argument and then didn't. That makes me kinda suspicious.

Yeah, why not give the old man the gift of mod points.

Most people certainly can perceive frame rates faster than 30 FPS. The difference between 30 and 60 FPS when playing a game on a modern LCD display is huge. Stop perpetuating dumb myths.