Ever try that with the drive spinning? Have you ever dropped a laptop that was powered on? Even a few inches can kill the HDD if it was running. Laptops in the past 5 years often have drives that can dock the read heads if it detects acceleration, but this can cause other problems and is not fool proof, clearly since the one you bike with failed when I presume it was powered off.

SSDs use more power when actively reading or writing, but far less when idle, and don't take time to spin back up when completely shut down, so this depends on use. I personally never let my HDDs spin down, this always seems to cause problems for some applications, so an SSD would be a power savings for me, and I suspect most end users. In a server environment when the drive is under more constant load I would expect higher consumption, though maybe not compared to 15k rpm hdds.

I've honestly never tried this, but would a remote desktop application like VNC or LogMeIn work well enough for that kind of task?

Indeed, my cousin works w/ Fab@Home and one of my friends in college worked on 3D chocolate printing similar to this a few years before that as a grad project. Nothing new here.

In my other comment I mentioned I actually owned Palm IIIc circa 2000. I didn't mean it was useless, just that it would not catch on with the general public until they merged into what we call smartphone today. I'm sure it was mostly just business and legal reasons such an integration did not occur earlier and Palm did start selling an integrated device very shortly afterward.

Today I use a iPhone 3G that is increasingly useless because of apple's lack of support yet continued updates, which I can't upgrade because its under a corporate contract, and a standard size laptop. I never feel the need for something inbetween because I either want contacts/emails/calendar on the go, or something that can do some real work in excel.

A quick google/amazon search does wonders.

http://www.amazon.com/Archos-3-2-Inch-Internet-Tablet-Android/dp/tech-data/B003X26VNM/ref=de_a_smtd

Its the size of cell-phone, runs android, plays media files, no contract. $134. The confusion might be that they are marketed as "tablets" when they are closest in format to smartphones or classic PDAs.

An iPod touch has all the features of its smartphone equivalent minus the contract and cellular data access. I used to have a Palm IIIc and I'm relatively confident an iPod touch has all the same basic features out of the box, and costs about the same (not even considering 10+ years of inflation). I don't know if there is a true equivalent in android yet, they have mid-size 8" tablets that fall between smartphone and full tablet size though.

Thats because they are a bad idea. The first time I saw the Palm Pilot, I said, "This will only be useful once its part of my cellphone". 10 years later it was ubiquitous.

Theres almost always minor errors on the disc, and when reading audio instead of data the drive mostly ignores them. Try ripping the same CD twice on the same drive with the same settings and I'll bet you $100 the hash won't be the same.

This is perfectly legal in the US. The only reason the same thing doesn't apply to DVDs and Blu-rays are laws against circumventing encryption, but it is fair use to format shift unencrypted media you own for personal use. Its no longer personal use when I rip a CD then give the original to a friend or sell it, but if I keep the CD, then the mp3s, flacs, accs, or whatever are fine.

Which is why your 'CD-Player' should go PCM over spdif optical cable to your receiver.

http://ps3mediaserver.blogspot.com/

Works like a charm, multiplatform (java), transcodes incompatible formats and containers.

What state do you live in that you can pass inspection with the "check engine" light lit?

I grew up in NJ and had a similar experience. I never subscribed to AOL but the AIM was available standalone I began using it to communicate with all my friends any family who were either AOL users or got AIM because of the huge install base. I had used IRC and ICQ but mostly to talk to foreigners. Eventually yahoo and msn as well. The article specifically talks about a significant time period when aim had "status" or "away messages" and people began leaving it connected perpetually. People (teenagers) used these the same way they now use facebook to broadcast what they were doing to their friends. Many people I know still do this. I keep my aim connected through gmail/gtalk, pidgin, or an iphone app to this day. My fiancée's entire office uses it to communicate. I used aim for voice chat a few times, yahoo and msn for video chat long before Skype was "the thing". I still don't keep skype connected.

Are you serious are is this a joke?