I'm looking at you Wired...

Execpt my perfectly good* LCD monitor from six years ago doesn't have HDMI.

I could accept ditching my six year old monitor in the name of progress if I really did think HDMI was progress over DVI, but it's not.

*I bought it large at the time so it's still great by today's standards

Sure, life in the universe COULD be different than our carbon-based, water-needing forms. But there are restrictions on how many detectors etc. you can package on one rover. Given that difficult decisions need to be made in regards to equipping our search for life, it makes sense to search for life in a form that we are 100% sure exists at least one place in the universe.

IMHO tablets and "traditional" computers are, and will remain for the foreseeable future, complementary. Tablets provide a convenient means to check email, read the web, watch video, update your Facebook page, and play some quick games. But I'm not sure they're capable of replacing traditional computers for things like spreadsheets and proper document authoring. I recognize that spreadsheets and document authoring probably only make up 5% (or heck, maybe 2% if I'm pulling numbers out of my ass) of the total computing needs of Joe Smith American, but it's a 5% people aren't going to be willing to give up. It's the same reason our homes have three extra bedrooms and people complain about the range on electric cars; a small house and an electric car would meet people's needs for 364 days of the year, "But what about the inconvenience when Grandma comes to visit at Christmas or when we want to go on our annual road trip to Sea World!?!" Computers are no longer seen as luxury items, and my guess is that people will buy a computer AND a tablet (whether that's wise or not) rather than just ditch the computer for a tablet.

That's assuming time on the internet is "wasted". I consider it leisure time, which has a non-zero value to me. If I really wanted to I could get a part-time job at a coffee shop to use up these hours where I'm not at work, but I value non-work hours more than I value the $40 I'd get doing a shift at Tim Horton's for the evening. There's more to life than making money.

I mean, if I can have this in combo with a battery that would be moderately cool. If it maintained standby power and I only drained from the battery when actively using the phone I'm sure it would reduce the frequency I'd have to recharge. Surely that's worth something.

It's not our fault you've allowed pharm companies to rape you up the ass.

Don't we call those "Unions"?

I think you're onto something here. My holiday project:
1. Make software titled "Wind"
2. Use Wind to distribute IP
3. Sue the shit out of receivers of IP
4. PROFIT!

I'm with GoDaddy for my domain name. When I was looking for a personal domain I checked out a bunch of domain sites. They all had basically identical annoying splash pages that tried to upsell me on everything. There was nothing to differentiate them except price. So I went with GoDaddy for its price and because I knew the name. When I get back to my computer after the holidays you can be sure I'll be ditching them and going with some of the good hosts suggested here.

On a related note, I didn't go with GoDaddy for my page hosting because I found holeinthewallhosting.com. Honestly, they're awesome. Nice clean pages, no upselling, awesome price. I dunno how good reliability is, but it's certainly good enough for my person page.

The phone issue is interesting. I was just on the "How Much Data Do You Need?" page for a local provider. You slide the bar for various things, like how many web pages you visit in a month (as if anyone really knows that). Their assumption was 0.17MB/page. I know there are mobile versions of pages and such, but this still seems like a gross underestimate given this story.

Careful. There are a lot of people on slashdot who would love to see this happen.

Unless things have advanced rapidly since four years ago when I was doing my animal physiology class, the answer is "no".

Our school had the option to do dissections digitally if you had a good reason. Watching people do it I can say that it was terribly useless. There's a big difference between the neatness of a digital model and the realities of fluids and membranes and the huge physical variations shown across different individual aninals.

Well I guess it depends. How much is the extra warranty costing them, and how much is it worth it to people? If 5 year warranties are forcing them to price their drives $10 higher than the competition, but the percieved value of those warranties is only $2 to the customer, then no one will buy their drives. There is nothing "competetive" about selling features that customers don't value.

Not 100% true. I just discovered www.abandonia.com, which is basically a collection of pre-2001 games for free. I was super excited about all the classics from my childhood on there. But when I tried to play a lot of them I just couldn't do it for more than a few minutes. Back in those days I guess we were just more accepting of bad control schemes and interfaces. Now I've been spoiled.

But yes, I do agree with your statement in general. There are quite a few old games out there that are just as fun to play now as they were 5 - 15 years ago. My SNES collection is a big example.