Oh shit. There goes the planet... (surprisingly less off topic than one would suspect!)

Enders Game, but more for how I related to Ender as a child, than the plot lines. The values and motivations resonated with me.

Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, has subtly but surely made me who I am today. Why? I can't really say, but I suspect that if you understand Ender's motivations, then you're not far from understanding me.

Oh yeah? Well I can pick up a mole (animal) and throw it. Anything I can throw weighs one pound. One pound is one kilogram. Moles are mostly water, so we're talking about a kilogram of water.

Absolutely, the clickwheel was superior to touchscreens in some situations. One thing that pissed me off about the iPhone (when I had one) that kept me going back to my 1st Gen iPod Nano was that the touchscreen was, for me, useless on a plane. If I was dozing on a plane, I couldn't skip forward or go back with my eyes shut. I had open my eyes and turn on a bright screen, which was annoying both for me, and for others during a long-haul, overnight trip. Adjusting volume was easier too, though that is possible using the hardware volume buttons.

For a dedicated music player, the click/touchwheel was hard to beat.

I've had an idea for touchscreen "blind music control", but I think it'd have to be implemented on the OS level, if the hardware even supports it. Specifically, keep the LCD off, but the touch sensor on to recognize gestures. Gestures that are not rotations of each other, e.g. _| and |_ should help the device differentiate between commands, regardless of orientation.

Yes. If you get the Android SDK, it comes with a VM - you can run pretty much any version. (its kind of slow, as its running a java VM on a virtual ARM processor on your x86. (Though apparently the latest version is an x86 version - haven't confirmed that yet)

Warning you now though - you're running a touch OS with a mouse. Think about the reaction to Metro that people are giving.

My point is, if you don't like running it in the VM, be aware that its a much better experience on actual hardware.

Lets call a spade a spade. That may have been an inexpensive one, but the defining characteristic is "defective", and (QA procedures aside) could have happened at any price point. An inexpensive replacement would have likely worked just as well.

So totally off topic, but prompted by your last sentence: I'm currently renting a car, a Toyota Yaris, I think. They moved the WHOLE DASH to the CENTER.

This: http://www.carid.com/dash-kit-gallery/images/dash-kits/Toyota_Yaris_2006-UP_2427BE_A04.jpg

Oh my god, It is the worst ever. I feel like I'm a danger on the road every time I try to check my speed. Who in their right minds thought this was a good idea?

And if you make a scratching motion, it sounds like Pacman!

Not in the States*. You just have to pay a $200 tax and get a specific license.

* Individual state laws may vary; some states ban threaded barrels, which makes it almost impossible to mount a sound suppressor.

I'm not an iTunes fan at all, nor an audiophile, but I believe the idea of remastering for itunes is not to put back lost data, but for account for it.

This is me making it up: "Oh, it looks like AAC will reduce sounds in the 18 KHz range, but that makes the bass too powerful and affects the voice. I can reduce the bass a bit and up the voice frequencies to compensate and now it sounds better than pure AAC applied blindly."

(This is what I understood from my reading here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/02/mastered-for-itunes-how-audio-engineers-tweak-tunes-for-the-ipod-age.ars

I make no claim as to its accuracy - just that its background information relevant to the article at hand.

Sure, theres that. But what about the "sales and marketing" aspect where you're trying to convince people who already have requirements A, B and C, and that your widget meets those requirements better than a competitors?

"I hear you need paper! Well, Dunder Mifflin can meet your paper needs better than Hammermill. Our paper is whiter, cut more precisely, and our special SoftEdge technology reduces the number of papercuts!"

"I hear you need XYZ specialized financial management solution. Ours is better than theirs."

I see nothing fundamentally wrong with that. (implementation of marketting, such as bribes, is outside the scope of this post)

Eh, not bad at first glance, but I can't be on board with zapping time zones. As someone who deals with international locations across the globe every single day, its a ton easier to find out "oh, they're 8 hours behind us" vs "Hmm, its 0900 Global. We just had lunch... what are they doing in New York at this time? Its 0900 there too - I think its still dark, but I don't know if its close to dawn or if they just woke up."

Sounds good in theory, but god it would suck.