The computer allows us to make everything, and yet we insist on creating worlds that are essentially no different from the one we live in. Where is the weird, the fantastic, the horrible and the wonderful? Why do we settle, when we can have anything? When do we start creating art?

Normally, "art" *is* about creating worlds that are essentially no different from the one we live in. Mass market movies and genre novels are all about aliens, explosions, and dashing adventurers. Art movies and literary fiction are generally about realistic stories -- people coping with a divorce or the death of their child, things like that.

Do you don't use a laptop? Or do you have a 3G modem or something? That's the main point of Gears -- being able to edit a Google Docs document on a laptop without needing to find a wifi hotspot.

It only went out to the sub 10K crowd...

I thought people realized a long time ago that there was "soft" science fiction that really was just using SF to say something about current society and its problems and "hard" science fiction that was actually about the science and technology. Star Trek is probably the most famous example of the "soft" style. Stross obviously just prefers the second type.

E-ink certainly *does* cause less eye-strain than LCDs -- that's the whole point of using it. There were LCD e-books in the 1990s (like the RocketBook), but nobody was interested in them.

Supposedly a "supergun". But like the rest of Iraqs' WMDs, it may may have been mythical. It's really not that absurd that Saddam would actually want a facility to launch peaceful satellites. I mean, the guy was a dictator, but he liked money; having a facility to hire out would have given him the cash to build even more palaces for himself.
 

When I read "OS 9" I was thinking "Gee..I didn't know they ported OS-9 to the Mac until I realized that you meant version 9 of the the classic Mac OS.

Well, in part, but another important lesson in science labs is learning to report the truth, even if is disappointing and not what you want. This is an important lesson and unfortunately even some well known scientists don't learn it,

1) As people have already said, there weren't *nearly* as many cows around before we started making them a major part of our diet
2) The cows that *were* around ate grass. Feeding cows corn, as farmers tend to do, fattens them up but gives them much more gas.

Really, I have yet to see an iPhone game that captured my attention for more than an hour or two -- even the recent version of the Sims for the iPhone is a very stripped down version of the real game. A DS or full fledged console or computer game may cost $30 or more but I expect I'll get at least 50 hours of enjoyment out of it....

The problem is that most of these are not particularly good translations and lack commentary -- you won't be able to follow Newton, for example, without the detailed commentary that other editions, such as those edited by the historian of science Bernard Cohen, have. It isn't just converting Latin to English -- the mathematical techniques themselves need "translation" as nobody today does math using the primitive methods available to Newton.

No. you don't have to go through Amazon. You put things on a Kindle via USB. It mounts like a thumb drive and you just copy things over. The only need for Amazon's servers is to buy books.

For commercial content that is. There's no DRM even on the Kindle for your own content, but you are deluding yourself if you think major publishers are going to allow DRM-free e-books. If you don't want DRM, you are going to be limited to Project Gutenberg and the works of Cory Doctorow, basically.
 

'Trick Used To Pass French "Three Strikes"'

Sounds like you are talking about a trick used to avoid failing a language class!

Remember that Transylvania used to be part of Hungary, and has a Hungarian-speaking minority even to this day...