And I'm not some young whippersnapper with good eyes....I'm 54, wearing tri-focals. I have never experienced the problems you allude to, and I am a voracious reader.

I can't find the link anymore, but a few weeks ago I read a study that showed that aging users with poor eyesight fare better with LCD screens since their eyes can distinguish less contrast, and benefit from the emitted light. For pretty much everyone else e-ink is far more comfortable to read on, especially for extended times.

Note that Microsoft Security essentials is only 'free' if you install it on 10 other less computers in an organization; more than that requires additional licensing.

Why would you expect a company to pay more than they have to when individuals do not?

Most individuals don't funnel their money through foreign tax shelters.

If you have an old Nook Color (the eReader model, not the Nook Tablet) you can easily triple-boot into the stock B&N Android build, cyanogenmod Gingerbread, and cyanogenmod ICS simply by inserting a microSD card with the respective OSes. Either built it yourself, or pick up one of the countless pre-built memorycards from ebay.
Sure, It's three different android builds, but it's multi-boot nonetheless

In addition to that, the HP Touchpad has been able to dual boot between WebOS and Android for a long time now.

At 20c per message (160 bytes), works out at $1310 of income per megabyte of traffic. [wikipedia.org] for the telcos. Talk about a cash cow.

Even more so because text messages piggy-back using unused space in the status pings that your phone continuously exchanges with the tower anyway, to stay connected to their network.

Just because they got results, doesn't mean that there's any conscious thought going on.

Case in point: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
"So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it “a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.” To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, “was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”

The salmon, as Bennett’s poster on the test dryly notes, “was not alive at the time of scanning.”

If that were all that had occurred, the salmon scanning would simply live on in Dartmouth lore as a “crowning achievement in terms of ridiculous objects to scan.” But the fish had a surprise in store. When they got around to analyzing the voxel (think: 3-D or “volumetric” pixel) data, the voxels representing the area where the salmon’s tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown."

So a lifetime warranty means it's warranted until it breaks down?

Pretty much, yes.

"Lifetime product warranties" typically cover the 'reasonably expected' lifetime of the product the product in question, not your lifetime.

If anything, 'lifetime warranty' can be a much worse deal than a predefined number of years, since it's so vague. It's often used in sales since it sounds like a great deal to the uninformed buyer, but in reality it's pretty much the ultimate weasel-word.

Hey its winter already, a watt used by your CPU is a watt less that has to be used by your radiant or convective heater.

Except in the summer every watt used by your CPU requires your air conditioner to use more energy to counteract it.

Most 'normal' cars have little potential take out your house right along with it when they get ruined while parked in an attached garage during moderate flooding.

Does make you wonder -- if half their brain shuts down at alternate times, does that also mean that their personality changes for those periods?

Step-through bikes are the norm and are not considered "women's" bikes.

That one isn't true -- In the Netherlands step-through bikes are still considered a female model (originally made that way to accommodate wearing a skirt/dress), Men's bikes pretty much all have a horizontal bar closing the gap to increase structural integrity. That said, it's not that rare for men to ride a women's bike and vice-versa

While a Dutch bike is comfortable to ride on flat surfaces, they are less suited for hilly terrain -- which is a non-issue in the Netherlands since the whole place is about a flat as can be. They suck to have to climb a hill or bridge on a windy day, though.

Many companies reserve the right to limit quantities. Making one customer happy by selling them every drive in stock means ticking off hundreds of others that wouldn't be able to buy the single drive they need.

Under Windows NT4 Microsoft's NTLM password database would only store the first 14 characters of each password, silently ignoring everything else. Worse, they'd actually split it into two seven-digit chunks and store them separately, without applying a SALT. The result of this was that having a password that's a few characters longer than 7 digits would actually be worse than having a short 7-digit password, since those couple of extra characters would be trivial to brute-force and could potentially give clues about what the first part of the password could be.
On top of that, LM backwards compatibility further dramatically reduced the key space .

What's the exchange rate for Canadian bacon?

Except that helium molecules are so small, they slowly leak out of pretty much any 'sealed' container?