"The thing makes a great toy but falls down for real work or anything that requires manipulating your own data..." HUH? Do you have a clue about what you are writing? Ever heard of google Apps? how about iWork? Cloud storage? These things are vastly easier to administer than a a laptop, and high school students by and large, don't need to know how to program a computer. Keep the piece of hardware in the user's hands simple and non configurable so they can't screw it up. An appliance instead of a tempermental, albeit flexible computer. Then put all the storage and processing programmability back in the cloud. Kind of a dumb terminal for the 21st century. But with the added capability of being a standalone ebook reader, media consumption device and web browser. And by the way, if your a registered developer (like a school district's net admin) you can do ad hoc software distribution to your own devices of any software you write outside of the Apple lockdown. So lighten up.

Really! How are all those kids going to do their homework on the beach?

The emergency charge is double what it really cost. The half of society that doesn't have insurance welches on the bill. The half that don't have 3 SUVs and don't have unlimited voice/data/text for their preeteen kid (since they view insurance as more important) forward the bill to their insurance company. And that insurance subsidizes the the other half. That is what the health care industry in this country has come to.

Give me a break. I know some out there are just certain that Apple is the Evil Empire, consider this. An owner loses his phone. There is no market for the phone to be an "un-jailbroken" phone since apple and AT&T won't allow it to be activated on the network. Unless it's jailbroken. The rightful owner or police want to use the camera and GPS to see and localize the thief. Doesn't sound any more privacy invading than what On-star advertises that they will do with your Cadillac if you report it stolen.

I'm not in the least interested in buying a hybrid. I want an all-electric car. I want a normal-size car that can do 80 mph uphill, and has at least 300 miles of range at typical highway speeds. Get the price under 50g, and..... Yeah, me too. And I want a beachfront mansion in the Hamptons,too, but only if it costs less than $20k. Oh well.

visiting the site "starts the process". What else is needed to complete the process? Does the user need to take other actions to complete it?

Not only that, there are lions and tigers and bears!

Except he could wind up being the next incarnation of Michael Dell instead of Steve Jobs.

Bullshit. To all the conspiracy theorists out there, why is the destruction of the car like, in Joan Claybrook's words, book burning? The value of a prototype would only be in tearing it apart to see how it was built. Much more valuable would be the blueprints and mechanical drawings, the design documents. Most of all, how about all the footage of all those crash tests which show how the car performed in the frontal, front offset, rollover, etc. I'm sure citizen advocate Joan made all that government funded information public and shared copies of it all with the auto makers, the press and the public in general. Joan was the NHTSA administrator under the Carter administration and had control of all this information. Where are all those fruits of my tax dollars? Someone needs to perform a FOIA request to get all this precious research in the public. Are you listening out there Consumer Reports? Perhaps a grand jury investigation into Joan and her cohorts is in order here.

yes but Claybrook's car probably weighed three times as much as the 2400 pound Accord due to the weight of additional structural steel to make it safe, as well as the weight of additional airbags, etc. Accords of that era were smaller and lighter (and much less safe) than a current Honda civic. And it's not too hard to de-tune an engine to get good fuel economy at the expense of performance. just restrict the throttle from fully opening.

The average slashdotter just can't get it. This is not for you, the technogeek power user. This is for the 80% of the population of the developed world that does not have the inclination to install arbitrary OS's or OS patches, concern himself with viruses or continual signature file updates. This is a relatively bulletproof appliance they can hand to their kids and not fear the software configuration being irrevocably scrambled. This is something grandma can use with impunity and not concern herself (or you since she won't be calling you so often to fix her netbook) over continual maintenance of the software. To many neophytes, closed and limited is good.

If two different ground control facilities could not raise the pilots over the radio for several minutes and ATC was in the process of having fighters scrambled, there was a little more than a minor distraction here. If the pilots had said "we took our headsets off and went to sleep" then the FAA would have prohibited that activity. But if just playing solitare means you miss repeated radio calls, then that activity is obviously excessively distracting.

Except that Apple has no monopoly in mobile phones. Or even smartphones for that matter. So to compare Apple with less than 10% of the smartphone market with M$, that has 80+% of the computer OS market makes no sense whatsoever. There is healthy competition in the Smartphone space with Android, iPhone, Blackberry and Palm all vying. If Apple is really anti-consumer here they will fail. If Adobe is really anti-consumer here they will as well. No litigation required here.

yes the iPad is locked down and you can't do a thing to it yourself. But wait a minute. While I was waiting Saturday morning for my UPS man to deliver my new iPad, I read an article on the procedure for replacing those non-replacable batteries in your iPad. Thing is Apples are all serviceable. But like the lock on your front door that keeps honest people honest, apple hides the screws and does not invite the non-technical person to void their warranty by opening their shiny new appliance.

Apple may surprise you. Apple only got into the Safari business when Microsoft stopped supporting IE for the Mac. There is no real profit in browsers per se, hence only OS developers and open source projects are doing anything with them. If they are smart Apple will see more popularity for Opera as another blow to IE and MS dominance, both of which are good for to Apple.