Yeah, my Core2 unibody macbook is I think my favorite of any laptop I have seen or used, despite the fact that I think I prefer Windows 7 (or Ubuntu) over OSX. I like the pointer, I like the screen (though there are better ones out to be sure), I like the shape and heft, battery life is good, sound is good. Sure any of these things could be better, particularly with newer and better tech out for some of them, but no one thing stands out to me as bad.

Yet, looking at the current trend in apple laptops, I probably won't be getting another. Sure, a few ounces lighter is nice, but I really see no reason to glue and solder everything in to save a few millimeters of thickness.

There is always going to be a need to pack as much power as possible into a workstation for CAD, 3d graphics and other specialty applications. This means a form-factor that can dissipate more heat then a tablet can.

On the flip side, on the very low end, administrators are going to want machines that are essentially tied down to the desk for places like call centers or data processing. For one the mouse/monitor/keyboard paradigm works very well here, but also workstations are much less 'personal'.

The point being, that while there be some interesting things that tablets and touch screens bring to the party that disrupt the mouse/monitor paradigm, the computer workstation and some variation on it's components will still be here for decades.

I'd like to add an addendum to this.

While for a small utility like this, I agree with what the parent said. It's perfectly reasonable, and easy to record.

For expensive, specialized utilities I actually prefer key-server type systems. Why? Because there are many applications that many people need, but only just once in a while. I can't tell you how many times that we have seen a application we liked, sometimes into the thousands of dollars, but more then one person needed to use it to make it worthwhile. Even though only one person at a time would be using it, we needed it on multiple computers and there was no way to afford enough copies. So instead, we just skipped it and found another way around it with our workflow on what could have been a sale.

But the service prices don't change without big additional limitations, too.

I have a Virgin Mobile account and it's OK, but they keep it locked down to a handful of older phones. No iPhone 5 still, no Galaxy S3 still and certainly no Nexus. So yeah, you can buy your phone, but you have to buy a phone that's already out of date.

If there are discount carriers or plans that are open to other phones and actually a reduced price, I would like to hear about them.

It might not be officially dead, but it may as well be. I would have paid money for it, but it's been unreliable, flaky with getting texts to other carriers, and hasn't been updated in years now. I can't even make IP voice calls from voice.google.com, I have to go to gmail.com to make a call from my Google voice number. There is no way that I would use my google voice number as my main number with it's issues, and it doesn't look like that is ever going to change now. It's a shame, it was the product for me, and I would be recommending it to all my friends and coworkers who travel internationally.

Considering these parts include fans, which cleaning are a part of regular maintenance, it's bordering on obscene that one would be expected to have to take your computer in for what would become a fairly expensive repair just to keep the machine from overheating.

Because all three have different answers. I enjoy using a digital SLR camera the most, I can do lots of inter sting things and get the best results from a situation. My favorite image quality still comes from large format conventional film, but cost of equipment and processing is a barrier. While of course my phone camera is the most convenient.

Broadly, my favorite camera is the one that gets me the picture I want. Sometimes that just means being "the one I have with me", but sometimes it takes good optics, pulling lots of light and having plenty of control.

Bullshit

Just off the top of my head: Teflon (dupont), the transistor (Bell Labs), the GUI (Xerox Parc), the blue LED (Nichia). The list goes on and on of things that have been major game changers that came from a group of smart people getting a paycheck putting their heads together or building on each other's work on something new.

That's not to say that there aren't impediments to innovation today, be it short sighted investors or patent issues, but a great deal of big innovations, if not many of the biggest in the last 100 years have come from academics on grants and guys on salaries. What seems to be special about SpaceX is that those are the guys that seem to be the focus in the company rather then much larger (less flat) companies that are mostly about managing management and pleasing investors.

IANAAEE (I am not an aeronautical EE?) but from my understanding, the FAA requires stringent testing of their equipment before it's allowed to be used below 10,000, where above, after takeoff and landing it is a bit more lax, on top of slow rule changes by the FAA such as allowing wi-fi to be used (which was likely the result of some lobbying by the industry). Most consumer electronics manufacturers don't want to bother with such testing for under 10k feet use, and even if they did airlines don't want to have to try to determine which are approved and which are not, so just have a blanket 'no electronic devices' policy. Gogo doesn't operate below 10k feet for one, but also, they do go through all that testing that allows them to operate in an aviation environment (they used to be aircell, which made inflight phones and such).

As for bandwidth, the fact of the mater is that domestic flights just are not that long (Gogo only covers domestic flights). Most people I have noticed don't feel inclined to pay $10 for a few hours of internet when they can just read a book, do a little off-line work, watch a movie, etc. That only leaves the hand full of people with an actual need, so it's just good old fashioned supply and demand. I fly between once and 4 times a month depending on work, and have only had to use it once, the speed was fine, certainly enough for the emails I need to do, but also for just browsing once I was done with work.

Security is of course as bad as any other public wi-fi (not very) so use a vpn or whatever usual security you would use.

Exactly, so it again has absolutely nothing to do with iPhone. There is no technology news here any more then it would be car industry news if it happened at a car dealership.

We spend almost as much on the NRO alone the NASA's whole budget and it only does one thing: spy satellites. NASA gets just a few billion more and does a whole range of things, rovers, space station, weather and aeronautics research, long term research in a verity of fields at what is suppose to be the vangaurd of US Science. So yes, I think there is something wrong with all this too.

National Reconnaissance Office Budget for 2010: ~$15 Billion
NASA Budget for 2010: $18.7 Billion

You raise an interesting point, in fact it's Standard Time and the change between I dislike. If we were a more rational race I think most people would prefer that normal business hours be 8-4, which is in essence all we do when we go to daylight savings time. Just dump the change and leave it that way through the winter.

But that's not why Sweden's being so tough on him in prison. Authorities believe he may have played a role in the hacking of Logica, a Swedish technology company with ties to the country's tax authorities.

What does it matter if there was another crime? Of course he should be tried and prosecuted if he committed a crime, but to give someone solitary confinement before he's even been charged for a non-violent crime seems completely excessive. If your justice system has people leaving it more dangerous and damaged when they came in, you are doing it wrong.

I suppose that not every country has an innocent until guilty system though, is this usual in Sweden?