I suppose in theory you could. The downside is they're under 10" and you'd have to buy them in lots of multiple millions.

> Why is 4:3 such a useful aspect ratio?

I don't know, but I agree with the question's implied premise (4:3's high utility).

It's a good question and I wish I knew the answer to it. I couldn't find any historical reference as to why 4:3 was originally chosen for televisions (the details behind the NTSC format are brilliant, but that's a separate topic). I don't feel anything like "boxed in" when computing on a 21" 1600x1200 CRT, and I don't want to give up vertical resolution for a widescreen of the same size. Lets speculate.

The closer the ratio is to square, the more usable area you have for the size of the device. If wider screens were better, why wouldn't we keep making them wider, why not 3:1 or 4:1 or 5:1 ratios? Maybe 3:4 is just a sweet spot for compromise between high area and our forward facing binocular vision. It's a mistake to even call them wider than conventional displays, as aspect ratio is independent of physical size. Have laptops really gotten wider, or have they gotten shorter? I think wider ratios are actually mis-marketed short-screens, with their prevalence reflecting cost (smaller area) in pushing HDTV sales, and not quality.

I know newspapers print in short columns for readability, as its easier to keep your place with short lines than with very wide ones, and computer screens were dominated by text long before graphics. Books too are mainly tall rather than wide ratios. Wider aspects are preferred for landscapes and juxtapositions of people in films, but whatever we gain in video game FOV we're losing in visible detail under our feet (and performance is lost to render peripheral objects you barely see, at increasingly skewed projection angles, versus more sky and ground in a taller ratio, which are virtually free performance-wise).

The bottom line is always useability. Do you really want to squeeze every vertical pixel out of an interface (browsers for instance), to deal with displays that are just too short? I sure don't, and I don't care to move a physical setup around when resizing display elements is sufficient. It may even just be tribalism or convention, but I know I like it. Long live 4:3!

I'm looking forward to desktop displays getting increased resolution and 4:3 aspect ratios back some day. It's mildly ridiculous that we'll have the mobile device market to thank for it.

> Interesting how the original headline reads "Apple Best at Auditing Factories, Still Not Doing Enough" while Slashdot's reads "Apple May Be Terrible, But All Others Are Worse". From best to terrible in the flash of a Slashdot submission.

Best and terrible are not mutually exclusive.

The PC version of Kinect is also a new version of the hardware, and it can be used accurately at 1/2 meter range. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kinectforwindows/archive/2011/11/22/kinect-for-windows-building-the-future.aspx

Will the surface of the Earth be completely replaced, and if so how many times, before the Sun explodes?

Estimates for the Sun's lifetime are very common, but I've never seen lifetime numbers for the Earth's surface based on plate tectonics, mid-ocean rift spreading, and other crust replacement factors.

Minecraft is wildly successful because it provides a simple, understandable world model that players can manipulate easily, and a compelling naturalistic procedural environment. It already has a hugely successful imitator in the 2d Terraria (which has probably over a million sales at this point, at less than a year in development, and is regularly in the top 10 games played on Steam). The modding community are already making every kind of playable thing you would build on a base like Minecraft, with the added difficulty of the Minecraft releases being obfuscated java bytecode, and Mojang have said they will both add a modding interface and release the game source in full.

Strictly as a game, Minecraft is underwhelming (and still incomplete), but as an open-ended sandbox experience, it's very compelling. As a world model, a substrate to create new games on, it is absolutely exploding. A procedural world, that players can manipulate, with world dynamics (like mob spawning) that react to their changes, and a dead-easy interface. The impact of this is really only just beginning to unfold.

This was on Kotaku yesterday: http://kotaku.com/5864910/digital-download-discount-for-vita-may-explain-sonys-memory-stick-plans

The info is unconfirmed, but it says they're charging 40% less for downloads than games at retail and that's why the memory cards are more expensive. In other words, please pay up front so they can hold your money for you, and very probably the developers don't get a cut.

I suspect that some post offices are sloppier than others. I've received my share of misdelivered mail in the US, but by far the worst incident was when my brother moved out of town and set up a forwarding address with the USPS, to which they then they proceeded to send him portions of MY mail in addition to his, including new videogames I'd ordered. That really drove me bananas.

Just remove it. While it was a clever optimization for its time, on current hardware it is unnecessary.

This is what JC's tweet suggests he is doing, not re-writing it.