Do you have young children, and have you ever spent more than 2 hours in a minivan with them? Law requires me to be in the driver's seat, kids in the back seat. Kinda hard to entertain small children that way.

I agree that there may be other more worthwile forms of entertainment (books and travel games), which I have, but even those fade in time. A headrest monitor with DVD/whatever else capability is another tool in the box to keep your journey sane.

Now, as for the iPadd "killing" this, really??? I've seen dual monitor DVD kits for under $200, not sure how a $500 piece of hardware "kills" that. Shoot, I paid $400 for a laptop that often gets used a a backseat entertainment system, and has a lot more functionality than this Apple contraption.

* iPadd is a reflection of the fact that Apple has finally built a Star Trek TNG padd-like device that can actually be used as such for managing server farms. For this I give them credit.

That's why I stick to the tried and true Web 1.0. You know the old, boring web where "cool" was writing a submission script in perl.

Generator... check
Icom 746.... check
folding dipole... check

I'm sorry, what are these phone things you were talking about?

Transporters on Star Trek were no better explained than hover-craft in Star Wars

In reality they were. Transporters on Star Trek are only one step ahead of what we could build today, and the only reason they don't work in real life is because of Heisenburg's principle. Heisenburg identified that you cannot measure the position and velocity of a molecule at the same time. You either know one or the other. Both are required for the transporter. Hence, Star Trek utilizes the "Heisenburg compensator".

Because the Enterpise often encountered species that were less knowledgeable, it was often that the crew would show off and explain their technology to other guests. Much different than Star Wars. The visiting species didn't want to learn about your tech, they wanted to kill you. By the time they "learned" of the tech, it was because it killed them.