You really think the builders would have done a worse job than the guys who built the tower of Pisa? That's a joke, right?

BSA is why my company and family dropped Microsoft Office and went to Openoffice.

http://www.twincreekstechnologies.com/technology/hyperion.html

The significant quote is "Twin Creeks has lifted 14 laminae from a single donor wafer in its labs with Hyperion and produced solar cells on ten laminae lifted from a single donor wafer."

    So, they've only been able to lift 14 wafers from a donor and made all of ten cells? Really? Either their web page is way out of date, or Twin Creeks is so early in the process that they are years and years away from being ready to ship.

Nothing changes???? In 1980, solar PV cost about $22 a watt. If you order a large system today, you can do that for about $3 a watt. If you take inflation into account, that 1980 number is closer to $50 a watt in today's dollars. Yes, a reduction in price of 94% is peanuts compared to what has happened with computers, but that still beats the heck out of all of all the other energy sources. For example, oil costs more today than in 1980. Coal costs more than in 1980. And so it goes.

    Solar is already cheaper than grid power in some areas. If prices keep dropping at the same rate they have been dropping (about 8% a year), within a decade, solar PV will be cheaper than the retail electricity rate for pretty much everyone in the US.

I once had a "reputable" company doing that to me (unsubscribe did not work, phone calls, etc.). So, I found e-mail address for about fifteen higher ups in the company, and set up a filter that would auto-forward anything I got from their domain them to all fifteen of them (with "Please unsubscribe me" added). Their e-mail was then automatically deleted. It must have worked, because a couple of years later I changed e-mail systems, and I've never had to recreate that filter.

You wrote "That means when you carry it around every day, it won't fall apart as fast. It WILL fall apart eventually - that's always been my experience with laptops in general"

    Yeah, mine too, until my family started buying Macbooks. Maybe we are just lucky, but the only one we had flake out was one my wife spilled a glass of hot tea on the keyboard (and it even worked well for 18 months after that!).

Yeah, a buddy of mine used to always buy the Best Buy extended warranty. The one time he actually needed to use it, he had to bring the laptop in five times to have the same issue fixed (three is supposed to trigger the lemon policy and get you a new unit). Best Buy argued that, since Best Buy was too stupid to actually fix the issue, none of the attempts to fix the laptop actually counted. My friend spent at least ten hours at Best Buy arguing, and at least 20 hours on the phone with me complaining about them. After six months without his laptop, Best Buy finally honored their lemon policy and gave him a new laptop.

    JFC! I will happily avoid all of this insanity by not buying the extended warranty.

You wrote "I have always believed that tablets were a very small niche application. "

    OK. The last serious estimate I read said that there are already 30 million tablets out there and within 36 months there will most likely be around 300 million.

    That's one heck of a niche.