That's what this messy scheme essentially is, except that instead of doing it cleanly, as you propose, it offers another TLD boondoggle. It "solves" the problem of one failed institution by introducing 100 new ones.

TLDs were a wrong solution to begin with, introduced redundant names, forced people to buy multiple domains to protect the uniqueness of their name (made tons of money for the registrars that way), but no one wants to admit it. Better to make a clean cut. Scrap this whole nonsense now.

I have found myself in a situation where my laptop was field-unrecoverable. Yet, since I carry a fairly common model of a Thinkpad, I was able to borrow one from the site I was visiting, and a simple drive swap solved the problem.

That's another problem altogether - that kind of information should never be carried on one's laptop, period. It should only be accessed through a secure tunnel, and it should reside at HQ. There it should be encrypted.

As a road warrior I should be using encryption, right? I would be a perfect candidate for it? And yet there is no way I will encrypt my laptop when I travel. The risk of losing access to the data when something goes wrong is far too dangerous to risk it. I have had problems on the road already, yet I have always managed to recover my data either from my laptop or from backups, but what happens when the decryption mechanism or the OS crashes? Carry another laptop? Carry bootable USB-based decryption tools? Sorry, too many variables, too much potential for trouble.

It all comes down to a simple calculation - what is the mathematical probability of someone stealing my drive vs. my OS or disk crashing?(1) Anyone who has traveled knows the second far outweighs the first.

(1) As long as it is unencrypted, you can still recover it relatively easily.

Since I used to sell them, I can break it to you - they were made by Matsushita.

TFA seems to suggest that the Quanta, Mobinnova, ASUS, and MSI are capable of playing 1080p video. I would like to see a single spec proving that it is possible without attaching to an external monitor. Otherwise, it is not very useful to travelers, which paradoxically appear to be the primary target of these devices.

Also, space savings by not including screen cover are an illusion. One will have to carry it in a special protective shell, or your screen won't last very long.

Works on my Blackberry like a charm, every time I throw it against the wall.

Of course. I have no illusion that our culture is anything but a temporary step in history, no less, no more. Evolution is not limited to genes. It spans both micro and macro aspects of human development.

Dying off of cultures and civilizations is a natural process. What must be preserved is their collective knowledge. Written records of their stories may one day prove to be a giant shortcut for future research.