Even that would be a complete waste of money. After 9/11 passengers know that if the plane gets hijacked they will likely die. The passengers and crew will now prevent a hijacking just as a Marine would. The other easy to imagine threat is that someone tries to blow up the plane. In that case a Marine isn't going to be much help. We would be better off devoting the money to intelligence and investigation.

You can click a link at the bottom of the invite to stop receiving them. If it bothers you that much, this seems like a pretty "low cost" way of eliminating the problem.

In my opinion, the problem is price. If we stop trying to treat e-books as real books, then we shouldn't have to pay real book prices. I would be fine with either of these scenarios, but would probably prefer the second...

a) Keep trying to treat e-books as real books. Let people lend and re-sell them. Keep prices where they are now, usually somewhere between a hardcover and paperback.

b) Treat an e-book as a DRMed digital object. No lending or resale. Also recognize that it is nearly zero marginal cost to produce, and bring the price way down. Maybe somewhere around $1 per book.

Lotteries are for suckers if they have a negative expected payoff. You wouldn't be a sucker for taking a "heads you pay $1, tails you win $100" lottery. You've done nothing to argue that the app store has a negative expected payoff.

Care to elaborate? I find my iPhone very useful.

I don't really buy this argument as the sole explanation for Apple not supporting Flash on mobile devices. Mobile Safari supports enough of HTML 5 that you can re-create most of the flash apps that you suggest would eat into Apple's profit. There are a lot of iPhone specific web apps that give a lot of functionality. Sure, not as much as building a native app, but you won't get the same functionality as native apps with Flash either.

Not all of their keyboards have sucked. I still think the Apple Extended II is one of the best keyboards ever made. I have several backup keyboards squirreled away in case the one I'm using breaks.

I think it will be great for playing go. I can place stones on my iphone pretty well and a 9.7" screen can only be better. Plus my main problem with playing on the computer right now is that I don't want to sit at my desk for hours at a time. With the iPad it would be easy to get up and move about the house while I play.

I just wish KGS would open up the protocol and let third parties create clients. I may switch to IGS in order to play online with the iPad.

Also looking forward to a version of SmartGo for the iPad.

Lots of libraries for numerical work. Fortunately many of them are being ported to Python modules so you can get the speed/convenience advantage and work in a modern language at the same time.