Let's assume the shortest possible distance, 3,347 km by crow from San Diego, CA to Jacksonville, FL.
Let them all lie down (1.7m average height) - after all this will take a while.
And then throw in 40cm between them for comfort.
You could still fit in 1.5 million people and change, or about the population of Idaho.

- super-wow graphic on front page to suck you in
- 6 page thank you note by author
- 11 page table of contents, double spaced
- 17 page prologue describing the conception of the e-book
- overly normalized content, stuffed with references to other chapters
- no index, forcing you to flip through all the pages

I don't know about you, but I don't like the sound of these e-books.

It's a well-worn path.
USA/Russia - War (Good vs Cheap), Detente (Nuclear brinkmanship, Cold war), Disrupt (new economies), Decline (high cost of supporting existing infrastructure/policies)
RIM/Nokia - War (Good vs Cheap), Detente (stuck to their product lines), Disrupt (Touch replaced T9 / Qwerty), Decline (high cost of losing customers & late entry to new markets)
Apple/Google - War (Good vs Cheap), now settling into a comfortable Detente. They're not stupid. They both know there will be a Disruption. It won't come from Microsoft and Blackberry making "me too" phones.

Apple will try and do it themselves, with loads of secret R&D. Google are trying to do it with loads of public R&D (driverless cars, Glass, Nexus Q, Ingress).

But it's inevitable. One day, some other company will blindside them and Disrupt them utterly.

Does this mean Apple is the most profitable flash memory reseller in the world?

Each time you go to the checkout, the software can associate your phone's ID with (say) 20-30 payments happening in that vicinity.

After the second time you've been through the checkout, they will know who you are.

Get a Nexus 7.

Costs US$199, most games are under $5. Goes with the kids in the car, in the bedroom, but still easy to confiscate and lock away.

Far better selection of educational games, not just twitch reflex shooters.

Serves double duty as a media player. Movies, music, Youtube.

Serves triple duty as an internet research / learning tool. How do volcanoes work? Look it up.

With Android 4.2 you can set up individual user accounts for each child & parent, so the whole family can use it. But it's still cheap enough that you can buy one for each person if you wanted.

Honestly, why would you get a console?

Apple: Our iDevice is now FREE but requires an iCloud account. iCloud is $39 a month.

Motorola: Hey, where's our 2.25%?

Apple: Hahahahaha.

The Singapore Flyer (540 feet) just has a really long platform. The wheel moves slowly enough (2 rotations per hour) that you can simply step into your capsule. They can slow it down even further for wheelchairs if needed.

After a few weeks of 8 hour bathroom breaks they'll give up on this plan.

Who says it's for humans? Parcel shipping is growing year on year. A few of these Mach 6 shuttles linking continents makes "same-day delivery" a reality. For a price, of course.

.. a top-level domain for happy people?

Apple's design concepts revolve around a simple experience for the 80%, and accessibility support for the 20% has historically been a long time in coming. It took 3 years for captioning to arrive on their Apple TV platform, and the iPhone didn't get accessibility features until its third iteration. I can and have recommended Apple products to others, but for this reason I am unable to use them myself.

I cannot think of a worse company to have a lock up on accessibility-related patents :(

The trouble is, people are lazy. If given a car like this I would just be, or pretend to be, asleep/drunk at every opportunity, letting the car do all the driving.

So you end up with a "fully autonomous" car anyway, just not a very good one.

Better to aim for perfection right from the start, Google Car style. (How very at odds with their usual ship-the-beta approach!)

The market always provides through emergent behaviours. I am expecting this to be the next big thing from Google. Individuals will take it on themselves to cover the zoning board and deliver reports on Google+ / Blogger. Similar to Youtube, Google will start profit-sharing with producers of quality and unique content, delivering a cut of the advertising revenue straight to their Google Wallet. Thus local journalists receive an income stream.

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.