Because it's awesome. I was once like you, thinking it was just a gimmick, but then I bought a wireless charger and I'll never look back. There are so many benefits it's not even worth listing a handful since I may or may not hit the ones you care about, but really, the chargers cost about $12 now (you pay the extra $7 because 3-coil is where it's at), so just try it and you'll understand much more completely.

Thanks for the link, I've been looking for data like that. Any idea if any one has made similar comparisons to some of the hydrogen fuel cell concepts?

It's great to see that the electric cars are beating up the gas cars by a nice margin already, but I just have a hard time believing that heavy metal batteries are the best we can do.

Yeah, I was confused as to why they wouldn't just do that, or at least just have a pool of them at each airport. Drop it off when you finish your flight and it will be updated, charged, cleaned, etc.

I guess you're saving even more weight if your pilot isn't also carrying a personal laptop for when he gets to the destination, and people do tend to take better care of devices if they're theirs... maybe that's the logic, or maybe the logic is in the article I didn't read.

Not what flight critical means...

The problem is the newer content is hit or miss. I paid for Hulu for a few months until I got sick of "this show isn't available yet unless your a member of a participating cable company", and "web only", and the straw that broke the camel's back for me "this episode expires in X days".

I thought I got all new content, quickly, and the entire season.... but that's not true, it's highly qualified. Everything in hulu is content dependent and it's just not fun to keep track of it, so I stopped and replaced it with more DVR'ing.

Any one else notice that even the billionaire can't figure out a decent place to put his computer speakers? They're jammed in behind his monitor just like mine. I don't know why, but that gave me a lot of enjoyment.

Wish I had mod-points. This is so completely true, and combine it with the fact that they all come with vendor lock in, and it's even worse.

I have a Nook simple touch, and really want to move to a front lit e-ink reader. Problem is the nook glow is the least tempting of the front lit e-readers to me. That said, I feel locked in due to the number of books already in the B&N cloud. Yes I know I can download, strip DRM, side-load, but bleh, I don't consider that a real solution.

Some day maybe we can buy e-books instead of rent them from a couple of disjointed retailers. Then I could buy a new e-reader every year based on whoever built the best one!

Yeah, that's the version I heard when driving home.

It still seems to me to have a big flaw, namely the assumption of causation. Social networks with messages like this are a self selecting group, how do they know that those with friends who voted aren't just in more politically savvy peer groups?

Now if they would have randomly lied to people about whether or not their friends had voted I could see some determination of causation, but as it was done I think the above is at least one potential flaw.

I wish it did. But even artists need to eat.

For better or worse (I'd argue better), we're past the days of aristocracy founded artistic endeavours so if you plan to do "interesting work", be it paint, code, write, architect, etc. you better find a way to market it. It doesn't necessarily have to be mass marketed or commercially successful, but doing it as the OP suggested "something wonderful no one ever sees" isn't viable unless it's just your spare time.

And if it is, more power to you, but I'd argue that to push any real envelopes in these worlds you need to dedicate more serious time, which means some one needs to feed you.

Funny, I meant creative. I wonder if that was Freudian.

It's a nice thought... but the problem is it becomes very difficult to fund future creations with that mindset. Unless you're fortunate enough to be in some funded department who is just doing R&D it's not a great way to go through life. Even if you are that fortunate, chances are there's some very political individual properly extracting enough from your group to make sure the company at large is getting value out of their funding.

Same holds for pretty much any productive endeavor.

you don't realize how much "de briefing" you go through on your drive home

Something big hidden in this part of the comment. You need to have an end to the work day. My biggest challenge when I worked at home was starting and stopping a day. Basically I worked 24 hours a day, but never very hard. It turned into a negative for both my work and social lives.

My solution was twofold. 1) I enforced a strict start time. I'm not a morning person so the start time was my killer, if I started by 9am every day I found it easier to delineate a day than if I opened the laptop on the kitchen table around 8:30 with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. 2) No TV during working hours. Not so much for the lack of distraction while working, but for decompression it allowed me when I did turn the TV on.

I imagine everyone is different, but that was what worked for me.

Also curious - but on patents like this one I'm always struck by the fact that there's nothing interesting except for the "put it on a computer" part. Yes, there was a time when digitizing was non-obvious, but now it seems to me that adding "on a computer" would fit with just about everything. Certainly everything media related.

Margin notes have worked this way for hundreds of years, though they've fallen out of favor recently. Authorization to receive the annotations seems like a pretty weak addition, but I guess you could cite a library card if you wanted to take my analogy too far.

I get this type of comment from some media sources, but confused how someone on Slashdot overlooks the Nook Color. It was $50 more, but it was available about a year ago... hopefully B&N will counter with a price drop/hardware refresh.

That said, I think Amazon did a good job with the launch, and the better streaming media offering of Amazon will make this a huge success over the Nook.

And, to answer the question in the summary. I don't want one. e-reader + full featured tablet is my preference. Hoping the Xoom 2 is what I'm looking for.

I am never going to be able to unthink this post... you may have just ruined this movie for me.