That's a great story. Thanks.
OP

"And yes, the invention is every bit as obvious as you can imagine."

The standard defense against this type of claim-without-support is that if it were obvious, and given that there are _lots_ of eyeballs on the subject matter, and given that it is highly useful, then someone would have already done it. Therefore, since nobody has done it before, it was not obvious.

The "it's obvious" rant is almost universal when someone sees an idea that they (a) know is good, and (b) understand. As an inventor and generally creative type myself, I can't tell you how many times people will say that something is obvious once I have explained it clearly to them, even though had I not done so, they would never have made the same invention in their lifetime. The corollary is that there is a high probability that they will then believe that the idea was their own. I once showed a choreographer the ending to her dance with which she was struggling; after its first performance, someone congratulated her on her work, especially the ending, and she took full credit even though I was standing at her side at the time.

Will this version of Qt improve the horrible impedance mismatch to the OS X GUI?

'What would it be like if we could run native code inside the browser..."

This sounds awesome. Maybe I will finally be able to run a browser inside my browser.

Nonetheless, Gleick's treatment of the likes of Shannon, Babbage, and Ada Lovelace are fair and fairly detailed, and will vastly enlighten the non-technical reader, which is, after all, the intended audience for this book.

Why is this lead piece written as a teaser instead of giving us the punch line? This is at odds with most Slashdot leads. I hope this doesn't catch on as it has for abstracts for technical papers.

128 KB Macintosh, 1984. Finally I could get to work and stop fucking around with my computer.

This doesn't specifically respond to your e-book specification, but Skim on the Mac is amazingly useful for reading PDFs. It has extensive notation and mark-up abilities. I use it exclusively to read technical papers and also use it exclusively to review journal manuscripts that are sent to me.

Awesome--an easy way to improve my IQ.

Could this harm MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) communication systems which rely on multipath transmission?

OMG! So much radical change all at once! I don't think I can handle it!

"As a result, there was less money in R&D budgets to spend on advancements in sound."

OK. But how much additional R&D money is needed to maintain the state of the art? Either it is mysteriously greater than zero or companies are deliberately making less-than-state-of-the-art equipment at many price points.

When I was a senior EE student at Kansas State University in 1977 I participated in an alternative energy project. We realized then, even as students, that flywheels can have a very high energy density, can be local to the power plant or distributed across an area, are very efficient, are somewhat low-tech, etc. Recently I was at an informal gathering of high-level engineers and managers from a regional electric utility who happened to mention the problem with smoothing the supply curve associated with solar-thermal arrays (in Arizona). I mentioned flywheels and they all looked at me like I was an idiot.

$0.99 for a Lada Gaga album? Seems a little high, don't you think.

"And while shoppers like it because it helps avoid an interminable wait at the cashier...."

Shoppers will spend more time scanning their items than they would waiting at the cashier. It will only seem like they are saving time because the psychological perception of small amounts of time is different than that of one large chunk of time. In the meantime, the store saves money by getting the shopper to do their work for free.

I actually avoid stores that routinely make you wait at the cashier (Fry's in my town in Arizona) versus those that don't (Safeway).