You've obviously never heard of google's Data Liberation Front.

Yes. For some reason, in the SF Bay Area, the price of diesel is quite high. Price-per-mile-wise, I'm guessing that the cost of diesel is close to the cost of gas. If I had to put on a fruitcake conspiracy tinfoil hat, I'd think that the gas companies are doing this to make people continue to buy gasoline.

Yup, no argument there. It's just a concern, and one possibly where I'm the only one that cares about it. :)

Perhaps it's just me, but I'd be too worried about having a leaky roof some years down the line. Poking lots of mounting holes in a roof can't be good for it. Even if the installer uses some "leak-proof sealing system", how do you know that all holes are properly sealed, even assuming that, um, "low-cost labor" isn't being used to do the installation? (Possibly worse still, some solar power systems are rented -- what happens to the roof when the system is uninstalled??)

Many years ago, I installed a satellite dish on a roof, and sealed the mounting plate and all of the bolts using UV-resistant caulking. Years later, when I replaced it, I was amazed at how corroded the bolts were (they were supposed to be galvanized, but apparently weren't). Somehow, and I don't know how, water was getting to the bolts, and down the holes in the roof (the caulking appeared to be in great shape).

This. It was great when Gina was around, but I believe the quality can, IMO, "vary wildly". My favorite was last year's article on "Thawing Frozen Food in the Washing Machine". I kid you not.

You're missing the overall point (which, admittedly, wasn't very well made): a tablet fulfills (or will fulfill) the needs of the majority of people. To go into more detail:

1. A "majority" is not "all". No sane person is saying that a tablet will, in the next few years, fulfill the needs of everyone. However, as most people just consume media and data (web browsing, email, IM/messaging, etc.), a tablet works just fine.

2. No, a "majority" really is not "all". Not everyone simply "consumes media and data", and a tablet won't work for them. Examples include people who do significant software development, people who analyze data (spreadsheets), and people who heavy-duty number-crunching simulations of varying types. There are many other examples. Of course, a tablet won't work for them. (I suppose I should include hardcore 3D games, too, as the keyboard/gaming keypad/mouse input combo is still a much superior UI. :-)

3. While there are many examples for which a tablet isn't good, your thesis example isn't very good. As other people have pointed out, there is such a thing as a bluetooth keyboard, and a tablet & keyboard will work just fine for a thesis that doesn't have a lot of pictures, plots, and diagrams.

4. No, the PC isn't going away, but it's long-term marketshare is going to fall into the toilet. Like the horse carriage, blacksmith, and buggy whip when the automobile came out, the long-term outlook for PCs isn't good. (And, just for emphasis, let me point out that horse carriages, blacksmiths, and buggy whips are still made today -- just not in the numbers of yesteryear.)

5. Don't ignore the potential of "AI". For example, today, Siri is like a 1-year-old baby. Wait until it grows up.

(In case it's not clear, "HackTheWeb" is a viable replacement for "Aardvark" the firefox extension, and not "Aardvark" the social search engine.)

For a reasonable replacement for Aardvark, see HackTheWeb: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hack-the-web/

(I'd give you mod points if I had any. Since I don't, I'm going to ask a silly question.)

I'm not familiar with either HAMMER1 or HAMMER2, but will migrating to a HAMMER2 FS require a backup and restore, or is the HAMMER1 FS compatible/migratable? I realize that, as HAMMER2 is in development, you might not have a clear answer, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

That's because tablet and phone technology hasn't caught up to desktop technology. Give it 20 years -- maybe even 10 -- or less, and we'll probably have multi-window tablets.

My guess is that that the "effective" dose is much higher than the normal dosage for cancer treatment, and quite possibly toxic. If "normal" doses worked as well as the mice trials, we'd likely have seen anecdotal evidence by now from the people being treated for skin cancer.

Doesn't matter. As SerpentMage said:

If you want to split hairs, just replace "Android" with "non-iOS tablet", and everything's still true. Apple delivers a certain experience, and the KF also delivers a certain experience. They're both selling well.

It's certainly not obvious, but you generally don't want to choose "GMail" to access google services on iOS.

Instead, you really want "MS Exchange". Yes that's right, "MS Exchange", which you use to access Google Sync, which gives you push gmail, calendar, and contacts (but not notes). Google Sync works well, but it does have the crazy issue of lumping all of your contacts into one big pile; even though you may have organized them into contact groups at google's end, Google Sync gives them to iOS as one big lumpy pile.

Instructions for Google Sync are here (don't skip the part at the end about specifying which calendars to sync): https://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=14252&answer=138740

Tip: if you get a lot of mail, and find the push email sound annoying on your iOS device, you can mute the push sound for selected messages using gmail filters: any message that gets marked as read does not cause a sound on the iOS device.

In all fairness, however, Google Sync on the iPhone doesn't support contact groups. While both ActiveSync and the iPhone support contact groups, Google Sync doesn't support it on the iPhone (It's supposedly supported on android). You just get one big pile o'contacts. Sure, you and others may like having one big pile, but some of us like having our contacts separated out into work, friends, and business groups.