I don't get it. Virtually every laptop or tablet has a choice of preconfigured, built-in amounts of RAM, flash memory, hard drive space. I realize the combinatorial issue, but why isn't a double-sized battery a user-configurable choice at purchase time? You can of course find all sorts of add-on third-party products but in general if you want 32 GB of flash memory in a tablet, you buy a tablet with 32 GB of flash memory preinstalled. You don't walk around with a USB stick or a compact flash card permanently poking out the side. Furthermore, how to say this except that users are willing to overpay for the convenience and security-blanket of preinstalled RAM and flash memory, so it could be a source of additional profit margin.

Why the reluctance to offer bigger batteries? Let the users who need longer runtimes buy longer runtimes, let the users who need lighter weight buy lighter weight. Is it fear that reviewers comparing competitive products would insist on citing the weight for comparable runtime instead of weight of the lightest unit?

There was a period of a couple of years when a web page hosted on my ISP's freebie 15 megabytes of web space was the top hit for a particular Google search. It was a good page--a lay discussion of a technical topic--and I enjoyed the ego boost, but I always wondered why since I was not aware of it's being linked from anywhere, let alone any high-traffic or high-creditibility page. Now I think I know.

(I have since contributed that page's content to Wikipedia. The article has evolved with contributions from others but is still very recognizably mine... and I recently received a the left-handed compliment of an angry email from someone who'd stumbled across my own web page and complained that I had plagiarized it from Wikipedia!)

...Shakespeare's estate will sue Caplin's butt off over "The Sound and the Fury."

"the cloak is unidirectional (it only provides invisibility from one very specific direction)."

This is reminiscent of the 1930s Hollywood special effect called the "glass shot," which looks perfect from the point of view of the camera, but not from anywhere else.

"It is now just a matter of time before visible-light, omnidirectional invisibility cloaks are created." That's about like saying that if David Copperfield can make the Statue of Liberty vanish... as a magic trick... seen under special conditions from an audience confined to a special viewpoint... it is only a matter of time before he can do it for real.

They all starting with pretty much the same technology, suppliers, engineering competence. So if Apple can manage to put together a product with all of the elements on your wishlist, and nobody else can... maybe it's not actually obvious what should be done, maybe doing it is actually not that easy, and maybe Apple is actually good at it.

Steve Jobs called it "taste."

I once worked at a Fortune 500 company that seemed to be completely unable to identify good ideas on their merits. Every idea had to be validated, basically by seeing that the competition was already doing it. When their customers would start clamoring for the features and products their competition had, they would suddenly get very busy and whip out something, under pressure and in a rush. Their motto seemed to be "we'll do whatever IBM does, two years later and poorly." There's a lot of that in the computer industry.

Simple as that. Glad to know someone was taking it seriously. And your next impossible mission, should you choose to accept it... "the chimney company."

I am glad that it works "like a charm" for you on "the majority" of documents. Could you tell us what, exactly, it does for you on the minority?

I downloaded the no-cost XML converter from Microsoft for my Mac some years ago, for the excellent reason that they hadn't produced a version of Word that supported .docx yet. My experience was that at least half the time, it would run for many minutes trying to convert a document and then crash. These were not long documents, and I was never able to characterize what things about a document caused the crash. The conversions were always slow, like minutes, even when successful. And when the documents did convert, I often found that there were unacceptable formatting problems.

I found that NeoOffice--then the most appropriate Mac version of OpenOffice, was faster and more reliable at opening .docx files--and then saving them in .doc format--but it, too, often had formatting compatibility issues.

Well, that sort of explains something that had been puzzling me. My wife and I just recently bought the (original) Kindle Fires, and one minor detail that puzzled and bugged me is that there is no easy way to change the wallpaper on the screens it displays. Mind you, I rather like the pictures Amazon provides... a tasteful rotation of pictures of nostalgic old technology like pens and pencils.

But I'd rather have a picture of my grandson. And for about a quarter of a century, every high-tech device with a screen has invited me to set the default background wallpaper to anything I like.

There is apparently no way to set custom wallpaper on a Kindle Fire jailbreaking or hacking it.

Obviously, even on the Kindle Fire, Amazon feels that they, not the purchaser, "own" the screen.

A modern-day Dickens could do something with it.

"Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless."--Charles Dickens, Bleak House

This is great and I applaud and respect him for doing this. After you get done cracking jokes, go read The Big Necessity by Rose George. I never fully understood just how privileged we are.

"2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. I don't mean that they have no toilet in their house and must use a public one with queues and fees. Or that they have an outhouse, or a rickety shack that empties into a filthy drain or pigsty. All that counts as sanitation, though not a safe variety. The people who have those are the fortunate ones. Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. Instead, they defecate by train tracks and in forests. They do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways.... Four in ten people live in situations where they are surrounded by human excrement because it is in the bushes outside the village or in the city yards, left by children outside the backdoor...

In 2007, readers of the British Medical Journal were asked to vote for the biggest medical milestone of the last two hundred years. Their choice was wide: antibiotics, penicillin, anesthesia, The Pill. They chose sanitation."

I don't know who said it--when I heard it it was attributed to Mark Twain but that doesn't seem to be right. At any rate, someone asked a nonbeliever whether he wasn't terrified by the thought of nonexistence after death. He replied, "Not at all. I experienced nonexistence for eons before I was born, and I enjoyed every minute of it."

I wish them luck with their $5 million, but I don't think they'll be any wiser than Omar Khayyam:

With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d-
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”

Into this Universe, and Why not knowing,
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.

There simply are intrinsic problems with stereoscopic 3D. The first is that the point of the technology is to increase realism. When you are experiencing that increase realism, 3D enhances the experience.

The problem is that because of the geometry of stereoscopy, 3D in a theatre only increases realism if you are sitting in a rather small sweet spot in the middle of the house; in a home, only if you're sitting on one properly placed piece of furniture. Sit farther back, and depth is exaggerated. Sit farther forward, and it's flattened. Sit to the size, and everything is skewed--cubes become rhomboids. Instead of being more realistic than flat cinema, it becomes less realistic.

This Cabinet-of-Dr.-Caligari effect is novel and stimulating, but it is not realistic or story-enhancing. It's rather like the early days of color TV. Colored snow, and actors changing from purplish to greenish as they walk across the screen, have a gee-whiz appeal, but in the long haul it has to be accurate or it doesn't satisfy, and it can't be accurate if they want to fill a theatre.

A second problem is that 3D doesn't really work unless the picture is so big that you are never looking close to the screen edges, where you get insoluble problems with binocular disparity if any object in the screen image is closer than the physical screen.

The second is that you only get an increase in realism if the director and cinematographer throw out a century of screen grammar, and limit themselves to using lens of one focal length. And, the more realistic the basic process, the more jarring something as ordinary as a cut is. We've learned to take cuts from a long shot to a closeup in stride, but it's harder if the image is so realistic that every cut induces a sense of physical movement. The re-thinking of how to tell a story on the screen might be possible. After all, the introduction of sound posed similar problems in the early days. But adding sound meant adding a whole new sensory modality. 3D is really, at heart, just a better picture... just like Cinerama or 48 fps Showscan, neither of which had staying power despite being a breakthrough in realism.

Herman Wouk (of all people--he's better-known for "The Caine Mutiny" and "The Winds of War"--) wrote a reasonably amusing novel about the project, published in 2005, entitled "A Hole In Texas." I'm afraid I don't remember the plot twists--it's not a layman's crib sheet on either the physics or the history of the supercollider. If you enjoyed the atomic bomb background material in "War and Remembrance," it's that sort of thing... and as Abraham Lincoln probably didn't say, "People who like this sort of thing will find it just the sort of thing they like."

I'll call Textcelerator the curelution for infoverload if it deliminates Slashvertisements.

Most of the time highway traffic is safe and predictable. Driving 125 miles under favorable conditions (perfect weather and visibility if the news photo is any guide) without incident? Drunks do that and often get away with it; so do texting teenagers and fatigued truck drivers.

If someone demonstrated that he could drive 125 while smoking marijuana without having an accident, would we conclude that driving while high is safe and should be allowed?

The accident rate on highways is so low that 125 miles tells you nothing at all. The average accident rate in the United States is 8 fatalities per billion passenger miles. There is no way in the world a single 125 mile test involving four vehicles can tell you whether the accident rate for these car-trains is the same, ten times as high, or ten times as low. This is just a stunt, and proves nothing except that someone at Volvo had guts, and that someone in authority exercised bad judgement and allowed it.