I think Seumas is commenting in part on the announcers' apparent lack of concern for the safety of the drivers. Yes, the crash could be a pivotal moment in the race - but it's arguably a little warped to be audibly excited about an event that could lead to the injury/death of several of the people involved. It's a fair criticism, whether you enjoy the sport or not.

Standard 2.5" - it'd fit most laptops and netbooks, but not ultra-slim ones like the Macbook Air. The one I had in mind specifically is the Samsung 840, which supposedly draws 0.071W when active and has read/write speeds of 540MB/s and 250MB/s, respectively (manufacturer's claims - probably does worse in real-world). I couldn't tell you how much of that 2.5" is casing / padding or whether it'd be possible to arrange the internal chips in an iPad-friendly fashion, but I suspect a strongly motivated corporation could fit something comparable into the iPad form factor for an awful lot less than $300 per device (and still make a sizeable profit).

All that said, Apple's not going to have much trouble finding buyers for this iPad, even at this price.

Logarithmic pricing or not, if you're paying a $300 premium for this version of the iPad (vs. the 16GB version), that's a seriously lousy price on flash storage; typical SSD prices these days are on the order of $180 for a 250GB SSD (and I've seen sale prices as low as $140-150). Apple's doing this with a lot of other products these days, too: the RAM on their laptops isn't user-serviceable any more, so you have to buy it built-in at hugely inflated prices.

My understanding is that wind exposure increases temperature change. If the air temperature is below your body temperature, wind will actually cool you down faster (hence the weather report's inclusion of a 'wind chill factor' during the winter months). That said, if it's warmer than your body temperature, exposure to wind will increase your body temperature, and in warm climates (like India) such temperatures are entirely possible.

Air cooling is almost always effective for devices like your computer's CPU/GPU as they're generally much warmer than air temperature.

I've heard rumors that Nintendo might go to an app-store model for the Wii U that would presumably be a lot more open and XBLIG-ish than their current system (wherein they won't even consider giving you a dev kit unless you're an established development company with a dedicated office, etc.). If they actually did that they'd have to eat a bit of crow, though; Iwata and co. have come out against the app store model in the past pointing at all the crap that winds up making it through. Perhaps they're realizing that being an 'established' company doesn't prevent one from dishing out the shovelware, though, even as they lose out on indie hits like Tiny Towers that might not have made their licensing cut.

The continued popularity of the iPad (and decent success enjoyed by Asus and Samsung with their respective Android tablets) would tend to put the lie to this claim. Acer's own entry into the tablet race was by all accounts a bit crap, so this sounds like some serious sour grapes to me. Also, I haven't heard from anybody in the real world who's excited about these 'ultrabooks' ; they sound like a sad marketing scheme from Intel, along the lines of their old 'Viiv' branding.

Bow ties are cool. Or Stetsons. Stetsons are cool, too.

The bit that complicates it for me in this case is that this is knowing that I'm paying $20 to piggy-back on packets that are already being sent constantly anyhow. There's no incremental bandwidth usage and no real infrastructure cost associated - charging for texting is close to pure profit.

Actually, I believe Edgar Wright (of Shaun of the Dead / Hot Fuzz fame) is currently working on an Ant Man film.

I'm not sure when they changed it (I remember downloading it for free too), but the most recent version of XCode was a $5 purchase on the Mac App Store for me. It really doesn't appear to be free any more.

To be fair: Nintendo has come up with something of a solution re: the "nine-year-old's difficulty" bit. Their more recent games (Mario Galaxy 2, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Ocarina of time 3D) have all had "super guide" functionality - basically, a system that will optionally take over and play part of the game for you if you suck at nine-year-old levels. Seems like they've used that as leverage to start making their games properly challenging again for the rest of us. (Good thing, too; I don't think I died once during Twilight Princess or Wind Waker.)

If we had unlimited power all the other problems are probably solvable through application of more power (for noise reduction, for instance, some sort of active noise-cancelling system, like a giant pair of Bose headphones). It would be a pain in the ass to maintain, and it would probably cause nasty environmental problems in the colder parts of the world (barring further application of our hypothetical unlimited power source).

Today's XKCD strip seems appropriate here. Granted, there's no guarantee that Microsoft actually plans on implementing this ever...