I know you geeks can be "eccentric", but I don't think you can pick up girls by claiming the way to fix this is to jog nude.

About as likely as Don Lemon's hare-brained idea that the Malaysia Airlines flight was sucked into a black hole. Sony didn't hack itself, though it could have been an inside job. That was the language of the first threats.

I'd think a modified shotgun shell (or a compressed air version for the UK) stuffed with fine netting with a few weights attached would easily be able to take down any drones flying at less than 30 meters or so. Japan developed such a "spiderman-gun" for holligans in the Nagano Olympics years ago. For higher-flying drones, an anti-drone drone that could drop a net from above would also work. In either case, though, you'd have drones falling from the sky.

"Shed" sounds like a cheap, DIY building in the country or on your litter-strewn backyard. "Shack" has similar connotations. I don't think there is actually anything that wrong with the name. If the CipherShed product is high quality, then the "shed" part well be imagined as a clean, well-constructed small building in a well-maintained lawn. Some people have to bitch, though.

Keep in mind that the rovers lasted FAR longer than anyone expected them too. That the wheels ended up being the weakest link is hardly with much criticism. If they had over-engineered every component, the river would have been heavier, more expensive, delayed, over-budget, and maybe still on earth. The solution? Just make two more with stronger wheels and send them up tomorrow. The overall efficiency of the mission was that good.

While an 8-inch screen might be fine, for typing you need a 10-inch netbook. I had a 9-inch netbook years ago, and it was a real chore for my average-sized thin guy fingers to type on. I was envious when the 10-inch netbooks came out. The screen was marginally different, but there was a world of difference with the keyboard. Maybe one size up or down would work for people with much thinner and thicker fingers, I'm not sure, but any 8 inch tablet might as well be a tablet because you'll need an external keyboard anyway.

You don't need continental drift to make sandstone. You get sandstone from accumulating sediments and the pressure and heat that accompanies the increasing depth of deposition. Continental drift can later raise these rocks to the surface where erosion begins to expose the sandstone, but the compression itself is not due to such.

There were numerous provisions of the ACA that allowed the president to delay components. The flexibility needed to implement the law well were built into it on purpose, you dolt. Why would this not be worth consideration, oh, learned pile of turds?

Why does Steve Ballmer come to mind -- throwing chairs and bouncing around like a spastic Hippity Hop?

Shentino, with views like that, have you ever wondered if you are a sociopath? I see the social drive in my fellow Homo sapiens. We are a social species. If you can't discern that, then you've either let cynicism take over the role of open, critical thought, or you're just socially unaffected: a sociopath.

We know who is good and who is bad at offering upgrades, and we remember this when we and our friends are buying new phones. So, there is clearly more than zero incentive for the carriers to do the upgrades.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Superb. I am not sure if it is right, but that is a more basic way of relating the two. Something similar, I think, can be said about the many-worlds interpretation. Instead of saying that a new, parallel world is created for every possibility at every moment, we can instead say there are always an infinite number of (plausible) variations succeeding any particular moment. We will always be in only one. Outside this framework, we are singularly unable to speak.

I got a Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet (android 3.1 for now). It is one of the few android tablets with multiple ports and connectors and an N-trig digitizer/stylus. The software is still lacking. It doesn't have anything like OneNote yet. But I am able to listen to a lecture and take notes about as easy as using paper. The android app I us is Quill. The thing it lacks is handwriting recognition. There is a handwriting recognition app included (Notes Mobile), and its recognition is pretty good, but it is still useless most everyone agrees. Maybe a second generation will fix the manifold problems. Using my tablet, I can take notes, export png's, send to Evernote for partial OCR and indexing, and even print the notes out . . . It does work, though the clikcing of the stylus on the surface is a bit louder than I'd like. The ThinkPad Tablet is coming under a lit of criticism, though. Just check the forums for the breaking USB port issue (forums.lenovo.com). The ASUS Transformer Prime coming out next month I think will be the ThinkPad's equal, and it will have android 4.0 with its built-in stylus benefits, and the Tegra 3 processor, and all the accessories the Transformer is known for. Look into it -- and watch in general any tablets that use the N-trig digitizer.

You could try readability: http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets It works well on my browsers, though I don't know if it will work on your browser.

I don't have a tablet yet, but I can see clearly how I would use one:
- reading news/books on the train. I can do this with my android phone now. The comparison of phone to tablet for this is a bit of a wash. However, netbooks/notebooks don't suffice. You need to be sitting down, and the keyboard is a useless, awkward mass. On a crowded train, I can't even get a notebook out of my bag.
- watching videos/playing games on the train. I do this less often, but a tablet would be marginally better than a phone. Again, the notebook form-factor is useless and awkward.
- Showing videos to my classes on the in-room monitors/projectors. The tablet has more possibilities than does the phone (USB host, external memory, more video connectors). Again, the keyboard is unneeded.
- Light document editing at my desk -- using a USB keyboard I leave at the school. Here the notebook has an advantage in terms of software available, but if google docs suffices for lessons plans, then the tablet is just as good.
- Email from my desk. Same as notebook as long as I have the aforementioned USB keyboard.
- Web browsing from desk.

So, for me, the tablet does double duty -- PVR/notebook and transit eReader/PVR/game/email/web device.

The price, though. It seems to me that the touchscreen and the novelty are the big differences between netbooks and tablets (that, and the missing keyboard). So I'd expect a USD 100 or so premium for the tablet. Notion Ink's Adam is looking like the ideal device at the moment, though they need to demonstrate long-term viability and service and support (like offering an upgrade to honeycomb soon with the ability to forego their Eden UI entirely.)