Let me apply my psychic detective skills to that mystery. I'm seeing a dollar sign. An L ... no, wait, that's a one. And f..... a five. I'm seeing a five. And then seven zeroes. And something that looks like a slice of pie ... about 30% of a pie.

Even if you use it fewer than 25 times a year, you get 256Kbps AAC files — for all those songs you ripped at 128K because you had a small iPod or didn't know any better, for all those torrented files with crappy rips. Even for the ones you legitimately own, it means not having to dig out the binder full of CDs and…

Where are you seeing this "MOST of the video on the internet"? Not YouTube or Vimeo, not most of the TV networks, not movie trailers. I have a plug-in blocker (a descendent of Click2Flash) on my Mac, which displays a gray box and doesn't load Flash until you click it (or unless you whitelist the site). The majority of…

It suddenly dawned on my why so many people insist that Flash is essential to surfing the Web: They visit a lot of deeply, irredeemably shitty sites. About 90% of official movie and band sites are hopelessly flashfucked. If you spend most of your Web-surfing day at rockemsockemrobotsthemovie.com, the mobile browsing…

I was expecting all of Atlanta's entries to be hip-hop stars. I didn't even think of CNN (multiple feeds) and the CDC. It's just possible I underestimated Twitter.

Adobe couldn't make it work. Mobile flash eats battery life for lunch and has iffy performance, not to mention that a lot of Flash content is designed with mouseovers and clicks in mind, and thus doesn't work on a touchscreen. All these things are true regardless of anything Apple says or does.

AM is much more useful in an emergency. AM radio can be picked up over vast distances, especially at night. Most stations have to power down, but the designated clear-channel (not to be confused with Clear Channel, the company) stations remain full power. In olden times when I only had an AM radio in the car, I could…

A search engine is, basically, two things: The catalog and the algorithm. Isn't Siri just a front end to Google or another existing catalog and algorithm?

Now make me one that can hold several novels, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the Oxford English Dictionary in an easily totable package.

Untreated human waste is a bad idea. Human waste that has been treated, whether through natural or artificial means, is in everything you eat or have ever eaten. It's in your drinking water if anyone lives upstream of you. Cycle of life and all.

Put about 50 of these in a nice leather binding, about the size of a trade paperback, with the electronics in the spine and covers, and you've got the e-book I've been dreaming about since Xerox first demoed e-paper mumblety-eleven years ago. The solar part would be a bonus.

The strip clubs will sell scrip or "house cash," just like they do now for folks who use credit cards and put it on their expense accounts. The clubs prefer that, because once you've bought in, it's not like you're going to walk out with any of that "cash" in your pocket.

Yeah, the Clie was definitely the best of the five Palm organizers I went through, what with that hot high-res 320x320 screen. It would have made a better phone than the Treo 300.

I humbly propose a new feature: If you're too drunk to type your password, Facebook tells you to go to bed. You can also designate three to five "trusted friends" that your phone will lock you out from drunk-dialing.

What lucrative career is out there waiting for someone whose core competency is instant recall of random facts? Seriously. I need to apply for it.

"1,2,3,4,5... is not that difficult follow." But A,B,C,D,E is, apparently.

Jujube.

And it comes with a ready-made tag line: "I don't think you're ready for this jelly."

In ages past, big companies (especially those with monopolies or something close to it) spent a lot of money on R&D, with emphasis on the R. Not quite pure research, but no timetables to bring something to market. We got a lot of great stuff out of GE's GERL, AT&T's Bell Labs, and Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center…

My thought exactly. Disney foundered for years after Walt died and until Eisner came in. Jobs was passingly familiar with Disney, so I doubt he'd want the company stuck in "what would Steve do" paralysis.