Or for $450 you can buy a tablet and get an app to use it as a Win8 touch controller. Or get a tablet and leave the laptop at home.

CES is a cuple days off. If you don't want to read about gadgets with no pricing or ship date, you might want to take a week or two off from the gadget blogs.

Replace the felt with nylon web and price the materials for a DIY rather than the farcical $250, and this would be a half-decent Lifehacker idea. I'm mulling some possible walls for something like this.

1TB hybrid rather than 500GB of SSD. Do I need to explain how those are not comparable?

So you're saying that Apple skimped on components by not having half the storage space?

Can you show me a sub-$2000 computer with a terabyte SSD? Or, for that matter, a sub-$2000 terabyte SSD?

It should still install and run locally. I still have VNC from its brief appearance. "Kill switch" code was found in iOS back in '08 when the app store debuted, but to my knowledge Apple has never used it.

You should demand your money back.

Apple stole the iPhone name like it stole all those neat ideas from Xerox PARC — through the fiendishly clever M.O. of offering the rightful owners a bunch of money which they accepted. Bastards!

You know that scene in Aliens when the slimy little weasel Burke (Paul Reiser) gets killed by the alien, and for just a moment you're rooting for the dangerous acid monster?

Camping and camera stores carry jumbo-size packets of silica gel. I've even seen buckets of silica gel to dehumidify closets. As another poster mentioned, when they get saturated, a little while on low heat has them dried out and ready to reuse.

Unless you have a huge-ass phone from 1986, we're talking about mililiters here. If your vacuum is going to choke on a thimbleful of water, you might as well shop for a new vacuum while you're out getting a new phone.

All other things being equal*, more resolution is better. If you think the image is finished when it's written to the memory card, you probably don't need a DSLR at all; if you're going to crop, more pixels means more options.

A Jaws figure that isn't Quint? Please.

I used a lot of VNC remote apps, and finally went with Splashtop. One big point in its favor is that on the LAN, it can manage 30fps with sound, so if you're watching a movie on the computer you can take it with you to another room.

The White House isn't under any legal obligation to respond, but it has publicly committed to doing so. It is worth noting that saying "that is the silliest damn thing I've ever seen" is a response.

Hasn't methane already been detected on Saturn's moons? Finding organic compounds would suggest the possibility of life, but it doesn't prove its existence by a long shot.

Awesome. I was just thinking that my $1 cheeseburger is way too expensive and there are too many jobs for kids and unskilled workers. Yay, technology!

I don't know how thorough developing-world butchers "use everything but the squeal," as an old hog farmer once put it. This would be of marginal use in a first-world country, where brick is hardly hard to come by, but the fact that it sets up at a mere 70°C and can be made with locally abundant materials and just one…

You greatly overestimate the legal savvy of the under-35 set. I've found that at any age, a lot of people with little or no understanding of how the law works believe that it's a series of magic words, and you just have to invoke the proper incantation.