USDA Zone 9b - my Musa basjoo gets burned, a lot, during our occasional dips below 40 degrees (f). Banana leaves aren't a good substitute between December and March in most of Florida (or the USA for that matter.) BTW — Their leaves are too long to be really useful for this unless you chop them up. I recommend…

I'm a huge fan of the A-10 and supplied munitions for a wing of them in South Korea many years ago. (IYAAYAS) However, the 30MM round is not the size of a normal champagne bottle (at least not the ones I buy.) It is thinner and a few inches taller than your standard beer bottle. [www.mindfully.org]

Virtual on the hardware but Sammy had to load it up with all that nonSense and then test it.

Even more unfortunate that it still happens, regularly, even in modern societies.

Maybe they are marketing to governments that have a need for lethal crowd suppression. They do sell to Syria, after all.

We agree on the main point, which is that it's the ecosystem. We disagree on how well Microsoft has done with that in the past. I personally find Google's Play easier to use than iTunes and more visually attractive than Amazon. However, it is missing some features that I think are important.

1) That will last about 6 months at most, then Dell, Samsung, HP, and whatever other device manufacturer out there that builds Win8 Tablets will create the same problem for Microsoft they did for Google.

I'm a linux guy, but at work I've been assigned a Mac Air for travel purposes. It's a killer piece of hardware. Unless you're locked in to Microsoft solutions, it's worth a test drive.

"Nobody can compete with the first parties on profit margin..."

1. Established ecosystem. If it doesn't integrate into my existing digital life, it's a paperweight. Phone, desktop, music, & note-taking are key. Video only when I travel.

Depends on your reading of the word "devalued." If cost != value, then you can have a cheaper item that consumer value the same. Given the original point, I read "devalued" as "less desirable" rather than "costs less."

1) Huh?! The IP is mostly in the card—or should be. The driver is just a compatibility layer so those expensive cards can have a larger market. Very little of those millions went into the driver. And no one is asking them to release their IP, just release enough interface details so customers can get all that…

Medical uses as well. I recall walking over glue mats in hospitals that were supposed to pull debris off your shoes before entering certain areas. This mat might replace them and cost less overall.

If the market were "free", that would be the best, correct answer. But the market is far from free at this point. We have a cartel attempting to set a floor price for books.

What is "below cost" on a digital work where its price is set based on the cost to produce a heavy, paper product? I get the "insurance" model used by publishers to distribute the risk of unpopular and unfinished works across the entire product line. I get the cost of issuing advances to authors. I get the cost of…

As an avid consumer of certain genre's of books, I have this sense that the current state of things is $30 for hardcover, $10 for paperback, and $10 for a DRM-locked digital copy.

On what do you base the assumption that it "devalues" the product?

Meat Grinder = Gadget.

Why?

Because this feature is considered a mandatory minimum for high-end mobile devices. Apple has to introduce it if it wishes to maintain their lead in that market. Every time Google (Or Microsoft, or any future competitor) can define such a feature and get Apple to shift gears and expend time and resources to support…