We must have bought at about the same time. Really, though, to be perfect it also needs the $999 docking station with 27" auxiliary display.

Ahh, but your kids have abandoned you! You live the carefree life of the liberated. Work is where I go to kick back and relax. Home is much more hectic, and my kids don't like the servants taking unscheduled breaks. Anyway if my mother (or, much worse, my father) calls me out of turn I get chest pains.

I'm waiting for someone to mention the internment of Japanese-American civilians in WW II (but not German-Americans of course). I wonder how many Americans today now think that was a GOOD idea. On the bright side, I think Obama has a technique that works. He lets the right wing whip itself up into a frenzy, then watches it collapse from exhaustion and humiliation. I'm guessing (hoping) the right wing's hangover is kicking in about now. If I'm write about how this will turn out, it may not even play as badly as we expect abroad

Thanks for the ping Brad. I enjoyed all the comments! (I'm John Gordon btw.) I think we'll figure this out over the next 10-20 years as we do more paleogenomics and study the relationship of writing to technology change. One of the things that impressed me about the deep history of Mesopotamia is how much writing they did, and yet how static (from a distance) their technology seemed. In my original post Charlie Stross wrote about the antecedents to writing "here's also some recent work on cave inscriptions that suggests some glyphs found on cave walls may well have been symbolic communication, going back up to 75Kyears, but it's still controversial. (Which leads me to wonder: if there was a written culture that long ago, how hard would it be to detect? My guess: incredibly hard, if not impossible, in the absence of monolithic constructions such as engraved stone slabs -- which tend to be created by the large institutions made possible by agriculture and sustained settlement.)

Brad, there was another guy like this. I can't quite remember his name. No, it wasn't Bob. Something starting with a B. Didn't his wife run for something too? He was governor of something. Oklohama? Wait, it'll come to me. It's on the tip of my tongue ...

We're all concerned about childhood obesity. Safe bicycle and walking routes to schools should be a top priority.

First of all, you missed a spam comment! One snuck in from 3/14/2010. Secondly, I'd love to see an update to this post. My mother has macular degeneration, and I've experimented with an HD TV display. The results using a VGA cable were awful [1]. I suspect results would be better using HDMI. Despite your 2006 optimism, the worsening problem with pixel density, the falling cost of HD TVs, and the slowwww emergence of vector solutions, I don't see people taking this route. Why not? [1] http://tech.kateva.org/2010/03/using-hdtv-as-low-vision-monitor.html

Here's a big Blogger feature. Thanks to Google's Data Freedom group there's an XML specification for exporting and importing a blog. You can actually MOVE your Blogger data. I don't think any other service has an analogous form of data freedom. This doesn't mean anyone (except Blogger) can import this XML, but it's a fully open spec. Great credit to Blogger for this. On the other hand, there's an undocumented 5,000 post limit of sorts! The Blogger dashboard can't go back beyond 5,000 entries.