I can understand - some people want a dingus that Does It All. I'm not one of them. If my phone craps out, I want my PDA unaffected, and vice-versa. Same for my MP3 player.

I'm clinging for dear life to my lovely old iPAQ PDA. It has a small screen, but I have good eyes; and it fits perfectly into an exterior pouch on my purse. I have a dumbphone, which fits in the smaller pouch. If I'm going to a coffeeshop or such, I'll take my netbook, which does fit in the purse itself.

But it seems PDAs are getting hard to find.

Disney had a nature film called "Beaver Valley". I wonder how they'd rename it?

Maria Goeppert-Mayer, co-developer of the Mayer-Jensen Shell Model, deserves a place somewhere on that list. Oh, and we could use a Lady Nerd icon...

I have a couple of laptops - one about three years old, one about six, both perfectly fine for travel. Neither of the manufacturers is supplying 'manufacturer's spec' batteries any more. So I should throw a couple good computers away just because I might have to use an aftermarket battery? Hell, NO! Nor should anybody with a printer, or a camera, be tethered to the manufacturer by chains of silicon!

Of course the New York Times doesn't allow Wikipedia-style misinformation. They have their own roster of professional liars, and their own preferred lies. No public involvement needed.

I will believe the equality campaigners are honest when they are working just as hard to get men into Home Economics.

And what will happen, pray tell, if the opposition hacks into the signals and uses them to program their own GPS-enabled weapons? Even if the weapon is just a lurking suicide bomber, it cannot be good for them to know where our side is.

I got a Buffalo 500-gig external drive. It came with Memeo Autobackup software. It works, lets you save as many copies/versions of a file as you designate (great for writers!), and does it without your intervention. Saved my data several times so far. Works just fine on Windows XP.

Losing money on netbooks? Losing money? When somebody fits out a computer with Linux, Microsoft may not GET the money they think they deserve. But they don't lose anything.

I go with the lines from Kipling: "So I left them, sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind."

I see no end point to this nonsense.

We all are experts on a very few things, duffers on a lot more, and completely incompetent on huge tracts of action. And everything - from cars and planes down to computers and fire extinguishers - is capable of causing problems.

If I have to be competent before I can do anything, you've closed off the vast majority of human activity to me. And yourself. The details may differ from one person to the next -- the effect is universal.

I worked at a museum, and it took all the support I could manage to get a computer (over the opposition of a pointy-haired boss).

Buying software? "What? You want MORE?"

IT department? I was the only one who could do anything besides word processing.

So I wrote a dBase III program to let me keep track of what we had, and later ported it to Microsoft Access. I'm retired now, but they still have to haul me in as an independent contractor to teach the new curators how to use the thing.

But I tell ya - nowhere in there was there a chance for me to actually BUY software, nor did we have a real IT department. It wasn't ideal, but it got done. If I hadn't done it that way, it would still all be pieces of paper covered with handwriting, and a picture (formerly) stuck on with rubber cement.

So give me an IT department, and I'll be glad to let them do the work. As it is, the program I wrote in 1985 and ported about 2000 is still doing the job.

Bear in mind that I'm speaking as a physicist rather than a computer scientist, but long ago (the 1960s) I was taking a programming course. ALGOL, nothing but ALGOL. I noted that I'd rather have FORTRAN. Steam started coming out of the professor's ears.

Academe has a strong anti-utilitarian bias. Always has, always will. "Are we a trade school, then?" they will say. And as a result, they turn out people unfit for actually DOING things.

A radio-control pterodactyl was commisioned by the Smithsonian Museum, and created by Paul MacCready. It flew by flapping its wings. I've seen the film, and seen the pterodactyl itself on display in the Air and Space museum.

Perhaps this driver saw a secret military version of same. Was it black? Gotta watch out for them black pterodactyls!