While I think Apple does us all a service by proving that certain futuristic devices have a market (and I still weep for the Newton!), in general it's always best to wait for the Chinese and Korean companies who make products similar to (but slightly less stylish than) Apple products. Such products also have two important advantages: easy-to-replace batteries and an absence of DRM. My iAudio MP3 player connects to my computer via USB 2.0 and runs for many hours on a single AA battery (which can be rechargeable). It also allows me to record ambient sounds and listen to an embedded FM radio - and it never crashes. It serves as a USB thumb drive if I need one and there is never anything standing in my way when I want to take music from it and load it onto a friend's computer. Fair use baby! More than fair!

I love the new touch screen iPod's built-in WiFi, though I don't think it will be made very useful. It'll be better than the Zune's completely useless WiFi, but it won't allow me to sync with random computers or download music from random locations.

I'm certain a Korean knock off will show up some six months from now that will basically be a pocket-sized laptop replacement - able to run third party software on some sort of Linux backend. It'll be clunky and unsexy, but it'll have WiFi, scads of storage, and I won't have to wonder what to do when its batteries eventually die.

Surely Moore's Law will continue for centuries, until our silicon chips have transistors smaller than quarks. Of course by then they won't be made of silicon and maybe then we won't be made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Where in a J-curve baby, and there's one thing J curves teach us is that they go on and on forever! Look at the housing boom! Look at the dotcom boom! Baby, my Cisco stocks split twenty nine times and are still worth $200 each! I love America! Grow, baby grow! And have another white kid for Jesus!

The reason the inclination to act as hectoring morons persists in our species is that it has historically served a valuable purpose: enforcing strict moral codes and suppressing inclinations towards tolerance and open-mindedness. In stable times it pays for an organism to be conservative in its behavior, since the things that were done that permitted survival will tend to do so in the future. This applies to communities as well as organisms, all of which are shaped by Darwinian forces.

But in troubled or changing times, such conservatism is counter-productive. In Jared Diamond's Collapse we learn that the hide-bound Roman Catholicism of the Greenland Norse (which had them shooting Inuit full of arrows instead of learning from them) allowed them to live as dairy farmers in the arctic for 400 years. That's impressive. Dairy farmers haven't been living in the Hudson Valley for that long! I'm sure the people living in those Greenland Norse communities were precisely the sort who would shout "this is an abomination" had anyone in their community started following an Inuit practice, such as eating fish or tooling around in a kayak - even though such practices could well have saved the Norse from their extinction that came in the early 1400s at the onset of the Little Ice Age. For example, we have written records from the Greenland Norse of them burning their own villagers at the stake for the crime of witchcraft. A tolerant open-minded society doesn't do such things.

I remember the first stinking hot summer I stayed in Oberlin after the academic year ended. Those crude plywood lean-tos that had been attached to Victorians in hopes of creating more student rental units - those were a bitch once the weather turned hot! Oh, the unstoppable sweat mixing with the rumbling of nascent summer love when the girl next door - there for the whole summer! - came by while I was hanging out on the porch because she vaguely knew my housemate and was interested in maybe buying pot. Those were the days, and air conditioning would have completely ruined them.

I recently visited my friend John, who was running his air conditioning in 75 degree weather, and it killed me to see how it isolated him in his house. With air conditioning stoops, porches, and community are all utterly abandoned for the greed of unqualified comfort.

Why not have the European Union rip up all those vinyards, replant them in McMansions (I mean of the most obscenely large, architecturally incoherent variety), and then settle them with all the Islamic malcontents of their "suburbs" - it would be the American notion of suburbia meeting the French one, and who knows what solutions might emerge from such a synthesis? I would be particularly interested in seeing these developed without connections to mass transit and I'd like to see the occupants required by law to buy nothing smaller than a Hummer H2 for the purposes of commuting to work. If we can benefit from European-style socialized medicine, as Michael Moore seems to think, then why can't Europe benefit from America's greatest invention?

So people fleeing the slave trade fled into more rugged areas in Africa, and this paper is saying this is a good thing? How is ending up in a more rugged area a good thing? If Americans were forced by slave traders from Andromeda into the rockies, would they consider themselves lucky?

I know that two of the problems with Rwanda are that it is overpopulated and rugged, and that once you've farmed to the peak of a mountain there is no land higher left to be farmed. At that point people get desperate and wars break out - they're framed as ethnic wars, but the truth of the matter is that when people are desperate they want to fight the people least like themselves, not their own tribe.