TetOn

No, but you can plug a set of earphones with a mic into it and it will work.

Greetings from the future: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/technology/personaltech/04...

The key distinction being the ability to find the URLs that you don't know by fishing for the one piece you do remember, that may (inconveniently) not be until the end of the URL.

An example: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/ which I inevitably reach by typing "big"; this was un-possible with the previous iterations.

Yes.

With the requisite warnings about "no connection present" duly dismissed (this is an iPod Touch 2.0, so no AT&T network backstopping it either), I can browse my GMail inbox, read messages, make changes, and perform seemingly any "normal" mail function all without a connection. Obviously will have to connect at some point for it to be useful, but can do everything but send/receive new messages while away from a network connection.

Also interesting to note that this sort of rich web app is the way Palm Pre development is (supposedly) going to work...

The X reasons you should be doing Y

Predictably, "Continued on page 2>>" doesn't make the list.

What I find disturbing in this piece is the seemingly massive false equivalency being perpetrated. Donating a kidney is not like giving blood. This is a major operation and carries with it an assortment of long-term health risks to both the donor and recipient (though, obviously, the recipient has essentially nothing to lose; long-term followup studies of live donors are still pretty small and not that informative)...yet the entire article seems predicated on "you'd be a monster not to give up at least one of your kidneys!" Where's that attitude coming from, exactly? Why not just toss a lung into the mix as well?

But Google is specifically digitizing the entire holdings of well stocked libraries, such as Harvard's. This activity directly argues against the thesis of the article: if we assume for the moment that any and all rights issues are resolved, then Bezos is quite right that every book currently available anywhere in any form could indeed be downloadable in 60 seconds. Even books represented by a single extant copy could become widely available, potentially for the first time in centuries, in their "new" digital form. This is the exact opposite of any "recency" bias.

>solving the last-mile problem.

I think the only way you can hope to achieve this is through zoning and long-term alteration of how cities are built. Sprawly cities like Houston et al. can't possibly hope to build out any right-of-way based system such that everyone is within a mile of a station...thus you build the center and let density rise. Combine this with a suitable number of edge-sitting mega stations that outlying folks drive (or, even better: ride a bus) a shorter distance to (relative to a full commute) and you've solved a large portion of the problem, anyway.

The most remarkable thing about this article is that it isn't spread over 15 pages. They can't quite bring themselves to get it down to one, but limiting any of these "X greatest Y things" articles to two clicks is major progress.

And, indeed, where's OMNI? Page three, no doubt...

Did you mean the Apple //?

(Also would have accepted Apple ][.)

"very long rant about the mere premise of this article. Please, for the love of god, let. it. go."

I think you and many others are missing the premise of the article, if you bothered to read it at all. 9.11 is merely a setting for the image. The article is about the image, the inherent "lie" of photography in general, and about people's reaction to images such as this one.

True, this is a famous image from a particularly notable event in recent history, but the same basic article could have been written about many other images, even some of those specifically mentioned in the article itself.

For more in the same vein, check Errol Morris' excellent series of blog entries (http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-...); then re-read the Esquire piece. I think you'll have a different feeling about it coming from that perspective.