You know I could go to home depot and buy a gallon of methanol for $15... Suddenly it becomes more economical. At least until they DRM their methanol.

I don't understand why people are complaining about price. Go spec an *exactly* the same laptop from Dell/HP, you'll find that their price are the same as Apple, maybe 5% less (or even more). Dell/etc give you cheap laptop models because they put older/crappier components in them. With Apple, they force you to get the more expensive (but better) components.

Case in point, the Dell Studio XPS 13 is $999, essentially the same spec as Macbook, with slightly slower processor and 1GB more memory, same hard disk, same graphics card, and less battery life. That's from hardware alone, forget about OS.

But I guess you could save a buck or two and go with less popular brands, like Acer or Toshiba.

Not to mention that their cameras also take SD, or CF in the higher end models.

Yeah it's also too bad the Canon weather sealing doesn't work too well; if you want good weather sealing, there's Olympus and Pentax, and Nikon if you spend the $$. Anecdotally, Sony has good weather sealing, even though they don't advertise it - see http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/antarctica-2009-worked.shtml and all the 5dII failures due to weather - Canon just has terrible build quality compared to everyone else. This is very true of the Rebel cameras; they just feel like plastic toys, where everyone else's low end cameras feel quite sturdy.

I absolutely love it how no Sony cameras were reviewed, even though most (all?) these cameras use Sony sensors.

Jon, Sony probably moved to an 18-55 design because their 18-70 wasn't very good. Nikon and Canon's latest 18-55 give quite high resolution and are optically great. Since the new 18-55 has a in-body motor in it, it probably costs even more to make than the 18-70, so no cost cutting there.

There are 18-200 (11x) and 18-250 (14x) lenses out there (not too heavy, not too expensive), but just remember, the more zoom range you get, the less overall quality the lens is (in general). This is why pros never get lenses with more than 3x zoom, because that's about the limit before you start compromising on optical quality.

Temple, don't forget to mention that *all* Nikon and *all* Canon point & shoot cameras use Sony sensors. And these companies make a ton of money from that segment too...

These micro-robots are laser cut pieces of regular every day neodymium-iron-boron "rare earth" magnets, sort of boring I suppose, but simple is always a good thing when it comes to micro-devices. We are working on more intricate designs that can be batch fabricated, but that's yet to be published and is an on-going work.

You can see more links at our lab website: http://nanolab.me.cmu.edu/projects/MagneticMicroRobot/
And there's also the robocup nanogram website: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/calmed/robocup_photos.html

200 microns, I suppose is 'huge' in micro-device terms, but is a convenient size - not too small that you can't easily handle with just tweezers. We have, anecdotally, seen smaller magnetic 'shards' move - about 10 times smaller in each dimension, and about 10 times slower too. We aren't focusing on scaling down right now; instead we are working on exploring the possibilities with these "larger" micro-scale magnets, such as multiple magnet control and robotic manipulation/soccer playing.

Oh wow this got onto Engadget. So I'm one of the people who work on this project (so I can take any questions). Robocup 2007 was good in that it first started this foray into micro-robotics, with a targeted goal of micro-robots playing soccer. At that time there really wasn't a way to have multiple micro-robots operate, which is one of the newer features of this micro-robotic system shown in the video at the link. Of course we aren't the only ones working on multiple magnetic micro-robots, but this is our approach for this magnetic system, and it has its advantages and disadvantages compared to other systems (i.e. the Dartmouth micro-robot and the ETH-Zurich micro-robot, also from Robocup 2007). There's also much work in understanding the way these micro-robot systems operate, and figuring out what realizable applications there are with such a system.

Does Pentax really make good glass? I see some good ones, but many underwhelming ones, just browsing photozone.de. Case in point, the 16-50/2.8 is low edge resolution, high aberration, and high distortion, and the 50-135/2.8 is weak on the long end. These are rebadged Tokina, but nevertheless not as good as the competition. Same with several of their prime/limited lenses, lousy wide-open performance. I don't mean to flame, but this is what I really see.