Dell looking into flaming laptop incident

You've got to hand it to Dell; even though its laptops may burst into flames at the most inopportune moments, at least the company has the good sense to conduct a prompt and public investigation into the matter (although the worldwide coverage of those "inflammatory" photos probably helped speed things up just a bit). Apparently the charred remains from that fateful conference in Osaka, Japan have been beamed back up to the mother ship, where Dell engineers are furiously working to discover how their product turned into a pyrotechnics show that amused and frightened us all. As usual, everyone's looking to pin this incident on that easiest of scapegoats -- the malfunctioning battery -- but whatever the problem turns out to be, we're sure hoping it gets fixed before another notebook decides to disobey the "no smoking" sign and light up on an airplane.