Word: launchful
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...Still, we seem to love the lion's den experience, the Silicon Valley press corps. There we were again on Tuesday, crammed into the auditorium of Infinite Loop building 4 on Apple's Cupertino campus for the launch of the new and improved iBook. Who else but Jobs could attract a standing-room-only theaterful of journos for something so mundane as a laptop show-and-tell, we mused afterwards? To be fair, most of us were there as a result of that classic Apple tactic: don't show or tell until the very last possible moment...
...launch now? Why not wait for the next Macworld and its attendant wave of adoration? Jobs claims he was trying to catch what is known as the "dads and grads" season, the mid-May madness when most computers used by students and educators are actually bought. (The new, lighter, fully-featured low-priced iBook is being heavily promoted as a boon to education, and Apple was handed a dream piece of publicity when one school district in Virginia pre-ordered a whopping 23,000 of them...
...they're afraid of that. The Joint Chiefs want it funded separately rather than out of the defense budget. They've said the terrorist threat is far greater from a suitcase bomb than from someone launching an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). It's a lot easier, for example, to sail a boat to 200 miles off America's shores and then launch a nuclear tipped cruise missile flying below the radar, using a GPS (global positioning system) for guidance - and the missile defense scheme would not cover that threat. Why would anyone go to all the trouble and expense...
...launch gods cooperate this Saturday, a rocket will blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and loft a Soyuz capsule into space. A day or so later, the capsule will rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station (ISS)--thus earning a place in the annals of space history. For aboard that Soyuz craft, along with two Russian cosmonauts, will be a 60-year-old American millionaire named Dennis Tito. Amateurs have flown in space before--including three U.S. congressmen, a Russian politician, a Japanese TV reporter and a Saudi prince--but Tito will be the first paying tourist...
Williams got revenge with the January launch of Questia.com a 24-hour academic library offering everything from Death of a Salesman to St. Augustine's The City of God, for a $19.95 monthly subscription. Questia is one of several e-libraries that will offer college students a more streamlined way of writing papers. He immodestly predicts that the e-library will be an "advance for civilization" as momentous as Gutenberg's press, making knowledge available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. For a price...