The Fun Factor

"Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. This is your captain PATEL (Boniface) welcoming both seated and standing passengers on board of Air India. We apologize for the four-day delay in taking off...it was due to bad weather and some overtime I had to put in at the bakery. This is flight 717 to Mumbai. Landing there is not guaranteed, but we will end up somewhere in India. And, if luck is in our favour, we may even be landing on your village! Air India has an excellent safety-record... In fact, our safety standards are so high, that even terrorists are afraid to fly with us! It is with pleasure; I announce that, starting this year, over 30% of our passengers have reached their destination. If our engines are too noisy for you, on passenger request, we can arrange to turn them off! To make your free fall to earth pleasant and memorable, we serve complimentary DHARU and Wada pavw. For our not-so-religious passengers, we are the only airline who can help you find out if there really is ...

Microsoft loves tablets. Here is CEO Steve Ballmer holding up the new ThinkPad X41 Tablet, from China's Lenovo Group, at Microsoft's TechEd 2005 back in June. Ballmer was quoted as saying that the tablet will run on Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. Credit: Microsoft Gateway's new CX2600 notebook family, starting at $1,349, has a 14-inch widescreen that swivels around on a titanium frame. The 6-pound tablet comes with a flash card reader, wireless networking and slots for batteries that last for up to nine hours. Credit: Gateway Think tablet PCs are too expensive? Prices for Hewlett-Packard's Compaq tc4200 , which was first released in February 2005, start at $1,599, which is $44 less than a similarly outfitted Compaq nc4200 notebook. Credit: Hewlett-Packard Lenovo's X41T tablet is the first ThinkPad with a screen that swivels around to make a tablet PC. Retailing for $1,899, the tablet is Lenovo's first offering following its purchase of...