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The past 10 days or so has been a particularly interesting time for releases of new consumer technology. Which of the "big three" for the week will matter the most in a month or two: the new iPhone 5, Nintendo WiiU or Kindle Fire HD?

One advantage of the iPhone family is that they tend to retain their value to a greater degree than many other mobile devices.  I would also think that selling it right now would maximize your cost recovery, before the new iPhone is released.  Of course, you might be without a device for a little while.    

I've recently had trouble keeping laptops safe from physical damage, and am looking for something that is specifically designed for use in harsh environments. I use them for telemetry data and engine management of racing motorcycles, and as you might expect, the pit environment can be a little rough in the heat of battle.

Ok, I know this question may sound a little weird, but I promise that I'm not walking around my office all day wearing gloves. No matter how dapper that might look, now that I think about it. :-)

  Up until a few months ago I worked at a University, so my initial response was, "What is this BlackBerry thing of which you speak?"  :-)  

Honestly, I think you can rest assured that you will be protected by what folks in the good ole US of A call a "double standard".  We are going to demand the extradition of people from other countries for violating our laws, even when the actually connection to the US is tenuous at best, and many times we will get it.

That's awesome, and I'm glad to see cross platform support.  One thing about it though, the games that EA and others have made available for Linux are (1) ports, and (2) relatively simple.  The EA games in particular are HTML based, so there wasn't a lot of effort required.

We are looking at NoSQL database choices, and both MongoDB and CouchDB have been recommended. I personally have never used either of them. Is there much significant difference between the two, or are we basically choosing between brands of vanilla ice cream - there may be small differences, but they are essentially the same?

I think you hit one nail on the head when you mentioned patents.  Motorola has 17,000+ patents.  As we have seen over the past couple of years, patent litigation has become an industry into itself.  Google knows a little about this, with that little ongoing unpleasantness with Oracle.

Hah, well, well - the issue of APIs raises its head once again, this time outside of Oracle/Google context!  Win32 APIs are only available to Internet Explorer.  Of course, a big difference between Windows and Java is that Windows isn't open source, so the issue of APIs is a bit different here than in the Oracle v Google case.