Star Trek meets Dave's perfect podcast player 

Listening to the new TWIT in my car at lunchtime today, this crazy-ass vision arrived unbidden as I was listening to Dave and Steve talk about the ideal mp3 player for podcasts. The dreamed-of device would have wifi so it wouldn't have to be "tethered," in Dave's words, to a computer, and it would have podcatcher software (like iTunes, but better for podcasts) built right in. You'd be able to produce podcasts on it and develop applications for it.

I don't know, maybe the word "tether" brought to mind a wild old idea of the developers of the Empire State Building. At one time they thought the spire would tether dirigibles, and the building would become a sort of blimpport.

So I get this vision of a desktop computer as the DS9 station, a laptop as a Galaxy class starship, a regular iPod/mp3 player as a shuttlecraft, and the perfect podcast player as the Defiant. "Tough little ship," Riker called it.