The HP TouchPad: You Could Give It Away With A Hooker and a Bag Of Cool Ranch Doritos, and No One Would Want It

I read on a tech rumor blog just now that the much-lamented and now doomed HP Touchpad is not only being given away with HD televisions in some retailers, it might have it's price quartered to $100.

Quartered. Like William Wallace. But this isn't the Braveheart of tablets. Well, maybe it is; it's a once possible contender for the throne that fought hard for (software) independence from tyrannical social norms imposed upon them by others. And they both failed. Spectacularly.

A hundred bones for a WiFi- and bluetooth-capable tablet? That plays flash? With 16 or 32 GB and a gig of memory? Sounds pretty awesome, suddenly! I actually looked up a couple in-depth reviews because of all that.

Yeah, no, it's still a crap tablet. And it's not like there's going to be any more apps coming out. Ever, really. Maybe if I buy seven and hock them on eBay for parts I can make enough for an iPad.

Chinese Boy Sells Kidney For iPad 2

"Thaaaaaat not gonna end well, Lady."

Some 17 year old Chinese boy, obviously about 12 years retired from working at the Foxcon plant, so desperately wanted an iPad 2 that, when contacted by a black market organ broker, he sold one of his kidneys for 20,000 yuan. Or about $3,000 US. So like an iPad and an iPhone and maybe a MacBook Pro. [EDIT: He totally bought a laptop too.]

Thoughts:

• Thank god they didn't just take both kidneys and leave him covered in ice in a Chinese bathtub.
• Do they have bathtubs in China? It'd take a lot of ice to fill a Japanese-style bath. Maybe they'd dump him in one of those low-rent portable barrel-on-a-hotplate baths.
• There should really be a black market for non-essential organs. Like appendices and tonsils and the like. Maybe if we gave someone four appendices we'd be able to watch what happens to him and figure out what the hell that little pink meat sac does.
• How pissed is the supposedly communist government of China over this? That was their kidney that boy sold off.
• Did his mom really think she could find the broker and just ask nicely for him to return her son's organ that he just paid good money to take out and sell to some rich Westerner on dialysis?
• Do they not have Law & Order in China?
• If only he could have waited for the iPhone 4S….