1960: Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger parachutes from an open gondola tethered to a helium balloon from an altitude of 102,800 feet — just over 18 miles. It remains the highest-altitude jump ever attempted.

Kittinger’s jump was no stunt but rather part of Project Excelsior, established by the U.S. Air Force to study the problems presented to pilots by high-altitude escape. He’d already made two jumps — from 76,400 feet and 74,600 feet — before strapping it on for the big one.

The Air Force came away with statistical data from his Aug. 16 jump that, even now, makes for eye-opening reading. Wearing...

It’s kind of amazing what $880 will get you these days: 15.6 inches of laptop, with a Core i5 CPU, 6GB of RAM, a 750 GB hard drive and high-end Nvidia GeForce GT 540M graphics. Laptop buyers looking for all the basics and beyond couldn’t go wrong with specs like this, and Toshiba aims to give it to them with the new Satellite P755.

Performance is decidedly mixed. While you may spend years filling that monstrous hard drive, the P755 is on the sluggish side when it comes to general application capabilities. It’s good e...