Darn! I forgot to add ["Don't Worry, Be Happy" starts to play] to the last one. :(

...pay per read?

I can't let you order that pizza. You're overweight.
Do you really want directions to Hooters, Dave? What would your wife think?
"Spanish Sky" is a sad song, and you just cancelled a reservation for two. I will play you something happy.

A nanny state is bad enough. I don't want a nanny phone.

I think that we will end up with individual reporters posting to the web, supported by subscription. If you have access to a copy of Marc Stiegler's Earthweb, read it, paying particular attention to the part where the reporter interviews "The Predictor".

From TFE (email): "Within the constraints I have, what should I and perhaps other NVIDIA employees be contributing to in the kernel?"

I suspect those constraints essentially preclude what would really be useful, so what's the point?

Pauline Kael? Is that you? :) (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael#Alleged_Nixon_quote)

With reason--as someone once said, "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object..."

For heaven's sake, PLEASE adopt the WebOS UI. It is easy to use and intuitive. Let the Android UI die the death it overwhelmingly deserves.

I recently went to the local Sprint store to ask whether the batteries on my wife's and my HTC Evo 4G need replacement. In passing asked the tech what things I could do to extend battery life, in particular how I could avoid leaving apps running. Here's what I was told: "If you leave an app by hitting the 'home' button, it will keep running. If you leave it with the back arrow button, it will shut down." I've been training myself to do that, and what a proctalgia it is, especially with the web browser and apps that invoke it! (Do I really have to back all the way out of the sequence of pages I've viewed, potentially reloading graphics or Flash animations?) With WebOS, it's easy--if an app has a window, it has a process. Flick the window up and off the screen, and you're telling it to shut down.

7 + 2 = 9

"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands."

Now, you may think the law should demand more. I would disagree with you. I don't resent Apple their ability to avoid taxation, any more than I would resent a friend who managed to escape a thief or mugger with minimal damage or loss.

Mr. Stephenson, you're just part of a much larger bunch. Technophobic literature and movies have been around for a long time. The mad scientist has been a stock character since Frankenstein, and these days he's usually combined with today's other knee-jerk evildoer, the businessman. George Lucas wanting to show technology defeated by cute, fuzzy little commercial tie-ins probably had a lot more effect than your writings--again, with all due respect, and no indication of relative quality implied.

How many films these days are masturbatory fantasies for the greens? Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Day After Tomorrow, The Hunger Games.... or TV series, like the History Channel's Life After Humans.

All that said, you're right to the extent that you're certainly not helping. Once upon a time, Lloyd Biggle Jr. accurately said, as best I can recall, "Given a bunch of people in a sewer, mainstream literature will lovingly describe those who are content to stay there. Science fiction will write about those trying to get out." That's at best less true than it was.

Ada Lovelace, judging by portraits, was no slouch for looks. I vaguely recall reading secondary sources, but I can't cite them. Ditto for Sonja Kovalevsky (for her, there's photographic evidence).

That said, you're right. Beauty doesn't matter in this context.

Those private entities would have the ultimate accountability--parents could take their children elsewhere and tell said entities where to go... as opposed to the current situation.

Funny how, here on Slashdot where there's so much concern about MS's monopoly status and freedom of choice for computing, very few either notice or care about the government's effective monopoly on grade school education.

I don't know about child abuse, but... from Mamoru Iga, "Suicide of Japanese Youth" (Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, v.11, Issue 1, pp.17-30): "The uniquely intense stress due to the Examination Hell (shiken jigoku) not only generates a basic drive for Japan's economic success but also contributes to a high rate of young people's suicide."