The Conservative party consists of a large caucus holding the overwheliming majority of seats from Western Canada and a smaller rump from populous Ontario (which elects almost 1/3 of the parliamentary seats). In order to have a political future the Cons need to grow in Ontario - they can't expect much more in the West and they burned their bridges with the Quebec electorate in last December's coalition crisis. But the cabinet pickings are slim from the Ontario Con group, most of whom are cretinous hard-right retreads from the old Mike Harris provincial government in power here in the late 90s. Peter Van Loan is perhaps the dumbest of the bunch - his talent seems to consist of partisan brawling at the gutter level and not much else. Like most of the Ontario Conservative members, he represents a rural riding. Minister of Public Safety? His title should really be Minister of the Public Be Damned. I don't know what to make of Van Loan being the front man for this initiative by the Conservative government. Either his political star is rising, or the Conservatives don't really expect the initiative to pass and are hanging Van Loan out to dry since he's one of the more expendable cogs in their machine.

I think the integration and interface complexity pitch this more toward corporate users and other organized groups who want to brainstorm and develop policies together. There is growing dissatisfaction with the amount of employee time that is sucked away by email. This could make in-house discussions much more effective. For individuals I think this is a better replacement for things like message boards and email lists.

Maybe the best thing Wave has going for it it the openness and extensibility. If it does turn out to be a game changer, the change will come from outside developers who will use it in ways its inventors hadn't thought of. Twitter is simple, yes, but that simplicity limits the blue-sky possibilities compared to Wave.

Didn't Ellison and McNealy try to sell us this pig in a poke years ago? They got nowhere with their initiative, and the current "cloud computing" nonsense won't replace local apps and data any time soon, either. What stopped this tired old notion before was lack of bandwidth - lots of people were on dialup, and it would have been painfully slow for them. Nowadays most are on broadband, but how much bandwidth do we REALLY have to play with? Not all that much, according to the Comcasts, Rogers, Bell Canadas and Verizons of this world. Do we really want to rely on online access going through an ISP which is counting every kilobyte of traffic and choking it off as it sees fit? Not to mention spyong on its customers on behalf of various shadowy government agencies.

Also, isn't the browser itself becoming another big choke point in all this? Security vulnerabilities, remote exploits, memory hogging, reliance on add-on technologies like Flash and Java with their own security problems - and of course, all this is built on the shaky foundations of browser scripting, which can never be made completely secure.

Forget it, boys. This turkey STILL won't fly.

Especially when it comes to laptops I'd agree with you. Or I would have until I saw how slowly Google Earth ran on my niece's otherwise perfectly capable 1-1/2 year old laptop with integrated Intel video. It was unuseable. My own 4 year old Toshiba Tecra M3 laptop, on the other hand, has Nvidia video - the modestly-performing GeForce Go 6200. Google Earth runs very well on it. And there's other good stuff coming to make use of the graphics chip - Nvidia's VDPAU for video playback is a good example.

No, $150 is more midrange than budget, at least in my book. In the Tom's Hardware article I cited, they mention an ATI Radeon HD 4670 for $65 and an Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT for $80. Those are today's budget cards. I've had a 9600GT myself for a little over a year now and it gives me all the performance I need. I paid considerably more than $80 for mine a year ago - the price drop wouldn't have happened without the stiff competition from the HD 4670 and other ATI cards. The point is that we're getting a lot more bang for the buck now than we were a year ago.

Let's leave the Xbox 360 out of this particular discussion - I don't think anyone could argue that PC gaming is anywhere near console gaming in cost effectiveness. And there ARE other uses for accelerated video besides gaming, you know. :)

As the other components in a PC got steadily cheaper, video cards seem to have stayed stubbornly pricey until recently. But that's changing very fast. I'm astounded by the price/performance breakthroughs we've seen over the last year or so. AMD/ATI deserves full marks for taking the lead on this stuff lately, especially in using a 40 nm process for their GPUs and passing the resulting savings on to the customer.

Too bad that as a Linux user, I can't really consider running ATI video since their binary drivers seem to be of considerably lower quality than the ones turned out by their arch-rivals at Nvidia.

By the way, another great article on these new cheaper video cards is at Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-graphics,2296.html

The problem with Apple is not that they don't take security seriously. Far from it. Lots of stuff does get fixed - witness the multi-hundred megabyte download the other week. But the corporate culture at Apple is secrecy. They must figure that documenting every patch serves only to draw a roadmap for hackers. This "security through obscurity" approach is in dramatic contrast to Microsoft's. Every Windows fix gets a Knowledge Base article which the user can consult before applying the patch. In the case of this Java vulnerability, I'm stunned that Apple didn't fix it in that recent update.

As for "prettying up the OS" I'd argue that current versions of the open source Gnome and KDE desktops, with compositing enabled, are probably prettier than Mac OS in most respects. Apple's strength has always been an unwavering focus on functionality and great industrial design, and on keeping the user experience uncluttered.

This latest story only reinforces the generalization that Scripting Is Dangerous. Mac OS users can be safer by using Firefox with the NoScript extension enabled. So can everyone else, for that matter.

And his article isn't THAT compelling, but he does bring up a point that telcos and cablecos would like us to forget: their physical plant makes use of public roadways and rights of way to route their wiring to their customers. If they refuse to invest sufficiently in their networks to provide adequate service to all their customers without traffic shaping shenanigans, then government should replace them with someone else who will.

I think telco and cableco ISPs are classic examples of "gatekeeper" organizations who feel entitled to a cushy income by merely existing and having the power to exact that income. In Michael Heller's recent book "The Gridlock Economy" (highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the harm that "gatekeeper" organizations and their sense of entitlement can do to the economy) he relates the history of the so-called "robber baron" castles along the Rhine River in Europe who exacted heavy tolls on all river traffic. There were so many castles and so many tolls to pay that river commerce became largely uneconomical. The economy of the time suffered until the advent of railroads which could bypass the river toll collectors.

Telcos and cablecos are by no means the only gatekeepers who hold back the economy - there are many other good examples. Net neutrality legislation is a good way for us to cut down the power wielded by these modern robber barons and freeing the Internet economy from their tolls.

... so, presumably, this isn't really about improving the speed but is instead a desperate attempt to get an actual full day's use out of the G1 before it has to be recharged. Reach for those stars, boys. :)

...they had no Flash, no animated GIF, or any other obnoxious animations to attract attention to themselves. I wouldn't block ads as a matter of course if I could be sure they all stuck to my "nothing moving" requirement. And it only takes one offender to ruin things. If Palant carries through with his unblock idea, I hope he imposes similar requirements on sites and ads wishing to be unblocked. Otherwise, I hope someone forks Adblock Plus and does away with the unblock free pass.

I don't get it. This is a super-expensive product and the extra screen and digitizer tablet, combined with the high end processors and GPUs available, would aim it squarely at graphics professionals, and successful wealthy ones at that. But isn't that whole industry using Macs anyway? I don't see a graphics art type abandoning his Mac for this. (And yes, I agree with the previous posters that the slideout screen is on the wrong side for most users, who tend to keep tool palettes on the left side.)

One thing about creative types is how appreciative they are of attractive industrial design. I think that's part of the reason these people gravitate to Macs in the first place. But this computer seems to be continuing the old Thinkpad tradition of butt-ugliness. Any creative guy buying it is going to make himself a laughingstock among his colleagues.