So it's like an expensive netbook, but you can only run programs approved by Apple?

What's the point?

Poverty is defined as a lack of money. Can I claim that money solves poverty?

I think the main point of this is to show that using physical analogies for digital data does not make sense, and to mock the whole "copying is stealing" idea.

I also does a good job showing that the current copyright law are not ready for a digital age.

Well, yes. That's not the first time a company says the patent system is broken and they have to get bogus patents just to defend themselves.

How do you make a monopoly with Free Software? Google doesn't control Android, anybody can make their own version, and integrate it with their own services. If you're afraid they use Android to promote use of the other Google services, you can just make a version of Android that integrates with Microsoft's online offering.

Well, making a private use copy of a song or movie you buy used to be pretty simple in the analog days.

Then came Macrovision. And CSS. And AACS. And the DMCA.

If you want an example of a specific feature that was pushed onto users, HDCP is a good one. Initially it was implemented in monitors just in case your next OS would need it, and then it became mandatory in order to watch any HD content.

SecureBoot is exactly the same. TPM have been present in many computers in the last years, just in case some people would have a use for them. SecureBoot will make them mandatory if you want some shiny sticker. Soon enough it will be mandatory if you want to watch some media or play some games. Microsoft have been working on something similar for almost ten years.

There are some good reasons to use such a system, for security (it can prevent some kind of malware), or in order to access files in a way that the author can control (security sensible documents, or media and games). But there's also a bunch of bad reasons: maybe Microsoft have some patents and they plan to collect royalties, maybe they want to make money out of an App Store and prevent you from installing foreign applications, maybe they want to kill some competition...

In any case, there are two things that are quite wrong:

• 1. Most users will give away the control of their machine to Microsoft and Big Content. Even of I don't have to do the same that worries me.
• 2. I really don't like the idea of hardware manufacturers giving Microsoft a special access to my hardware, and I sure hope they will be mandated to give me the power to revoke that special access and give it to someone else.

Actually I think we currently have a little problem with money and energy.

If secure communication is important to me, I want my data to go through a VPN that I control, not through the VPN of some random telecom company. By the way, several governments aked RIM to give them access to the data, so I'm not really sure what kind of security is given by their VPN.

I agree that recent browsers do a decent jobs when they collaborate properly with the OS, and when you have good fonts installed (and I'm glad to see that hyphenation is finally coming to the browser). But that's quite recent, and I don't how many users will have such a setup.

In any case, I think that you will get at best a Word-like rendering which is still not as good as what LaTeX can do. You can also get various improvements using javascript, but then the code will be much more complex that the LaTeX code...

What browser are you using?

My browser doesn't do hyphenation or ligatures, the kerning is probably rather bad, and I don't think that the line breaking algorithm is as good as the one in TeX. Moreover, there is no reasonable way to set the line length (half of the websites use a very small column, and the other half use the full window width which is generally too wide), and making a table of content is a pain in the ass.

And to answer a specific claims:

I't called a widow, and you can prevent them with \widowpenalty=10000. By default, they are only discouraged because sometimes they look less ugly that the other alternatives.

We already have very good ways to transmit data from a human subject to a machine, using all kinds of controllers (the most common is probably a steering wheel). We don't need to do it directly from the brain.