Journalism's been dying for years, but like a frog in a pan of water, it will not flex a muscle to save itself. Though it boils violently in it's own excrement, its' audience can scarcely be bothered, as the spectacle isn't awful enough.

Pardon my anecdote:

I was at E3 2000 when MS revealed another (pardon the pun) "game changer" in much the same way as this "iPad-killer": The X-Box.

There was no case, no controller (it was a Logitech PC controller) and myself and 20 or so journalists sat in a makeshift theatre watched a fly-through demo highlighting what we all knew was a basic PC Direct-X graphics engine. No one steered the flythrough, none of us were allowed to touch the controller or the clunky plexiglass and PC-guts that sat on a small, cloth-draped a/v rack. None of our questions could really be answered, either. To this day, I'm not at all sure why they didn't call individual reporters up to breakout rooms or hotel suites, because those of us who weren't in our early 20's were thoroughly unimpressed.

I'm sure someone gave them props. After all, E3, gaming and the Web (still) were booming, and fact-checked news and Comdex were showing their age.

Read the Web articles of the NYT, WashPo, WSJ, - any of the leading print publications from the past 30 years or more. How often do you see grammatical, spelling, or factual errors? I see them with exponentially increasing frequency. I think it's indicative of the "death of print," and more distressingly, the "dumbing-down of America." No one cares about quality reporting anymore. They want HuffPo, Brietbart, TMZ, and Gawker. They want blood.

Bradbury was right.

When I originally read of this woman's story here, it got me wondering:

If you are arrested for some material crime, is it common practice for the prosecution to force you to explain every key on your keychain, and to unlock the lock it to which it belongs?

What if you have a drawer literally full of old keys? Is the burden of proof on you to prove that the prosecutor's evidence isn't being secured somewhere and hidden by you, facilitated by one of those keys?

I think there's likely a simpler explanation for why this woman is being coerced - there is other hard evidence that she used that laptop and used encryption to secure the evidence that the court seeks. Perhaps a phone conversation, email or confession to that effect?

Still, it does beg the question as to whom is doing the prosecution's job.

Yes, that headline would be more suitable, but the analogy is trite. Water is not "wet" when it is a solid, or a vapor. I wish people would let this expression die.

I bought an HP Mini that ships with Quickweb - a highly optimized Linux-based alternative to the Windows Starter also installed. It handles email, Skype, media, Web-surfing (Firefox "lite"), and it boots in about 10 seconds. It has a pretty painless "integration" with Windows too, so even novice users can choose what suits them best for a given task. For many netbook customers, all they really ever need is something like this. Supposedly, a ChromeOS netbook will drop any day, and Android tablets have been popping up on the radar. If HP gets its' act together and drops a netbook/tablet with an SSD and WebOS, it could undercut the iPad and the become the darling of the low-priced, entry-level set. Dual-boot takes care of any enterprise requirements, such as a Citrix client, W32 apps, etc.