I'd say that this still has overall beneficial effect: people who view the company as their fief, rather than merely a convenient but disposable source of income at this particular moment, are far more likely to manage it well and look at long-term effects of what they're doing.

Having the company as your private empire may well have the opposite effect. Since effectively nobody can fire you, your only enemy being an overly ambitious relation, you have no incentive to do well on the job. On the other hand, if you're a hard worker, you may prefer to do things by the book, fearful of innovation, since you don't want to be known as the guy who ruined the family dynasty.

While we're on the subject here's an overview of other tiny Linux PCs, including handhelds like the Pandora and the Ben Nanote. The list of course excludes what potentially could be the most widely deployd tiny Linux PCs, cellphones and 7-inch tablets running Android.

The difference in the east and the U.S.: the CEO is considered important but not necessarily above the other workers. In the U.S. they are in an ivory tower. That's a problem and that's what so much of us have a problem with.

Since we're both [citation needed], let me counter you with my own theory about why Asian CEOs appear to be less fabulously compensated. Many of the larger corporations in Asia tend to be family or at least clan-controlled. I mean, take a look at Microsoft and Apple. If Microsoft were an Asian corporation, Bill Gates IV or V would now be in charge. Apple would now be led by Steve Jobs's wife or sister. Similar to the way some US execs enjoy working for the pauperly sum of $1, Asian CEOs (I'm generalizing, okay?) are willing to work for much less than their US counterparts since it's the family business anyway.

I'm just curious what CmdrTaco is alluding to in the following paragraph:

Of course, Facebook is doing more or less the same thing. You probably just don't care as much, because Facebook was always doing it. You weren't using it anonymously in 1998, so your expectations are different.

One way to read that passage is that he got his dates horribly wrong (theFacebook started in 2004). I'm inclined to think it's a hint to another (anti)social networking site.

Isn't Ramadan a Muslim holiday? How is it "the country's holy month"?

Ramadan isn't the holiday, since it lasts more or less a month. Now even if you're not familiar with Islamic religious feasts, just imagine the consequences of an entire nation taking their vacation at the same time. The holiday (and holy day) is called Eid ul-Fitr, which marks the end of the Ramadan.

Eid ul-Fitr has been compared to Christmas. I think it's closer to Easter Sunday, since both holy days mark the end of some sort abstinence, Lent in the case of Easter. Nowadays fasting is a word not general associated with the Christmas season.

Wouldn't biometrics already be a better solution if you want an authentication routine that strong? I mean to bypass multiple input biometrics (fingerprint + some other bodily feature) you'd have to kidnap the user. And if you already have the user under your control, you can probably force any strong password out of him.

Technicalities and what-ifs do not change what the person likely intended and the way it is read by, well, pretty much everyone.

So what did the person who wrote it, intend? Do we punish people for what is effectively a thought crime? And "pretty much everyone" is a nice shorthand for groupthink. Just because everybody thinks so, it must be right?

2007 would have been the bad year then. That year Microsoft released Vista and bought the ad company now being written off as a loss. Of course, Vista was almost instantly recognized as a bad decision, unlike Microsoft's venture into online advertising.

That bottom area on Gnome 3 is one of its big flaws, I think. They display notifications there, but only when you hover your mouse over them.

I don't have a Gnome Shell instance at moment, so I'm not sure if that's the case. I do remember seeing notifications on the bottom area and on the top panel. Now, I'm not sure if the messages that appeared on the top panel were notifications or merely tooltips. Maybe that's what the Fedora folks were thinking, to separate the tooltips from the notifications. I prefer the notifications to pop up (automatically when important) not in a blank area, but near a recognizable screen element, say, a special icon or panel area.

Come on Unity is much better than Gnome Shell (of course, classic Gnome 2 is better than both). Just one reason why Gnome Shell is bad: you got clickable elements on all four sides of the default (Home) screen. In Unity, only the right side and the top are significant, similar to the Mac and Gnome 2, where the bottom (the dock in the case of the Mac) and top are significant.

On one hand, I get concerned anytime someone wants to regulate a new technology.

While this is admittedly troublesome, I'm more worried by attempts to require new technology. For example, what if a a law passes that requires everybody to get a Facebook account as a form of dgiital identification? Or what if the only way you can pay your taxes would be by downloading an official tax app? Or that every baby now has to be implanted with an RFID tag? That would be more terrifying than any law that bans (regulates) Google from indexing certain sites, teachers from "friending" their students, or adults from downloading (but not 0wning pr0nography).

Regulating new technology is less of a problem for me. After all, if it's new technology, we've survived fine without it.

selling your mint condition iDevice with mint condition packaging means you get higher resell value on eBay.

Ah, the joy of reselling a product that's never been used.

Read my post below. Rereading the summary, I now have serious doubts Negroponte is behind this deployment. The Thai tablets will supposedly be running Android ICS. Negroponte's tablet deployment would have run a more conventional GNU/Linux install underneath what would most probably be the Sugar interface (Fedora-based).

Can somebody confirm if this is an official project of the same organization behind the XO laptop (One Laptop Per Child) or a local (Thai) project with a similar sounding name? I cannot find any mention of any Thai deployment in the official OLPC web site, laptop.org (Google keywords, "site:laptop.org" "thailand"). There is mention of an official One Tablet Per Child (OTPC), but the links invariably point to pilot projects in Africa (i.e. the project is still being "trial"-ed). From a blog entry dated May 2012:

Can tablets make a difference to a child learning to read for the first time, without a teacher or traditional classroom structure? That's the question we are exploring with our reading project, currently underway in Ethiopia.

Anecdotal evidence from Africa that such a program MIGHT work:

[A team from the One Laptop Per Child Project] left boxed tablets in a village and within three hours the children had opened the boxes and worked out how to turn the tablets on. After just a couple of weeks of unassisted use, the children were seen competing with each when reciting the alphabet, which they learned from one of the many pre-installed apps.