Netbook sales tend to go up around September, spike at December (Christmas), and then decline again until the next September. Most of this is due to people who use it for school (a useful purpose) rather than ones who rush out to buy a netbook just because it's brand-new.

Because the "lol Apples are for people that HAVE A LIFE" mentality is the most obnoxious thing to come out of the Apple vs. Everything else dichotomy.

You're missing a distinction. We're trying to make the point that Apple products are crap and Apple supremacy is wrong, we're not saying it's impossible or even improbable. We just wish people didn't fall for their bullshit.

Not a right bozo, merely a possibility. You are not constrained from doing anything with your property, program it with anything you like in any way you like. But if you want to sell it to others in their store you have to play by their rules. Get over it. Go play with YOUR property and stop bothering the rest of us that actually live in reality.

could get a little hairy.

Instead they belong in federal courts.

How ironic that you would make an accusation of tribalism.

Good for you for speaking eight languages, but that doesn't add any authority to your ridiculous statement. Just why would you expect everybody to use English? Move on, you're irrelevant.

"rule number 1 of slashdot: ANY thread can be twisted into a bash of microsoft. no exceptions."

Well, if you insist.

This is another case of egregious anti-competitive collusion - the furry animal (but not quite sweaty) version of Microsoft. Nuke'em from the orbit.

"Beaver - damn; visible from space!" :P

Who said anything about there needing to be a grand conspiracy? Isn't it bad enough that they performed non-transparent manipulations on data - and then blocked attempts at transparency - at all?

The issue for me isn't deliberate deception but the potential for self-deception and groupthink - and that academia seems to flirt heavily with operations and methods which assume that the general public has no need to know or critique work which will affect public resources.

Some of the best scientists who were also writers, who got their education in the pre-WW2 era, such as Isaac Asimov, didn't have this view. They believed that the public needed to understand what science is about and that they could be trusted with that knowledge. But today's scientists seem to often prefer to work in the dark, in small clusters, and avoid even interdisciplinary communication, believe that science naturally is split into multiple specialties and that generalism is the same thing as ignorance, and seem to believe that releasing 'trade secret' knowledge to the public is bad and scary, because who knows what that ignorant generalist public might do with the knowledge? The public might stampede! The horror! Only we specialists understand the truth! We must protect it from the knowlessmen!

This seems like a dangerously anti-democratic trend to me. In fact, it seems downright anti-scientific, frankly. It resembles more the old days of alchemy: small groups zealously guarding their secret ideas and methods.

I don't know what the solution is - the sheer volume of scientific data makes some kind of abstraction and summarising essential, and gives huge power to the gatekeepers of those abstractions - but it does seem a problem.

There are potholes in the roads near my house that are visible from space (on Google).

Why can't it be that Obama was showing due respect to a fellow world leader. It's not like he was looking the other way while companies ship billions of dollars to a country with a horrible human rights record and labor standards. Or sells us oil to finance terrorist organizations. But yeah you are right the whole bowing thing that is the real problem we can't be seen to be respecting them while we do it in private by selling our souls for $1 a dozen tube socks or a cheap fill up.

iwlist shows them just fine.
What do you think "iwlist scanning" does?

Again I say, silly windows user.

I suspect that Google has this so sandboxed to hell they don't give a fuck what you do to it. VM inside a VM inside a VM inside a VM rebooting and losing state every 5 minutes sounds about right. Also alternate between linux and windows in the VMs, and make sure to run Norton antivirus on all hte Windows ones.

For optimal security, randomly vary the VM recursion depth so attackers can't figure it out.

You can already get stuff to do this for free. Is this stuff that's getting sold made for the less technical crowd or something?