she concludes that we don't need to worry about computers and the Internet causing a decline in general literacy

Right now, text is a major part of the user interface with computers and the Internet. That is likely to change. Audio and video are increasingly becoming part of the web and replacing content that would otherwise have been text. This trend will only increase with the increasing availability of broadband. We're already seeing people blog by sitting in front of a webcam and posting the video to youtube. Voice recognition will probably reach a point where it becomes the primary means of giving commands to a computer and becomes the main method of data entry. Text-to-voice is getting better all the time and will eventually be as good or better than having someone read to you. When these things happen, it will be the end of our current golden age of literacy. It will become easier then ever to function without being able to read.

These are works that should be in the public domain now for a variety of reasons.

Actually, the LOTR movies included some scenes which were not in the LOTR books. The scenes involving Isildur, for example, were from The Silmarillion or other books, published after J.R.R. Tolkien's death, with Christopher Tolkien as editor.

Actually, there is a mature technology for powering ships with wind. It's called a sail.

Personally, I don't believe it makes sense to have a web completely free of "web bugs"...

Why? Why can't advertising work on the web without tracking? Advertising in newspapers, television and radio doesn't track people and that has worked just fine for many many years.

You're right but storing personal info in the cookie itself isn't the way it's normally done. More often, they store something like visitor#42383645934568125 which is a database key. Your personal info is in their database and not in the cookie. Part of the problem with web beacons is that they effectively allow different sites to share the same database key. This wasn't supposed to happen with cookies which are restricted to being read back only by the same site that set them in the first place. Web beacons get around this limitation by loading a portion of the site which you are visiting, even something as small as a one pixel graphic, from a common advertising agency site. Some of these advertising sites are backed by huge clusters and able to serve a bit of content to a huge percentage of sites on the internet. That's what the graphs about Google's reach are explaining.

Well I disagree with your disagreement about OS X performance. I went through progressive upgrades of OS X on the same hardware on several machines and the upgrades, except 10.5, were definitely progressively faster. I would agree that Apple's speed improvements in Software were not as fast as Moore's law but that isn't the point. The point is that OS X did get faster on the same hardware, counter to Page's Law. It is also true that OS X started with very poor performance and then improved. Yellow Dog Linux did perform much better than 10.0 on the same hardware back then. Today, my experience is that the relative performance of OS X and Linux is a lot closer, though I think Ubuntu (which is what I use now) is still faster.

Your impression may be a matter of RAM. Under about 256 MB RAM, OS 9 will perform better than any version of OS X. But 10.3 and above are faster as long as you have more RAM than that. 10.3 and above run reasonably fast on G3 Macs (unless you're really short on RAM) and quite well on G4 machines. I still have a 500Mhz G3 PowerBook "Pismo", 768 MB RAM with 10.4.11 and that's at least as fast as the same machine running OS 9 (I have it set up to dual boot.) It's certainly much more usable. It's more stable and can remain very responsive while running more programs at once than it can with OS 9. This machine doesn't have a suitable graphics card for Quartz Extreme. 10.4 is even more impressive on G3 and G4 machines if you remove Dashboard.

The other possibility (besides RAM) is that you haven't done a good job with maintenance. The unwritten rule is that you really need a third party disk utility like Alsoft Disk Warrior or Prosoft Drive Genius. Without one of those, you will see deterioration of performance over time, if not worse problems.

Better support for multi-core machines is one of the improvements in 10.6. The other big one is the 64-bit kernel. It is also better optimized for Intel processors in general. In fact it's Intel only so there won't be any speed comparison on PPC machines. Single core Intel (Core Solo) Macs are very rare and I don't have one to try out but I think 10.6 will probably run as fast or faster on those than 10.5 does.

"Familiar - Windows is easy to use and familiar so you can be up and running right away" - with 94% market share (Mac at 5% and Linux at 1%) it is reasonable to assume that most people are familiar with the Windows environment.

I realize that exact figures don't really change your argument much but market share figures are something that have long been slippery. The more appropriate figures, in my opinion, put Windows at about 88%, Mac at 9.7 and Linux around 1%.

Market share properly refers to the number of computers sold during a given period of time, which is not necessarily a good indication of the number of computers actually in use, which is called "installed base." One reason is that the time period given may or may not be representative. For example, the Mac had almost 20% market share in the month immediately following the introduction of the original iMac in 1997. That was short lived and didn't really affect the installed base that much. Another reason is, Mac advocates contend, that Mac users keep their Macs longer than Windows users keep their PCs. Therefore, the Mac's market share translates to a higher installed base. In the case of Linux, it's really hard to tell because many copies of Linux are not sold at all. They're just downloaded and installed on as many machines as the user wants.

Market share is often cited because it's something that's easy to measure. Another method that's relatively easy to measure is the percent of web surfing observed. This can be biased because of different uses for different kinds of computers and different software configurations. For example, the inclusion of RSS feeds turned on by default in recent versions of OS X gives Apple an unfair advantage because it constantly generates multiple hits to popular sites which the user is not actually going to. On the other hand, pervasive spyware may give Windows an unfair advantage for similar reasons. Linux is underrepresented in terms of these kinds of unintended surfing. Internet share also doesn't do a very good job counting the share of Linux in the server and embedded markets since these machines aren't really used that much for web surfing. Web surfing figures are often, wrongly, published as "market share," as in this article. Nevertheless, it is interesting to look at the figures.

I think an important thing to consider is the ability to forward your number. I'm thinking of doing that in general. If I have one number which I can forward different places, I can give that out to people who want to call me and I can have it forwarded to a prepaid cell phone, my work phone or other devices as needed at any particular time. It makes your idea much more practical and I think it's how people will do things in the future. It also helps enable more competition in the market for mobile phone devices.

... and the grid is 92.8% efficient.

I've seen this estimate before but where does it come from? Is it an average for a metropolitan area?

I thought that the efficiency of transmission for electricity is a function which drops off quickly with distance. This is the basis for the idea of distributed generation - you put numerous smaller generators near the points of use rather than a huge generator farther away. It is supposed to be a great use for stationary fuel cells because they can be placed in the middle of metropolitan areas without creating problems with emissions.

USO is a good ETF of the sort you're talking about. I'm currently long on that because I think it's better than trying to time the market for home heating oil. My tank at home it currently empty but I won't need to fill it until fall. I thought about filling it now while prices are low but, if prices start to fall again, I can't sell it back to the oil company the way I can trade an ETF.

First Solar is not a bad idea but it may be better to buy a fund with a mix of alternative energy players like PBW.

... and if that's too invasive, they could just use pervasive surveillance cameras combined with facial recognition software.

The law is specifically against uploading files without informing the authorized user of the computer. I don't think that's such a bad thing nor is it a bad thing that it applies to all internet communications. It helps to clear up some situations where spyware would otherwise be in a legal grey area. It's also interesting to note that the legislation, as quoted on C-Net, does not make any specific exception for law enforcement to get files from a computer without the user's knowledge. I suppose that's covered by other laws.

Worst case scenario - rewrite some protocols to encrypt data and make it look like normal traffic.

You mean, more or less, what Freenet does.

I think part of this battery swapping scheme has to include having multiple batteries in a vehicle. This is necessary so that different size vehicles could all use the same standard batteries. Larger vehicles would use more and smaller vehicles would use fewer. It would also greatly mitigate the issue that you're talking about since, if one battery fails, you still have the others. A somewhat less critical, but still important factor is that multiple batteries would allow for the possibility that a customer would only want a partial fill up. In other words, they would replace some but not all of their batteries at a given stop.

That reminds me of something I heard as part of a FileMaker Pro salesman's pitch about why to use FileMaker instead of MS Office. The Law of Office Inertia: Data in Microsoft Office tends to remain in Microsoft Office.