No, but I can tell that you threw in a useless addendum to an otherwise insightful post.

Take a look at the N900. It has more or less exactly the specs you outlined and it runs Maemo which is a mobile optimized linux distro. Its a little pricey (~$600 or so) but IMHO well worth the cost. I'll be ordering mine shortly.

Granted we do need to think about all of the possibilities, but this thread is coming from the discussion "what if the enemy has a mirror". When was the last time you saw a person/vehicle/whatever having a mirror? I somehow doubt they'll start making structures any more "laser proof" than they make them "bomb proof".

Well I guess any piece of software has a "potential for abuse"...so you'll just have to make the decision of whether that potential is enough to justify the benefits it provides (just like any software/"feature"). I guess this may (and most likely should) end up like javascript. Your site shouldn't depend on it to function but it progressively enhances the browsing experience. The end user will have to decide whether they want to allow it or not. I would think that you could make an extension similar to no-script for fonts.

What about an image of a good font? (I kid, I kid).

Here is one of my favorite site for fonts. Supposedly they are all freely available, so maybe this will be a good starting place. Also, maybe some of the large internet companies (think google) would offer up a cache of commonly used fonts, similar to how they host popular javascript libraries. Not only would that mitigate some of the "trust" issues, but I would think google would do their due diligence on the licensing front before they offered to host them.

You sure are being (irrationally) resilient in your reasoning for not wanting this.

Font licensing will have all of the same challenges as image licensing and by using your logic we should stop allowing images to be used on the web in fear that one may somehow be used illegally. I'm not saying that we should ignore this aspect/problem/challenge but to dismiss the entire concept simply because it could be abused is a little heavy handed.

Concerning security, you can't program for exploits that you aren't aware of. However, as many people have pointed out that this does have potential for abuse and as such I would think that it would be an area that will get much scrutiny and as exploits arise they will be dealt with accordingly. Again, to say that the entire concept should be scrapped due to "potential for abuse" is absurd.

There are tons of feature in the firefox core that I don't use/want. However there are enough people that felt they were worthwhile and added value to the browsing experience. Even though I may not use this feature I am open-minded enough to see how it can in fact make the browsing experience better and that it is most definitely a good feature to support. The simple fact that you do not agree with that opinion does not mean that it should just simply go away.

If all that you want a browser to do is display the text of a document (which it sounds like you do), then might I suggest you look into lynx as it will be blazingly fast, stable and you won't be annoyed by the rest of then web's definition of "progress"

Wow, somebody is grumpy...and ill informed.

Licensing? Resolvable. No different than "copyrighted" images and the licensing for them. Honest developers will use properly licensed material (fonts, images, etc), dishonest or uninformed developers won't care.
Bandwidth? At 50-100k they are not that much compared to swf files or large images previously used (also, you can cache them)
Security? Security patches will come as they arise. How is this different than any other "potential for abuse"?
Compatibility? Does degrade nicely, you can specify the web fonts but fall back to "traditional" fonts
Gains? Designers will have flexibility! They won't have to rely on images to produce "nice fonts" and the pages can be more semantic (text > images). This is just a few of the potential gains.

Do you really want to hold back progress because YOU think something is stupid and YOU would prefer no styling at all just standard html? Also, you do not have to "DOWNLOAD every font mentioned on a page", just the ones you want to specify, so get your facts straight before you jump to irrational conclusions. Get your morning coffee, relax and realize that this is progress even if you don't see the benefit in the implementation/execution.

Not when you want a catchy headline...

I think you answered your own question: "because we can".

I would think that you have it just backwards. I would think that skinny ones would have less to compress. Also, wouldn't the ones be skinny and the zeros be fat?

True, but I bought my PS3 primarily for Blu-ray. Yeah, I play a game every now and then, but I'd say that my ratio of movie watching to game playing is probably 3 to 1.

When people ask me about what Blu-ray player to get, I tell them to get the PS3. It cost just marginally more than a (decent) standalone player but it has the ability to play games, surf the net, etc. Even if you don't think you'll use those features that often I still think it is worth it in terms of how future-proof the system is. I mean, Sony is going to be pushing/updating the system for at least the next few years. I don't think you'll see that same level of support for some stand-alone player...the manufacturer would rather have you buy yet another player that "now has feature X", whereas Sony will keep the PS3 relevant due to the fact that it does more than just play movies, and that the greater the number of PS3's shipped the larger the potential for game-developers to target the platform which leads to more licensing revenue.

So to recap, I get your point. But don't underestimate the PS3 as actually being purchased as (more or less) a standalone player as well.

What are birds afraid of? Cats.

So it would seem obvious that you should just paint the airplane to look like a cat. That way when the birds look over their shoulder, they think they see a cat sneaking up on them and they evade as quickly as possible.

I get your underlying point, but wine has more subjective values (wine enthusiasts would debate this though) that come into play whereas CPUs have more quantifiable comparisons. That said, for both CPUs and wine I would think that most of the people who are buying "high end" products they are a little more discerning about their purchases.

The way I approach IE6 is to get it to an "acceptable" level of usability but not go out of my way to make it look as good as say the latest Firefox. For instance, I don't put any PNG transparency hacks, etc.

At my site, ~40% of my traffic is Firefox, ~30% is IE of which ~5% is IE6 (or below...all grouped together). FWIW, I used the YUI as a reference design for my layout and using BrowserShots nearly every browsers handles the layout (more or less) correctly.

That is a very interesting idea indeed...a grand total of $830 ($30 for the powerstrip). However, other than the novelty and space savings, how would the efficiency of these things compare to a pair of "tranditional" low powered/cheap web servers ($400 each) in terms of both $/throughput and $/watt?
It would allow for easy/cheap capacity planning. $100 for an extra node in your webserver cluster...guess this would be a poor mans implementation of blade servers.