How about an RFID built into the steering wheel and a corresponding short-range sensor built into the phone which when activated, shuts down the phone? There are probably several other ways to do this, too. But since I don't really want it done, there's not much incentive for me to work on the problem.

If this gets required, I'm SURE it'll remind people to vote on election day 2012, and President Obama might as well not bother running for re-election. This is going to be the very last straw for a lot of people, I think.

No problems, and apparently, no downside. The netbook is visibly faster, even the spinning cube desktop switching animation spins faster.

Though if there's a problem with running both the hack and the kernel patch at the same time, I hope the word gets around when the kernel with the patch goes into distros.

I was in second grade.

I assume the AC I was responding to was too young to see it on TV news on a monochrome TV and either failed history or worse, was pretty massively failed by public or private education.

That was in 1962 when the US and USSR played a game of nuclear chicken.. You really should have stayed awake in your history classes.

I don't regard 5 seconds from a standing start unacceptable for a program that's part of an office productivity suite. Though running a modern computer (low-end quad core / SSD) probably makes some level of difference as to results.

feature that is far more important than functionality or cost-effectiveness.

Thanks to the Citizens United decision that says that corporations are people with unlimited freedom of speech, M$ can provide MN politicians who supported the bill with unlimited campaign TV ad support.

With a feature like that, who cares if it works? Or if state employees can actually send and receive e-mail or process documents? Or if a "no-bid" contract is a pointer towards government corruption?

Or if MN has to hire IBM in a few months to clean up the mess, replace M$ with a Google or IBM cloud or Open Source enterprise software, and have IBM help them to hire a shitload of replacement IT workers to replace the ones MN thought it can safely fire over the next few weeks?

KDE has had a bottom screen taskbar ever since I started using Linux 4 years ago. I'm looking at my desktop right now, I've got 19 apps on it.

And even with Gnome, if one wants a taskbar on the bottom of the screen, all it takes is drag and drop.

Note that Carly "Failorina" Fiorina and Meg Whitman have not been invited to run any public corporatons after each tanked the stock values of the companies they ran. At least Whitman had sense enough to go quietly. Each serves as a director to, IIRC, several corporations. After all, somebody has to support the bloated compensation schemes that pay off CEOs at the expense of their shareholders and employees. But neither will ever run a Fortune 1000 corporation again.

The bad news is that Whitman is running for Governor of California and Failorina for Senator. Both, of course, have teabagger support.

to exclude modern technology from their community.

Mainly because when the residents discover that their real estate values are dropping faster than everyone else's due to "zero bars" practically everywhere in town, I'm looking forward to hearing their screams of anger.

"People always get the kind of local government they deserve." E.E. "Doc" Smith

NIMBYs who demand services and band together to exclude what is needed to make them available from their community should get big middle fingers from their service providers.

some time when your car is stuck in the middle of nowhere and there isn't a pay phone you can use within 100 miles.

Or, assuming you've got a mobile phone regardless of your public opinion about cell phones, when you've got an emergency and zero bars.

Or no emergency at all, but a member of your family wanted to add something to your shopping list, a fact you did not discover until you got home and found out that said family member couldn't get through and as a result, you've got to hit the road yet again.

Or when you're lost and you can't connect to the Net to access Google Maps.

an Android tablet with IR support and a "learning remote" app and you can toss your individual remotes as quickly as you can load the commands from each into the remote.

generalizes to ... a city whose streets were routed at random a few hundred years ago and which was never converted to a more or less standard grid. There are no cities in America that I know of that fit that description.

The real question about the study for you is whether you are buying into the conclusions of a study paid for by Big Oil ... or somebody's auto industry.

I paid $105 plus shipping for my own generic tablet... which is underpowered. I think a $150 generic tablet would be about right.

I think it's fairly obvious that one of the places where a tablet can shine is specifically for device controller UI applications. It's compact and all one has to do to make it control a device is to stick a mini-webserver on it, after which your UI can be simple static webpages plus hardware control/monitor scripts. That's why I bought one (MID-006) directly from China a couple of months ago, to enable me to experiment in this area. Other places where it makes sense is as an e-reader and casual websurfing.

That said, I prefer a netbook for multimedia on the basis that one doesn't have to hold it to view it in place to view it and it has a lot more CPU and GPU horsepower than one can stuff into a tablet with acceptable battery life and size.

People and companies are still trying to figure out where tablets make the most sense, the idea that it will magically replace every other form of computer in the next few years is a non-starter no matter how many IT pundits tell us that It Must Happen.