"He was phenomenally talented" I would not go that far. Thriller was a brilliant and successful album, but I think that was more due to the production team around it and a phenomenal video, at a time when MTV still showed them. The rest of his body of work I would definitely describe as bland and forgettable.

Now his PRIVATE life, that was surely neither bland nor forgettable. He put the eek into freak.

"At which point the cops are called. School adminstrators never have the right to strip search kids. Jesus christ..."

I agree 100%. Giving this level of authority to all school officials is just inviting abuse, which I suspect this case might have been. That step 1, was not to call the parents seems particularly telling. This was some school VP getting carried away with authority issues. I suspect that if this gets to a jury in a civil trial, the district will be hosed.

"Microsoft's rules do not disallow OEMs bundling browsers." Yeah, but you lose your OEM discount if you do. Nothing like having to pay retail to ship Windows when your competitors do not have to. Kind of like Intel giving preferences and access to the latest CPUs to Intel only shops.

Crippleware? Been around for a long time. I wonder how long it will take to crack? I hope the crackers patent the methodology...

"Third, I think that students are already under a great deal of financial stress. The temptation to save a few dollars by grabbing a free copy of the textbook is very understandable to me. I just wish people would look at text book authors as the good guys because I think we provide much more information per dollar than the universities. Alas, I don't think I'm going to change people's ideas on that very soon." Textbooks as revenue generation vs. teaching aid? Incestuous deals between professors and textbook publishers? High levels of new editions to stifle any fair use secondary market? There is no sane reason a textbook should cost >50$. So I doubt you'd get much sympathy from the concept on one student being able to "buy" a textbook and share it with the entire class. Information wants to be free...

"Oh, servers are the only reason to keep the PC running eeh?" Yeah, my first though is that the early morning hours are when the Euros and locals are at peak bandwidth. Perhaps he has a virtual instance running somewhere at a colo?

It is not surprise that this administration would be pro-big media. The question to me would be, to what extent are they willing to compromise common carrier and constitution in that endeavor.

No reference to "Are You Being Served?" That was a nice collection of flawed folks, that tickled my funny-bone for years, on PBS.

So I guess it's off to "other" avenues begining with the letter "B" to find the episodes then...sigh.... Too bad. You'll have to wait until Saturday, like the rest of the world...

Sounds like embrace and extend to me. MSFT had a fit, when Asus started selling millions of low cost non-MSOS systems and even implemented an XP license exception, and special pricing, to allow XP to ship on systems with 1GB RAM. It seems to be a bit of a stretch to include some of the systems that MS is claiming to be "netbooks," as netbooks, when they are probably notebooks, instead. In my view, a netbook is defined by the feature set, of the least expensive method available to launch and run Firefox and any app for that API. Any more than that, and I think you drift from netbook to notebook. Of course you are free to have a different view.

I would argue that the sole purpose of life/DNA is to replicate. I guess you could go with "brain," if you can clone.

"I think what happened is that lots of people want a "portable computer" to do more than just access the web. They want something they can use to do word processing, spreadsheets and presentations (which for most people means Microsoft Office)."

I can understand that people may expect more for a portable, but a "netbook," as originally specified, should not even have a hard drive with which to install MS Office. It should be used to access "the cloud" and use google aps or the like to handle word processing and handle E-Mail via webmail. I just think that these "netbooks" were sold to people looking for notebooks and not a completely new animal. Spreadsheets and presentations should be out of the netbook realm.

I would think these devices should be marketed in the same vicinity as PDA's and iPhones that you can type on, not in the laptop dept.