There are too many people that don't want anyone to have our God-given/Constitutionally-recognized (however you choose to see them) rights, period. They view rights like free speech as dangerous because such a right allows others to criticize them and possibly undermine their authority or whatever else it is they're afraid of. Since it's easier to condition young people to not claim those rights than it is to strip those rights from older people , who are already accustomed to exercising them, that's the route that has been taken.

That's why schools now have essentially the same authority over students that the parents do. In many ways, it's nothing more than an end-around that bypasses the First Amendment--and many others. Schools were transformed from a pure agent of the state into quasi-parental figures without losing their state-given powers of coercion.

Since there's no magical age at which people begin to think responsibly, schools have decided that allowing no differing thoughts of any kind is the way to go. And they can, because they have that power. Eventually, all of society will be like our schools; no one will know how life could be different because no one was ever allowed to taste the thrills, or responsibilities, of freedom.

I did make "Elite." It took about nine months of game-play. And then my 286 died--which sucked hard because the version I had behaved like a hummingbird on fast forward if I played on anything faster than 8 megahertz!

This Texas law sounds like so many of the speech codes found on college campuses today. Like those speech codes, this law intentionally restricts speech that has been consistently found to be constitutional. The reason for such asinine restrictions? We "have to protect our innocent kids from the real world." This, of course, is utter bullplop. All it does is create a generation of children who have no emotional stability. They never learn how to deal with the fact that not everyone will like them.

The arrested girl may be a bully; if she is, there are laws already in place to deal with her. The problem with those laws, in some eyes, is that bullying requires a pattern of behavior. They want to eliminate all forms of verbal abuse so badly that they'll trample on our constitutional right to occasionally make fun of each other.

Fortunately, this law is in the mold of so many that have been shot down, and shot down hard.

One could easily turn this around and say that bloggers need to have greater ethics and standards than do print journalists. They have no reputation except for the one that they build for themselves. They don't have the luxury of being forced on a potentially unwilling audience, and one poorly written blog entry can be more damaging than one poorly written newspaper article.

I've seen a truckload of shoddy reporting done by people who are content to ride on the coattails of the Associated Press or hide behind the respected name of the Tribune Company. Newspapers are folding because ever-increasing numbers of people find that they are irrelevant and refuse to read them. The standards that print journalists are supposed to follow mean little when those standards stand in the way of attracting readers.

Remember: sex, violence and hysteria sell in print just as well as they do on television. They also grow old just as fast.

Even so, there's a certain feel that doesn't come easily (or at all) on the computer. A set of buttons can only go so far in recreating the whole experience of pinball. Still, Visual Pinball kicks stupendous amounts of ass, especially when you start building your own tables. If you built a proper VP cabinet, it just might be better than the real thing.

They are saying you can run Windows 7 on a netbook. Ya, like you could run Vista on one. Yes it installs and sorta runs but XP runs better.

My stock Eee 904 would like to disagree with you and your definition of "sorta runs." Is Seven numerically and meaningfully faster than XP? I don't know. I don't do benchmarks. What I do is use Seven in what could be considered real world testing, and I do know this: From where I type this, the experience of using Seven beats the experience of using XP. In fact, I've been running Seven longer than I ran XP on this machine.

All the usual YMMV caveats apply, but don't knock it unless you've tried it.

It's no replacement for a full-blown laptop if that's what you need....

The ''if that's what you need'' is the key part. Most people don't need all that extra stuff that adds weight and price to a laptop while detracting from its main function--to be portable. So long as you don't need uber-processing power, there's no reason a 9- or 10-inch Eee couldn't be one's only laptop/

I picked one up in November (a 904HA model) and the little machine is fantastic. Even the stock configuration is enough to make Windows 7 fly. I know why people like their 17-inch SS Luggables, but after a week with the Eee, I'd never go back to full-size.

Wouldn't offering this as an update to '07 break Intuit's business model of requiring full-price purchases to get updates that should be free?