You raise a good point that a all-in-one solution, such as a laptop, would be ideal. But what's so interesting about the $25 PC is that it's not all-in-one, and encourages thinking outside the box. After spending a month or two toying around with Linux, students could be encouraged to explore cutting-edge technology by pushing all their Raspberry Pi computers together and building beowulf clusters, render farms, or protein folding simulators at very low cost. Or perhaps even create a next-generation videogame console with this PC at the heart!

The cloud is a big thing these days. Cloud this, cloud that, it's almost like we're all in a fog trying to wrap our minds around how to make use of it.

But as with many new technologies, its own hype precedes it. Sure, you can put everything you own data-wise into a cloud, but should you is the question we need to ask ourselves. And you know, it's not even that the answer is "no" as you might be expecting from the way that question was phrased.

As the name suggests, clouds are mainly good for carrying very lightweight data. Your e-mail, for example, has effectively been in a cloud since the day it was invented (at least until you download it). Websites are in their own clouds. Games and operating systems, on the other hand, are very rarely in clouds.

So if you're trying to figure out whether or not to use a cloud for yourself, you should ask, "Is this a game or operating system?" If not, I say go for it wholeheartedly. And you know what, even if it is the case, go for it. You're your own man and nobody tells you what to do.

We're at the point where consoles have achieved parity with personal computers in all ways except freedom. Which begs the question, why not go back to personal computers for gaming? It's ironic, but for most games that come out on consoles a keyboard and mouse are the superior input solution, and you can do a lot more with a computer besides.

The whole situation brings to mind a discussion I had about information security the other day at the bakery. Ten years ago, who even thought you could play music on a computer? And now look at things. We need to get to a point where instead of using credit card information for transactions we use tokens instead -- that way, if someone gets into a database, they end up with a whole bunch of tokens instead of credit cards. Good luck using tokens anywhere else, they don't take em. Or maybe we should go back to paper for billing.

Anyway, computers are conclusively better if only for the fact that you can play MP3s while you game. That rules.

The missing element in these claims is the citation of some sort of study that combines an examination of buying power and psychology to determine when piracy or the purchase of a counterfeit good represents a lost sale to the afflicted rights holder and when it does not. You can't just multiply retail cost of original good by estimated number of IP violations; that very likely surpasses the upper bound of the "damage" that has been caused. It's faulty journalism to ignore this fact or pass the responsibility for the veracity of this information to somebody else, but that doesn't seem to stop anybody from breathlessly regurgitating these sky-high numbers.

...that rampant piracy has diminished the useful and legitimate purposes of these devices to such a degree that they must be criminalized. I grew up in an era where "homebrew" was the only type of gaming there was. One could say that it actually created the game industry.

But the game industry has grown up now into serious business, and while landing a couple of pasted-together white blocks onto a platform of larger white blocks used to be great fun, I don't think anybody wants to give up Mario 25 and Zelda 21 just yet.

Is that the price to be paid in a world where these devices are permitted to exist? A better question, perhaps, is do you want to take that chance?

Especially now that people text while driving, it's probably a good thing that we're bringing automation to bear on traffic problems.

They could do more to prevent problems than to catch people after the fact, I think. They're able to drop crossing guards on railroad tracks and tollbooths; why not set them up at every practical intersection as well? There's some good talk out there about adding a breath test to the steering columns of every vehicle, but how about in-car interference of the cellphone frequency?

I think we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg on what can be done here to ensure safety.

I like the looks of the new interface, but am rather concerned it might put people off by being too different from Windows.

I've been playing around with soft lighting in the GIMP, and I think one innovation I'd like to see come up (in X-windows or wherever) would be to allow users to "tint" the whole desktop with a particular color scheme and pattern... something that can hit the windows and wallpaper evenly not unlike the sun is currently hitting my monitor, only not so bright, blurry and distracting.

Think looking at a monitor with the faint reflection of light hitting rippling water... ahh, soothing!

I suppose this is too much to ask, but I'd love to see websites start to block AT&T (corporate, customers, whatever) for a little while, just to let them see what a network without neutrality looks like from that end.