I just played with a friend's netbook, while fixing it (turned out to be the PS cable).

It's small, and simple. It netboots, has 1GB of ram and drove my 19"monitor just fine without any special work. For the price, you can just ignore the 9" screen.

Don't bother buying the latest and greatest. Get machines that are near the end of their sales life. It's cheaper and they'll probably last just as long.

Don't bother trying to censor the internet. It's not going to happen. Your better bet is to just get a higher profile for yourself in the present. Just be more judicious about what you release about yourself this time. Be prolific and useful, and bury the one bad reference.

All that does is make the problem as difficult for the astronauts, now, as it was when they were in high school,

I figure 2 weeks of general release before we're getting stories about people throwing themselves out of windows with Natal.

Not so bad if you're in a house, but God help the guy on a penthouse balcony.

uhm, No. You have to use less than 50% of your rated bandwidth to avoid being blocked. the 70% rule is only one of a number of triggers, any one of which can trigger rate limiting. by the rules that they document, about the only thing that can keep you up to full bandwidth capability is to be under 50% of your rated bandwidth for the last 15 minutes.

Microsoft patched it because the Firefox people informed them that they were going to (out of frustration) explicitly disable it for having an 8 month old unpatched critical security bug.

With Microsoft now suddenly deciding to patch this bug, Firefox is only disabling a potentially unpatched security hole that Microsoft hoisted on their users.

You want to tout MS Hardware independence over Linux???? You must be somewhere between delusional and psychotic!

Yeah, I think it was a broadcom wireless that a friend of mine (Sunni) had on her laptop. For some reason it wouldn't work on Vista, no matter what she did.

I mentioned, out of frustration, the idea of installing Linux on the laptop, and she said "Is that the system you installed for father?" (I gave her 80 year old dad a Linux box earlier this year). I told her it was, and she said "Yeah, go for it". (Half his family has been playing with his Linux box since I installed it... It's been solid as a rock).

The broadcom wireless that Windows could't get working runs fine, and I now have 3 generations running Linux. (Sunni's daughter also got Ubuntu Ultimate on her desktop, but her grandson is autistic, so I'm not willing to upset him by replacing Windows -- even though it's got black-screen, and Dell want's $50 for a disk that will wipe his box clean and reinstall the OS with a 'proper' key).

But you want to know how I did the Linux install on their machines??? I did the install on a portable drive on my home machine, and then I took the newly installed disk and copied the partitions onto Sunni's laptop, and her daughter's desktop..... Install a new swap partition on the two machines, and boom, job done!

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If you don't think that that's enough proof of Linux's hardware independence, you should see how we do installations at Free Geek Vancouver. We start with completely wiped disks. We've got 4 machines that we do OEM installs on. Each install takes about 1/2 hour on a 2.4Gz celeron, and runs with almost NO user interaction (other than choosing 'automatic OEM install' from the network boot menu). .... then we take the installed drives, and plop them into random machines (truly random configurations ranging from a 800Mz Pentium 3s to higher end AMD multicores. ... then we test for hardware problems and send the machines out.

Compare that to Windows, where simply swapping out your hard drive can send the system into apoplexy and eat half your day's productivity by forcing you to beg Microsoft for permission to upgrade your machine.

I still remember my first Linux install. It was a dual-boot system. (Redhat 5.2 and Windows 98). I decided to upgrade the motherboard from a P2 to a P3 (OK: needed a new case, too). Linux was easy It asked to verify that I'd changed my mouse, and then it finished booting happy.

Windows was an entirely different matter. It took a few days of tweaking and downloading drivers (Using the Linux side, of course), before Windows was anywhere near stable.

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The laptop I'm typing on also had WIndows XP hork on a simple hard drive upgrade. The Windows partition was copied from one drive to another. Linux on the other hand went from being installed on a file inside of NTFS, to a native Linux partition... No problems with Linux, but Windows was never the same again, even though the change was more trivial for WIndows.

So.... Windows hardware independent???? Give . Me . A . Break.

You should probably send an email to I4I's lawyers. I fully agree with what you said. It's pretty easy to 're-image' without word, or -- more likely -- to re-image with a 'patched' version of Word.

I'd expect that Dell creates images that incorporate new patches from MS all the time... The only difference in this case would be that the 'patch' would be mandated by a court rather than MS's business plan.

I expect that the FSF, and/or other like-minded associations would be willing to buck up and support the first few stations to get sued that way...

Thankfully, Copyright law has a 'loser pays' rule which means that, once you show that you there's a CC licensed version of your song, it's up to the RIAA lawyers to prove (on the balance of the probabilites, with a tie being in your favor) that you were playing a non-CC version of that song.

If they fail to do so (and they're likely to fail if they're suing on false pretenses), then they're the ones who end up paying your court costs.

Perhaps -- On the other hand, people who make music available without royalty (thus staying outside of the CARB system) -- such as Creative Commons licenses, or even non-CC licenses which simply explicitly allow On-Air radio stations that aren't part of CARB to play them -- might find themselves with a boon as they will then be the only music that small radio stations will be able to play.

If I was a small (or even not-so-small) musician that wanted my music to get play, I'd probably release my music on a license that allowed people who haven't signed up for CARB to play my music royalty free, but had standard fees for stations that had paid the CARB $25K minimum (I mean, why give up royalties that have already been allocated to me?).

That way, smaller stations can play my music, and the larger stations (that really make money) can give me my fair share of CARB royalties if/when I get big enough to attract the attention of the larger stations.

Well, we also have diferent standards. For example, there are some parts of Canada (and the US, I'm sure) where 3 cars at The traffic light is considered a traffic jam.

I'm sorry, Canada is now full due to all of the Bush Era refugees. Try again in a few years.

Hydrogen probably came from:

• solar wind, and
• primordial disc hydrogen.

My guess is that earth started out as a (not -so-giant?) gas giant and bled of most of it's original hydrogen. If that's even vaguely true, then there's little likelihood that the isotope mix would be anywhere near what's in comets.

I'm guessing that the deuterium mix is much higher than in comets (because deuterium, being heavier than hydrogen, is less likely to bleed off).

The problem with OOXML is that it is incomplete and it was X pages long.

One example is that Despite being a massive document, the OOXML 'standard' contained critical sections that essentially consisted of "Oh, just reverse-engineer Word-97 for this part"

That so-called reference is highly problematic for a number of reasons:

1. It means that implementers can't just depend on the standards document to figure out how things work. They now have to reverse engineer an entirely different document format and implement that too.
2. Microsoft's EULA for office claims that reverse-engineering is illegal. This means that the research that the OOXML requires you to do to implement it can open the researcher to legal liability.
3. Microsoft's patent pact only includes aspects of OOXML that are explicitly documented. This means that an implementer who implements these legacy formats (touted by Microsoft as being a critical advantage of OOXML over ODF) now opens themselves to patent liabilities.
4. If you were to include the referenced legacy formats in the OOXML definition it could, concievably double the size of the already behemoth standard.
5. The 'legacy' formats include all sorts of microsoft bugs and traps that should never be included in any sane international standard

And that's just one issue with the OOXML standard document.

In summary: the OOXML standard is massive, broken and incomplete.