Al Franken hasn't lived in Minnesota for decades. He moved to Minnesota, where he was born, just in time to qualify and win a 3 horse race for Senate in 2008. Republican's had only a slight chance of winning anything in 2008, so Al won and then left for Washington DC. He is a comedian and don't forget Minnesotan's elected a pro wrestler to be their governor a few years back. The whole "I'm a Minnesotan" is an act. He still belongs to the Actors Guild, but he's not a very good actor or Senator.

Adwords are free for Google, so they can always be at the top. Check it out, search anything to do with email, calendar, webmail, apps, etc.

Apple is going from the iPhone up and all the other tablet vendors are have gone from the desktop down. They are not trying to win over people that need a real computer. I am surprised how many people I know that own an iPhone and have never owned a Mac. The same holds true for the iPod and will probably be true with the iPad. People like the simplicity and the vast majority of computer users today only use a few apps most of the time, a browser, email and maybe games.

People buy a Mac because it is easy to use and it just works. I have a couple Atom boxes (a single and dual core) and have thought about installing one of my family licenses (10.5 or 10.6) on one of them, but I haven't had the time (or I am to lazy). Originally it was a pain to install Linux on the Atom, because of the Ethernet drivers, but now they work good with Linux. I recommend Macs to my family and friends, because I don't have to do tech support for them, they can figure everything out themselves. We have a few Macs in my immediate family and a couple Windows boxes and few Linux boxes. I use the Linux boxes as servers/appliances and seldom use Windows. My kids use Windows at school, but mostly use Macs at home and have been syncing their iPods and now iPod Touches to the Macs since they were young. I still like to play with Linux, but when I want to use a computer I use a Mac, because it just works.

The BBC should compete in the USA, if the can actually be non-biased. It would rock the foundations of journalism here. In the USA the journalists are unionized, so it is hard to believe they are not biased?

The current bill in Congress allows newspapers to become non-profits. The thinking behind it, is that they have been losing money and don't pay taxes anyway. They must follow different rules if a newspaper wants to take this route. There in a educational content to ad ratio of 50:50 and they can't endorse any party or politician. They also have to provide equal access to parties/candidates/issues. This would be much better than the heavily left leaning paper where I live. After subscribing for many years, I finally stopped my subscription last year, because I was sick of their politics. I stopped the national edition of the NY Times shortly after. I would gladly subscribe to a non-union, non-biased paper, if I could find one.

This administration has stated that it's goal is to save and create union jobs. Funding pure research won't accomplish that goal, but giving money to GM and others will.

They may need find Headquarter Havens. Now that the Unions and the Government are taking over the failing businesses, they are getting hungry, very, very hungry. The current administration is clearly anti-business and anti-rich, unless of course you are a rich politician or union member (entertainment, media, sports, etc). Back when the UK had a 99% tax bracket, the rich moved (rock stars, for example) and that could happen now in the USA.

CAT 5 will outlive you and I have run GbE on CAT 3. I also remember seeing a booth at COMDEX that had GbE running on barbed wire. If you listen to a wire company that is selling you cable, they say it will last for centuries, before you buy it and tell you it needs to be upgraded the following year with a new cable that will last for a century. If it's in the wall or ceiling there is nothing to harm it there, but patch cables can be physically damaged by humans or animals. The dog or cat chewing on a cable or a chair rolling over a cable regularly will ruin them.

I had a liver transplant almost a decade ago and haven't had a single problem with rejection. Strangely, I haven't had any infections and can't remember having any colds since my transplant. I stopped taking the prescribed steroids a few months after the transplant and have cut my anti-rejection drugs to a quarter the prescribed dose a couple times, for a couple weeks to see if I would have any reaction, after reading that 20% of liver transplant patients can survive without drugs. I can only guess that my body is able to fight infection or ignores the rhino virus and that the donor was a pretty close match (cadaver, unrelated to me). Both sides of my family have been in America for nearly 400 years, so I would guess I share genes with a large number of people and may have been lucky enough to find a donor that shares some of those genes. I would like to stop taking the anti-rejection drugs and truly believe the odds are better than 50% that I could just quit, because of the lack of problems I have experienced, but am not willing to take the chance that I may reject the organ. The anti-rejection drugs will eventually take my kidneys out, so the sooner they find a solution the better.

Computers can be tools or toys. An OS is an OS when it comes to educational tools. Young people (my 13 year old twins) are agnostic when it comes to computers. That is until they hear opinions of people that only know how to use one OS. We have Macs, Windows and Linux boxes at home and my kids learned to use Linux at the same time they learned to use the other OSs. The sub $300 netbooks with Linux will change everything, as kids get them at a young age and learn Linux as their first OS. Schools can benefit from Open Source, because the basics needed for education are free. I'd bet they could get 2x-3x as many computers, or save over 50% if they started using Open Source.

This may be the best kept military secret ever. It took until now to uncover the technology they developed and no one ever got credit for it.

Nobody likes a monopoly! I have never liked the phone company, the electric company, the gas company, the cable company or Microsoft.

The only unions industries that seem to be doing well are in entertainment (Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild, etc) and sports (Players Unions). Unions have ruined the auto, steel, transportation, textile and other industries and then complained that jobs are being shipped over seas. The tech industry has lost jobs to India, Russia and China, but it still stays competitive, because it hasn't unionized, it's competitive. Competition makes the world go around. In the days when American companies built machines, made steel and had not only a technology advantage, but a capitol investment advantage, unions were tolerable, but they have more smoke stacks in China now and they have a capital equipment and a labor force advantage. Free enterprise will prevail, but we have to earn our advantages and maintain a lead in new areas that unions haven't thought about and won't even be thinking about when they emerge.