You're right, and I guess the MBAir doesn't have touchscreen or built-in LTE as an option, if those matter to you. I'd rather carry a hotspot to get all my devices on LTE, and I'd rather not gorilla arm myself fingerprinting up my touch-screen laptop, but that's just me.

Since when is such a machine considered "premium?" :) Even if I wasn't a Mac fan, to buy this over a Macbook Air, which is also an x86 box at heart wouldn't make a ton of sense to me, as it could run the same x86 OSes but also run OSX natively without hackery and dodging updates that might break your Hackintosh, etc.

Protecting yourself against weird things Facebook does is actually fairly simple. I sandbox FB in it's own browser. It's all I use Firefox for, that and the occasional browser compatibility test, but I reset cookies/cache/etc before and after. Combine that with a fake name and you're largely safe to post whatever you want. Won't fool, like, law enforcement or whatever if they look specifically at you, but it will confuse whatever automated ad/cross site dossier these companies are compiling on you. I tie it to the dumpster gmail address I use when I know I'm going to get spammed (drop in your biz card, win a free happy hour!) and bam, I don't even think I've ever touched the privacy settings menu.

You would have found it if you read the title: "In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop" :-D

For a low-power 8-bit MC with 2.5k RAM, the navigation seems more fluent than some Android tablets I've used...

Yep, we were told the same thing. We even had a tracking SKU for the setup to, I guess, prove to mfgrs that we did it (though we could have just as easily not done it and ran the track SKU anyway.) I did it because it was easy, and I didn't mind doing it, and it killed 5 minutes that I'd normally be forced out to the sales floor to try and sell our services. So I actually did quite thorough inspections of customer machines in order to kill as much time as possible, haha.... tested CD ROM drive, removed pack-in crapware, tested the AC adapter, turned on the pre-installed anti-virus, the whole nine. That job was pretty easy and actually got a lot less stressful if you just built a little rapport with the customers and tried to help them, because really, you got paid the same whether you were an ass or actually tried, and most customers were pretty cool. Made the time go faster, I thought. Something the current gen Geek Squaders seem to know nothing about.

Back in highschool, I worked in Geek Squad before it was called Geek Squad (we just wore black polo shirts instead of blue, and we were called "Tech Services") and can confirm they've been doing this for more than a decade now.

Neat ideas, but unfortunately if an innocent, law-abiding person is driving the vehicle of someone who's license is suspended / is uninsured / a criminal, we're going to have a lot of false positives. If my license was suspended and I was obeying the law and not driving, it's totally possible that a family member or friend would then be driving my car, and it'd be out on the road getting scanned by these scanners.

Buying the mother-in-law an iPad was the best money I ever spent. Let's see her get AntiVirus2009 installed on -that- thing.

Dammit she's calling my phone right now.

Oh, haha, I see now, I suppose it was a little dense of me to miss that, but I guess I'm happy that my mind didn't go the same direction as this perv-o. Yea, I certainly wouldn't take my Macbook in the hot shower-room with me. Doesn't sound like an optimal operating environment.

This wasn't exactly recording half-hour long videos of people, but rather quick snaps. In a reasonably lit room, it's possible some may have missed a blink of said green dot, or if they had their back turned, doing something else in the room, even looking down at the keyboard. Those who saw it might have just thought "eh, that was weird, but it's off now" and wrote it off as a glitch.

Also of note, this fella got caught because this software was actually also popping up strange error messages designed to look like OS X system-launched messages that directed users to "use hot steam to clear a sensor" on their laptop. So maybe he was trying to keep himself in business hoping hapless users damaged their own computers heeding these warnings, so they'd call him back for return business? Because I'd guess that would also add a fraud charge. Perhaps he got greedy on top of pervy.

I agree, geez, I'm usually Captain Science and Progress before all things Religious, but I wonder if this "brain" was in any way "conscious" for that short period of time? Or am I misunderstanding what was achieved here?

There was an old project called PearPC that was able to virualize a PowerPC G4 for virtual non-Intel OS X, but I heard it ran like crud.

Your best bet might be just to pick up a cheap USB KVM and a refurb Intel Mac Mini, doubt it'd cost you more than $400-500 tops, as well as a modern copy of Pagemaker... and just have them working side-by-side. I find for moving stubborn users, having the "migration-target" right on the desk with them for a reasonable transition period ends up being the least painful way, if you have the option.

Not defending either machine, just straightening your facts.

The Acer is more extensible, with user-replaceable battery, savvy-user-replaceable hard drive and RAM (though the RAM is a total pain to get to, not just a door on the back, everything has to come out to get at it) and the possibility for a lot more storage as laptop hard drives get bigger. If it gets stolen, and your data on it is backed up and protected from malcontents, it's $300 and not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things.

The Macbook is much thinner, a little lighter, significantly more powerful with it's 64-bit dual core processor, has reportedly better battery life (Apple's reporting has been pretty close to reality lately) and a full-sized keyboard and almost full-sized multi-touch trackpad (compared to the postage stamp Acer calls a trackpad,) slightly larger screen with quite a bit higher resolution, higher resolution webcam, much faster but more limited storage, can be configured with 4gb RAM (must be done at config time, part of the logic board) and for those that care, Apple's customer service and reliability are rated much higher (per the keynote video.)

Between the two? I'm probably going with the Macbook Air. I don't mind the premium for what I think will be better usability. I'm a larger gentleman with larger hands, and I haven't found a netbook keyboard and/or trackpad yet I want to use for more than a few minutes at a time... too small, slash key and period/comma keys are half size, etc. While the machines are similar in size, the MBAir has it beaten quite soundly in specs. It's really easy to say "haha, Jobs-o made a netbook after putting them down..." but he really didn't. This is no netbook. I had a netbook for two months, gave it to my mother, and I'll never own one again.