It's a cheap internet appliance with a keyboard as opposed to a touchscreen. Is anyone using tablets?

Or did you mean anyone using ChromeOS not on a Chromebook? Probably that animal doesn't exist, Google is trying to keep a "unified experience", i.e. Apple-like control over their platform. A large concern here is security; you can put it into "Developer Mode" and do whatever you want to the system, but otherwise it's pretty locked-down. I don't really mind this; people who want to screw with Linux can, and people who just want to browse the web and not worry about what the machine is doing can also do this. Turning on developer mode is extremely non-obvious, and that's probably good too.

As a primary machine, a Chromebook can be a little limiting, less so if you are well versed in wrangling Linux. However, I understand that it is being used in education a lot; it sounds pretty much perfect. Ultra-cheap hardware, simple software, low maintenance -- what's not to like?

Probably most of them. The drivers don't exist for Windows, and installing a Linux distro is a little more complicated than you might hope for. Plus, there are some actual benefits to ChomeOS, mostly that it will back up your files for you, and that it boots in seconds (maybe a total of ten seconds from clicking reboot to having all the browser windows open again), but it's also more secure than Linux. Security is achieved at the cost of making it hard to change the system.

Also keep in mind, these things ship with a 16GB SSD. You can install a couple Linux distributions in that space, but it's pretty cramped for any sort of content: you're not going to be gaming or torrenting very much. Increasing the storage is possible, but if you're going to buy a $200 laptop and a $100 SSD, you may as well buy a real laptop.

Generally speaking, it's a nice, cheap, internet appliance, for those who want a keyboard instead of a touchscreen. It's really not that bad of a user experience. I have been leaving mine around the house for the roommates; they browse the web, listen to music, watch movies, and type their resumes. I don't know what other features you think it needs.

No, not all security is obscurity. If your list of things that need to be kept secret includes your security implementation, and especially your algorithm, then you have flawed security. Multi-level security increases the number of things you need to have and/or know in order to compromise the system. With e.g. ROT-13 or another shift cipher, once you know that they are using that cipher, there is no other knowledge that you need in order to break it. On the other hand, if you have an arbitrary number of keys and the knowledge that your opponent is using e.g. SSL, you don't have any greater ability to compromise other users.

Security through obscurity may be an overused phrase, but it does have a specific meaning; it only really makes sense in the context of security systems. You may use words however you wish, but to me that's not glory.

I don't always do graphics work, but when I do, I use the GIMP on Linux.

In my opinion, the open source community is practically perfect. Even with your once-in-25-years bug like Shellshock, I prefer having control over my systems, and access to the internals if I ever really need to. If I had unlimited power to direct the course of the open source community, and funds to match, I wouldn't change anything: just give me more of the same.

With one exception.

Can we start a petition for this? A Kickstarter? A lynch mob? The biggest embarrassment for open source isn't Shellshock, it's the name of the graphics editor. I suppose if nothing else it could lead to a profitable side business selling (Libre-) torches and pitchforks, but come on, people.

This is probably true, but not necessarily. There are probably a fair amount of access points and routers that run more fully-featured linuxes. Someone on HN confirmed that their WD MyCloud cheapo-NAS was vulnerable. The issue is, if there are any vulnerable embedded devices, they will probably go unpatched for a long time, especially if it's at all difficult for the end-user. If Joe Sixpack's TV can be hacked, he's probably not ever going to know, and probably not be able to fix it if so.

I predict there's going to be a lot of people with a lot of devices that are simply fucked.

You are required to identify yourself to a police officer who asks (per Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada). You are not required to show them identification documents. There is no good reason to do so. Do not do this. Tell them your (real) name. Certain states (not California, mind you) may have state laws requiring you to give the police such information as your address and date of birth; the Supreme Court has not ruled on the legality of these laws. I would probably not comply, but that one is up to you. Do not talk to the police. Do not assist them with any investigation -- you are not required to, and providing false information is an easy crime to get booked for. Do not answer their questions. Do not allow them to search you. There are nice cops who are just doing their job, but the potential downsides are not worth it. "Am I being charged with a crime? Am I free to go?" Those are the only things you should say to the police.

And if you get arrested, remember that, per the reprehensible miscarriage of justice in Berghuis v. Thompkins, you must explicitly invoke your right to silence in order for the police to stop questioning you. Police interrogations are so effective that perfectly innocent people have been known to sign confessions after extended interrogation sessions. Tell them you are using your right to silence, and that you will not answer questions without an attorney present, and do not say anything more until that attorney shows up.

Know your rights, and insist upon them. Do not cooperate with the police beyond strict necessity.

"Always from Africa comes something new." Pliny.

"May no new thing arise." Traditional Spanish benediction.

No, it's pretty well tested. Just because you don't understand something does not mean that no one does. Compare to geometry: you might not know how to construct a given shape, but you can probably say something about its properties given a few conditions that it must satisfy.

For example, we know that relativity is an extremely accurate description of the geometry of spacetime. We have proved mathematically that energy must be conserved, in addition to observational evidence. That gives us the conditions that a Dyson Sphere must satisfy: it must exist in a universe with the same physics. However, even setting aside that requirement -- if your technology can break the laws of thermodynamics, why would you need a Dyson Sphere?

The next time you feel compelled to argue that your ignorance is as good as someone else's knowledge, may I suggest in lieu of posting here that you start a television or political career?

It's actually less crazy than most of them.

Chromebooks work fine offline too. You do have to change a setting in Google Docs to enable offline use, and perhaps Gmail also suffers from this flaw, but it is trivially possible. It is not the default, which is frankly bizarre, but I bought mine to be a backup web development machine, so it's running debian in a chroot.

I'd love a $99 netbook. My current one is getting up in years, but it's great for tossing into a messenger bag; it fits the ultra-mobile lifestyle very well. $99 is cheap enough to be disposable; I am sure they would sell like hotcakes. I wasn't able to find any information about them on a cursory search, do you have a link that you could share?

Individuals, and individual rights, are like single atoms. They only exist in the abstract sense. The real world is entirely dominated by groups and collective actions.

You're a confused anarchist. The problem with non-coercive government is that all government is coercive. Government is primarily a set of restrictions on the use of force, or alternately the monopoly on that use of force. Getting rid of a government, or disarming it, merely allows anyone with a larger arsenal to set up their own government -- anarchy is an unstable system. We all have a right to violence, because it cannot be taken from us except in extreme situations. Remember, the Code of Hammurabi was instituted, "...so that the strong might not harm the weak." Coercive government is a necessary evil, and it will remain necessary so long as men are capable of harming their fellows, for that is its justification and primary purpose.

Rights are not inherent, except in some abstract sense. In the real world, your rights are what the men with guns say they are. You may feel fortunate that the world has had a long, bloody time to work out semi-cooperative frameworks to restrain our darker impulses. Individual rights are an important conceptual counterbalance to the overwhelming powers of the collective, but they are no justification for anarchy, economic or otherwise. The "free market" is an ideal, even a good one, but in most cases removing government interference makes markets less free, more subject to collusion and fraud. In some cases, where the service is required to be universal, or when the barriers to entry would be insurmountable, it makes sense for the government to assume these functions directly. Govenment can also be thought of as the natural monopoly of natural monopolies, in that sense.

Slavery is a word that has a specific meaning; your definition is specious. You just fundamentally don't like being told what to do. To some degree this idealism is admirable. For the true individualist, I can recommend (from long personal experience) the Alaskan wilderness; you can get land for free still up there, provided you build upon it. Whatever romantic images your mind conjures upon thinking of Alaska are all true; I can't stand the weather, personally, but it's as close to a pure state of nature as you will ever find. If you'd like to enjoy the benefits of society, however, you have to play by the rules. "Slavery" isn't an option -- it's mandatory.

No, it does not. It is not a view, it is fact. When the Earth's atmosphere has a higher partial pressure of CO2 it retains more heat. That is the essential point under consideration, and the exact value of the partial pressure is irrelevant and was not mentioned. We're not talking about the political issues, or the history of the planet, only cold hard measurable facts about [a] the relationship between irradiance and re-radiation, and [b] the absorption spectrum of CO2.

However, on the separate subject you have noted, while we are indeed two orders of magnitude away from the highest CO2 levels, and the highest rates of emission, the previous atmospheric changes happened over the course of millions of years and are usually associated with mass extinctions. We've already been doing pretty well on the mass extinction front; this may not be a good time to rock the boat.

If, as I have been told, conservatives are against change, can we maybe try to not pollute every square inch of the planet? I'm from rural Alaska, and it's getting a bit melty up there. It's not a place that I really enjoy living, but the glaciers were fairly pretty, and have you seen what permafrost does when it melts? Clearly this isn't a problem where you live, but please let's not pretend that it isn't an issue elsewhere. Pollution of any sort is ugly.

What brought out the cranks today?

Anyone who can claim that General Relativity is wrong has not understood it. It is incomplete, but it is not wrong, and certainly not to the point where black holes would be 'disallowed'. We're pretty good so far at determining what fundamental forces operate in the universe, and there simply is no property of matter which would prevent it from reaching the densities required for black hole formation. We have observed extremely massive dense objects far exceeding that threshold. Whether or not singularities exist in some sort of real way is another question. The internal structure of black holes is also fairly academic. That black holes exist is, as has been said, a direct consequence of General Relativity, which has been shown to be an extremely accurate description of the geometry of the universe, at all scales we have been able to observe, from the sub-atomic to the intergalactic. In order for black holes (or a phenomenon with identical properties) not to exist, you have to both explain the observation of these dense, massive objects, and simultaneously describe why objects cannot be that dense, or more precisely why spacetime cannot be curved such that it forms an event horizon.

ACs: if you do not have a working knowledge of relativity then please don't trouble yourselves to respond to this comment. Your theory has to have greater explanatory power if you want to replace relativity, and if you don't know what it says, well, you're not likely to have a useful opinion on the matter.

Yes, images taken in the IR spectrum in Earth's atmosphere are fairly blurry. For the same subject, at the same resolution, the IR image will have far less detail. The atmosphere is opaque to IR, or "optically thick" if you prefer. There is a narrow band called the Infrared window which is less absorbed, it is marked in blue in this image.

Previously, yes, I had been claiming that you were ignorant. Now I'm claiming you're devoted to upholding a single mistaken datapoint against freshman-level physics. Claiming that outgoing radiation is not absorbed by the atmosphere certainly takes care of that pesky greenhouse effect. It's entirely contradicted by reality, but you two don't seem to be well acquainted anyway. Sarcasm aside, if you'd like to continue this, you have my email.

I believe it's commonly accepted that we are still on the upward side of the current interglacial period. To say that IR is re-emitted often is not an exaggeration, the mean free path of an IR photon varies with the exact partial pressure but is generally in the low tens of meters as far as I know; I haven't bothered to calculate it myself. I found an anti-AGW site which claimed 65 meters for the atmosphere as a whole. The sky is blue because scattering is strongly dependent on wavelength, with blue light being scattered much more than red or IR. A cursory search didn't provide me with any high resolution IR images of Earth from space; I would appreciate if you could find me some.

At this level of explanation, any inconsistency is most likely due to one's own lack of understanding.