Huh. Win 7 Ultimate runs like a slippery fish on my netbook. In fact it runs so well that I'll not even bother installing a linux OS. Not trolling, just saying. Of course when I bought the netbook it ran like shit. Then I wiped XP and all the HP bloatware and installed Win 7. I was going to make it multi-boot, but since it runs so smoothly (and on 1 GB of ram) it's just not worth the hassle.

Thanks for the thrice daily dose of Apple propaganda. Stop being Apple's shill. They do not do news worthy things everyday.

Because PDF's were designed to be PRINT files. They are NOT screen friendly at all. Unless you're screen is a printer. If you really want to read PDF's on your screen, then good for you, but PDF's are not web friendly. PDF's are also not small screen friendly (i.e. - portable devices) unless the PDF is specifically formatted for the specific screen you're viewing it on. I can understand why Mozilla wants to add a PDF viewer, but I do not agree with them doing it. Quite frankly, a plug-in that loads an external viewer is fine (I use Foxit and have yet to have ANY problems with it). The reason I would prefer Mozilla to not do this is that it isn't needed and as such, takes away time resources from more important improvements to Firefox.

Yes, Jacques Valee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Vallee

Yes. Now the world must look to France for intelligent use of nuclear power. We're fucked.

From an economic P.O.V. how effective would this tech be for countries that do not have a decent power infrastructure? This may not be viable for those ensconced in the comfortable western economies, but perhaps if you live in a hut on the edge of a desert in Africa..?

Yes. Gregory Benford's 'Timescape'. An excellent novel. Go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timescape

Especially on an HP machine.

I'm all for it. A world government based around the notion any law you pass MUST apply to EVERYONE in the world. It might result in victimless crimes being wiped out and death penalties for those that commit atriocious acts of war. Or just a bunch of laws that allow you to take out teh other countries leaders...

Let's have a browser that supports add-ons to allow customization, but keep the browser itself from adding "social" features or any other use specific crap (aside from accessing the web). And if this fork was run by a non-profit, they might realize that Firefox doesn't need to compete with other browsers at whatever game those developers are doing. Make a solid, bug-free browser and damn the noise.

Well said, Sir.

I agree. I store all the movies I've acquired on an older 160 GB drive. If it dies, I really don't care. That stuff never gets backed up. In fact, I should say that I DID store movies on an older drive that never gets backed up because it died last week. And I haven't missed it or the files on it n the slightest. The important stuff is backed-up either to a local drive or to the cloud (for strange values of "the cloud").

"they are a much harder company to interface with than Microsoft" This. And typical for programmer and engineer driven projects, the end-user is the last considered aspect of the system. Consider the Nexus 1 customer service fiasco. That's Google all over.

F U C K tablets. I just bought a netbook. Guess what? It does everything on the go AND has a better keyboard. ANd I didn't have to sell a kidney to buy it.

"Because they get paid a fortune to do so" I don't think this is true across the board. I just bought an HP Mini 110 and it came stock with XP and a LOT of HP apps/tools. It ran like a dog and I sort of assumed it was just the Atom processor (my first time with an atom and expected it to be sluggish). After playing with it for a couple of hours, I decided that I wanted to put Win 7 on it just to see how it would run. So I did. A clean install of Win 7 Ultimate. The little netbook now runs like a slippery fish (I did some minor tweaking to remove unwanted Win 7 services). I'm using it within 30 seconds of a cold start. Sweet. Part of performance boost is just Win 7 over XP, but a LOT of that boost is the removal of the HP bloatware. The thing to keep in mind here is that this isn't 3rd party stuff HP is being paid to include, but HP tools that for the most part "replaces" functionality built-in to Windows. The only reason I can see for having that junk is to keep a team of coders at HP employed. It actually costs HP money to include the performace crushing software.