After building and running it locally yesterday morning, I started studying the code. I am not to interested in deploying it right now, but I might set it up in the future for use by family, friends, and customers.

I've had a Wave account for about 6 months (sandbox and beta) and I am more interested in building applications on top of Wave rather than hacking on the EtherPad code base. I am interested in learnng from the codebase however :-)

I was just saying that I enjoy target shooting, but not hunting.

I thought the same thing. Nintendo products have long lasting value.

I still on occasion use my U64 and I bet I am still playing at least a few Wii games 5 or 10 years from now. The US market is saturated with Wii consoles but I expect Nintendo still gets fairly good revenue from new game sales.

Gaming is about having *fun*, not technology. Nintendo's chief game designer came to Angel Studios (where I worked) and I think that I can paraphrase his philosophy as fun first, technology second.

I used to be a Nintendo U64 developer (mostly game AI, a bit of graphics). The U64 was a good platform, but I stand by my statement: the Wii is awesome because the games are *fun*.

BTW, even the Wii Fit "games" are cool: Yoga, balance exercises, etc. Lots of fun, and it is a good break during the day (I work at home as a software developer and author). I live 150 feet from a National Park trail head, but going on a hike takes hours, and the Wii games provide some fun and gets me away from my laptop - good for 10 minute breaks.

On the other hand, some of the games I have seen on (for example) the XBox are fairly much psychotic. What kind of people like to play games here they shoot people. If I want to shoot a gun I go my local the shooting range (I only shoot aluminum cans that don't have mothers :-)

Seriously, I don't intend to insult anyone, but I look at some of the violent video games and it makes me think of the fall of western civilization.

After playing video games on my grandson's XBox 360 over Thanksgiving, I signed up with GameFly so I can try a lot of Wii games at home. It is so much better playing video games standing up :-)

BTW, the "if you do nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide" argument is very bogus:

Personal information is valuable!

My wife and I use supermarket discount cards, allowing our supermarket chain to sell information. In return, we save quite a bit of money.

If Google and other web tracking companies offered a little "cash back" on using my private information, then I would be more agreeable with making it easy for them to collect data on me.

For years, I have used one browser (Safari) for nothing but online banking. I now use Chrome for all google related browsing (GMail+Google Apps, Blogger, Reader).

I do all other browsing on Firefox, blocking Google and most other cookies.

This is slightly inconvenient because if someone emails me a link, I need to copy and paste it into Firefox - probably copy/paste links between Chrome and Firefox about 5 to 10 times a day so this is a small overhead.

I usually use Google Search (on Firefox), but I also use Clusty and Bing.

Just some advice that I give friends and family:

        * Delete all cookies in your browser every week - it is easy enough to sign in again to web sites that require authentication. People who do not delete their cookies never see what sites are tracking them. It is easiest to do a 'delete all cookies' operation and not to try to save the 5 or 10 cookies out of thousands that are stored in your local browser data.
        * Keep a text file with all passwords in encrypted form - and, do not use the same password for different purposes.
        * Every time you use your super market's discount card (or possibly pay with a credit card), your purchases are permanently associated with you - do you care? maybe or maybe not.

I do use a lot of web services that track what I do (GMail, for example) but I make the decision to give up privacy vs. benefits on a service by service basis.

AnyTerm looks like a solution, but I would rather just have a term app included in Chrome OS. Thanks for the link.

I have Chrome OS running on VirtualBox - works as advertised, and when it is solid I'll probably buy a low cost device running it for travel, web browsing around the house and yard, etc.

I am hoping that it will eventually include a *great* xterm app with SSH support so it can also be used to monitor servers, and light weight admin work.

I dual boot my MacBook between Ubuntu and OS X, so the screen shots were interesting to me. I liked the multi-desktop preview with window drag and drop but OS X already has that - very convenient when arranging work flows. I thought that the central date display with drop down calendar was good also.

OTR: love to see innovation: I think that software engineering and computer science are the premier creative avocations because what we do is both 'self interesting' and enables most other fields.

A poll would be interesting.

Personally, I think that "Go and "Go! are two different names, so there is no problem.

Actually, generational (or ephemeral) garbage collectors can often perform better at runtime than coding it yourself. I think this is because larger blocks of storage can be freed at one time for very short-lived objects.

Yikes! I forgot to add:

* Transparency on the amount of oil that it is economically feasible to produce

Let's grade our (USA) government on:

* Transparency on real unemployment rates
* Transparency on getting into the Iraq war
* Transparency on getting into the Vietnam war
* Transparency on (not) publishing the M3 figures

I could go on, but I'll subjectively assign a grade of "D-"

It may be a cliche, but people are good and governments are usually mediocre at best.