Revolutionary! Bringing the BookBook to the masses is an admirable goal.

Many countries require fingerprints for entry. See, for example: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/biometrics-international.asp

And the above list is certainly not exhaustive. Malaysia fingerprints everyone. China has evidently recently started. etc. etc.

So we're just waiting for the suit now? http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101206/ap_on_re_as/as_new_zealand_seals_clubbed.

I spent a few years in different cities in China. Here's my take: in order to balance speed and access, you really only want to tunnel/proxy/vpn what you absolutely have to. Most sites aren't going to be blocked so using something like FoxyProxy is pretty essential. If you'll have VPN access, set up rules so that just the traffic that needs to go through the VPN (plus DNS) is getting tunneled.

Also, multiple workarounds for access is important too: you could very well get stuck somewhere where everything but ports 80, 443 are blocked, ruling out your ssh tunnel (unless you've thoughtfully set your ssh server to listen on a different port) and having a web proxy might save the day. Or one proxy goes down, get blocked, is too slow, etc.

I personally used a combination of ssh tunnels, web proxies, a paid VPN service and Tor.

Also, note that the great firewall isn't just a blacklist. It also performs packet inspection for keywords/phrases before issuing TCP resets to both parties, so your proxies definitely should be SSL enabled, even if it's just with a self-signed cert.

Went from Jaunty to Karmic on a Dell Mini 9 (both were the Netbook Remix editions) and was greeted with no wireless and no microphone in Skype. The former is a documented issue with the Broadcom drivers and has a fairly straightforward workaround if you're within reach of a wired ethernet connection. The latter appears to be a problem with Skype 2.1.0.47 (current version in Medibuntu for Karmic, and a "beta" no less) and PulseAudio. So far, the workarounds for the latter appear to be to downgrade Skype or remove Pulse.

Amazon never had the first mover advantage. Sony easily beat Amazon to market. Amazon obviously had more success, however. The Kindle runs Linux and Java. There's no excuse for failing to support unicode fonts in that environment. We're not even talking about poor interface issues for right-to-left languages. Most users for whom the Kindle's latin-only fixation is a problem would be well pleased if the Kindle just used a Unicode font!

A physical DVD, purchased from a brick and mortar store in central Shanghai (the city with the highest cost of living in China, AFAIK) retails for 7RMB*, which approximately USD1.03. Of course this is a "fake" DVD, but it includes full color printing on the DVD itself as well as a full-color jacket insert. I'll grant that the quality of the printing is of lesser quality than a legitimate DVD, but factoring in rent, wages, payoffs, returns (yes, they accept returns for defective merchandise), I don't think the production of a physical DVD approaches USD1.50.

* I've seen as low as 5RMB and as high as 12RMB, but the former are from street sellers and the latter for shops that have a largely foreign clientele.

Not to take away from your point, but according to the Chicago Sun-Times report, the driver requested a breathalyzer test on the scene, but the officer claimed he didn't have a breathalyzer device in his squad car. The driver only refused the test later, at the police station.