I wonder how they are getting around the age limitations...

One funny thing I forgot to mention is with my Acer Netbook and Transformer Tablet being pretty much the same size, I've caught myself reaching to touch the Acer screen way too often, so I guess I'm getting used to using 'touch' vs a 'touchpad' a bit more than anticipated!

I have the Transformer as well and it's been an interesting fight between my trusty Acer Netbook and the Transformer... Short story? I still have and use both and still haven't really migrated to one or the other. My Netbook is great. 2GB mem upgrade makes it usable for my tons of tabs, occasional Google Doc or LibreOffice runs - even can manage to edit the occasional Picasa photo without too much pain. It's a great form factor, the 9 Cell battery means long run times, and the screen is crazy bright (LED) - at night the dimmest setting can seem to bright. I may throw an SSD into it for fun. This has and continues to be my main 'away from the desktop' computer. I take it with me everywhere, bouncing WiFi off my phone when needed. The tablet is interesting. First - the keyboard is not perfect. The keys are too far apart and I find myself having a lot of trouble typing on it, but that may be me. Either they require too much travel to 'tick' or my hands just don't fit it well. The touchpad is RIGHT under the space bar and I found myself clicking with my thumb ALL the time - I turned it off the first week or two and haven't turned it on since. All that said, I leave it in the keyboard almost all the time. I hate touch typing on the screen. But when I need the tablet mode, it's SO easy to just pop out and keep going. The biggest adjustment (at first) was how many apps had no keyboard shortcuts. I'm a shortcut type - the less I need to touch a mouse the better. Simple Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V were foreign to many apps, which makes sense for an OS rooted in phones with no keyboard. The lack of support for some Google apps and other big ones on Honeycomb was criminal (No google voice? No netflix?) But to their credit the apps have gradually gotten better and better. More and more adding keyboard shortcuts they always should have had, battery life improving, and overall unlike most 'upgrades' anytime apps get updated you often notice the improvement. To me the tablet is fun. LOVE watching full length movies and not seeing the battery meter drop in realtime or have the device almost too hot to touch. Playing Angry Birds is, of course, much more fun using your finger vs a touchpad. Email is just fine using the GMail client and web browsing with Dolphin is decent (too many other browsers default to mobile mode which is crazy with a 10" screen) Google Docs on Android is an abomination, but hopefully will improve. So the tablet can take the place of my netbook for the basic email/web stuff and media viewing. Beyond that though? Not seeing it. At all. I'm just more efficient on my NetBook. Maybe that will change, but for now, I still find myself picking a device based on what I expect to do after work. Not sure that's bad, but seems inefficient.

Well - that's what maintaining an XBMC box is for :) Till Google does that... But my own server went away along with my static IPs and much else. Life is so much simpler now!

I think the whole exercise is short sighted. I've been there, done that. The amount of effort to keep everything running, updated, configured, etc is a PITA. Setting up a solid spam filter is a huge undertaking because it's a multi layered approach. SA or equiv, various milters, and more and you still won't come close to GMail. When I finally gave in and decided to switch to Google Apps I was floored by the improvement in Spam filtering. Are there quirks with Google' stuff. Sure. But they are improving it. I finally today got most of my stuff tied to my personal count migrated to my Apps account. The family enjoy using their apps accounts too compared to what we used to have. We've used IMP, Squirrel Mail, ROundcube, and others. Roundcube is the best in that group interface wise, but is still very buggy. Was Horde fun to play with way back before Google's services existed? Yup - because they were something not easily done elsewhere. But now? So good luck - it certainly can be done, but to be done right requires a lot of effort that's only worth it if you have nothign better to do or are a internet services admin at work and like to tinker at home. And even then... I can spend all that time spent screwing with my internet 'stack' and apply it to better things now that Google just handles the day to day stuff. Am I concerned about them 'owning' me - maybe a little. But so far, they've not done evil to me. Plus even if I wanted to migrate all my stuff back to a personal server again, Google Voice is the deal breaker for me. Can't live without it.

Exactly - because if the IT department explains the risks, but goes ahead anyway because 'they said so' and then it blows up - who gets blamed? The brain dead manager that wouldn't listen or the IT department because it was an 'IT project'. Even if you have extensive documentation backing up the warnings you gave, it's too technical' and at the high mgmt level all they hear is 'IT screwed up' and it was an IT project. One of the main reasons I got out of corporate IT management - chronic lack of funding and not being listened to when you gave realistic cost and time projections for what was asked for and you never could achieve 'success' only 'not failing'. Nobody cheers for the power company because they keep the lights on day in and day out, but when the power goes out, they're public enemy #1.

I've used TB forever. Every once in a while it would bug me and I'd switch to something else, then find myself coming back to it. Even after moving to Google Apps - I stuck with TBird on my desktop. Feels more natural - I can't get used to GMails concept of tagging everything - I end up deleting sent mail all the time trashing a conversation (yeah I know PEBKAC). So I've generally stuck with TBird and though 3.x was a decent upgrade and has worked well with multiple IMAP accounts tied to it. I use GMail's web interface on teh netbook and in a pinch elsewhere and it's fine too. 5.x is intriguing. If you've tried Opera's browser based email client, you'll see some similarities. It feels like a web browser more than ever, and not in a bad way. That said - I wish I could hide the menu bar and drop down to just the buttons and tabs. Beyond that - whoever suggested the Conversations plugin above - great suggestion. Give it a try - it does some cool things inspired by Mac Mail like unified inboxes and more (At least I *think* that's conversations - might be TBird 5) Whichever - you can flip between folder views - All Folders, Unread Folders, Unified Folders, and much more. Try it if you haven't. It's pretty sweet. Took a while for it to sort through the gobs of email in various accounts - but this is like a whole new email client. Tbird 5 and Conversations 2,0 is absolutely worth a look.

It absolutely works. The PayPal shipping stuff is all written in Java - it's browser independent. The problem is it also uses popups which Chrome and FF block. Once you set an exception for PayPal and the other external domains it uses (pitneybowes or something), you'll get the shipping windows and everything will popup and load the Java applets like it is supposed to.

This makes their new marketing slogan for Windows Live all the more humorous! 'To The Cloud' indeed! More like POOF!

Shown how? In the US, that generally requires a court of law proceeding and decision. I don't get my license taken away unless I'm convicted of DUI - not right after the breathalizer. The scary part of all this is MC is acting a judge and jury arbitrarily. Imagine if the local power utilities started cutting power to groups they felt were 'questionable'. This is a watershed event, and opens up the very real possibility of using private companies and the withdrawl of their critical services to punish groups that, while distasteful or even possibly illegal, have not been deemed such in a court of law. Chilling does not even begin to describe this.

If your computer had McAfee or Norton installed at one point (like when it was new), they leave parts of themselves behind which can sometimes fight with MSE. Download and run the removal tools for each and then reinstall MSE. See if that helps. I've installed MSE for hundreds of clients and have only seen this behavior with a couple and was always an interaction with another AV program or remnant.

Agree 100%. I deal mainly with residential clients and almost every infected box I deal with has a current Norton or McAffee subscription. We remove them, run their removal tools since, like a virus, they leave crud behind, and install MSE and ensure the firewall is properly configured. The speed up can often be significant, especially on older boxes, and it's free. I have no problem with MS offering as an OPTION the installation of MSE. I am NOT an MS fanboi by any stretch, but MSE has been great. But it's an AV program and virus writers work to get ahead of them. I've certainly had a few MSE boxes return infected again with scareware. Only so much you can do. One part of MSE I really like is the ultra simple process for submitting things it did not detect (right in the Help menu) and how they provide you with ongoing status updates as they analyze your submission. Only thing about MSE is it uses a decent amount of memory (90-150MB) So any box with 512MB is going to struggle and we often encourage clients with 1GB to upgrade to 1GB anyway, even with XP, given the expanded memory footprint of browsers, AV, office, etc. The only clients we don't encourage to switch are those that actively use Norton's backup service if they have a stout enough computer to handle running N360, etc. Sure they could use MSE, MS Firewall, and an online backup service like Backblaze, but that's just more stuff to deal with and we'll encourage them to go ahead and stick with N360 until such a time that they decide to backup some other way or hit 2GB and don't want to pay Norton for more space. This is VERY rare. So hats off to MS. Don't care if you bought the technology. MSE is a great tool and I hope they continue to keep it lightweight and easy to use.

Yup - same here. I live in a relatively rural area and the location was exact. Like posters above said - matters not about encryption as the MAC address is sent clear (all my APs are WPA2 only)

The key thing is if you're arrested, right or wrong, it's public record. Published in newspapers, etc - so why is publishing it on Facebook any worse? Because it's 'more' public? Currently the laws don't split that hair, so bottom line is - it's public record and can be made public as the police see fit. As for my name, address, etc - again, if I was that worried about it I'd take steps to try and conceal it. But I'm not. The point is - the statement made by that professor was silly. It's a public record, and until laws are enacted which differentiate manners in which such information is publicized, hard to see how anyone would have recourse for it.