What nobody has mentioned so far is the intense physical pressure you experience at a Tufte presentation. It's like you're being pushed in on all sides, pressed incredibly strongly... by his ego.

There is no US auditorium large enough for you and Tufte's ego.

The ego is self-referential, and almost certainly will compare Tufte's books to Galileo's at some point, and also smarmy, self-confident and smug.

All that said, I loved going -- GO! You'll learn a lot. But then, I'm fascinated by huge egos, so whenever I got bored hearing a rant, I could switch over and admire the size and quality of the ego.

The issue here is not just that Amazon might want its own app store, a reasonable desire. The issue is that the current Android market really sucks. Google does not have good expertise in the curation methods that an appstore needs; right now, you have two options browsing the appstore: you can look at top, all-time sales. Games that have been out for two years top these charts, not surprisingly.

Or, you can look at the raw feed of 'newest'. In games, that would be 64 underwear puzzle games, three things in Japanese, and a tech demo of rotating lines, controlled by some sensor or other.

Google's traditional approach to this sort of problem is search, but search does not work well here, and there's significant market opportunity. Hence, Amazon.

Unlike many people posting here, I've traveled enough to understand what you want to do, and why it is likely to work, and I applaud you!

That said, England is full of these devices, and I would suggest you buy one rather than roll your own. My quick searches didn't turn anything up, but I know they exist, as there are websites devoted to pictures of people burning them down in England. : ).

For slashdotters with complaints about this:

A fine can be sent automatically. Social circumstances in much of the Middle East make automated fining likely to gain far higher compliance than police or traffic lights could. Of course senior government officials won't pay their tickets, duh. That doesn't change how likely it is to help the man/woman on the street.

Be aware, current security best practices suggest that you physically destroy whatever computer you use while you're in China. It is highly likely to be subverted while there. Seriously. Think about buying a cheap netbook while you're there, or get a used one here that you're going to sell before you leave.

Before you publish, absolutely file a provisional patent. It's cheap to do, and if you have created something valuable, as soon as you publish it, it will become public domain in Europe and the UK.

I'm really enjoying living in the Future, I have to say. When I was young, I never imagined a trial over the right to have a computer play a game for you... Just wouldn't have made sense to my eight year old videogame-loving brain.

The EFF details some ways that suggest to me that Apple will never be able to be in compliance with the GPL under their current terms and conditions. For example: GPLv2, Section 6:

Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the
Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to
these terms and conditions.

From EFF's dissection of Apple's Agreement:

Section 7.2 makes it clear that any applications developed using Apple's SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store, and that Apple can reject an app for any reason, even if it meets all the formal requirements disclosed by Apple. So if you use the SDK and your app is rejected by Apple, you're prohibited from distributing it through competing app stores like Cydia or Rock Your Phone.

I am not a lawyer, but I would say that together these mean that Apple is in violation of the GPL if it distributes GPL code through its app store; it either needs to waive those terms in 7.2 (hah!) or outright ban GPL'ed code in the app store.

Also, Ubuntu ONE means that if they were using it, they could just change out a thumb drive if it died. That would be nice.

If 4GB isn't necessary, I think the clear answer would be virtualbox running Ubuntu. 4GB would be tight, but 8GB would do nicely, 16GB even better.

You could put the virtualbox installers for OS X, and Windows on the USB sticks, and include a pre-setup Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04 (depending on when your class starts). You might need to include virtualbox source to comply with the license, or at least a link back to virtualbox.org.

Once nice thing about this approach is you could dump a few different images on there, so you could put a minimal Debian install for them, and probably a minimal CentOS server image as well so that they could learn CLI directly when you get there.

Larry knows exactly how to make money; he is probably the world's best businessman at holding you upside-down and shaking you vigorously until your pockets empty.

I would be stunned if Oracle ever comes out with a credible OpenSolaris strategy -- it's not Oracle's way, nor is it in their best interests to have a vibrant opensolaris community. Unlike Linux, the best parts of Solaris have never come from outside Sun. Dtrace, ZFS, integrated hardware, all this stuff is where Sun's real value lay.

The end game for OpenSolaris began when Sun moved ahead with the merger. From then until the official end is just drama, positioning, etc.

Dear Taco,

Thank you for your commentary. I laughed out loud. That was nice. Then I thought (probably Taco), and checked -- there you were. A part of slashdot will die forever when Darl ends his campaign.

In other news, WW3 started slowly with Google and Dell pulling out of China. Infowars continued to increase when China's root nameserver began to propagate its information out to the developing world, areas that had been increasingly reliant on Chinese funding since the post-cold-War US' international power began to wane..