It's very easy to spend $1500 and up on a MacBook Air.

This is the dumbest argument I've seen on slashdot. Congratulations!

We were quite lucky in the chess club at my highschool. We had the star running back and linebacker in our club. Nobody made fun of chess club.

Besides, if you want battery life, you can get the Samsung Chromebook with a faster SSD and 6.5 hours of battery life for only $250.

Samsung Chromebook

Crap! I accidentally modded this troll instead of interesting, and it looks like the only way to undo it is to reply.

Frankly there's probably very few websites now that don't track your IP address

Well... yeah. That's how they're able to send you the web page that you requested.

I did a double-take when reading that summary.

Google provides a way to opt-out of that sort of tracking as well. It requires saving a cookie with the preference in your browser, so you are still trusting them.

Google Advertising FAQ: How do I opt out of interest-based advertising?

Linux was never a competitor on the desktop.

It has very little to do with the quality of the software, or backwards compatibility. The problem is that Linux didn't have a big marketing machine pushing it on the desktop.

I too had bought a Dell Zino, hoping to use it as a MythTV frontend. But the lack of good drivers nixed that idea.

I ended up purchasing Lenovo Ideacentre Q150's for the frontends (Atom processors, nVidia GPUs), and relegated the Zino as the backend server. Works very well.

I've found a fairly simple solution.

I set up an extra router for the kids. This router forwards OpenDNS as the DNS server. I've setup OpenDNS to only allow the sites that I allow them to access without supervision. OpenDNS also provides reports of what sites were attempted to be resolved.

When the kids want to play an online game (or do some other activity that we believe should be supervised), they have to bring their laptops downstairs to the family room where we can watch them and connect an ethernet cable to our main router.

LOL, no it didn't. I actually read about it elsewhere (Google Plus). Then shortly after posting this comment, I see the Slashdot article and the lightbulb turned on. Oh well.

Did somebody say Copter Cat?

why isn't there a google alternative that is worth a damn, that isn't in the US, isn't hosted in the US and doesn't use a US-controlled TLD, and thus, not subject to this DMCA bullshit?

Here you go: Baidu

Sorry, but if you're by yourself, it doesn't count as gay.

At the poles it is not much of a toss. It is pretty safe to say that if there is water at the poles it is frozen and not very likely to turn liquid at any given time.

In Mars' low-pressure atmosphere, water will behave much like dry ice does on Earth - it converts straight between a solid and a gas without entering a liquid phase.

Phase Diagram of Water

Note that the air pressure averages around 600 pascals. That's below the solid-liquid-gas triple-point in the diagram. And temperatures on Mars tend to be well below the freezing point as well.