> costs on the order of a thousand dollars

Weasel words. Base model iPad 2 is $499.

> throws away 30 years of office app development

Don't care. Don't use Office or any competitor. Do not need it, do not want it.

> can't play a dvd

Don't need it to. My iPad has 32gig of storage on it. Right now I have seasons 3 and 4 of the Venture Brothers on there, as well as a few movies for my kids. If that's not enough I can stream stuff from my media server, or from Netflix.

DVDs are a dead storage medium.

> can't store more than a couple dozen gigs

So what? It's not a file server. It's a tablet. It has more than enough storage to do the job. And as mentioned before, streaming options are also available.

> doesn't allow installation of different OSs

So what? What if you don't care about installing different OSes?

> runs anemic, "power-friendly" processors

Powerful enough to run Lego Harry Potter, watch a movie, or anything else I want to do with it. What are you prevented from doing?

> can't multitask well

Same question: what are you prevented from doing? It polls for new emails in the background, if I get an IM I'm notified, etc., etc. What's your bitch?

Won't happen.

There have been many similar proposals made over the years. None of them are implemented, because those who maintain power are apparently happy with the way things are. American democracy is a sham, highly susceptible to fraud, and anyone who makes such observations is dismissed by "serious" journalists and citizens.

I'm very glad MS made this proposal. Kudos to them. What would move me from mild approval to full-fledged fanboyism were they to take this idea and have it implemented universally.

Look, honestly, what are you going to do about it? Complaining doesn't matter. The TSA will be here forever, and, as much as we hate to admit it, there is nothing that can be done about it. There is too much money involved, and contractors have vast amounts of power, much more so than any collection of outraged stories and messages on the internet does.

Seriously, I hope the TSA is abolished tomorrow, or hell even five years from now. But honestly without fundamental, almost revolutionary changes to the way the US government works this simply will not happen. Money talks, national security lobbyists have TONS of money, and that's pretty much the end of it.

I was there. It did exist. Now, it's Slashdot is primarily based around Apple hate and imbeciles.

There are other places on the internet. No harm, no foul.

> Umm... No, these Apple "cultist/fanboy" have existed forever, but only as straw men in the minds of people who seem only capable of seeing things in extremes.

Agreed. It is the modern equivalent of the emperor has no clothes.

The iPad has an on-screen keyboard, and if that isn't good enough for you then you can connect a Bluetooth one to it.

Sorry, what part of Google is "free as in beer", exactly? Their search algorithms? Ad placement? Gmail? G+? GTalk? Android?

None of Google's significant properties are open. None. The emperor has no clothes. Here, chew on this:

Code. Android. "Highly proprietary".

There are reasons to like Android, but "openness" is not one of them.

> All the Android fans could only hope that Apple would be this galactically stupid.

Which is exactly why this article was posted in the first place.

Hype? More like "running joke". DNF wasn't hyped so much as it was ridiculed and made the butt of jokes.

And not in a good way, either.

Now the only thing left is a homophobic reference about Steve Jobs.

Yeah, that's my thought as well. It looks like they took OS X's Dashboard and put it front-and-center. After Dashboard's initial novelty wore off, I found I didn't use it at all. I don't see how this is particularly different.

MacDefender is not a virus. There are no known in-the-wild viruses for OS X.

That is a surprisingly high number, even after all these years of knowing about various rootkits, viruses, and other malware that have so persistently affected Windows. 1 in 14? That's... crazy.

And what is the economic cost of having to deal with this crap? It must be well into the billions of dollars by now.

It's also consistently depressing that inertia is such that Windows seems like it will maintain its desktop dominance for the foreseeable future. There are better OSes out there. USE ONE, PEOPLE. Please!

I refuse to live in fear of nebulous enemies. Show the photos.

I do not trust the government to tell the truth on matters this large. While I doubt bin Laden is alive, I doubt the official version of his death even more.