I just cleaned up an old Dell Latitude D410 for my 7-year-old - reinstalled an old copy of XP and it works great. It was a leftover from my wife's work. Battery doesn't work but I figure that's a good thing since I don't really want him taking it around with him any old place - just at his desk and for very limited blocks of time. As for software we've been enjoying MIT's Scratch. It's a great programming environment for kids that he really loves to play with. He can actually manipulate graphical sprites with sounds, move them around on the screen, and encode logic using a graphical lego-brick-style metaphor.

There's something else going on here - reversion to the mean. Think of your health as a curve that goes up and down. On average, you're probably pretty healthy. Sometimes less and sometimes more. When you're sick, no matter what you do, you'll probably get better. So as long as whatever treatment you do or don't do doesn't make you a lot worse, you will probably get better. Drilling a hole in your skull might seem to cure depression, the common cold, or hemorrhoids, as long as you don't drill too deep or get a bad infection that kills you. Rubbing your ear, walking in a circle, drinking infused water -- almost anything, including eating sugar pills, or just waiting, will seem to cure you most of the time.

This is really simple. You don't like the product, don't buy it. Microsoft hasn't misrepresented a thing here. It's kind of the same thing as the hackintosh, actually. Is Apple evil too? If so you have a real simple remedy -- don't buy it. These companies are within their rights entirely. If someone wants to sell a different kind of game console and a different kind of game network where games are cheaper and mods are allowed, then fine. Maybe there's a business there. Maybe this is your big chance. Go start that business and stop whining.

This kind of approach makes me think about the drone pilots in Nevada. If the car is entirely drive-by-wire, maybe I could hire someone else to drive me to work, or better yet, home from the pub when I'm drunk. The real driver would never have to leave their office in Bangalore or Nevada or wherever! Just put a couple of cameras and proximity sensors on the bumpers and connect it up with 3G wireless and voilla!

Sounds like you have the beginnings of a business plan. While you may be a bit too optimistic on cost savings, why not give it a try? Compete with this techno-gadget in the open marketplace and win! If you don't do it you'll be kicking yourself when someone else does and makes a billion.

Open isn't enough - you're right. And Apple has brought in partners in an astute way to make iPhone successful - AT&T and their hardware partners for example. Also the App Store is a controlled way to open up the platform to build an ecosystem. But it may not be enough. Time will tell but one lesson from the past is that open can be a powerful differentiator, even in the face of better usability or features. Apple lost this gamble last time.

Apple doesn't learn. This very same strategy is what gave Microsoft such a big opening in the 80s. If Apple sticks to the closed system approach they will have higher price points in the short term, but long term will lose out to more open platforms like Android where the incentives for a more diverse network of partners will be greater. In the early 80s Apple outsold IBM and everybody else in PCs. They took their Apple II win and moved up-market with the Mac. Sure the technology and user experience were radically better than the competition, but they further closed down the platform to partners and end users. Pretty quickly the open platform, multi-vendor combination promoted by IBM, Microsoft, and Intel won the day - even though it didn't work as well.

Do you own shares in the company or something? It's awfully hard for me to believe that a boutique car company selling 50k+ vehicles is somehow going to transform the economy and have more impact than the interstate highway system. There is no new technology required to build electric cars. Even the batteries are good enough to provide enough power for most commuters today. If you want electric cars to be delivered next year you just have to do one thing -- increase the price of fuel dramatically. Until that happens none of this matters and no efforts short of that to move to electric cars will work.

I just don't know why we have to keep on waiting for an electric car we can buy off in the future. Electric cars aren't new. This isn't about innovation. There is no new technology required to deliver electric cars. Just retool the factories and get started. Now that the government owns a big part of GM why not have a cheap electric car for 2010?

How is funding a boutique luxury car manufacturer at the rate of half a billion similar to funding interstates, military, postal service, etc.? Tesla does not even hope to provide shared infrastructure or essential services to the country as do these programs. I don't get it.