Linus Torvalds is the Harlan Ellison of Linux.

There was a waiting list for the original phones when they first came out and they sold out quickly. And WebOS was fantastic. But...

  - the phones themselves had battery problems (if you slid the phone closed too quickly the phone would job the battery out and the phone would cut off)
  - as cool as the phone was, it was too damn small. Slab phones were becoming the preferred interface for smartphones.
  - as cool as the OS was, the user base wanted it built on, with extra features added, and Palm decided for whatever reason that it was going to focus on incremental things instead of sweeping new feature sets.
  - battery life was not good. Seriously. It was freaking horrible. Worse than your standard android phone.

All these things worked against it, plus Sprint decided it was more in love with HTC, so Palm didn't get the kind of backing it was hoping for. But Palm did fumble a few times before HP took it over, so you're right that HP can't shoulder all the blame.

The original community was broken into pieces and moving over to other sites (like the ill-fated AMP3.com) before the RIAA lawsuit came to be.

... not for the most part, anyway. The gamers never reached the upper tiers of revenue as far as I remember. But they were pulling out all the stops to try to get there and it wrecked the place.

I had overlooked the Prime thing, and yes, that will probably cut down on gaming. However, you could still game by trying to stuff the ballot box on your end by putting tens, fifties, hundreds of titles into the pool... the wiki-rippers come to mind.

Exclusive to one publisher, maybe. Exclusive to one distributor? That's pretty new. You can buy the same book at Barnes and Noble and Amazon... you don't publish a "B&N Edition" and an "Amazon Edition..." With eBooks, the distributors are trying to push people in that direction, though.

The main thing to understand about PfP was that it was a fixed pool of money that never changed. It was one million dollars a month, which is nothing to sneeze at, but in the beginning (before they required you be a premium member) there were a LOT of artists on MP3.com who were eligible, and that one million dollar pool started looking pretty shallow. So in order to increase their returns, some artists began to game the system:

  - get their fans to download PfP songs over and over again to maximize their count
  - coordinate with other artists to pool their fans, increasing downloads for both
  - a few tried to start PR campaigns against some of the more popular PfP artists in an attempt to reduce their downloads

Essentially by putting all these artists in a fixed pool, it turned a community of allies into a community of competitors, and it got pretty nasty. There wasn't much left of the original community once that started.

... indentity theives have to create private accounts in cyber crime stores. o_O

When they're buying their batch of stolen credit card numbers, probably with another stolen credit card number, does the store then steal the stolen credit card number and start using it themselves? Which they might then add to the next batch of stolen credit card numbers... which the identity thief might then buy back the next time he buys a new batch of stolen credit card numbers...

... it's the cycle of crime!

Yes.

Yes you do.

You do deserve better ebooks. Because the current quality of ebooks is destroying the Internet, and, dare I say it, destroying the fabric of America itself. And as every red-blooded American knows, the Internet and the United States of America ARE EXACTLY THE SAME THING.

Every night I weep, weep bitter tears, at the terrible, terrible, quality of ebooks infesting our world. Me, I blame socialists. Or fascists. Or communists. Or atheists. Or Christians. It's the socio-fascist-communo-godless-theocratic industrial complex destroying the world one lousy ebook at a time.

... which is why you should immediately run out and buy a copy of Pay Me, Bug!, available on Amazon.com (Kindle), Barnes and Noble (Nook), Smashwords (epub, Kobe, PDF, LRF, PalmDoc), and iTunes. It is the only chance we all have to ensure a better tomorrow.

... since he was so faithful to the concept of John Constaine, Keanu Reeves will be cast as the Doctor.

One of his companions will be a street-smart, wisecracking black man.

One of his companions will be a 20-something slacker genius computer hacker (hollywood-style)

The third companion will be Mary Jane Smith, played by either Christina Ricci or Angelina Jolie

The hacker will manage to hack into the heart of the TARDIS by guessing its password, which will be "TARDIS"

The TARDIS will be updated so that it's chameleon circuit is stuck on the form of a porta-potty. hilarity will, of course, ensue.

The slider looks neat, but from what I understand the battery life isn't nearly as good. What's your experience with the battery life? Maybe I just read some sloppy reviews...

The tablet alone is a good tablet, but with the keyboard it becomes what a netbook always wanted to be but could never quite manage to pull off.

15 hours of battery life -- good for an entire school day and then some. Physcially connected keyboard (useful if the campus has bluetooth restrictions). keyboard also has full-sized USB connector (2) so you can back it up to thumb drive for use elsewhere... As for specific android apps, that's sort of a mixed bag. None of the "office compatible" apps have spellcheck, which is annoying, but if you're looking for something just to put notes in the Polaris Office that comes preloaded with the ASUS is more than sufficient.

... is that using the touch screen is difficult at the very edge of the screen. This is really only a problem with some applications that put buttons in the corners, like Tweetcaster. Also, the Nook reader is very hard to use unless you pump up the dpi to make the graphical elements larger.

But that kind of stuff is pretty trivial.

Also, a dual-core 7" tablet for $200 is pretty sweet, especially if it's as hackable as the original.

I tried reading that document and glazed over. Is there a site that gives you some practical procedures for making sure your site is secure? Because based on what I've read I only vaguely understand the problem and don't know how to determine if my site has it. I'd prefer not to find out the hard way...