Firefox is going to end up like Netscape 4.7.

Firefox has an IM client built in now. Clearly, you're using the wrong verb tense.

Yo dawg, I heard you like 'application platforms' so I turned your web browser into a goddamn operating system?

Fuck that. Just because Google does it doesn't make it a good idea!

Videoconferencing from any device on the planet without installing any special software is bloat?

YES, in the same way that every user on the planet would probably want a calculator once in a while but that doesn't mean the browser needs to add one!

A 14" (or better yet, 13.5") 4:3 ratio screen would work great for an e-reader: it would be big enough to display a whole sheet of paper (either A4 or letter, I think) and still have room for menus and whatnot along the edges.

Having the ability to touch any word on the screen and have definitions, translations, and wikipedia entries pop up as you read (which is great for many of the older books) is a fantastic benefit...

Why, are you illiterate or something?

No, seriously -- if you have to go look up stuff often enough for that to be a big deal, then (a) the book is too hard for you and (b) you're missing the point of reading. You'd lose sense of how the story flows if you keep starting and stopping like that. When you run across the occasional unfamiliar word, it provides a better experience just to figure it out from context and move on.

Capacity begets usage. It's so true it's even been a meme ("if you build it, they will come") from before the Internet made "memes" a meme! Building a pipeline to ship the oil faster will cause more oil to be shipped in a shorter period of time.

If you don't like having the oil shipped by rail, then fix that problem instead! (Make the rail cars safer, prohibit shipping oil by rail -- whatever.)

In what way is Chicago landlocked? The entire point of its existence is the fact that it's a good port to ship things from the interior of the US out the St. Lawrence Seaway to the rest of the world.

But, the most crappy, inefficient code in the world can be covered up by hardware

Well, until it gets the answer wrong in a way that fucks up the business...

...But by then, the management fucks who made the bad decision have gotten their golden parachutes and shed their liability, so nobody gives a shit, apparently.

I really want to see what you can do with $30K in Atlanta.

Before I graduated and started working, my wife and I lived comfortably on her $30K artist's salary. We even bought a three-bedroom house in a decent neighborhood close to downtown. Of course, this was in 2009.... our house would cost about twice that much now.

(We still live comfortably spending less than $30K, although I now make a lot more.)

And btw, why aren't there americans willing to work for $60K?

There are! They just aren't willing to relocate to a fucking cardboard box in Silicon Valley.

The company I work for is currently code-naming their projects after cartoon characters.

Given the hardware advances in the 6 years since the 1000HE was released, I find it hard to believe Asus can't put out a computer that serves the same purpose for the same amount of money. Or less money.

I bought an Asus X200CA (12" touchscreen, slow CPU, 4 GB RAM) for about $260 back in October. They do make computers that serve the same purpose for the same amount of money (or less money); it's just that the computer in TFA isn't it.

In the example I was thinking of, the "one computer per classroom" thing didn't actually happen until almost 2000, when networking and email did exist.

"Glorified toy?" You give those schools too much credit -- they'd put one computer in each classroom... and then the teacher would use it for email and nothing else (if he even used it at all).

Clearly, he means schools founded by magnates, like Carnegie Mellon University.