Exactly. NTFS-3G has been solid for quite a while now. I've been using it for years on both my Macs and Linux boxes without issue. All of my large capacity external drives are formatted NTFS nowadays and they easily talk to all of the systems I care about.

Depends on the compression. I agree with you about classical music that uses lossy compression, however there are plenty of places where you can get it in a lossless format such as FLAC. Most of them often offer not only CD quality (16-bit, 44/48khz, but also high definition 24-bit 88/96khz for many tracks) FLAC. And Linn records has recently started selling 24-bit 192khz tracks (at not much more then the 88/96khz tracks).

http://www.linnrecords.com/index.aspx
https://www.hdtracks.com/index.php

I always grab the highest definition (24-bit 88, 96, or 192khz) offered and resample when I transcode it to other formats (such as mp3 or AAC for portable players which don't benefit from the higher fidelity).

I have been trying to get one of my IPs unblocked by Slashdot for several months now and have seem to have hit a black hole, emails go in never to be seen again...

I am reminded of a quote from Wil Wheaton's Memories of the Future (or a comment on his blog about it and the podcast he's doing for it) about Patrick Stewart and how he really helped carry ST:TNG through the first couple horrible seasons.

Basically, it said that he (Stewart) could take the crappiest of lines and deliver it with the passion and intensity to make it really believable, but that they needed to "stop encouraging him", and actually give him GOOD dialog to see what he could do with *THAT*.

That is a special class which includes actors such as Sean Connery and Tom Hanks, that can take almost anything handed to them and believably deliver it to the audience where no one else could have.

I'm fairly sure we all can cite off the tops of our heads several dozen shows from the past few years with potential but fell into one or more of these categories... (and possibly were still enjoyable in spite of it)

In fact, just about EVERY show from the past few years...

And of course there's always examples like the the later seasons of BSG when it turned into Soap Opera in space (Galactica 90210?)...

Because we all know what the frack they're saying and since it's a fracking cable network why the frack don't they just say what they fracking mean to say...

Da-shiong bao-jah-shr duh la-doo-tze!

The Kindle DX will natively display PDF's. I have one and LOVE it. it has ~3.5G of storage space, but sadly no expansion capability. Amazon's eBooks are in the MobiPocket format with a derivative of it's DRM. There are tools that will strip the DRM from Mobipocket files, both Amazon and non-Amazon, and software that will convert between formats including PDF, eBook, MobiPocket, etc. such as Calibre.

Which is something that I try to point out when various Vehicular GPS' refuse to accept input while the vehicle is moving. My Dad has to go through a convoluted routine to put the integrated GPS into a service mode every time he starts his car so that it is willing to accept input while in motion, such as from the passenger...

I see it as another example of "Nanny State" thinking where they feel necessary (or in some cases may be mandated by law) to protect us from the very possibility of our own stupidity.

I used to be a longtime Palm user, only stopped carrying my Tungsten T3 a year or so ago after getting my iPhone. Palm has been an a downhill plummet for the past several years anyway. I used to love their devices in spite of their limitations as they were the best and most stable mobile platform, and the OS really seemed designed for the form factor instead of "squeezed" into it, like Windows CE always seemed to be.

Then, they starting changing the device hardware interfaces every few revisions and breaking old accessories. They purchased BeOS and subsequently sped up it's death. They never did properly support OSX with their Palm Desktop. They spun off and started an on-again/off-again relationship with their OS, pretty much abandoning PalmOS and halting development of things such as true/improved multitasking and start pushing Windows Mobile. They then come out with WebOS which is in many ways is just another entry in the iPhone/Android/etc. new generation mobile OS trend.

The childish tantrums they are having over WebOS and iTunes really shows in my opinion how they have edge as the leader in handhelds to just another follower.As has been pointed out time and again, there are legitimate ways that the iTunes library can be accessed and synced but instead Palm is LYING and trying to piggy back on Apple's work, and when things fail it's Apple that gets the support calls/blame not Palm. They should instead update their PalmDesktop to support the Pre and use the hooks that are available to add iTunes library syncing, but instead they are violating the USB specifications and abandoning their responsibilities and agreements as a USB-IF member and I truly hope they get slapped hard.

I have lost a lot of respect for Palm, especially over the course of the Pre debacle, and am not sure they would be able to win me back as a customer now. A lot of the people that made up the old great Palm are no longer with the company. Thankfully, in many ways Apple has picked up the ball that Palm dropped several years ago when they introduced the iPhone SDK/App Store.

Except the EU does not have this pesky little "First Amendment" that the US does which, among other things, guarantees one's right to "freedom of speech" no matter how deplorable that speech might be. If any government in the US (be it the state of California, or our favorite disbarred activist/lawyer Jack Thompson) tried to get something like that banned, they would quickly get their head handed back to them by the Federal Court system. That would not prevent, say, WalMart from banning it within their stores as they are not a government entity. WalMart is known to often ban particularly vulgar or otherwise similarly NSFW music CD's in order to at least appear to be more "family friendly", as a result labels will often be "forced" to publish a sanitized for WalMart in order to be stocked (WalMart is the largest brick and mortar music retailer).

As far as the EU goes, I'm not terribly familiar with their government structure in terms of at what levels the EU governance overrides local governance, but while the member nations are in large part handing much of their sovereignty over to the EU parliament, they still maintain some level of independence (something we lost in the United States after the Civil War when the transition from what was a loose confederacy of states to an even more powerful centralized federal governing system was really solidified. I see Europe headed in a similar direction).

Sadly, the government of Germany, and apparently the people of Germany as a whole seem to still be sensitive about their involvement in the World Wars and in the Nazi regime to the point that such censorship is widely supported. There is plenty of Nazi/Racist sentiment within Germany in large part because of cultural aspects and "generational racism" where feelings and attitudes are passed down from parent, and grandparent, to child, but like we see in other forms of prohibition, such as alcohol in the 20's and drugs today, the fact that it is forbidden can make it more attractive, exciting, and "adventurous" to some.

I'm sure most here on Slashdot will agree that while such Neo-Nazi and racist sentiment such as the movements in Germany are "A bad thing (TM)", the proper action isn't to ignore the past and censor/ban any sort of expression that even appears to possible in some remote way relate to it, but rather to encourage an open discussion and exchange of ideas like the First Amendment in the United States was written to ensure.

I find it ironic that a region (Europe) that tries to be so "progressive" in many areas, become real stick-in-the-mud's in other areas such as German censorship laws, French cryptography laws, British firearm laws, etc.

More to the point, they don't (and can't) claim copyright to the text of "Tom Sawyer", but they can and are claiming copyright to that particular print version (ie. the aspects of the presentation (bound/electronic volume) beyond the words of the title book itself. So while the words are not under copyright, the rest of the total of the "presentation" is, and include the entirety of the other aspects such as fonts used, pagination, cover art/design, page/chapter art/design, prefacing commentary, etc. effective from the first publication of that edition.

So, I can take and a hundred copies of Tom Sawyer and hand them out to anyone I wanted, I can't print out/sell/give copies of a specific copyrighted edition. Even though 98% of the book, that core text is identical, that other 2% which extends beyond the words on the page that IS covered under copyright.

A similar example is in music. Mozart's Requiem is long public domain. However an orchestral performance of Requiem has a separate copyright. So while recording A may have entered into the public domain, recording B is still under copyright protection even though both recordings are of the same piece of music, and may sound nearly indistinguishable from each other to someone who may not know/listen for the nuances of particular performances/orchestras/etc.

You can certainly take and publish/perform your own versions of Tom Sawyer/Mozart's Requiem, but you can't take and reproduce/redistribute a duplicate of the edition/performance by Bantam Books/Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Here in Baltimore we've had WiMax for well over a year. I've been running WiMax via XOHM both on my laptops as well as a secondary/redundant connection at home using XOHM's Pick Two plan. I get consistently respectable speeds (3-5M Down, ~1M up). The biggest hurdle right now is that coverage quickly goes from dense in the city itself, to moderate in the more populated suburbs such as in Columbia, to non-existent the further you get from the city.

When it works, it works wonderfully and I'm glad I have it, especially when I was having trouble with Comcast, I was able to stay online through XOHM until the issue was resolved. It may not have been as fast or as low latency, but it's still pretty darn fast. Fast enough for large downloads, video streaming, etc. (even HD Netflix streams to my Roku!)

From what I've seen, WiMax is being considered by many as more of a incremental stepping stone to LTE deployment further into the future.

A word of advice however. Go with XOHM or Clearwire (which now owns XOHM) and not the Sprint 3G/4G service. Sprint imposes a total bandwidth cap (I believe it's around 5GB) which covers both 3G and 4G usage whereas with XOHM, which is only WiMax (4G) only, there is no usage cap I am aware of (and they also claim it is "unlimited" with no cap, especially since they do pitch and offer service designed to be a primary connection, potentially replacing traditional wired DSL/Cable connections). When it was my primary connection while arguing with Comcast, I used MANY (tens, if not hundreds) GB's of data over the XOHM connection (HD Video streams, multi GB software downloads, online gaming, etc.) and never got any sort of complaints about "excessive usage", or "overage fees".

The closest thing to a Consumer Desktop Remote Management card I've found is a "PC Weasel" which I saw back in 2000... http://www.realweasel.com/intro.html

That said, the website hasn't been updated since ~2000, it's expensive, but is the closest thing to what you're asking for, "Headless BIOS access" without going with real server hardware. Personally, I'd just keep a video card in the thing and hook it to a KVM switch... It's not going to pull that much extra power.

Ugh, notice my typo AFTER hitting Submit... BAD SLASHDOTTER...

It's "Ron Smith".
http://www.wbal.com/shows/smith/

A local talk show host (Rom Smith, WBAL Radio) succinctly summed it up fairly accurately (I am paraphrasing here as I don't remember his EXACT words, though he has references this point repeatedly).

"The only actual job of a politician is to win elections"