Whoa, now! The most vitriolic marriage arguments I hear seem to stem from the Catholics I know. While I'll admit that the party line for Christianity in general is anti gay marriage, it does seem that there are a number of Protestant members that are at least open to progressive thinking.

But...it's implemented *on a computer*! Bang, that's a new patent! And don't forget another separate one for *on a mobile computer*...that's different enough, too! Someone better get in there and grab one for *on a wearable mobile computer* before someone takes it!

Didn't Oracle lose that just recently?

But...but....there's *icons*! On a *mobile computing device*! And you "click" those icons with your *finger*! They might as well be one and the same!

--signed another extremely happy Galaxy Nexus owner

I dabbled in Linux for awhile, then switched full time to Ubuntu some years back. I wanted to run some specific games and switched to Windows 7 for awhile, until the hard drive crashed and am now back on the latest Ubuntu. I went from Unity to plain Gnome3 and now am on Cinnamon. And yes, I think the open source desktops are losing competitiveness. I personally think at this point in time OSX is the only one keeping things together. Windows 7 is actually very nice but Windows 8 looks like a train wreck. But for Linux it seems like your choices of desktop environments are either stuck in Win95-era or prior feel, or you have a "modern" DE that's half-assed at best and takes a ton of work to make it usable.

Speaking mostly for Gnome, but the colors, themes, icons...they always feel like they're missing that extra polish or something that you get from the commercial OSes. Everything just feels...clumsy. It may work, but it just isn't polished. And while I appreciate pushing new innovations both Unity and Gnome3 seem to be halfway there at best, leaving sort of mostly working setups.

Thing is, with Compiz and the wobbly windows stuff, it actually looked pretty sharp. Honestly, I think the more things I try the less I know what I want, just that what I have isn't exactly what I'm looking for!

Just my $.02.

I've wondered the same thing as I've seen ads that pretty much every major school district in my area are touting iPads for every student next year. I love new shiny tech, but I feel like 'get of my lawn' curmudgeon being skeptical on the benefits of outfitting every kid with a free-to-use tablet. It's especially frustrating when in the same article about the local district offering iPads to everyone (via a technology-specific millage) that same district is still 500k in the hole after cutting $1 million by way of faculty layoffs.

I haven't looked, but is there research showing that giving every student an iPad improves something?

When will we see a Thinkpad with a hi PPI display? I can't believe this display is news to anyone, especially other manufactures. When will we start seeing these displays in other laptops and even standalone LCD monitors?

So where's the 'retina' display or the 1680x1050 resolution? I'd love a super hi res display, but would like more work area than 1440 x 900.

Well, yeah. Being from pretty much anywhere in Ohio is a mark against in my book. I mean come on, it's *Ohio*.

Seems to me like the time to go out and patent my method of not charging for "non-gift" purchased items until delivery, and allowing of canceling the order prior to delivery.

Even better, after you patent math *on a computer*, I can turn around and patent math *on a mobile device* AND math *on the internet*!

Granted I think I've only used Thunderbird or Outlook in recent history (with some Eudora thrown in) but I've never found the conversation threading in any of the desktop clients to be as good as Gmail's. Maybe I'm missing something...

So Facebook is going to buy Opera and then build a phone? These both seem like desperate moves to stay relevant and even then I don't know if I'd call either of those ideas *good*. Why not focus on making a mobile app that doesn't suck first? All the news around Facebook lately seems to revolve around them realizing they need to have some sort of future plan to remain profitable, relevant, and grow at the same time. And it's like they're just realizing this newfangled mobile thing is going to take off.

Agreed. I just went back to Linux after a quite awhile on Windows 7. I was getting into some web development projects and it's just easier for me to get up and running and set things up on Linux. I went with Ubuntu since I had worked with that before, but Unity was all screwed up - specifically some quirks with Chromium tabs on it and I just didn't like it. I set up the Gnome3 stock PPA and used that for awhile. I liked how it looked but it just got to be too much work to use. Maybe it's because I'm on a laptop but with running everything full screen I found it tedious to keep alt-tabbing back and forth between browser, editor, and command prompt to do anything. Throw in a file explorer window or two and it was a mess. And with no taskbar I had little idea what all was running. I could spend a ton of time tweaking it and customizing it but why? Why spend all that time and work to get things to where they should be? So then I installed Cinnamon and have been using that for a few weeks. It's OK, but still has it's quirks. The taskbar font is ugly as hell, too small, and I can't seem to find a way to make it look cleaner. I've run into the "start" menu shifting like above, and some weird quirk where the locations of the open window tabs rearrange themselves when coming back from a lockscreen. I dunno, I guess it does work for the most part, seems to be better than Unity or stock Gnome3, but maybe I'd just be better off going back to classic Gnome.

Windows 7 wasn't that bad - I actually really like the UI. I just found myself wanting/needing a bunch of the command line stuff from Linux, plus this time around I didn't want to mess with activations, etc.

Is it really too much to ask for a Linux desktop that isn't half-assed complete but also looks and acts a bit more modern than Windows 95? Maybe that's why Microsoft and Apple have the big budgets, to get the little details. But coming from Windows Gnome3 and Unity seem like a completely wrong direction (Unity) and half-implemented (Gnome3). And everything else just seems dated. Sigh...

What's funny is that I actually moved to Chrome fully *because* of Linux. I used to use Firefox all the time, everywhere. But Firefox on Ubuntu was slooooow. Not necessarily the page loading or script performance, but the UI just seemed laggy and ugly, especially compared to using Firefox all day on Windows at work. But Chromium in Ubuntu was *fast*, UI was fast to respond, fast to load pages, fast everywhere. So I eventually switched to Chrome on Windows and Chromium on Ubuntu so I'd have the same UI across the board.