VirtualBox OSE has (Tight)VNC support if you run it through VBoxHeadless. I personally run it to virtualize an older windows installation tucked away on a cheap-o computer which does not do VM-extensions and it works well.

Unless you need USB2 or PXE-boot (or RDP to your virtualized display for some reason), the open source edition is really neat.

It's an FPGA on there with verilog code available. Go grab the Xilinx WebPack (free, windows/linux), get a JTAG cable (I've seen Xilinx USB-clones for less than $50 on eBay) and get cracking.

Getting to know the tools is hard, learning to think in VHDL/Verilog is hard (at least if you're not used to thinking in terms of logic gates and other hardware) but you can transform that board into pretty much any hardware you'd like and control it from the arduino. The reason for the 400x300 is probably memory limitations on the Spartan chip, some clever design/coding to optimise memory to your application should help with that.

If you're going to propose that Moblin is somehow better than Android for non-phone devices, it would be nice to have some backup information to prove your point.

The fact of the matter is that Linux is not designed to be an embedded OS, and the efforts that Moblin and Linux are making are significant but not wholly complete. When, as you say, the OS boots faster, is transparent, and exists invisibly to users (though clearly to developers), then we will have a true "mobile Linux" distribution.

Acer seems to be tempting fate here and begging Microsoft to raise their licensing costs. If they pass their costs onto consumers, will their cheap hardware keep prices low enough to attract customers, even with the higher-priced desktop OS? I don't know, but it seems very dangerous for them to be making such claims at this point.

Won't work, because first you need to authorize the account number being added, and the challenge to adding that is by inputting the account number into your token. Thus the criminal can't transfer funds into his account.
The second part is a challenge with the amount you want to transfer. Again, making it hard to fiddle, although since there are limited amount of digits on the token you can fiddle a bit with the amount, however you still can't get it to your account unless that account# has been pre-authorized to receive transactions.

And there happens to be one set of T5500's that have vmx, so you are probably one of the lucky ones. http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/watercooler-catchall/topic/54562/

base64 -d | bzip2 -d | tar -x

You can, that's the good part about it, many times signals reflect when they hit an improperly terminated connection (impendance mismatch). This holds for both optical and electrical signals. Given the propagation time and speed, length is trivially calculated. There's special hardware to do this for you. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impedance_mismatch

I did, the major reason when that I switched back was due to UTF-8 problems, and as far as I know the line editor is still blissfully unaware of multibyte characters.

There was also trivial stuff like coloring the prompt, which for me makes things easier to find on a terminal full of text and additionally highlight that you're root (in addition to the #-sign).

In all fairness, coloring (and probably everything else I was annoyed at) is doable and wouldn't have stopped me from trying it out a bit longer though.