Well, you can't buy this one in BestBuy, but you can buy it in the US. I'm planning to order one after I recover monetarily from christmas. It's an ARM based notebook running Linux, and it converts in to a tablet. http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

While an ad is playing on Hulu, there are two buttons to the left of the video: "Like ad" and "Dislike ad". These are only visible in the windowed video though, not full screen. I make a point of clicking on the "Dislike ad" button any time a commercial is too loud and/or obnoxious like the [rum company] ad you are referring to. I don't know if Hulu tracks these clicks on a per user basis, but after clicking on the "dislike ad" button a few times, I don't see that ad any more. Even if it doesn't track it on a per-user basis, I'd like to at least believe that it sends Hulu and advertisers the message that we won't tolerate these kinds of games.

It is the incessant, obnoxious commercials on cable TV that lead to me disconnecting it as soon as I learned about Hulu. Now I've been spreading the word about Hulu and even my older parents and some retirees I know are using it rather than pay for cable.

I don't know if you were going for sarcasm or missed it in the article, but the machines in question (the flawed machines in Humboldt County) ARE optical scan machines. They are made by Diebold and they have software flaws that cause errors in how the votes are tabulated. For example, their software was in some cases dropping the entire first batch of scanned ballots (batch 0).

However, it is precisely because they are optical scan ballots - with a paper trail - that led to the flaw being found. Mitch Trachtenberg, a volunteer AFAIK, was able to scan all of the ballots post-election and tabulate them using his own open-source software. The discrepancy between his results and the official results is what led to the discovery of the flaw in Diebold's software.

I'm glad that they were using optical-scan ballots and that they saved the paper copies (and made them accessible), but it's still vulnerable to software flaws, "errors", etc., even if it is optical scan.

For what it's worth, I've been buying DRM free music from Amazon using Ubuntu for a while now. They even offer a handy downloader for Linux.

It was once true that you couldn't buy the Macintosh OS on its own, but it has been possible to buy OSX without an Apple computer for some time now. Example at amazon.

For what it's worth, the comments in the linked article say, "What Victor Deeb was working on is the elimination of Bisphenol A, Bisphenol F, (used in container closure coatings) PVC, pthalates (used in food container sealants) BisPhenol A, Bisphenol F and pthalates ( carcinogens) have been detected in baby food, and Dioxin( a very powerful carcinogen the product of incinerating food container closure to recover the metal) from the environment"