This is why, after a power outage, there are false starts of power. These are people turning on their generator, forgetting to turn off the mains switch, and inadvertently feeding everyone with power. Much more than their poor generator can handle.

Laptop - fits in your lap. Good term. That's where mine is often.

Netbook - ummm? So it has a network, so does everything. I never did like this term anyway. How about Palmtop? Oh, yea -- Palm(tm) so how about Petitetop? Yes, I do like that :)

With this, expect P2P to move to dynamic DNS. The P2P payload in the TXT DNS replies, MIME encoded perhaps.

If they are this draconian, why don't they just mandate VCR type screen recording of everyone's screens. Isn't that the only way they can truly accomplish their goals? Tampering would result in life imprisonment, by law.

Geez.

They can do this because they control the pipes.

The Internet is a bunch of computers all connected together through various networks.

What this screams for is an Internet where we don't get inter-connected through their pipes but our own. e.g. Wireless mesh.

RIAA type of fix;

How much is a cheap MP3 player? I can find 512MB for less than the cost of a RIAA CD.

So in RIAA thinking, why not drop the tunes on a cheap MP3 player. Remove the USB connection. Put in batteries that will perhaps last a year or two, non user replaceable. Make the device tamper proof (SecurID) so if you tamper with it you pull the chips apart.

Use the Macrovision technology where the audio is distorted in a way which is not detectable by the human ear, but by which trying to feed the audio out signal into a CD record/computer results in a useless copy.

Prohibit distribution by other means. e.g. Don't also release the media on CD/DVD or this is entirely worthless.

Cheap solution, IMO.

I have Firefox running on Vista, XP, 2000, 2003, Mac OS X, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu, and others. Firefox versions 2 and 3.

My experience is that the Auto Update mechanism in Firefox is flawed. A number of these PC's never trigger to be updated even if they are months behind. One of my Windows 2000 servers often takes about a week before it's auto updated.

Experience shows that it doesn't check for an update at every launch. And that sometimes it gets stuck, something gets corrupt, and not until you ask it to check will it check again.

Granted, this is much better than most software. However the update mechanism needs work.

Microsoft signs/encrypts and then checks the IE package signature. As much as a dog Microsoft, their update mechanism is one of the best.

Yes, but that is unstable. I don't know about you but when I'm making a backup of my media files to my external NTFS drive I would rather have it be slow and stable than risk a corrupt backup.

You can, however, disable NTFS-3G using the scripts in the TOOLS folder of the DMG and utilize the high speed reading ability until you need read-write. The scripts let you start/stop NTFS-3G.

By slow, I mean that I get 3MB/s in OSX but if I boot into XP bootcamp I can see ten times that speed.

Just because they use the same engine doesn't mean they are the same. That's like saying why compare a Corvette to a GTO since they have the same engine;
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200280846198

I have both Camino and Firefox on my Mac. Camino gives me a more Aqua like feel, whereas Firefox 3 has more recent versions of the engine and some menu options not found in Camino.