I'll believe the "10 hour battery life and 1 month of standby" line once real independent reviewers have had them in their hands for a couple of weeks/months. I've lived through enough decades of oversold battery promises, from Apple and everyone else, to buy it from the press release.

Among other things, 14th Amendment, Equal protection clause.

It's called free-ridership.

The US Constitution says that California can't keep out any American, and has to treat them the same as people who were already there. Basically immediately.

If California implements non-deny universal coverage, healthy people will choose to work in states without health care mandates. Then, when they get a cancer or other diagnosis, they hop the first plane to California and establish residence.

Virtually all countries have a medical exam as a part of immigration. Unless you want to amend the US Constitution so that California can deny access to incomers who already have medical conditions, it's an intractable problem. Home insurance can work on a state-by-state basis (the house doesn't move). Even car insurance can (the car moves, but accidents are discrete events that happen in one location or another). Medical insurance doesn't.

Cursive writing, as we know it, is an artifact of now mostly gone writing technologies. The fountain pen, dip pen, and even split-nib quill, had certain technical limitations. For an even line, you needed to avoid unnecessary starts and stops. These pens also wrote almost entirely with downstrokes.

If you have cursive training deep in your subconscious, take out a fountain pen and start writing for a few minutes. Cursive is almost inevitable. And, it's a lot of fun. But, without the technical restriction, it's not necessarily a natural development.

If it had been possible to find a broadband adapter for less than I paid for the console (on closeout), I'd probably still have it hooked up as a hacktoy.

I'm certainly a smaller town person at heart. Any smaller town of decent size has some IT jobs (hospital, school district, governments, whatever the major employers are).

The problem is that there isn't some vast pool of IT jobs available. You can't necessarily get exactly what you want, and if you do go unemployed for a while, there may not be an IT job at all for a while. Oh, yeah, and the pay is crap compared to big city wages.

On the flip side, houses in some smaller towns are coastal-jaw-droppingly cheap (quite functional houses go for $50k, sometimes less, in my part of Kansas).

With the low cost of living, if you save up well in the good years, you can live on near-minimum-wage jobs for a year or two looking for the next rare opportunity.

People certainly had the idea by the end of that generation. Apple's ADB standard for mice, keyboards, and supposedly other I/O was rolling by the late 80s. Texas Instruments, one of the worst offenders on the list (although most TI-99s either had no expansions or the expansion box) had a remarkably USB-like bus called HexBus lined up for the next generation of desktops they were working on when they pulled the plug on the home computer line in '84.

The point is to learn how to use programming to accomplish a task on a set of numbers (most likely some big comma-separated text document) and output some other set of numbers.

I want the students to get to the point that they have the numbers read and writable on the first day.

Perl or Python. Suck it in, split on commas, and it's in a 2D array. 3 lines. Bob's your uncle. Write it out in a preformatted template. Boom.

I coded some things with my undergrad science major friends (atmo sci roommate). The FORTRAN students not only devoted pages of code to the trivia, they spent hours debugging it. The code part was simple for any of them. Our Perl scripts were seriously 10 lines long to their pages, and better looking output to boot.

Any of these sound okay to me. As long as I'm just about never working more than 40 hours a week (30-35 preferred) with some time off besides (doesn't even have to be paid time off), decently-paid (not that much, really, by urban standards), and don't have to move out of low-cost smaller-town middle America? I'm game. Low levels of office politics and irrelevant meetings would be bonus points.

I know rail and buses aren't terribly popular in the US. But, I'd be a lot more willing to consider slightly slower travel, particularly in the sub-500-mile range (Dallas-SanAntonio-Houston triangle, Chicago to MSP/STL/DET, Northeast corridor, LA/SF/Vegas) if I had power and consistent WiFi.

I've pretty much changed desktop environments once in the more-than-decade I've used Linux as my primary desktop. I used twm and 3 xterms. For a decade. Still do on OpenBSD. Then, when I jumped to Ubuntu (6.06 era), I was just fine with their default GNOME. Ububtu was sort of that point on lots of things. I'd compiled kernels for a decade. Now, meh. I had tweaked config files by hand. Still do some, but mostly meh. I had compiled various software for a decade. Current box? I don't think there's *anything* I bothered dl/compiling.

There's the evangelism perspective.

Look, if you're like me, and been primarily Linux-using since the a.out days (see Slashdot ID), you'll check every component and buy based on "what works great with Linux", and even "who's directly advancing open-source software, not being buttheads".

Problem is, I, and much of the Linux community, want to be able to give an Ubuntu LiveCD to my friend Joe who just recently heard about this 'Linux thing". And have it work.

I don't want to say "so, what kind of video chipset did eMachines put in your Walmart box", "what network", "what sound".

Sure. There are *lots* of considerations beyond speed to want SSDs.

First is battery life. Batteries suck. Laptops pulling 5 or 6 watts total make that suck more bearable. SSDs are part of that.

There's also noise. Hard drives have gotten much quieter. But in a dead-silent conference room, I want dead-silence.

Even form-factor is an issue. a 2.5" cylinder is a notable chunk of a small notebook. 1.8" drives are, generally, quite slow. SSDs can be worked into design.

Sure there were. I had some PowerEdge 1Us do that (1650??). BANG and smokesmell (not much actual smoke) is *never* your friend in the server room.