I happen to find the CLI far superior to the GUI.

Ok, but that's just to familiarize himself with the course - any game will do. F1 teams have now developed plug-ins for rFactor which are so true to life that the drivers are able to give feedback to the designers on new components, suspension and set-up before investing millions in actually making the things and flying them out to Spain or wherever to try them out on a race track for real. Combine this with the GIS data collected from the laser trucks and the simulator knows about every single bump and groove on the track down to the nearest milli-meter. It's really quite amazing - and keeps a fair few Phd boffins employed in interesting jobs for each of the big teams.

I do believe that if that car were to maintain at velocity of exactly 88 MPH while simultaneously turning on all that gear...

The N900 is a major step forward since it gives people root access and apt-get without jailbreaking and playing cat and mouse with the telcos. Unfortunately though, some dick decided to render it pretty much useless by shipping it with the worst touchscreen ever known to man.

Well, apparentley not since the intent wasn't criminal. Which kind of makes you wonder why we have to extradite Gareth McKinnon since he was only trying to find out the truth about UFOs.

You do realize that using a 'z' is the correct English usage and always has been? This is one area where our American cousins are actually more correct than we are. The usage of an 's' is commonly referred to as the 'Frenchified' version and is a dilution of the language due to cross-pollination with our Gallic neighbours. The misconception that the Frenchified usage is correct English has arisen since the Government adopted it for their official documents (in the 70s?). I can see the connexion, but read an early print of any of Tolkein's works and tell me how many instances you find. Use zeds.

I don't know how transferable it is, but I purchased an Asus Aspire ONE for my better half at xmas and it came with a Linpus Distro which is a Netbook OS based on Fedora 8. Out of the bag it's a little locked down but after a few minutes of searching you can unlock the desktop and get an XFCE window manager and package-installer. Support for drivers is great - but then you'd expect that since it was the original OS that came with the Netbook.

w32 can keep its lions share - that way the malware writers don't target much else and all the clueless users clog up the windows forums, leaving a high signal to noise ratio in the unix groups.

..Sun's Virtual Box does it easier, quicker and got there first.