People were making fun of them for years after that.

Have we stopped already? Heck, every time I encounter either a hotmail or aol email address, a part of me giggles at least a little bit.

The leaders of Russia and China want to retain such abusive powers for themselves, which is why they veto'd the UN resolution condemning Assad for doing it. Case in point: Tiananmen Square (and please don't google that from inside China).

This is exactly the news to make my point. Our resources are best spent on sending instruments into places where man can't go, because that's where the science is happening. That is exploration.

Stupid human tricks belong on the David Letterman show. Or the Guinness book of world records.

Thank goodness we could get up there to fix the space telescopes though. You know, that kind of thing is important too.

Microsoft Outlook is a massive organisational security risk that is also used as an email client.

No wait, have you ever been to France. They have Minitel that can do everything!

I've been in your shoes, and lived your argument and don't really disagree with you at all. That said, I made a conscious security decision not to install insecure crap I couldn't otherwise afford; and instead I used Ubuntu and its ecosystem. This has been a terrific investment of mine.

OK, I'm not a webdesigner, but close enough. I used to do technical illustration, and I've tried to make a business long ago with Photoshop lithography, which turned out to be a terrible business model that only served Adobe's purposes. But now I develop CMS's using Drupal and LAMP, and I've saved projects by being able to deliver solutions overnight using available open-source tools, as opposed to being faced with budget approval and an acquisition period of $1000+ of 'software tools I need to finish the job', plus get myself paid too. This is why I trained myself to use GIMP, because just doing the job, as opposed to getting approval to buy a tool, is simply so nice.

I had a client that only knew MS Office/Excel and Outlook email for project management (laugh, I know); and I was stumped trying to answer the questions I was responsible for. Without budget approval for anything, I installed Drupal on a rented hosted VPS, imported the flat 2d spreadsheets, and gave proper database reporting the next day once they allowed me to do that. This extended the project several months for me, when otherwise I was basically on the way out the door for not answering what they wanted to know, using the tools they gave me; and no way would I get a budget or even time to use anything else. This is one example of what I mean when I say my investment paid off.

Yes, I've owned mine for a month and concur. Check out the 2nd from the left thumbnailed-video at the very bottom of the page at http://swipe.nokia.com/ and dig on the one-handed GUI demo. Yes, the whole OS really is that smooth to use, and when the 1st service pack came out the Swipe keyboard became available too, (I swear Microsoft paid Nokia to BURY this OS & GUI).

The forums at maemo.org are very active with fanboys still modding their linux N900s and discussing things like installing Fennec (that's firefox mobile) to the N9 too. That's what I did and I am in phone browser heaven with the combo of n9 OS swipe gestures along with Firefox mobiles (which amazingly do not conflict, because the N9 swipe is 'from the edge in' while firefox works with a left swipe that did not start at the edge) So yeah, firefox tabs, bookmarks, etc.

I bought mine so I could reduce the wear and tear on my N900. Slashdotters enable Dev-mode in N9 settings, then VNC is right there ready to use over USB or wifi without a password (which you can tweak further) but this means you can use your regular PC keyboard to set passwords into the browser, etc.). Haven't got copy/paste to work over VNC in this way yet though, whereas normally that works for me.

To use a car analogy, I figure this thing is like knowing to buy a 1963 Corvette off the showroom floor new and just taking care of it. And the thing is just a solid little brick by the way, (but not big, svelte). Oh Nokia gives you a rubber skin kind of carrying case and I really like the grip it provides, so I guess ultra-svelte is not interesting for me. The OS with SSH, PGP keys, VNC etc. is just great.

This is why I try to get my colleagues, many of which are 'normal users' in a volunteer charity website for example, to use Passpack. I try to teach them to use strong unique passwords for each site they register with; while actually only having to remember about two passwords (and using copy/paste). But also a feature of Passpack (like other similar services, I imagine) is being able to share passwords among a workgroup, in case the server admin gets hit by a bus for example. This solution is the best I've found so far for this common problem.

Have you tried SparkleShare for DropBox-like integration? It looks like, and works like dropbox. In terms of a GUI it is really hard now to think of any difference with DropBox; I can't. I wrote more about it in another comment here: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2621608&cid=38704028

This is a corrected section of text, just to be clear. The last line has been corrected.

...Normally, you might use something like the following commands to work with GIT. (these are not necessary if you use SparkleShare)

git clone ssh://user@example.com:port/home/user/NEWREPOSITORY.git
cd NEWREPOSITORY.git
git pull -v