The kid was borrowing Mom's MacBook too much. So bought the Acer Chromebook, installed chrUbuntu, upgraded to Xubuntu (Unity sucks), put Minecraft on it, and the kid sees a computer that looks just about like Mom's.

Aside from training the kid not to press the space bar on boot, which reverts it totally to stock, and the track pad being on the cheap side, the thing's a bargain. Screen would be good at twice the price or more.

As a Democrat who follows the standard array of leftie fora, I can assure you that (1) nobody in the progressive, activist core of the party likes Holder even slightly, and (2) the majority of us are quite open about it. That includes not a few of us who on balance like his boss.

As for our Democratic senators, too many of them are old, coming from a time when success in politics required bowing to "law and order." And a number of them were prosecutors in their younger life. Younger Democrats are, almost across the board, left-libertarian and wish Holder were impeached as a traitor to the Constitution. In his earlier career he was a lawyer serving the big investment banks. He still is. We're all shamed by him.

The premise of the claim is that procrastination is the ultimate goal of intelligence, with procrastination defined as keeping open the widest range of possible options by avoiding all actions that would decisively limit that range.

This would seem, even on the surface, to ignore the many situations where intelligent life must take the narrow path, sacrificing procrastination to the pursuit of a single goal. Once through a narrow path we may find a wide vista of prospects again before us. But without taking such narrow paths at significant times, by always hesitating at the crossroads for as long as possible, we may find ourselves with Robert Johnson, sinking down.

Also, the claim that the natural goal of choice is to maximize future choice is entirely circular. Like saying the goal of walking is to maximize future walking, the goal of eating to maximize future eating, there's something to it, but it's not quite true. Also, a great deal of research shows that people strive to avoid choice, for the most part.

How are you going to have a flashback to an experience under a drug that specifically robs you of any memory of the occassion? How can you have a flashback to a state when, consciously, you weren't there?

Suppression of sexuality is the core goal of rape. The rapist percieves sexuality in the raped, and punishes them for it by directly assaulting it. That's precisely why priests rape boys, for instance. The priests' conviction that sex is evil makes them want to punish the emerging sexuality of the children in the most direct way. The Ada Foundation have appointed themselves priestesses of a new Catholicism. They have raped the conference.

In Switzerland the minimum wage is around $20 an hour. Makes for expensive restaurants for travellers. But it also makes for a prosperous, full-employment country. You get rid of all sorts of social problems if everyone working makes $40,000 a year. And all those people making that money, and spending it, help keep each other employed.

Either you want a blend of crime and welfare, or you want liveable wages. Switzerland has it right. And they hardly fail to be a capitalist society!

The valuable web developers are those who are inventing what's next — or riding that wave as others are inventing it — creating the trend or solidifying it. Then there are all the people a few years behind using standard content management systems and standard design sensibilities.

So you've either got to get yourself to someplace where the trends are alive, and get to the front of that. Or if your aspirations are more modest and you just want to follow a few years behind the vanguard, learn some other business entirely while studing one of the content management systems and taking a few design courses, or at least hanging out in museums to absorb some design sensibility. Anyone can use a CMS to create a good-enough site. It's knowing some other business that will allow you to communicate with people in that business, to build sites for them. It's not web skills that are in shortage. It's people with decent web skills who can understand the needs and vocabularies of particular niches.

Unless you're brilliant enough to invent something better than the current standard CMS platforms, for some particular niche. But it's still knowing the niche that's important. If it's a brand-new niche, all the better. No course can teach you to create that, though. If you need to follow authority, get a degree in something totally remote from computers. Then code up the web advances that particular area needs, using standard tools that, frankly in themselves don't require much in the way of education or intelligence.

There is no trademark or copyright for book titles. Period. Ever. In the US. You'll find multiple books of the same title, often, sometimes published within a year or two of each other. If there were a way to use trademark or copyright to prevent that, you can be sure we wouldn't see this.

The article does not "state that plant viruses commonly infect animals" as you say. Instead it points out that plant viruses can exchange genes with animal viruses. Viral coding, it turns out, is open source and freely distributed. Viruses swap genes in their common hunt for advantage over the rest of us. This has been recognized in standard science for decades.

Slackware (floppies) > Redhat > Knoppix > Gentoo > Ubuntu & Debian & CentOS & a few specialty recovery/diagnostic/security distros

If you think there's a licensing violation, sue their asses off.

Have you ever had intellectual property stolen before, and talked to a lawyer about it? Unless you've got really deep pockets, you can't afford it. Because you're a small guy — not even in the country in this case — and they're well-capitalized by guys with very deep pockets who can afford the sort of well-connected lawyer who bills at $500 an hour and up. It doesn't matter how thoroughly you can document the whole thing, or that what you developed is absolutely essential to what the thief is selling. Unless you've got at least 10s of 1000s of dollars to speculate on the outcome in court, you can't even get into court with good enough representation to prevail.

Depending on the courts as first line of defense is impractical. The courts belong to the big players, not the common folk. Especially in New York — where I once watch the opposing attorney openly, in court session, bribe the judge for a favorable outcome. Community opinion is sometimes the only defense we've got, especially if we can use the press to force thieves back into something like compliance with GPL licensing and the spirit of the movement.

I've got my 7-year-old on a Nexus 7 ($250) paired with a Logitech Tablet Keyboard for Android ($50 - with a case that doubles as a stand for the tablet). So the total is the $300 you want to spend. No exposure to parts, but a complex interface to master - and with the keyboard he feels it's "like a real computer."

That phrase, "picking winners and losers," is a loser. It totally denies the structure of human society, in which most achievements require broad collaboration. Yes, collaboration can lead to conspiracy and corruption. But it is also essential to building civilization. A major role of government and politicians is to encourage the healthy sorts of collaboration, and discourage the corrupt sorts. So already, government and politicians should be trying to pick "winners" who display good ethics, and make "losers" of those who don't. Can government go overboard? Sure. Like all things worth doing well, it can also be done badly. But it needs to be attempted, or we end up with conspiracy and corruption dominating, and become a nation like Italy or Afghanistan or Somalia, depending on the degree of that domination.

So the question isn't "Does government pick winners and losers?" Government has to be picking winners, which is to say encouraging collaborations in society among the ethically good players - where "good" in defined in terms of virtues like honesty and concern for the broader well-being of society. Governments aren't just about penalities for those who are bad players (e.g., torturers, those committing fraud in financial institutions - neither of whom are currently penalized, as it happens, due to the weakness of our government), but rewards for those who are good players (including giving them government contracts, such as the Ryan family as prospered from for generations). Government should contract and collaborate with and support good players, and shun and otherwise hinder the bad. That's just essential. And there's no way to separate that from "picking winners and losers." Those who use that phrase are not just opposed to bad government, but even to good government, as if the withering away of the state to produce the utopia foreseen by an intellectual vanguard were not just the failed dream of Karl Marx, but a practical program for today. This libertarian dream is the mirror image of Marxism, and just as evil when put into practice. We need government, we need government to be good, and we need government to be on the side of good, or else good cannot prevail. Because all government is is a large-scale structure for social collaboration. And without that, there can be no civilization.

I've been a Ting customer since a month after they started. We have two smartphones, both with 3G, one with WiMAX. Here in northern New England 3G is all any carrier has. Sprint's network lags Verizon's slightly - and while Ting has free voice roaming there's no data roaming at all. But Sprint's 3G isn't overtaxed. Works well for us, especially with the free tethering for our laptops. If we want to stream huge media files we use our wired connection at home. Meanwhile our combined bill averages less than $30 a month. Of course, that's after paying for the phones outright. What would this cost us on Verizon ... or Sprint? (Neither AT&T nor T-Mobile is even present here.)

When we visit cities with WiMAX, that works decently too, a nice boost. If we want LTE later, we'll have to buy another phone. But we're saving enough on the monthly bill to easily afford one by then. The WiMAX arrangement with Sprint may even work out, in a way. They're keeping WiMAX lit for a least a few more years, and meanwhile the Clearwire spectrum that WiMAX is on - and far from saturating - is enabling Clearwire to do an LTE buildout that's on superior frequencies to what anybody else has for LTE, in terms of bandwidth density. Sprint, as majority owner of Clearwire, is first in line for that.

And Ting is so much a better deal for normal users than anything else, while still presumably giving Sprint a nice profit, that it should end up a very successful way to pull customers away from Verizon and AT&T - which by both polls and anecdotes, few people like. And Verizon in particular, as an enemy of net neutrality as well as a notorious union buster - why would anyone with a conscience buy from them?

Motivation to perform on an IQ test affects the result. There's a certain authoritarian trance in society, which is part of the very definition of being "straight." Those with stoner attitudes take authority less seriously. So the 8 point spread may have nothing to do with IQ, and everything to do with motivation to obey the authority of the scientist giving you the IQ test.

As for the effect only pertaining for those who start smoking before 18, it's precisely in the teenage years that the sense of ones "place" in the social structure gets formed. If you're recruiting an army, you probably don't want smokers. They tend to favor peace over war too much anyway. And they're going to laugh at the pretentious sargeant the other recruits are terrified of. But if you're recruiting tech innovators or artists, these can be precisely who you'll do best with. You need people who don't take authority too seriously.