feature that is far more important than functionality or cost-effectiveness.

Thanks to the Citizens United decision that says that corporations are people with unlimited freedom of speech, M$ can provide MN politicians who supported the bill with unlimited campaign TV ad support.

With a feature like that, who cares if it works? Or if state employees can actually send and receive e-mail or process documents? Or if a "no-bid" contract is a pointer towards government corruption?

Or if MN has to hire IBM in a few months to clean up the mess, replace M$ with a Google or IBM cloud or Open Source enterprise software, and have IBM help them to hire a shitload of replacement IT workers to replace the ones MN thought it can safely fire over the next few weeks?

KDE has had a bottom screen taskbar ever since I started using Linux 4 years ago. I'm looking at my desktop right now, I've got 19 apps on it.

And even with Gnome, if one wants a taskbar on the bottom of the screen, all it takes is drag and drop.

Note that Carly "Failorina" Fiorina and Meg Whitman have not been invited to run any public corporatons after each tanked the stock values of the companies they ran. At least Whitman had sense enough to go quietly. Each serves as a director to, IIRC, several corporations. After all, somebody has to support the bloated compensation schemes that pay off CEOs at the expense of their shareholders and employees. But neither will ever run a Fortune 1000 corporation again.

The bad news is that Whitman is running for Governor of California and Failorina for Senator. Both, of course, have teabagger support.

to exclude modern technology from their community.

Mainly because when the residents discover that their real estate values are dropping faster than everyone else's due to "zero bars" practically everywhere in town, I'm looking forward to hearing their screams of anger.

"People always get the kind of local government they deserve." E.E. "Doc" Smith

NIMBYs who demand services and band together to exclude what is needed to make them available from their community should get big middle fingers from their service providers.

some time when your car is stuck in the middle of nowhere and there isn't a pay phone you can use within 100 miles.

Or, assuming you've got a mobile phone regardless of your public opinion about cell phones, when you've got an emergency and zero bars.

Or no emergency at all, but a member of your family wanted to add something to your shopping list, a fact you did not discover until you got home and found out that said family member couldn't get through and as a result, you've got to hit the road yet again.

Or when you're lost and you can't connect to the Net to access Google Maps.

an Android tablet with IR support and a "learning remote" app and you can toss your individual remotes as quickly as you can load the commands from each into the remote.

generalizes to ... a city whose streets were routed at random a few hundred years ago and which was never converted to a more or less standard grid. There are no cities in America that I know of that fit that description.

The real question about the study for you is whether you are buying into the conclusions of a study paid for by Big Oil ... or somebody's auto industry.

I paid $105 plus shipping for my own generic tablet... which is underpowered. I think a $150 generic tablet would be about right.

I think it's fairly obvious that one of the places where a tablet can shine is specifically for device controller UI applications. It's compact and all one has to do to make it control a device is to stick a mini-webserver on it, after which your UI can be simple static webpages plus hardware control/monitor scripts. That's why I bought one (MID-006) directly from China a couple of months ago, to enable me to experiment in this area. Other places where it makes sense is as an e-reader and casual websurfing.

That said, I prefer a netbook for multimedia on the basis that one doesn't have to hold it to view it in place to view it and it has a lot more CPU and GPU horsepower than one can stuff into a tablet with acceptable battery life and size.

People and companies are still trying to figure out where tablets make the most sense, the idea that it will magically replace every other form of computer in the next few years is a non-starter no matter how many IT pundits tell us that It Must Happen.

we go from our homes to bookstores via matter transporter? I don't know what kind of fantasy world you live in, but in the world I live in (suburb underserved by public transit), every trip to a bookstore means driving a car. And if one is buying online, it's more an exception than the rule to use the overnight delivery you're comparing it to.

As opposed to a UPS delivery truck serving 100 plus households per day on computer-optimized routings.

Compare 100 trips to a store by individual vehicles vs one UPS truck's daily deliveries, if your ability to do simple arithmetic is up to it.

in this area, just the only one I know of that's come to this . . . interesting conclusion.

While I agree with you that the press release the original post linked to has no substantial content, frankly, I don't care whether the study was rigged through cherry-picking data or simple incompetence on the part of the researchers. Though I'll be automatically discounting any research from this academic institution in future (their credibility from my POV just dropped to Oral Roberts University level) and I recommend everyone else do the same.

All I'm curious about is who paid for this study.

also works in favor of online shopping. What's the carbon loading of people driving individually to a store vs a single UPS truck full of packages delivering to hundreds of households? This isn't the only study on this subject that has been done, and IIRC, the other studies came up with the opposite conclusion.

However, this is the study you can expect to see cited in the mass media.

why bother with crypto on HDs? Simply do as many businesses do. Move your drive image to a server, wipe the drive, reinstall the base OS, and once you're at your destination, open an ssh channel to the server and rsync your data back to the drive. Of course, you might have to rent a colo for a day to get access to a pipe big enough to move that data in a reasonable length of time.

If ctypto use is illegal at your destination, what are you doing there?

when registering a business domain. Use a role ID like "Network Operating Center - [company name]" instead and use network_operating_center@domain.tld or other role-related userID as an e-mail address.

Identity theft aside, when the domain name user ID information is pointed at a specific person, that person might leave the company or die or go to jail, leaving domain renewal warnings or other messages relating specifically to the domain at an address accessible to nobody at the company or even to a disgruntled ex-employee.

is a google stockholder. If RIM shares all consumer Blackberry data on request, people who have reason to care about security who are not running enterprise Blackberry servers will have to shift to android in order to get access to encrypted file / text and encrypted VOIP apps. When I replace my Blackberry, it won't be with a RIM device. People are moving off the platform and this idiocy is going to encourage the move to the exits.

As for Apple iPhone "crypto":

Apple claims that hundreds of thousands of iPhones are being used by corporations and government agencies. What it won't tell you is that the supposedly enterprise-friendly encryption included with the iPhone 3GS is so weak it can be cracked in two minutes with a few pieces of readily available freeware.

As for WebOS ... don't know, does anyone else?