you can use UDF, all modern OS support it, both read and write.

the only problem is windows XP, but that is easy, windows XP users require a driver... that can be on the device, as it can read UDF, just cant write to it.

There, problem solved, no need for FAT.

Of course, MS could also support OTHER filesystems, as they are the blocking factor. Things like ufs and ext2 are well tested and somewhat simple to support

Just in case you didn't see it, european patents... specially the case where the the European patent office have broad powers, poor control and a very bad historic data (ie: likes to give software patents where they are explicit forbidden)

I personally use claws for several years (+- 10) and i think its great. the only thing that people might miss is the lack of edit html messages (it can write text only emails), but it can read html emails without any problem. it support calendar and meeting requests, attach remover and various gpg and smime via plugins, so it covers what people need. Its fast and light enough and many keyboard shortcuts when you dont want to use the mouse.

if you have imap, you may want to try the mulberry mail , it have the best imap support i ever used. its now open source, could use a facelift, but is very good.

i dont know... something like renewable energies?!

thermal, wind, solar, biofuel, waves, etc

Also, make things more efficient... many of the today cars, houses, electronic, machinery could be made to use a lot less energy

there is no "one size fits all", but all working in parallel can do it

(designed by the nation's top scientists in the field) where it can be guarded and monitored?

Go read this post: http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3299701&cid=42211457

Everyone wants to get his money and really don't care about it... it's not really designed nor monitored, only guarded

Having used all major browser i agree.

for browsing 2-3 pages, chrome is good, startup fast, but start to load more tabs, demand more from it and you will see the cpu and specially the ram going up.
During the last year and half, firefox manage to rebuild its memory usage and today have the best long term memory usage of all.

There are OTHER pdf readers, most of then with plugin support ... no need to use a buggy and insecure acrobat reader

http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2010/02/25/reprap-the-self-replicating-3d-printer/

yes, it still dont print the chips and boards, but we will get there :)

So Steve Jobs says that they will fight for the iphone leadership no matter what, that apple would go "nuclear", using patents if needed, sue google partners and the partners and google would stay still, paying the money to apple without doing anything? MS go after google partners for stupid patents, some claimed to hit the linux kernel (and never show up proof ), trying to get money from every android... and google would stay still without doing anything?
At least google dont like patents, but its a weapon and a good counter-attack weapon. Apple and MS sued everyone to limit and crash some money, its obvious that those partners and google would strike back. Its time now... apple is losing in several patent fights, MS cashed many dollars from google partners, time for google to cash some of that money "back", using exactly the same weapons they were so eager to use.

Patent fight is nuclear war, in the end, no one really wins. Money that could be spend in advancing the technology is spend in lawyers

raspberry pi!

It have good support and will have it for long time (unlike most of this "clones" ).
For a mail server it's powerful enough

not $49 , its $59 now and has been for some time .

when the indiegogo started, it costed only $19

Virtual memory != Resident memory

use a top or even the ps xua. the VSZ is the virtual memory request by the app... its the RAM that the app MIGHT need and so its reserved (but most of the times, only a small part is used). The RSS is the resident memory, its the amount of RAM actually used by the app and not in swap.

If you have no swap, you have all the virtual memory mapped to the real RAM, even if its never touched by the app. If you have swap, that unused area is virtually "remapped" to the swap and only stays in RAM the actual application memory

$ ps xua|grep "firefox\|RSS"
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
dleite 9361 4.9 12.9 2280832 1048048 pts/26 Sl+ Nov08 409:43 ./firefox

So in my case, 2.2GB of VSZ and 1GB of RSS... as i have swap, those 1.2GB of unused memory is mapped to the swap (without any IO) and not wasting RAM

"live cds run just fine without swap."

Yes, they waste ram and usually dont stay up for many hours/days, so the kernel swap problem would be hard to hit. but also remember that most liveCD will use the HD swap (or give the options to use it) if they find it

Remember that all windows 8 ARM based devices are REQUIRED to lock the boot to signed binaries... on the X86 is "just" recommended.
I dont know if the FSF/redhat/ubuntu boot loader can work on ARM (as usually the boot is limited by the cpu and firmware)... it might be a while until you can run other OS on MS surface.

You know that you should have ALWAYS some swap enabled... even if its just 100MB (1GB should be better). The linux kernel have some entries that fail if there no swap enabled, even if you have free memory and no need for swap, that might create weird problems.

Also, swap is good for big apps like chrome, firefox, java, etc, where the apps requests several GB of RAM, but will just use a small part of that. Without swap you will lose all that unused RAM, with swap that unused RAM is mapped to the swap (without any IO or delay, so its a win-win)

Also, tmpfs can be mapped to the swap if you would ever need to free RAM (i know, you believe that you will never need this, but just in case...)

So please, add some swap! :)

- Brother label printer

actually i just configured a brother label printer a few days ago and worked fine with the brother drivers

but its all the same story.. ask the hardware/software vendors for linux support... If there is no support, dont buy from then any more. just like you dont buy apple only hardware/software to "connect to"/"use in" a windows, dont buy window only hardware/software if you plan to use linux.

If you dont like all this, if you require all that windows lock-in ... then stay in windows... some people still also use DOS and Macintosh System [7-9]