The slider looks neat, but from what I understand the battery life isn't nearly as good. What's your experience with the battery life? Maybe I just read some sloppy reviews...

The tablet alone is a good tablet, but with the keyboard it becomes what a netbook always wanted to be but could never quite manage to pull off.

15 hours of battery life -- good for an entire school day and then some. Physcially connected keyboard (useful if the campus has bluetooth restrictions). keyboard also has full-sized USB connector (2) so you can back it up to thumb drive for use elsewhere... As for specific android apps, that's sort of a mixed bag. None of the "office compatible" apps have spellcheck, which is annoying, but if you're looking for something just to put notes in the Polaris Office that comes preloaded with the ASUS is more than sufficient.

... is that using the touch screen is difficult at the very edge of the screen. This is really only a problem with some applications that put buttons in the corners, like Tweetcaster. Also, the Nook reader is very hard to use unless you pump up the dpi to make the graphical elements larger.

But that kind of stuff is pretty trivial.

Also, a dual-core 7" tablet for $200 is pretty sweet, especially if it's as hackable as the original.

I tried reading that document and glazed over. Is there a site that gives you some practical procedures for making sure your site is secure? Because based on what I've read I only vaguely understand the problem and don't know how to determine if my site has it. I'd prefer not to find out the hard way...

KDE is already involved in the changes it wants for QT that are KDE-specific, aren't they? It's not like that would stop development cold. Hell, it might even make it easier for them to get the changes they want put in. Whether that adversely effects the rest of the developers who use QT for other things... well, I can't speak to that.

... hasn't QT been LGPL'd? I don't see the problem.

I figured glossy screens were cheaper to manufacture in mass quantities, so they became the new standard. I have no idea if that's true or not. I too miss the matte lcd screens, even though the colors aren't usually as bright I find the screens are easier to look at in almost any lighting.

For some reason I assumed it would automatically turn that into a link. Since it didn't: Announcement!

A cynic is an idealist who learns the hard way.

... isn't this similar to the service the old MP3.com offered that ultimately got them sued into oblivion?

Site certificates cost too much damn money and are too damn restrictive. I can't buy a certificate that will cover every conceivable iteration of my domain name unless buy an "unlimited subdomain" cert which is usually 2-3x more expensive than a single domain cert. And GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL if you actually have more than one domain name pointing to the same server...

Obviously you could just turn on https and redirect all traffic to it with a self-signed certificate, but when you do that every browser that visits your site starts screaming OH MY GOD I DON'T KNOW WHO SIGNED THIS EVIL HAXXX0R5 MIGHT BE STEALING YOUR IDENTITY AND SIPHONING YOUR BANK ACCOUNT AS WE SPEAK. This tends to degrade your average visitors confidence in the authenticity of your site.

I'm speaking from experience, since I had to go through this crap last October when Firesheep came out.

The good news is that 99.9% of all blogspam doesn't know how to handle https. Yet.

... that certain components (for example, audio) take a long time to figure out how to make work, and end users tend to get impatient about such things. That doesn't mean no progress is being made, or even that good progress isn't being made.

I've used Linux since about 2000-2001, and I'm not really an expert. From my perspective, Linux of today is leaps and bounds over what it was then in terms of user friendliness, configurability, etc. And in terms of multimedia, well... it's somewhat usable but not there yet. But it gets closer constantly. That doesn't mean it isn't frustrating, and I still cuss out pulseaudio (and eventually uninstall it) every time I try to get it to do things that seem intuitively obvious to me... but each time I've used it I notice improvements, and I'm pretty confident that one day it will just work... at which point there will be something ELSE that everyone complains about.

Because Linux developers don't have direct access to proprietary information, progress on proprietary-heavy aspects of an operating system (like audio, and video, etc.) is unfortunately slower than other areas. Nothing can get around that other than companies open sourcing their drivers and putting patents in the public domain (which is a longer way of saying "nothing can get around that.") But the progress is still both remarkable and laudable. Though I still reserve the right to cuss out the parts of Linux that don't work when I want them to. It's nothing personal, guys, it's just a pain in the ass.

SuricouRaven isn't saying that perpetual motion can be done, you're parsing the sentance wrong. Read it this way:

"Cold fusion isn't a theoretical impossibility (like perpetual motion). It can, in principle, be done."

In other words, OP is making a distinction between cold fusion and perpetual motion. Perpetual motion is an impossibility, cold fusion is at least in THEORY not impossible.

The sentence could have been parsed better so I can see how you misread it.

Does each individual patent cancel each other out? I'd always assumed if you owned a patent on a technology that was rather fundamental to the functioning of an entire industry it trumped 30 patents in a specific branch of that industry. I'm not saying those are the patents Google owns, I just didn't think that it was necessarily a #'s game.