It doesn't have to be just games that it distributes.

Even the normal Steam client lets you view embedded video, or download video as its own "store" item. Also, since a game is just another type of program, you could deliver other applications as well, such as the training simulators used in MCSE books, custom testing programs that some classes insist on using, editor applications such as Notepad++, GIMP, etc.

I think the biggest benefit of this would be giving the teachers a trusted software repository where they can tell their students to just go download it through the SteamEDU client, and not have to worry about them going to an impostor site and getting a school computer infected with malware (because obviously nobody knows how to ask for a rebuild of that system from the school's IT dept).

While I do like KDE4, GNOME2, and XFCE - my personal secondary system is a Core Solo ULV with 1GB of RAM from 2006, and was barely fast enough for WinXP.

I've been using a relatively bare-bones Debian 6 with OpenBox install for a while now - install just the basic CLI and apt-get, then install X, OpenBox, Nitrogen (wallpaper configurator GUI), FBPanel (for taskbar), WICD (WiFi configurator), and I if I remember SlimDM (login manager). Chrome is generally really good for web-browsing since it seems the only thing that really brings it down is Flash on webpages.

I think HP collects dying hardware companies for some voodoo ritual.

voodoopc.com? (one of HP's "high-end" desktop brands)

Disclaimer: I still haven't used Arch

The "bleeding" in part doesn't apply though if you can apply updates and it not break things or freak out because something requires newer libraries than the repos have (and thats with just the default repos) - all you have then is a distro thats on the edge, not the "bleeding, cut my wrists, edge"

Google Maps had the roads, but even the most recent update of TomTom did not.

Its been said enough already, but it's in Google's best interest to keep it open anyway. They make money on the number of people looking at ads, rather than pure profit of just the hardware.

This is Red Hat you're talking about here, if they wanted something like that to work they would have gone with Debian - but oh, that doesn't have "Enterprise Support" which only means that you are paying so that if something goes wrong, you get to blame it on Red Hat

The OP apparently doesn't even know why he installed LogMeIn in the first place. From the LogMeIn website:

Key Features Remote Control Your Computer Access your desktop from anywhere. Wake-On-LAN Start a sleeping computer on LAN. PC or Mac compatible Anytime, anywhere remote access.

It does this by installing their remote desktop client on the host to remote into, proxies through their servers over regular HTTP / port 80, and also features a web based control/viewer. The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia

Users access remote desktops using either the LogMeIn Ignition stand-alone application or a web portal. The web portal requires either an ActiveX plugin for Internet Explorer, or an extension for Firefox (the LogMeIn plug-in for Firefox), or an extension for Safari (the LogMeIn plug-in for Safari), failing that it falls back to requiring Java in order to run a Java program,[3] and failing that it falls back to "a screen-shot based HTML remote control".[4] The web portal also provides status information for the remote computers and, optionally, remote computer management functions.

So he has all the remote desktop capabilities in the world he could want. All he needs to do is setup a script to take photos whenever the lid is opened, and check on the browser cookies to see what web-sites the thief is going to. Even if the Apple camera application doesn't support this, I'm sure there are plenty of F/LOSS camera applications that would.

Basically, he needs to do what this DEFCON hacker did. Failing all of that, he could provide the S/N and other info to the Vancouver PD and Apple, so that if the thief attempts taking it to an Apple store to have it wiped (and removing LogMeIn by doing so) if they follow their processes and check the S/N, they should see it is a stolen laptop...

No. The GPL does NOT prevent you from downloading the software and not being able to install it. It prevents you from downloading and then redistributing it without making an offer for the source code. While they do not have to package the source with the binary download, they have to be able to give you the source for the program. The developer is allowed to charge a fee that makes sense to cover the costs of the CD or server bandwidth.

Also, a developer is allowed to charge for the binary, but again has to provide source to anybody that paid for the license to the binary. This means they do not have to provide source free of charge to anybody off the street just because they want the application for free.

The GPL isn't about restricting what the end user can do with the application, it's about preventing people and corporations from taking F/LOSS code that a lot of people worked on for free, or even paid developers by companies like Red Hat from having their code stolen by "Hypothetical Evil Company X" to be rebranded and sold for the profit of said evil company and not only not returning a dime of it to the original and rightful developers, but also to keep the application open for development by other people.

Which is why I said it probably wouldn't be very secure :(

Also, I should have clarified that to get the server working in such a basic state takes "adding or modifying" said number of lines.

However, I still stand that no matter which server you choose it is currently easier to get it up and running through CLI instead of said kludged together RedHat or Webmin configurators, which seem to use backend scripts that fail to even write to the file properly...

Also, hasn't this been the way pretty much every single feature phone from cellular carriers with a "web browser" worked this way since that capability came out?

Exactly - when I went to school they taught using Fedora 6 with Webmin and the non-working Fedora GUI tools for managing Apache and SSL. Even if the tool configured Apache to start and host a site, they NEVER configured SSL properly, no matter if you followed the textbook, or tried any combination or order of clicking buttons in the Red Hat tool or Webmin.

After a while, I installed Debian 4 (right after it came out) one of my systems, looked around for GUI configurators, saw none, and so it seemed that the only way to do so on Debian was through CLI. Turns out, a basic Apache config (probably not at all secure) was about 3 or 4 lines in the config file, and SSL is only another 5 or 10 minutes through the command line where weeks of playing with GUI tools at school yielded nothing.

Point of the story being that Apache and SSL really are easier to config through CLI. Also, I never really went back to Red Hat/Fedora/Etc after that since they always seemed to be too bleeding edge - giving Fedora dependency hell, you go to update all packages on a system, they require newer libraries than in the repo, and can't update. I've never really had this happen on Debian but for once or twice on experimental.

WHOOSH

The GP's point is if you are going to bother building a nuclear plant, why not just skip the oil and coal altogether? If you can build 1 or 2 nuclear plants that would replace 2 to 3 coal fired power plants, isn't that a much more straightforward path? Instead, somebody decided to only make the nuclear plant the middle man?

The same issue is one of the major roadblocks to electric cars. "Oh we're running out of oil for the cars, lets make a nuclear plant to harvest oil!" instead of "Lets build a nuclear plant, the electricity from which will power EV's!" If you're going to build a nuclear plant, at least make it actually effect the core issue more directly instead of prolonging you running out of gas - get rid of the gas altogether.

Also, Chrome is based on Google Chromium, so they already own the Chromium name

If I recall correctly, the OO packages put pretty much everything the libraries and core packages that are required no matter which you have installed, and the individual packages for Writer, Calc, etc only taking something like 5MiB each.