Deserts are not completely empty.

How long until we discover our solar panels covered up the native environment of some desert bug, which has been the sole reason we're protected from X disease?

Or that we've destroyed some endagered cacti/desert critter, and all the "free-the-animals" nuts jump on us?

Is it our fault or responsibility that all of the 3rd world is booming in population, taking their 6+ kids to Europe, and living there?

There's nothing racist about saying Europe is facing a cultural death. If anything it's more racist to say you don't give a damn about there being no white people in Europe. Isn't the death of any culture sad? Didn't you die a little on the inside, too, when you found out about the Japanese situation? Or when your kids (or you when you were a teen) found out about how Russia's population is dwindling down to nothing?

It depends where you are, though. I think this whole city-living has killed being a kid.

When I was growing up I didn't have any kids in my neighbourhood, let alone any my age. What was I going to do? I went out and played, sure, and my dad would bring me places too.

But not everyone got the chance to grow up in a small town out in the middle of nowhere, biking from town to town. I wish I lived that life... it would have been so much cooler.

I love it. When I've got a calculator out on my desktop I'm often doing physics stuff, and I've found Qalculate to be invaluable. Haven't figured out how to use it with gnuplot, but eventually I will.

For graphs, though, I'll use Gnumeric. And for quick calculations, either Google, or Xcalc, or Galculator (gcalc is nice but seems to take longer to start up).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this what PolicyKit is all about?

Or a rotating stock plan. Something new at Amazon, they put it in the stores, a few weeks later they refresh with newer stuff.

You also have catalogues and catalogue computers there, so people can look stuff up, and the sales staff is there to help them find what they need, or answer their questions about products. Sadly, you can't stock the entire Amazon inventory, so you'd have to have the items shipped. However, they could easily put in a warehouse in some of the bigger regions, and send them out from there, or to the store, and hopefully have it in by a day or two, or even that day if the customer's in a pinch and doesn't mind driving over.

Or a DS. Get a flash cart, and use it along with some of the homebrew programs (like the browser). The PSP is faster by a bit, but the DS has a touchscreen & better organsation possibilities. Plus it's cheaper (although depending on the flashcart and microSD card used it can be just as bad).

If you have a server-side application with a simple web front, the DS would be good, especially with its great battery life (in GBA mode I get like 23+ hours on lowest brightness, so I'm sure you could get a good 20 hours on a single charge using just a browser)

VIA's got a pretty strong CPU; the Nano holds its own for the low-power segments.

An nVidia-VIA partnership would have worked wonders but nVidia went there and came back. For some reason they wanted to do ION instead. What a sick joke; and here I was hoping for a VIA Nano wiht a 9400 chipset.

Or external PCIe. I've been waiting for that. The PCIE standard has it specified, just nobody wants to make stuff for it. Think of it this way, you come home, you plug in a box (with its own PSU) into your laptop, and you can now game on your laptop with whatever cards you had put in that box. When you're done, unplug everything, switch your resolution/drivers if necessary, and go.

Or you use Synaptic, right click the package, and click the option saying remove the program entirely including configuration files.

That's more because all the other diseases have been exterminated.

Have you looked into CellWriter? It's a very good Linux hand-writing recognition program.

There's not really many ARM netbooks on the market. There's a 266$ one at DealExtreme, and a 169$ (I think it's MIPS) netbook at some other site (geek.com?). Otherwise it's clone after clone of the Intel Atom reference design with a few changes here and there (ours is blue!).

I personally can't wait for the i.MX515 netbook by Pegatron, though. 199$? Freaking sweet.

Funny how everybody scrambled for motion-controls after Nintendo did it? And I wonder if you called the dpad, analog stick, etc., "gimick controls".

Motion-plus isn't really needed. It would have just bumped costs for nothing. There's only one game coming out that supports it, The Conduit, and it's not likely you'll see a whole bunch using it.

Everything in my house plays a fucking DVD. Do you really think I want another device burning its DVD drive just to play some movies? My laptop, my desktops, my DVD player all play DVDs already. (hey, who would have thought people bought these? what would you do with it if you had a wii? throw it out?)

Not everyone has optical audio. I don't. I want a car to come with my console. Does that mean I need it? HDMI is a terrible connector interface, the worst I've ever seen, with so many licensing issues, it's just a botched "standard". It's a good thing they didn't go for it.

"Gamers" make me fucking sad. You're the same pricks who bought PS2s back when the Gamecube was the only console putting out 480p over component, and was by far the strongest console of the last generation. Now that Nintendo realises it's a fairly useless title, you guys start bitching?

Dual-shock? Good?

You, my friend, and deluded. The fact that both analog sticks rest at the bottom but the buttons are at the top right corner is evidence enough that it sucks giant donkey nuts. With a gamecube controller I can move and shoot. Can't do that with a dual-shock.

The Gamecube also managed to put in two L/R buttons: press down for one, and click for a second.

The only bad thing about it was the Z button, but games barely used it.

You can't have a dual-core processor and keep XP. So thanks kids for clinging to windows on your netbooks! Really doing the world a favour!