Customers will pay one way or the other for actual capacity, but ending net-neutrality could have them paying for an extraordinary increase in ISPs' profits. The government sanctioned these ISPs' monopolies and needs to exercise some regulatory oversight in return.

What sets netbooks apart from laptops is that you sacrifice speed and screen size for battery life and portability. "Cheap" (as in shitty construction from shitty parts) is found in all form factors, and you tend to get what you pay for. For the same build quality, you'll tend to get netbooks cheaper than laptops primarily because the netbook requires fewer components, uses a slower processor, and has a smaller screen. But you can still find good quality netbooks just as easily as you can find crappy laptops, and vice versa.

"Netbook" may be a bullshit term, but it's here, and it accurately describes a niche of products. They used to be called "ultraportables" or "subnotebooks" when they first came out in the 90's, and there's still so much overlap between the "netbook" niche and the "subnotebook" niche to make any distinction pretty much meaningless. The basic theory is that a netbook will tend to sacrifice even more power than a subnotebook because it's designed to connect to servers to do most of the heavy lifting, and it really shouldn't have a lot of storage, but most have plenty of power to run local apps and tons of storage.

The build quality of my wife's Asus eee is quite good. It's plastic, of course, but it feels like durable stuff. It gets around 8 hours of real-life-real-use battery, it weighs almost nothing, and there are very few things it does noticeably slower than our dual-core 3GHZ desktop beast.

Yes, they've moved from a nice low-power SSD back to a spinning drive to save a few bucks, which was a bit disappointing, but it's still a solid little bugger, doesn't generate a lot of heat, and it still lasts all day with no need for a recharge. It's no replacement for a desktop or even a laptop, but it's not meant to be. It fills that niche between "portable as a cell phone" and "powerful as a laptop" quite nicely, and for a lot of people it's all the computer they really need on a day-in-day-out basis, and can be carried around a hell of a lot easier, and you're not constantly looking for a power plug when you do carry it.

I didn't buy it because it was cheaper than a laptop, I bought it because it is more portable and holds a charge longer, and because any laptop on the market today is to big, too clumsy, runs out of power too fast, heats up too much, and has more power than you need for what my wife wanted it for - casual surfing, maintaining a few HTML websites, and keeping up with Facebook.

"Too much of a good thing is not a good thing".

You don't. You notify the company's legal department. It's not a technology issue.

I'm one of the people this article mentions. I really just needed a netbook around the house and after 1 month I'm completely happy with the iPad. I read books and play games or study Japanese on BART and in my house I check email, surf the web or stream movies. More expensive than netbook, yes, but I like it.

or jailbreak it.. if all you want is to run your own apps jailbreaking is sufficient and free

Thanks for being part of what's killing off newsgroups.

No, it goes both ways - the government is deep in the pockets of corporations like BP, enacting laws to their profit - and they squeeze out every last bit of profit on the back of the rest of society. Sorry if I have been unclear. I definitely agree with you that the government enables the "evilness" (I actually don't like to talk in this kind of moral categories here, BP is simply acting rational under the current boundary conditions). My criticism was intended to be aimed at the whole political structure that makes this kind of stuff possible, and, of course, at the people who still believe holding up the status quo is in their best interest as members of the diminishing middle class. I would not agree that diminishing the role of the government would help, though. My point is that the we, the citizens, have to make a clear point as to for whose benefit the government does exist. And that's not the top 1% of the food chain.

This is closest thing to a fair treatment I've seen for this issue. There's more to their analysis than, "piracy is [a destructive force that will permanently destroy creativity the world over/a boon to industry and humanity as a whole]," although I believe their conclusion falls closer to the latter than the data would suggest it should. It's not a perfect study, but it's worth a read.

Because they could have, and should have, done so with their NNTP system. They're a software company, they could have come up with effective controls.

Firefox is slower, no doubt, but crashing? Mine never does, not on Windows nor Linux.

As you draw nearer you determine that the noises are coming from a sad apple sack whining and scheming with it's fleet of lawyers.

"Uh, can we sue him?", "Can we have Interpol ransack his house?", "Can we have the Queen behead him and say it was an accident?", "Hmm, okay, I guess will just fabricate some more monopoly objective disguising BS and write another laughable open letter".

When I first read the headline, I thought it might have been to prevent all the trash that comes from those cheep toys. Don't know how many times I have gone to clean my kids room to find those cheep toys broken and stuffed in drawer or toy bin.

Please re-read all the replies before that post. The problem wasn't the refusal of providing a password, but the refusal of providing ANY access at all. Combine that with the attempt to leave the state and it looks likely that he was going for a Denial Of Service in the most literal sense of the word. That's what got him convicted, not a refusal to hand over a password.

To rephase the issue, the city accused him of Denial of Service. His actions support that accusation. There are penalties for DOS-attacks and he got hit with 'em. Now, the DOS-attack would never have taken place if the city management had not been completely incompetent - that is very clear. But if I had been a juror on this, and with the explanations given above, I would have considered him guilty too.

That said, I might still have hesitated to actually vote that way, given the circumstances. But it looks like he did a Denial of Service on the city and yes, that carries a stiff penalty.

Thanks for giving me some insight!
Shame I don't have any mod points :o

Seriously, I'm in awe of these pictures and how much is out there. Between these and the new hubble images, it really drives home two things:

1) I miss living in the country. The night skies on clear nights were awesome. 2) I regret that I will not live long enough to see faster then light travel. Perhaps my son will see it.

I certainly hope that my children will get the chance to travel our of orbit. I'm still holding out that i'll step foot on the moon or another planet before I leave this beautiful blue marble. (A man's gotta have his dreams right?)

On a serious note faster than light travel by the next generation? We can always dream....