Drop the "The." Just "SkyNet." It's cleaner.

That may be the case, but it is what it is. You don't have nVidia commissioning games that only work on their hardware, or to use a car analogy, you don't have manufacturers coming up with their own weird basic control UIs, and that's generally a good thing for the end users.

What I can't get my head around is the concept of modifying the system by observing it (or just plain modifying the input to a predictive system).
So if you correctly identify area X as a potential hotspot, and send police there, it's a success if you prevent crime. But then that spot becomes less of a hotspot so you may send the police to other areas. Do you then just lapse into a cycle of entering and leaving an area as crime increases and decreases?

...but you need to be connected to the internet for the usb port to work ;)

If they can get Mark Shuttleworth on board, they'll have Google+ replacing Thunderbird in Ubuntu by the next release...

I think the problem is that to have a slick, user-friendly UI that doesn't get in your way with latency caused by inadequate performance, you need enough performance that doing thick-client stuff is trivial, and there's no reason not to include it.

I think if you used the SSD to hold a fairly large cache of applications, you could practically work "in the cloud" a bit like distributed RCSes (eg. git) do, and re-sync everything when the laptop can connect. You can still have backgrounded automatic update of the cached apps, and you can manage the cache completely automatically (or allow more power to users to "pin" data and apps to the cache). I haven't used ChromeOS before, but if it's on its way to working like that (TFA suggests it isn't there yet), it would be workable for some use cases.

I'd also like to see some open-source web apps rise to fame, I'm sure most companies deploying these things would be happy to contract with Google, but for government work or running a small company that competes with Google, I'd prefer to recompile the OS to point at a privately-managed cloud (which would probably be as simple as a couple of clustered web servers and maybe a DR site)

I'll bet "there was no outage"

Thanks, I've grabbed it, will check it out later.

I would have bought a single-file downloadable ebook from the AOSA site if they offered it though...

The machine sounds pretty boring...

Unless the REAL strategy is to patent-troll-troll, whereby the most profitable strategy is to attract trolls, get sued by them, then win and counter-sue for damages :)

no, they've replaced the court with a Microsoft product called JudgeWare 2012

If there's areas on a computing device that you can't really improve, and you still want people to plod along the upgrade path, just bump the numbers - like in the ca. 2000 "Mhz wars".

Like iPads!

Nah, everyone knows Windows is just for games.

They should have gone with OS/2

HDFury goes down, and a million chinese knockoffs rise up. If the *AAs are effective at controlling imports of those, then everyone gets to watch US media except those in the US. Maybe that's enough for them to say they've won, but by doing that they'd just be continuing down a financial spiral to oblivion.