Be careful though, if you link on the image rather than the customise link at the bottom then you get pushed over to Windows.

True, which is why I was saying that "IF it can get really 7 hours" then that would be awesome. I mean the processor is an ARM dual core, while I haven't seen *that* many meaningful comparisons in a notebook format, if Apple truly can get 5 hours out of their Macbook (and I can do that with web browsing and text editing, just don't start youtube or compiling) and that's on X86 with a HDD (and I've heard of Linux laptops being able to approach that), then why couldn't an ARM with an SSD get to 7 hours?
My Android phone can last around two days with mixed usage.

Note that the link talks about 8 hours of mixed video and browsing, the 7 hours was my typo. It was 7 days standby.

Now with such a slim case, I would like to see some benchmarks of the battery before I believe anything, but if it was in a normal laptop case with the size of their batteries, I wouldn't doubt it was possible.

I would agree that it looks awesome. When I first looked I thought that $450-$550 seemed a bit much, thinking about it though, if it can really get 7 hours of real usage then this could be something that a traveller could use.

Why would the RIAA care if you downloaded a TV show?

I would like to say that I appreciated at least the attempt, but when I went to replace my laptop earlier this year there wasn't a single Ubuntu laptop that didn't suck. They just picked out the bottom spec couple of PC's and stuck it on them, I would be not surprised if they come back saying that there was lack of interest because they didn't have a computer worth buying.

Were you watching Fox at the time? It might not be the bulb that made the room feel dim.

Compatability? I thought we used .net these days in Windows. Why are we using a VM if the code isn't portable?

T-Mobile does the Flex-pay. Is that what you are after? They require you pay the monthly bill at the beginning of the month rather than the end, but gives you a contract like plan but without the contract.

I don't think I really want to know how you can accomplish that...

Good. How did we ever get in to the situation where game companies can jack up average prices $20 with each new generation? There is a reason I stopped buying games after they passed the $30-40 mark. That is just too much for someone like me. Why should I feel sorry for people like EA and their identical annual franchises?

Ignoring all the other replies here, essentially the big reason is investment. Sure they talk up the redundancy and capabilities of mainframe, but really they are comparing tens of thousands of dollars on x86 to tens of millions spent on big iron and saying they get better performance from mainframes. They are expensive to run, and they are expensive to buy. But if you have one and your running custom software that no one know really how it works are you going to spend that $10 million on redundant x86 hardware, then $x million of research/development software which no one can predict how long it will take or how much it will cost? Distributed programming is not new. We have Java handling processing million of bank transactions a minute where I work. We still have mainframes, because no one wants to foot the bill to replace them.