Like cattle. Then you could really be accounted for. No problemo.

It's the old issue of "polling" vs automatic "interrupts". In this case, the polling solution would appear to have less impact on personal privacy. Anything that could generate an "interrupt" when you moved away from your computer could just as well track you as you moved eleswhere. As I said, cattle tags.

I think I'd rather put up with the minor annoyance of having my systems periodically time out on me.

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I love to jump in two days late... Anyway, who says REGULAR email is confidential? To quote Wikipedia: "e-mail messages have to go through intermediate computers before reaching their destination, meaning it is relatively easy for others to intercept and read messages". People stopped fretting about that years ago and basically accept the risk of interception of email en route. Risks of trusting Google are probably LESS than those resulting from routine use of unencrypted email, which is basically universal today in business and the professions. The vail of confidentiality is already fairly thin and I don't think using gmail or Google Docs makes it qualitatively any worse. If you have anything TRULY confidential you'd be nuts to put it in an email or for that matter any other electronic document, for a variety of reasons.

I had, IIRC, an Equity II. It had (again IIRC) an 8086 and a 20 meg drive and not quite the same OS as IBM. It was a great machine in its day, but it's not the model you have.

The Equity I, I believe had an 8088 and was closer to an original PC in architecture.

I would take the "B" 5 1/4 inch floppy drive and its cable temporarily out of the Epson and plug it into a modern machine (which I assume does not have a floppy of its own, but a header for it on the motherboard and a compatible free power connector). Boot up the modern machine with some 16-bit DOS variant. Insert a fresh floppy disk into the transplanted drive and FORMAT A: /S (which writes the two system files needed to boot) and then copy COMMAND.COM to the floppy. Then see if the Epson will boot off of this floppy from its A drive. If so, power down and return the B drive to the Epson, and from there you should be able to run DOS software that you find.

Yeah, I got a ticket because someone who was driving a car with my plate number went through a light and the plate was automatically photographed. Now I have an airtight defense! Whoopee!

Yeah but you're just trolling, I get it.

This is not thought through in the slightest.

Who is going to PAY to read the NY Post online???

Linux has great desktops - at least when you get away from the proprietary Xandros yuk garbage that some of these Netbooks came with. Windows users can feel comfortable with Gnome pretty fast. But he early netbooks used things like that Xandros setup, which was a real problem. Another problem is the perennial one of being not quite workalike and file-interchangeable with MS Office. You want to be able to edit a doc, xls or ppt file and know it will look the same to the person you email it to, and OpenOffice and the other alternatives just fall a little short on this. Also, if you're used to MS Office, OpenOffice seems quite alien at first. This picture may change if cloud-based office apps take hold. Good cloud apps could get around Microsoft's Office edifice dominating the desktop.

Here's a clue: "in a manner that is completely transparent" is NOT part of the claims. It is verbiage in the abstract and written description. Read the CLAIMS if you want a handle on what the patent actually covers.

Totally agree. My eeePC came with a PLUG UGLY Xandros (IIRC) distro, which I promptly replaced with eeeXubuntu. The fonts were a little teentsy on a 7 inch screen, which is probably why Asus felt they could not do something like that. However, with 10 inch screens at 1024x600 (and better to come) this is a different story. The newer machines can simply run plain Gnome Ubuntu. I confess I ditched the eee for a used IBM X40 (running, yes, yech, Windows XP), but would be willing to go back to a pure "netbook" with Linux now that those machines are getting more powerful. While Linux is viable, the average retail buyer still thinks Windows is the Name Brand and Linux some kind of generic schlock, and wants Word and Excel, not some OpenOffice weirdness. MS Office is really MS's sustaining crown jewel. When the FOSS world comes up with something that kicks MS Office's butt in every substantial way, THAT will be a major threat to MS. I actually prefer LaTex/gedit, which works swell on laughably wimpy hardware, and produces nicer documents with less work than MS Word - but since it is not WYSIWYG it will never make it with the Wal Mart or Best Buy crowds, and in addition, with Latex you tend to come up short when someone needs your .doc file to edit, rather than the output PDF. Perhaps a good "cloud" office suite (offering every conceivable format import and export) will really solve the problem - but even that will still will need a robust workalike offline solution in order to be viable, because you just can't be online with a laptop all the time, even with an aircard. Well, maybe if the magic tricks were done in the client-side Javascript (or other FOSS client-side modules), something like a cloud office solution with a good offline mode could really work. But is going to take something like that to displace Windows.

Every time I looked at Drupal I found it too complex for whatever simple site I was setting up. I have used Joomla, which was easier to jump into, but simplistic and inflexible. Honestly, SharePoint 2007 is much easier to use and fairly powerful and flexible. If you don't want to set up and administer the swerver, you can buy hosting or even get it free (with limitations) from a number of providers.