It's the same cpu (or at least the same family) used in the new Acer netbooks. I have one of these w/ 4GB ram and a 500GB drive, and it runs Win7 home x64 just fine for your basic putzing around type usage. Loaded up Eclipse to try out some Android development and that may be stretching things a bit, but it's not horrible. The full netbooks are ~350 or so rather than 200, but IMHO it does quite well as a poor-mans-ultrabook.

Figures that this would get coverage, but none of the analysis that shows how full of crap this report is. The US production of *crude oil* is only about 6.2 mmb/day - substantially lower than the ~10mmb/day produced by the Saudis. The IEA has included Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) in their numbers to magically claim the significant increase in US production. Given that the US consumes about 17-18 mmb/day of crude oil, it would take nothing less than a seismic shift in either production or consumption to achieve 'self sufficiency'. Not to completely downplay the significance - we are indeed awash in far more natural gas products than in the recent past and that shouldn't be missed. However, there is a lot of evidence that the depletion curves of the shale plays are not favorable, so extrapolating what is occurring now out 10-15 years is a fools game. In other words, this is basically a PR piece designed to assure investors that the oil industry is 'A-OK' - no need to worry and keep pouring the money in. Taking it as actually reflecting anything about reality would be a mistake.

I think we've got a lot of people around here that have never been to the southwest. 10k square miles of available space is most certainly NOT the problem. The truth is that many of the areas that are ideal for solar are very marginal lands due to the scorching heat and lack of water. I'm not entirely up on land prices, but given that I paid $1200/acre for some very nicely treed land in southern CO, I'd guess $400/acre for parched desert isn't a bad place to start. That puts the purchase price at under $4B for the land, or about as much as the US spends on oil in 2 days. (based on 20M bbl/day stat from herehttp://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickfacts/quickoil.html)

Transmission of the generated power and political will are the problems, not availability of land.