The practical result of the faculty who want to keep their jobs will simply be to spend less time preparing for the classes they teach, less time grading papers, less time interacting with students, and less time being teachers to make up for the added time spent researching and writing.

That is somewhat true. But these are people who are also responsible for teaching and probably administrative tasks associated with their departments. Sure, they could sit around publishing a whole lot but where does that really leave their students who they are suppose to be teaching. "Oh, sorry Johnny, I don't have time to give you feedback on your paper, I'm busy publishing my own."

The difference between having a class with a tenured faculty member and an adjunct post-doc desperately trying to find a tenure track position is that the professor with tenure actually has the time to be an expert and pass on that expertise to students and, well, teach. The period between finishing a dissertation and having meaningful, gainful employment has become increasingly long and dependent on a expansive CVs; those people are the worst make for the worst teachers in the classroom because they are persistently preoccupied with their own petty academic dramas.

I'm already on a permanent iTunes boycott; I won't buy digital media through iTunes at all simply because it is encumbered with DRM. Sure, I'll take advantage of their free downloads now and then, but owning the physical CD, a storage method that can always be relied on to re-install music after a hard drive or device failure, has always been more appealing to me.

iTunes though is fairly benign DRM. Users get to have five 'activations' and can globally reset all of their activations once a year. And while originally iTunes relied on users to know enough to backup their music, more recently any purchased song can easily be transferred from an iPod to a new computer.

While its understandable that any protest of DRM would include Apple's scheme, it is one of the least offensive iterations of DRM; perhaps if other media companies took direction from Apple, fewer users would be so offended by DRM.

I'll continue to enjoy Apple's free promotions, but ultimately buying the digital version just seems to risky, with or without DRM.

I think its likely that any touchscreen tablet from Apple would more or less simply be a larger version of the iPhone/Touch, but with similar hardware on the inside. This would have several huge advantages for Apple in terms of a business model.

Something like a 7 inch iPod Touch would provide most of the same functionality as a netbook, but have the advantage of a built in App store that Apple already tightly controls and has a monopoly on. The digital keyboard would save space and size, but a screen twice as large as the current iPhone/Touch would allow for greater usability. Such a product also follows with Job's claim that the iPhone is already a netbook.

I think any Apple entry into the Netbook market would rely heavily on the iPhone OS, especially since the whole idea over the iPhone OS is that its really, deep down at its core, Mac OS.