I want to see if others have experienced travel sites changing prices, e.g. removing seats after your third or fourth search for same route, same date even two months ahead of time. Sure, the seats could be disappearing, but in my unqualified and uninformed opinion, I think they probably raise the price when they know how inelastic your demand is (how bad you need that flight). I know prices vary slightly by weekday; I'm talking a 24 hour period. Any thoughts?

I have tried to get off these phone book distribtution lists for a long time. The delivery people don't use lists though; everyone gets one. In apartment complexes they dump a palet of the huge phone books and they do it semi-annually, if not more frequently. Their motivation is in the yellow pages - plain and simple advertisements. They make a a much higher profit on the book advertising than with online advertising. The only solution is to confront it by muicipality and require the bastards to use specific lists, giving residences opt-out capability.

I'm curious what people have to say about how the Telcos will fare with such a move. In my limited understanding that would mean increased competition and thus faster errosion of their customer base, though they still have to maintain the extensive infrastructure.

Yes, the built-in webcam works pretty good. It also has a built-in microphone and speakers so no extra hardware is required to video conference. Unfortunately, Skype's linux version (1.4) doesn't include webcam support, but the 2.0 beta version does. The eee PC comes with v1.4 as the default (probably because of its beta status), but their forum has a short tutorial on upgrading to the newer version. I've been using it with my girlfriend for a few weeks now with no problems.