I see no mention of removing all network connectivity, sealing them in a lead box, and encasing the box in a large block of cement. Until those things happen (or their equivalents), any computer is still "hackable." I believe they really mean that they couldn't think of a way to hack them, which is quite different. I am very eager to see a follow up in 6 months and a year out. I hope things go well, but I am afraid that I am still skeptical of the claims, but I do wish them well.

Any attempt to impose censorship will inevitably lead to bizarre and ironic situations. People who want censorship usually think that the world is a simple place with black and white decisions about right and wrong. Reality smacks you in the face when you try to apply what seems like a simple concept to actual situations.

I mainly use my netbook when I travel. I also see a lot of my students using them; they fit well on the arms of school desks, and the students have young enough eyes to tolerate the small screens. I see netbooks being very popular as second computers. Like I said, I use mine for traveling. Most of the students have a full sized desktop or laptop at home. XP fans will be happy because netbooks may force MS to keep it for a while. The biggest problem I see for MS is that a lot of the netbooks are coming out as part of data plans. The telcos are going to want to shave every bit of cost off these systems that they can, and the "MicroSoft tax" is one very obvious source of cost savings.

I am sure Best Buy is getting paid well for this, but ultimately it does hurt their reputation. One reason people go to a store like Best Buy is for information. If they get a reputation for giving out bad information then a lot of the reason for going there disappears. Granted, the typical reader of Slashdot probably doesn't need a lot of advice, and we probably know how to get better prices elsewhere. However, we do talk to a lot of people who are thinking about buying computers. I am thinking at this point it is probably better to go to Wal-mart where people assume the clerks know nothing about the products than it is to go to BestBuy where management is encouraging employees to give out bad information. I know there will be a lot of flames about the clerks at Best Buy being stupid, and people who rely on them are even stupider. However, I do know some Best Buy employees, and some of them are pretty sharp.

There have been a lot of these cases lately. On frequent theme is that the person publishing the schedule is also associated with some type of criticism of the transit authority involved. That suggests that the real reason for the lawsuits is to silence the critic rather than to block publication of the schedules. I haven't seen the proposed agreement in this case, but the license that has been proposed by the other transit authorities usually contains some language that ties access to the schedule data to restrictions on criticism of the transit authority. I wonder if that will happen here.

The thing that interests me is the model they are using. The major players are coming to an agreement on a standard before releasing products. The pattern over the last couple of decades has been for every major player to develop their own proprietary system and then try to force the market to their standard. This more open model is at the root of most successful technologies. Take a look at the TV industry. There was one common standard. Any company with the expertise could build a TV that would work with all commercial TV broadcasts, and broadcasters could send to any manufacturer's TV's. If TV had been invented in the 1990's, I could only watch Sony broadcasts on my Sony TV. The modern PC is another example. The IBM-PC was an inferior design, but it was an open standard; anyone could make parts and software for an IBM-PC. This technology might be boring, environmentally evil, and make us all sterile, but I am still glad to see the way this is being released.

One big difference is that Star Trek is a decent movie and Wolverine was at best mediocre.

For a long time KDE was regarded as the stable businesslike desktop and Gnome was for the experimenters. It is interesting to me that the roles have largely reversed. Gnome is now taking an incremental, evolutionary approach while KDE is the one taking risks and being more revolutionary.

The only real way to answer this question is to give it a try. Slapping a fee on everything could hurt the YouTube brand a lot, so it needs to be done slowly and starting at the fringes. I think they should let content providers charge subscription fees for their channels. Of course, YouTube/Google would get a cut of the revenue. Regular viewers shouldn't complain because this is new content above and beyond what is currently offered. YouTube could assess how users react and everyone could get a feel for how the price structures should be set up. My guess is that the content provides will seriously overprice their content. Content providers have pretty consistently overestimated the value of their content and what consumers will pay. We will probably end up with a model where short commercials are injected into long content. Viewers will have a choice to either watch or pay a subscription fee to skip the ads. Consumers will have the choice to 1)pay 2)watch commercials or 3)find entertainment elsewhere. Content providers tend to forget about this third option.

AP is no longer the only news source out there. CNN and Reuters will be more than happy to fill the gap if the AP wants to put itself behind higher paywalls and legal barriers to linking. This would be a good time to sell your stock in AP if you have any, because this kind of backward thinking will lead to the same results as Detroit believing that they could solve their economic problems by making bigger, less fuel efficient vehicles. Companies that want to return to the 1980's are doomed to fail.

It's not just the people. It looks like a lot of other industries finally woke up and say "Hey, this stuff the RIAA/MPAA is pulling is bad for OUR business." I was wondering how long it would take for other businesses to start putting up some resistance to the recording industry. I really hope this signals the start of a new trend. Perhaps the RIAA pushed to far on this one and woke up some sleeping giants.

This might work if they took the tax money from video games and applied it to things that really would reduce violent crime. Of course, things like reducing poverty, increasing literacy, and providing drug treatment for people who want to get off drugs won't get you as many headlines as bashing video games.

I thought Google had learned from Apple that making your developers mad is a bad idea. I guess they didn't.

You have a flash hard drive in the eee, so I would suggest using an ext2 or other non-journaling file system. Depending on how you use swap files you might also want to reduce the swappiness (I would be more specific, but discussions of swap space always precipitate flame wars). Wireless is the place you are most likely to run into support problems. The problems are resolvable, but it is still the area you are most likely to have headaches.