The article said he had this all figured out in 2007 - yet the details of this cypher are just now being published in July 2009. What took so long - the quest to gain ITAR compliance?

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the slot for the ATT SIM Card (a more elegant solution than USB device by God!) kind of tilts the playing field in the direction of one vendor? If I were to pay that much for a laptop I would want everything about it to be "general purpose" to the largest extent possible.

Several years ago we here at NASA replaced Solaris X86 with Red Hat Linux as the operating system for our PCS systems (Thinkpad laptops used as the crew interface in the Space Station's command and control systems) We are currently in the process of rehosting again, this time to Scientific Linux, a CentOS-like rebuild of RHEL done by the good folks up at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Certainly cost was a factor, but not the deciding one. From our perspective it is golden not to have to track how many laptops each of the various development groups (many of which are international) have it loaded on.