Baldrson made the front page.

Jim Bowery is a racist piece of crap. This is where my journey with this website ends.

Surely there's enough blame to go around?

We can and should blame the MPs for doing unethical things, bringing in bad laws and generally behaving like arseholes.

We can also blame the public for being complacent and not voting for AVC or whatever it was. In fact this latter blame apportioning appeals to me a lot because I left the country for several years, and when I came back I found out that the great unwashed had voted to continue being ignored. Morons!

Which goes to show that it has zero support, surely?

Always the way.

The last big one I remember was ID cards, which was also very skewed, but at the last minute the government decided that any results collected from the internet were unrepresentative and to be ignored.

It's almost as if your opinion doesn't count if collected electronically, because it's too easy or something. Never mind that it brings down the barriers and allows people to participate just that little bit more in democracy, no citizen, you didn't try hard enough so even though we heard you we feel safe ignoring you.

And they are safe, frankly. We never vote the bastards out because of this stuff.

Actually a number of them are potentially trying to bring the aircraft.

See 'chemtrails' for a conspiracy community of whackos who think that airliners are trying to poison them, and that bringing them down would be just awesome.

I don't agree either, because these provisions are usually more about what you are allowed to do with what you've bought than they are about hacking other people's systems.

Breaking DRM should be legal and applauded, not criminalised.

I agree it's a nice idea, this middle path where everyone wins. But I strongly disagree that people should have to opt out of anything, and I also don't believe for one second that advertisers will respect it even if it is left to the user. Since when are marketers even the slightest bit trustworthy?

The only way default-off is anything like an honest option, rather than a dishonest way of saying there's an option but leaving most people in the dark, would be to have the browser ask. Probably when it's installed or updated to a release that can do DNT. A full page explaining the issue clearly and concisely and letting the user choose. Not just slipping in a config option quietly.

And even then it would be a total failure because marketing scum would ignore it.

If a significant number of people turn it on, it will be ignored. This is wheter MS does it or the users do it themselves.

Of course we all know that users won't change the default because they may as well be cattle, but still...

I see the whole thing as a waste of time. Nobody wants to be tracked. A polite request is not oing to fix anything. Technological and legislative measures are needed.

Those single vehicle collisions are probably drunk people.

The war on drugs causes -
1. Money to be funnelled to cartels
2. Devloping countries to be in permanent states of civil war
3. Users' lives to be wrecked for a crime that harms only them
4. Users to die from impurites, unknown substances and unknown strengths
5. Billions of dollars that could go toward actual harm reduction to be spent on militarising the police
6. People with no relation to the drug war to get shot by those police
7. A myriad of other negative effects

'keep your head down, don't take the piss' is a great way to perpetuate injustice and murder. Just because it's not happning in your back yard doesn't mean much.

I'm not saying legalise everything with no restrictions, but there's got to be a better way than the way we're doing it now.

Maybe you're right, maybe the people that wanted a netbook already have one. I agree that they've just sorta stagnated since then. I partially blame windows for som of the market failure, they weren't really powerful enough for that. ASUS in particular failed hard at Linux too, the Xandros mine came with was horribly broken.

I've replaced nearly all the replaceable parts in the 901 too - more RAM (1->2GB), changed the webcam (ran it as a hackintosh for a short while, the original webcam in the linux model was not supported), larger SSD (16->64G), different network card, new keyboard... It's definitely past its prime though, compared to anything even slightly modern it really crawls. Can't even quite do HD video decoding, and the battery life is nothing special now. Maybe its replacement will be an ASUS transformer.

Well that sort of plays into what I meant. Instead of differentiating themselves by being damn small and damn cheap, they got bigger and more expensive until the point that low-end laptops became more appealing.

I loved the 9 inch models, which all but disappeared.

Could it be that a race to the bottom, cutting corners to reduce costs, ISN'T what people want? What happened with Netbooks again?

Except isn't this article saying that they're too expensve and not selling?

And what happened to netbooks is that they got more expensive and the specs stayed the same for multiple years. The manufacturers started adding bells and whistles and pushed the price up into the region of low end (but much more capable) laptops. Maybe they would have been a bigger success if they had focussed on budget. Also willing to concede that tablets ate their market.

(Typed on my eee901... )

Keep reading... Junior only starts bawling after a whole list of things are brought out and he realises the game is up.

Sociopath or not this kid needs to a full on psych eval, not just 'counselling'

DNT was a way to tell people not to track you. It's not only the ads that do that, but js plugins, analytics, even social networking buttons and graphics.

Not acceptable.

IMHO now this has failex we need a new set of ABP rules that block facebook and google (etc) resources from loading when not on their domains.

Indeed. I dont even mind if they detect that and block me. I'm not prepared to accept the implied contract to make my computer fetch ads over my connection. If they then want to drop their end it's fine.

I usually let text-ads through because they're just easy to ignore.