It says that Nissan is debating the idea of better battery options. Well, that's great, there, Nissan. My guess is that the folks at Tesla aren't debating these things so much as always working on it. This is what separates the old companies from the new.

I remember reading in _Big Blues_ how IBM mainframes were throttled when first installed. That way, a tech could be sent into the locked room with the golden screwdriver and magically upgrade things to incredible speed. The customers didn't know that they had been using hobbled systems and were happily impressed that the thing was now so much faster. Sounds like the same trick AT&T is trying to pull.

Our local Syracuse paper was bought up by the same folks who are running the Times-Picayune into the ground. We used to have two daily papers (certainly don't need that now), but are left with a non-daily paper that is primarily AP wire and NY Times stories.

What I would like is to see Syracuse University buy the paper, use the press to print a daily for both the university and the city (keeping with the Town & Gown movement). The paper could be the Journalism department and also be an outlet for the business department. It seems a win-win. I wonder what the downsides are.

And as with piracy, aren't the methods for eliminating ads going to increase? I tape delay the Olympics when I watch because I HAVE to have the ability to skip the commercials. I honestly can't stand them and won't watch. YouTube has become polluted with them too and I go there less and less. Have we reached the tipping point when a half hour network show is less than 20 minutes long?

I played Millipede until I ran my entire family dry of quarters. And the better I got at it, the more mushrooms appeared.

HBO is playing the same game. I wonder how long their quarters will last.

Nothing in the world says "I love you" quite so much as stolen merchandise. I'm so head over heels for my wife that I'm about to go out and knock over a convenience store.

This comment is right on the mark, but I wonder if Murdoch will wait for the money to happen. I would give this less than a year. (BTW, I have been wrong about every technology related prediction I have ever made.) Mostly I keep thinking, would I use this thing (if I had a tablet/iPad to run it on)? The answer is no, because for now the NYTimes is free. When their paywall goes up, I'll have to see how that works out and what other sources I might read. But it has been so long since I paid for news that I find it difficult to imagine going back to that. If nothing else, I'll send a hundred bucks to NPR and turn the radio on. Maybe I don't need to read the news at all.

A regime that tries to shut down all means for its population to communicate is one that does not deserve to continue.

Most places are reporting that she is in surgery. Please change the original post. Thank you.

Wow, I can't remember the last time I watched much of anything live on television. The price I pay for commercial free television is that I wait until it's over before starting the TiVo. Even my parents don't watch commercials anymore, they flip through the rest of the channels until their show is back on. It amazes me that companies still pay the price for commercial spots. They must still work, but it's hard to imagine. It's also hard to imagine that 1/2 hour show is shorter than 20 minutes long. When will businesses learn that when they make their practices onerous, people find a way around. Too many commercials leads to TiVo. Too high a price for music leads to bittorrent. And so on.

Oh well.

I would think that the rise of Macs is actually the reason fewer people are using Linux. The Macs just work for people and solve the Windows problems that so many of them have had. Besides, and this may sound curmudgeonly, I think that students are less and less interested in how things work and just want to get stuff done. Ten years ago, there was a real need to know html. Now, not so much. That translates to other things. When you don't need to know how to work under the hood, Mac makes sense.

For me, playing under the hood is half the reason I use Linux (though I'm typing this on Windows 7 right now) and most of the reason why I find the Mac so unsatisfying. But I'm old and toothless, so what do I know.

This is smart thinking. The process should be easy but not invisible. I like that Chrome does a lot of things easily, but don't like that I don't know about those things. It leads to the sudden "this thing doesn't work anymore" syndrome where things break with no seeming reason.

That said, I hate that Firefox has to be restarted to install add-ons. Things like that aren't good enough. I should be able to install the add-on and use it immediately.

Combine the two ideas: tell me that my program is being updated but do it for me when I push "OK".

I agree that the 3G is not necessary for my experience and that this thing should sell for $99. Amazon has just moved to selling more eBooks than hardcovers, why not just keep going with that.

As for the full tablet experience, an incremental approach sounds right to me. Next, how about an audio player for Amazon MP3s. Then color screen and the ability to download Amazon video. That way they keep generating revenue and utilize it as a tool for selling more stuff which is all it was ever designed to be.

Me, I'm sticking with my Netbook as well. I watched a few people during a summer course I took trying to make it with just an iPad. It's not there yet. Hell, I like a keyboard and there's that whole printing thing and...

But if it comes below $100, I might get me a Kindle.

Bad form to reply to my own post, but here goes.

I just had a thought: this is exactly the way it's supposed to work. Songbird is a pretty bad player and I wouldn't imagine that many people are using it, so it dies.

I like the idea of natural selection. It works.

...but I tried Songbird and it was slow, prone to crashes, and generally not very useful. Compared to Banshee, it just didn't work well enough. I don't like to see any company stop supporting their software on Linux, but I'm hardpressed to find anyone I know who uses Songbird anyway.

This is a sad thing at the general level of Linux software, but so far as usefulness goes, not that big of a deal to me.