Does $50k remotely make any dent there? Aren't these projects tens of millions of dollars?

I got one of these for work the first day they came out. Here's how I use it:

* At the office, I use it like a traditional Windows laptop, running virtual machines and whatnot for development.
* On the train, I turn it into a tablet and read books, play games, read the newspaper and magazines. There's a great PDF reader and a Kindle app. Also, I use it in a singing group I belong to for my sheet music.

In short, it's a laptop plus an iPad.

Also, I've had zero problems with smudging on the screen. I've had the device for over a month and have never cleaned the screen. Maybe I'm just super clean? I keep it in a soft case made for a Mac Air, so maybe sliding it in and out of that case cleans it off.

That and the "turbo" button. Anyone miss that?

My opinion is this is largely a consequence of how the Maximize functionality works / has worked.

The ability to half-screen maximize by dragging a window to the left or right side of the screen helps quite a bit -- this is in Windows 7 and newer builds of Ubuntu (IIRC).

My typical reason for wanting a second monitor is the ability to maximize documentation/help stuff on one monitor while the other is reserved for the code itself. I find I work much slower on, for example, a laptop where I constantly have to switch back and forth between different windows to get at what I want.

Exactly. People seem to forget that in order for data to become useful, the user has to decrypt it at some point. That involves providing the key, and that's when a clever rootkit will spring into action.

I'm not sure why one would view this as surprising -- given our own Solar System it seems like a highly likely outcome.

That being said, it's great the the resolution has reached the levels where features like this can be distinguished for such faint objects.

I believe they have a way to change your master password. So, what they'd likely do is decrypt the various keychain files using your old password (which you'd have to enter to change it), and then they re-encrypt with the new password.

Generally, passwords are pretty weak unless you follow specific protocols in how you set them up (passphrases, unusual chars, misspellings). I'd rather they used a public-private keypair, but then that would be cumbersome for users.

There was an open-source project called SAProxy at one point which would put SpamAssassin on your desktop. Not sure what happened to it. It was integrated into a great email client I used to use called Bloomba.

Doesn't Xbox lose money still?

I just can't take these products seriously. Instead of this niche marketing, microsoft needs to focus on something with broad appeal. There's a reason iPhone beat them in that space, and this is exactly it.

Sure, but people have been speculating about the iPad for at least a year and a half.

Obviously competitors have realized that it's worth it to come out with clone or me-too products much faster than they did in the past with the iPhone. This suggests to me that they'll be at least somewhat more successful than before in taking market share from apple.

On the desert-solar thing, It turns out you need to clean the mirrors frequently, which requires water, which requires energy to bring in since there is little in the desert. It's a big problem.