Instead of getting smaller and cheaper, they're getting smaller and more expensive. Instead of replacing desktops they've become a 'second' PC. I can't for the life of me see any long run practical use of an $800 laptop with a 9" screen unless I had something else to use instead most of the time. But if it were $200 bucks, and it could run my office stuff or I could stuff it in a bag and take it to the job site and not worry too much about it then possibly it would fill a niche. But as it is, either it's too small or too expensive or too fragile. When you can get an Acer with a 15" screen for less than $500 the difference in weight and size become less important.

Nine people were sentenced. One was a woman.

BTW 29 people were hanged in public from cranes this past Sunday. For various crimes from adultery, public drunkenness, being gay and the usual offenses the Peaceful Persian Kingdom of Peace that radical liberals in the left love to love so much found them guilty of.

Anything imperfect must be ignored.

That would be my plan.

Are murdered. Because America sucks and they all should die. That will show them.

Ration it. You get a fixed amount per month. To do with as you wish. Beyond that you don't get any. Period. End of story. Same thing with natural gas, heating oil and electricity. Decrease those allowances 10% per year.

Of course this would create a large black market, but so what? The prices would be so high as to be self regulating.

Sorry, you took the wrong book down off the Marxist bookshelf. They're in the building trades, home improvement, auto repair and general services businesses. They are paid far and above minimum wage but less than trade wages for non illegals. So, unless you're willing to tell me that the poor poor people are scratching out a living as a $17/hr roofer then you would be...........wrong.

Sorry again. Go back to Marxistblog.org and read a different book.

My county is floating its third billion dollar bond next year to keep pace with growth. Property taxes are going to go up another 30-40% on top of this year's 75% increase. given that population is increasing 8-9%/year but school population has increased 145% since 1996, somewhere the Salon radicals' math is wrong. The difference is children of illegal aliens who don't pay property taxes, 60% of which go to educating their children.

So again, all the happy hippies in Salon Francisco, please send your checks to me.

I bet a sternly worded letter followed up by a semi-harsh Op_Ed in a major newspaper are in order now. Look out.

What I do know is I will now be barraged by emails from Rahm Emmanuel asking for money.

My 15" Lenovo T61 and my 15" Lenovo N200 3000 each with a 9 cell Lion get more than 5 hrs. The T61 has 2GB/120GB the N200 has 1GB/80GB. The biggest factor for battery life is CPU draw. The T61 has a dual core while the N200 does not so the T61 needs some judicious power scheming.

From a production cost perspective, at least half the total cost of your laptop is the screen. Bigger screen more price. And yields and QA are such that anything above 17" is frightfully expensive. Conversely a 9" screen should be far cheaper than 9/15ths of the cost of a 15" screen. This is one reason why there are hundreds of millions of PoS/Cash registers with 9" screens, portable DVD players with them and why even cars are starting to get them. They're very cheap.

So once you have a uITX (micro ITX or even one of the up and coming pITX pico ITX) MoBo Form factor where just about everything is SBC surface mount and/or it uses a single uPCI header, and on board connectors for RAM are standard such as one of the half size DDR slots, the ONLY thing that represents a costly adder is solid state drive. Which honestly is more of a gew gaw at 6-8GB than anything useful. High durability flash with good R/W performance are still artificially expensive. A better solution is to flash the OS into ROM, and use a high capacity CF card or two or an SD type, for nonvolatile storage, or even a cheap hard drive. Remove all ports except for a USB and since we can't forget the pimp factor, you have to leave a DVD drive in. That's going to hurt battery life though so you'll have to add another row of Lion cells to the package and make a 'hanger' type battery pack that sticks out from the case. That would be the best relationship of small vs cheap.

But again, it's kind of a solution in search of a problem. It's not a notebook or a smart phone or a palmtop. It's something else. And yes atom is power miserly but in real world examples nothing runs like the spec. On average the atom's claim to fame is that it uses roughly the same amount of power under idle or full load. Let's wait and see how the gurus of low power, VIA do with their Isaiah.

Everything plans are $90 from Sprint for a longer commitment. Of course none of the carriers are actually UNLIMITED. They all put caps on data per month. Sprint's is about 3GB though it's unstated (similarly that unlimited VoIP phone service you have is soft capped at 4000-5000 minutes per month).

I have 5 phones on a voice plan (with no 3G), unlimited text, 2100 peak mins/month, free nights-weekends, unlimited email, unlimited picture mail, internet (slow), calling features, etc etc. for $141/mo. So by comparison, paying $90 for one phone for basically a 3G data add-on is insanely expensive.