Khameni himself said in 2006 that oil at $140/bbl is unsustainable and unwise for everyone. Iran today imports more than 80% of their own refined product. Iran is rationing gasoline. Iran has 25% unemployment and 25% inflation. Iran is diverting billions of dollars it can't afford, into an ill advised nuclear program instead of building refineries or maintaining their upstream oil infrastructure. An oil infrastructure they've let let decay since 1979. French oil concern ELF Aquitaine said several years ago, 2001-2 that Iran then needed to invest more than $20 billion in the next 5-8 years in order to keep their oil economy running. They have not done this. Oil fields in constant production since the 1930's are starting to play out. Getting more and better oil out of them requires more expensive high tech methods like steam injection.

Like any other dictatorship, jobs are handed out as political favors to ensure loyalty and curry favor. The energy portfolio in Iran is run by ideologues who need to suck revenue out of it in order to fund The Islamic Revolution, Hezbollah and regional terrorism. This is not an ideal organization for maintaining the oil infrastructure.

Iran sees its role, its destiny as being THE regional super power. They will spend and spend to that end. Now they are realizing that oil alone cannot fuel the revolution. Oil alone failed to wrest control of Iraq from the US. Oil alone hasn't eradicated the Jew Menace. THAT's why they're at the table, however pointless that exercise is. And all parties already agreed that Iran came with no reasonable intention to accomplish anything but a stalling manuever. Nothing in fact was accomplished.

We don't need markets to do their job. We need to ratchet down consumption.

We need a beneficent dictator to do the right thing in spite of what people want or think.

Eating less does a lot more than working twice as hard but you have to do a bit of both. The simple biological reality is that if you're sucking in hundreds of more calories than you burn you will get fat. Anything else is an excuse to be fat. So be it, and be fat. But stop complaining about our failure to over analyze it for you.

The couple who had to pretend to tend to a teenager wound up 'divorced'. That is the ultimate truth. Teenagers suck. Even they think so.

Their high prices are the result of taxes for which ostensibly, they get something back. We do not. All we get is a broken down highway system and falling down bridges. You could tax gas in the US $10/gal if you like, all you're doing is stealing $10/gal from people. It goes nowhere.

Because metered SMS is THE MOST expensive service they offer. It costs more to text than it does to send data to the International Space Station. With (really) unlimited SMS I saved on hundreds of call minutes otherwise. We use 4000 text messages a month on average. For $20 it's the best deal out there.

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.

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.