It's twice as big and twice as heavy as the Asus EeePC. I'm sure it's a nice laptop but it just isn't as portable as th EeePC and not everyone needs much power on the road. Taking notes, cheking the mail and surfing the web is what is enough for quite a few people. Why pay twice as much for a laptop that's twice the size and twice the weight, if you don't even need the extra power?

iPods aren't that uncommon among audiophiles. Most of the iPod models have a pretty good DAC, but the headphone amplifier could be better. Thankfully you can get Line out audio out of the dock port and use your own headphone amp for portable (though bulky) hifi goodness. Sure, it's bulkier than using the internal amp, but good 'phones really require more power to sound their best anyways.

iPod supports Apple Lossless and you can convert your old FLAC-files to it (lossless to lossless conversion doesn't deteriorate sound quality) or alternatively, if you have a 5G ipod or older, you can install an alternative firmware called Rockbox on it that supports FLAC (and ogg and such..)

iPods are not bad when it comes to producing portable hifi audio.

http://xkcd.com/331/

I didn't think that the USB message wand was that crappy. But whether or not you like it, those warning messages in chinese products are always quite hilarious!
http://www.digitalcowboy.jp/products/lampex/index.html
In the middle of that page, left side.

Just because the lens is slow, doesn't mean the lens can't produce high quality photos. As a matter of fact, a faster lens would be a lot more complex and they'd have to compromise on either image quality, size or price. So there is some logic with their choice.

Making a high-quality f/4.0 lens is a lot more easier than making a high-quality f/2.8 lens.

If you create applications that run on Ubuntu (or any other Linux distro), you don't have to release the source code. You can use whatever license you want with your applications.

However, if you use the source code of a GPL'ed application in your own application, you must release your own application under GPL, too (and release the source). Same goes if you modify a GPL'ed program and release the it (which is what Asus has basiaclly done)

Not all of the countries in Europe use dubbing. At least here in Finland pretty much EVERYTHING foreign is simply subtitiled (excluding programmes meant for very small children, they are dubbed). They tried to dub "The Bold and the Beautiful" quite a few years ago, but it resulted in a public outrage and they quickly switched back to subtitles. Finns hate dubbing.

So dont't generalize things. There are some pretty big differences among European countries, were not all the same.