Umm - it's $200 with Linux.

But I just bought a $200 laptop on ebay with a Pentium M 1.5 GHz and Windows XP Pro. Sure it's used - but it's a laptop.

By the way - engadget's new f-ing flash ads are crashing my browser.

Yes you are.

Earthlink is really a non-player in the evolving Internet. They are just living off of the scraps of people who can't get high-speed Internet anyway, so it's no surprise that they can't get their act together in finding a business model for the future.

Even in the dial-up space there were always better alternatives to them. The only reason they got briefly big was because they were very aggressive at marketing themselves as the anti-AOL.

Plus the pre-bubbleburst Internet analysts loved to over-hype founder Sky Dayton as a wunderkind, and he turned out to be a one-trick pony. His Boingo and eCompanies still haven't found a survivable business model, unless you call draining investors of their money a business model.

Think of the implications for interrogation and law enforcement.

One step closer to Asimov's imagined Psychic Probe.

How about a speech recognition interface that completely removes the need for any keyboard/mouse input? And voice recognition that removes the need for passwords and fingerprint readers. And not having to use a microphone or headset but instead having "ears" in the upper left and right corners of the display.

There is really only one thing I'd change - make the screen 1280x800.

That's all. Maybe when sales slow down (after the novelty wears off) Asus will finally make this thing usable for all of us that want a cheap, light, very portable machine that we can use to Remote Desktop to our home machines without having to scroll up and down.

I'm hoping lower power (and cheaper) displays come out soon that will allow Asus to give these machines 1200x800. That's when I'll buy a few dozen for our company's technicians (even at $399 each). 480 pixels of height just makes too many tasks too complicated, since most useful Linux (and Windows) programs and web sites are assuming at least 768 pixels high.

Since when did children have rights?

Even fundamentalist Christians think children only have rights and should be protected between conception and birth, and then it's an 18 year free-for-all of oppression and totalitarian control.

The best thing about this kind of abuse of technology is that it might create a more defiant generation.

Neither HP nor Motorola can make a decent WinMo handset to save their lives. HTC has been proving that you can make a decently priced WinMo phone with great call quality and battery life for a couple of years now. I replaced my SonyEricsson phones with HTC WinMo phones already this year.

My favorite is my T-Mobile Dash. Awesome calls and battery life, awesome MP3 and video with TCPMP (HTC should just put it on all their WinMo phones), fantastic texting with the keyboard, it's thinner than an iPhone, and I don't need iTunes to put stuff on it. Its POP email client imitates push email like a star, and the calendar, text editor, mini spreadsheet, and browser are the best I've used on any handheld device.

Plus I know software developers that can whip out a Microsoft .NET Compact Framework app twice as fast as any Java programmer I've seen can make an app for Symbian.

I actually welcome our robot overlords' plan to slowly replace human cabdrivers with machines. Honestly - while I hate to see hard-working and honest people lose their jobs to machines, this is just one step towards awesomely cool robotic cabs, and NYC is the best place to start. I hope that they just make sure that there are plenty of cameras on these babies when they go non-human, because the ensuing vandalism anarchy is going to be sick.