perfidy

Here's a couple more interesting bits:

• Foreign Policy has a nice bit on a nasty topic - the endless not-wars in Africa.  Made me think of a big billboard with a picture of King Leopold saying, "Miss me yet?"
• Trippy
• The Somali Pirate Business Model has one Problem
• The inconstant Sun

This made me giggle. I think I might have crossed over into tittering.

Don't think I don't have my misgivings about sending some hotshot Asian Studies minor into space for the first time. This is NASA, not Grinnell. I don't have the time or patience for your renegade attitude and macho bravado. I can't believe the fate of mankind rests on some roughneck bachelor of the arts. I know your type. You feed off the thrill of inference and small, instructor-led discussion. You think you're some kind of invincible God just because you have cursory understandings of Buddhism, classical literature, and introductory linguistics. Well listen up, cowboy. You make one false move up there, be it a clumsy thesis statement, poorly reasoned argument, or glib analysis, and your team is dead, along with this whole sorry planet.

It is a good and gracious God that created a world where there is a McSweeny's Internet Tendency. Hat tip to Isegoria, who I've been reading lately with great enjoyment and much edification. I happened across him by way of Aretae, who I linked a while back on the climate issue. I owe him a debt of thanks for saving me the trouble of writing an overlong climate post. And by way of them, I started reading Foseti, who is moderately local to me. Here's a few interesting posts from all of them - here, here, here and here.

And an apology, while I'm at it. I've written my next post twice. And then rewritten it again. I don't know exactly why I am procrastinating on actually clicking the publish button, but I am. I'm going to crap out that post no matter how much it hurts. And then, a guest blogger. Stay tuned.

Just watched The Men Who Stare at Goats. And it occurred to me that George Clooney is a fantastic actor. Other actors, concerned with their craft, try to disappear into the the role. Method acting. This is admirable. But not for George Fucking Clooney. He absorbs the role, and makes it him. He is the anti-method actor. Think about it - O Brother Where Art Thou?, ER, any other role. They are all distinct, yet they are clearly George Fucking Clooney.

Amazing. Good movie, btw. Two thumbs up.

There comes Lopt, the treacherous
Lusting for revenge
He leads the legions of the dead
Towards the Aesir's realm

They march in full battle dress
With faces grim and pale
Tattered banners and bloody flags
Rusty spears and blades

Cries ring out, loud and harsh
From cracked and broken horns
Long forgotten battle cries
In strange and foreign tongues

Spear and sword clash rhythmically
Against the broken shields they beat
They bring their hate and anarchy
Onto Vigrid's battlefield

There comes Lopt, the treacherous
He stands against the gods
His army grim and ravenous
Lusting for their blood

Nowhere is longer safe
The earth moves under our feet
The great world tree Yggorasil
Trembles to its roots

Sons of muspel gird the field
Behind them Midgaard burns
Hrym's horde march from Nifelheim
And the Fenris wolf returns

Heimdal grips the Giallarhorn
He sounds that dreaded note
Oden rides to quest the Norns
But their web is torn
The Aesir rides out to war
With armor shining bright
Followed by the Einherjer
See valkyries ride

Nowhere is longer safe
The earth moves under our feet
The great world tree Yggorasil
Trembles to its roots

Sons of muspel gird the field
Behind them Midgaard burns
Hrym's horde march from Nifelheim
And the Fenris wolf returns

Listening to this makes working at home really, really tolerable.

I don't know why that would bother anyone.

Related.

Screenshots from google, offered with next to no comment:

This is what people want to know:

Mild enough, but getting worse:

Let's run with this:

Interesting. What about...

Hmmnm.  Let's go further afield:

And...

Funny.  I wonder what other ordinary transactions could be productively and imaginatively re-imagined as sordid criminal activity?

While trolling the back waters of the internets for movie poster images, I found this charming compendium. My favorite, I think, is this one:

It's a nice logo, really. Clean, ambiguous, stark, vaguely ominous. Hints of atomic power.

I almost inexpressibly happy.  I am floating on air.  I am tingly with joy.  I am so happy, if I saw a congressman, I wouldn't spit on him.

Why? The materialistic and gadget addicted side of Buckethead has been deeply unhappy for much of 2010. Because on the day after Christmas, his dog Kasey gave him an anti-Christmas present. Kasey committed the unforgivable sin of breaking his master's iPhone. Horror!

I was walking Kasey, waiting patiently for him to find a suitable pile of snow to piss on. I realize that this is a difficult process, piles of snow being so different and all. So I was reading something or other on my iPhone and smoking a smoke when tragically, Kasey saw a squirrel or snow weasel or some damn thing and jerked on the leash. Which jerked my hand. Which held the iPhone. Which then wasn't holding the iPhone. The iPhone flipped up, did a one and a half gainer, and did a belly flop glass down on the pavement. 10.0 from the East German judge, but the glass was cracked.

Here's the villain, looking remorseful:

The only thing damaged was the glass surface - the underlying screen and touch sensors were still functional. For about a month, I continued to use the phone while I tried to figure out what course to follow for repairs. Every time I swiped my finger over the cracked glass, I cried a little tear inside.

Apple wanted $200 to fix the glass. "$200!" I exclaimed, "That's the price of a new phone!" "A new, unsubsidized phone is $650," the Apple Store employee helpfully pointed out. Well, that seemed high, seeing that you could buy the glass part for $25 online. Of course, I couldn't get a subsidized phone, I'd used my upgrade to get the one that lay, broken, before me. Mrs. Buckethead is eligible for an upgrade, but wasting her upgrade on a replacement phone for me seemed, well, unseemly. Also stupid, since I was planning on using her upgrade to get me an iPhone 4.0 when it comes out in June.

I dithered on ordering the parts and doing the repair myself. On the one hand, I'm moderately handy with electronics. I've built my own computers. I can repair things. I can make things better than they were before. On the other hand, the iPhone is a $600 piece of magical technology made out of rainbows and leprechaun brains, hand crafted by Unicorns. After deep soul searching and comparing the $50 with $200, I decided to order the parts.

The parts arrived, and I disassembled my phone using custom made plastic prybars and a suction cup. I removed twenty dozen molecule-sized screws. I pulled the screen assembly out of the phone. I disconnected things. The tricky bit was getting the LCD screen out and away from the glass. I removed the broken glass, not even cutting myself. I installed the new glass, reassembled the phone, and proudly turned it back on.

Holy mother of fuck, I broke the LCD display when I twisted it to get it out of the frame.

I cried bitter, bitter tears. It seems that LCD screens do not tolerate twisting, even in small, repair-justified amounts.

I tried not to think about my phone. About as successfully as you can avoid noticing you've amputated your arm. Because, after two and a half years, losing the phone was like losing an arm. I borrowed my wife's iPhone - my original iPhone. But that was like losing an arm and replacing it with one of those creepy hook things. Sure you can pick things up, but you scare small children. I wanted the full 3GS goodness.  I wanted my arm back.

So I looked online again. Some people warned against the online repair shops. Plus, shipping costs yet money. I decided to go with a local repair shop that was "only two blocks from the metro." Turns out, that's actually five blocks, not one of which has plowed sidewalks. And uphill both ways.  But anyway.

Dropped the maimed iPhone off with the helpful and condescending lackey. And three days and $200 later, I have a working iPhone again. And I am whole and happy once more.

This whole experience has been stuffed to the gills with lessons, moral and otherwise.

• One, never trust dogs. The little bastards don't care what you've got in your hand when they see an ice weasel. This obviously has implications beyond iPhones.
• Two, $30 for an iPhone case is cheaper than $250 in iPhone repair costs. You'd think that would be obvious. But it ain't.
• Three, I am completely and unabashedly addicted to my iPhone. I was briefly embarrassed by the extent and deepness of my affliction. But really, why shouldn't I be dependent on something so damn useful? Do you think your dependence on, say, the internet or cars is ridiculous?
• Four, I went down the road my Grandfather always walked, the one that made my grandmother say, "We fix everything twice." I spent $250 repairing the phone, and a lot more trouble. If I'd just gone to Apple I'd have had it fixed sooner, spent less money and wouldn't have violated my warranty.
• Five, I know all I have to do to recapture this feeling is buy an iPad next month.

While I was putting together some information for a gloating post on the collapse of the the whole Anthropomorphic Global Warming thingy, I found this calm and well organized bit that neatly outlines the whole thing in a sane and even tone.  Especially in light of the fact that the central figure in the AGW movement has admitted that there has been no statistically significant warming in the last fifteen years (a period that has seen ever more crazed claims of mounting disaster unless. we. act. right. now!) - this just lays it out:

On what grounds do we defer to scientists?

We defer to scientists on the grounds that their information is true.  They are using verifiable data.  They are using clear, repeatable processes.  Their theory/model predicts experimentally verifiable results.  They are using solidly agreed upon theory.  The proxy for solidly agreed upon theory is publication of (and citation count of) articles in science journals.  Finally, science is assumed to be done in a disinterested fashion.  Truth is more important than specific conclusions.  All of those things, we don't generally have time to check for ourselves, and it would take a lot of training to do so.  In AGW, all 5 reasons to defer to the scientists have broken down.

A.  On AGW, the data was not verifiable.  It was hidden data, that was not being released.  In the face of FOIA the data was not released.  Furthermore, ClimateGate emails say conclusively that there was a conspiracy to not release the data (which indicates fear of skeptics poking at it).  Furthermore, both Indian and Russian scientists/instrument techs have said that the data that the instruments gave have been manipulated in such a way as to provide the right conclusions.  Most recently, the line is that the dog ate the original data.  Conclusion: in the case of AGW, you cannot rely on the scientists for data.

B. On AGW, the processes were opaque.  First, the software was not released to the world.  And it was modeling software of the kind that we know (from experience with Macro) just doesn't work well in general.  When the software was released through the ClimateGate hack, we discovered that there was a very good reason that the software wasn't released: it sucks.  Feed in any data you like (the price of rice in china in the 15th century), and you'll get a hockey stick. Conclusion: in the case of AGW, you cannot rely on the scientists for process.

C.  On AGW, the theory and data don't line up ("Hide the decline").  Further, most predictions are effectively non-Popperian.  We can't verify.  Some of us would say that makes it not science.  Conclusion: in the case of AGW, you can't rely on the scientists for experimental verification.

D.  On AGW, the peer review process has been corrupted, as per the ClimateGate emails.  There was an active conspiracy to keep skeptical voices out of peer review process, and then active claims that "it's not peer reviewed science" against skeptics.  The peer review process for climate science is all the way broken.  Hence, there can be no supposition that peer-reviewed means good. Conclusion: in the case of AGW, you can' rely on the peer review process to converge upon true theory.

E.  On AGW, with all government grants going to climate alarmists, and 4 Trillion(!!!) Euros of green investment funds trying to find ways to make "green" investments more profitable, there is very little chance of disinterested science.  Furthermore, those of us who are suspicious of alarmism as per Mencken.

If you can't get funding for your current studies (or future studies) without coming to pro-AGW conclusions, somehow the AGW conclusions can be teased out of your data.

I'd like to hear what Al Gore was saying when the BBC interview with Phil Jones was released.  The entire global warming fiasco has been a perfect example of why science and government shouldn't sleep together, let alone get married.  They do not make a good couple, and their children are certain to be retarded.

But while you're waiting for me to get off my ass and write my own climate post, go and read the whole thing.  It's worth it.

From Scalzi, a link to a very wise post.

Note: this chart not to scale; the red slice is unimaginably large.

Although it merits a spot in the update at the bottom of the post, I would argue that one subcategory of the Shit you don't know you don't know is really more dangerous, and important, than the rest - the Shit you think you know, but don't.  This results in active stupid, truly dangerous or offensive behavior.  Someone who doesn't know something, when exposed to knowledge of it, will usually accept that there is something to learn.  But if you're convinced that you know something you will have absolutely no motivation to learn it, no matter how desperately important it is that you do.

I also dig this characterization of Don Rumsfeld's comments from a few years back:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

I was wandering through the dank cellars of the Perfidious Archives this morning, looking for proof of my prescient thoughts on a completely different topic, when I ran across this post from the summer of 2005.  Here we are a half decade later, and this is fully as relevant now as it was then.

I quoted from an editorial by California State representative Tom McClintock:

Across California, children are bringing home notes warning of dire consequences if Gov. Schwarzenegger's scorched earth budget is approved - a budget that slashes Proposition 98 public school spending from $42.2 billion this year all the way down to $44.7 billion next year. That should be proof enough that our math programs are suffering.

As a public school parent, I have given this crisis a great deal of thought and have a modest suggestion to help weather these dark days.

Maybe - as a temporary measure only - we should spend our school dollars on our schools. I realize that this is a radical departure from current practice, but desperate times require desperate measures.

The Governor proposed spending $10,084 per student from all sources. Devoting all of this money to the classroom would require turning tens of thousands of school bureaucrats, consultants, advisors and specialists onto the streets with no means of support or marketable job skills, something that no enlightened social democracy should allow.

So I will begin by excluding from this discussion the entire budget of the State Department of Education, as well as the pension system, debt service, special education, child care, nutrition programs and adult education. I also propose setting aside $3 billion to pay an additional 30,000 school bureaucrats $100,000-per-year (roughly the population of Monterey) with the proviso that they stay away from the classroom and pay their own hotel bills at conferences.

This leaves a mere $6,937 per student, which, for the duration of the funding crisis, I propose devoting to the classroom.

To illustrate how we might scrape by at this subsistence level, let's use a hypothetical school of 180 students with only $1.2 million to get through the year.

We have all seen the pictures of filthy bathrooms, leaky roofs, peeling paint and crumbling plaster to which our children have been condemned. I propose that we rescue them from this squalor by leasing out luxury commercial office space. Our school will need 4,800 square feet for five classrooms (the sixth class is gym). At $33 per foot, an annual lease will cost $158,400.

This will provide executive washrooms, around-the-clock janitorial service, wall-to-wall carpeting, utilities and music in the elevators. We'll also need new desks to preserve the professional ambiance.

Next, we'll need to hire five teachers - but not just any teachers. I propose hiring only associate professors from the California State University at their level of pay. Since university professors generally assign more reading, we'll need 12 of the latest edition, hardcover books for each student at an average $75 per book, plus an extra $5 to have the student's name engraved in gold leaf on the cover.

Since our conventional gym classes haven't stemmed the childhood obesity epidemic, I propose replacing them with an annual membership at a private health club for $39.95 per month. This would provide our children with a trained and courteous staff of nutrition and fitness counselors, aerobics classes and the latest in cardiovascular training technology.

Finally, we'll hire an $80,000 administrator with a $40,000 secretary because - well, I don't know exactly why, but we always have.

This budget leaves a razor-thin reserve of just $216,703 or $1,204 per pupil, which can pay for necessities like paper, pencils, personal computers and extra-curricular travel. After all, what's the point of taking four years of French if you can't see Paris in the spring?

The school I have just described is the school we're paying for. Maybe it's time to ask why it's not the school we're getting.

I added:

It’s this kind of thinking that exposes the problems with equating money spent with performance.  The educational bureaucracy eats away at the resources supposedly intended for students.  And strangely enough, we have become so used to the problem that something like this seems radical, strange and wild-eyed.

Just pretend that the previous school infrastructure was eliminated in a series of freak accidents.  Strangely selective tornados demolished all of the school buildings.  The teachers all got on Survivor X, Sierra Leone.  The superintendent was run over by a gas truck.  The principals were all convicted of barratry and loitering.  Nothing survived, and in two weeks, the dear little kiddies have to have a new school system.  Think about it - if you were in charge with creating from scratch a school system, wouldn’t you do something similar?  You wouldn’t even have to worry about providing sinecures for superfluous educrats.  Just provide a safe and confortable place where learning could take place.

This is another situation where the existing system is so out of whack that pouring money on the problem won’t accomplish a damn thing.  Even structural reform is unlikely to be successful given the entrenched interests.  And that is why so many people are home schooling - in the millions, now.  And why inner city families want vouchers to send their kids to private schools.  And why the teacher’s unions are so desperate to prevent it.

There is no sane reason why we fund the educational bureaucracy to the tune of billions of dollars per year.  Every parent who is disturbed by the public education system - zero tolerance idiocies, indoctrination, incompetence, waste - is paying for this nightmare.  And if they want to send their children to private schools, or homeschool, they are going to be paying twice.

I left my door at 8:30 this morning.  I did not sit down at work until 1:30.  Snow, closed metro stations, shuttle to different Metro station caught in traffic jam, hour long wait for train at new station, plus my normal two hours of travel time.  Nightmare.  The way home was much better, it only took me 3 hours instead of five.

I spent more time getting to and from work than I did working.

On the plus side, my new cubicle is a premium, semi-important person, double-sized cubicle.

As is widely known, I am a bit of a jackhole. And on a bad day, much much worse. Hell even on a good day, I barely clear vaguely irritating. So it should be no surprise to anyone that I have a blog that I don't, you know, blog on.

But it may come as a surprise to you, dear reader, that there are actual, real reasons for my bloggy hiatus. Here's one of them:

That darling creature and her two older siblings are cute, adorable, brilliant and exceptional in all ways.  Including being exceptional black holes for time.  A joyful, wonderful black hole, but the event horizon is there nevertheless.  Then there's the staggeringly less enjoyable time sink in my life, the five hour round trip commute.  This, mercifully, is abating - the reason that I've had the time to even contemplate a site redesign, and start writing again, is that I am now back to my ideal state of working at home the majority of the week.

My goal, my New Years and Groundhog Day's resolution, is to write, on average, at least one post a day.  And as an added bonus to you, I will even attempt to make them interesting and entertaining.  And just for Bram, I will post regularly on Zombies, since I was cruel enough not to design a zombie theme for perfidy.

I'm reading Daemon, by Daniel Suarez.  At about a third of the way through this book, I am totally blown away.  This is the most fucked up, fascinating thriller I have ever read.  I pray, pray, pray that the rest of the book lives up to what I've read so far.

I make my living in the IT world.  I read the tech press, I play with the toys, I use the tools of the information age to support my family.  As do many thousands of others in this world.  It has been a constant irritant, a thorn in my eye, that movies and books - even especially science fiction movies and books - consistently, thoroughly and unaccountably get the computer stuff utterly and gallingly wrong.  I could spend a week citing examples just from movies of the last five years.  But I won't, for your sake.  Because I am a benevolent and loving blogger.

I will admit that part of the reason is that computer technology - as it is instantiated in the really real world - is dull as ditchwater, and less exciting to watch than drying paint.  If you are attempting to put IT center screen, in a movie especially it will need to be jazzed up.  But everywhere else, we have fake operating systems, ridiculous dialog, implausibility stacked upon ridiculousness.

So it's a pet peeve of mine.

And that is the reason why Daemon so rocks[1. assuming it doesn't fall apart in the next chapter].  Suarez gets the tech; and all the tech in the book is plausible, compelling, and put together in really fascinating and creepy ways.  It's like Tom Clancy channelling Charlie Stross - it doesn't have the humor and quirkiness and density of Stross' best work, but like Halting State or Glasshouse, the underlying ideas are the kind of scary that comes from being solidly based in reality; and given the fallen nature of man, almost certainly inevitable.

I'll update this when I finish, but for now I just had to share how much I'm enjoying the ride.

[wik] Finished the book.  It got better.  Only downside, it finishes on a cliffhanger.  Happily, though, I waited to read it until just after the release of Volume II, Freedom™.  I will be purchasing that directly.

Welcome to the newest version of The Ministry of Minor Perfidy. This is the fourth incarnation since Perfidy popped, blooded and squalling, into the blogosphere in the Spring of 2003. The first effort was a rudimentary effort built on the Expression Engine platform. Our first redesign stayed with EE, and because we didn't want to go through the effort to import everything into WordPress for #3, it still exists, and can be viewed here.  I still kinda like that one.  The penultimate version saw a move to the WordPress platform, and a precipitous and ill-considered dive into an experimental format.  As of today, it sleeps with the fishes.

So here we are with the new hotness.  Or so we hope.  The theme for your present-day perfidy is a pared-down, simple design that in some respects harkens back to our first attempts at web design.  But this time, we know a lot more about html, css, php and other acronyms.

The starting point for Perfidy's layout was inspired by Oulipo, an elegant theme created by talented web desinger Andrea Mignolo.  After cutting out the few bits we didn't need, we made some changes: like the post meta thingy that hangs to the left of the posts and a new format for the archive pages.  We brought in the category icons that have been a tradition with Perfidy since v2.0.  We also brought over the link colors we've used since we started.  Other colors were removed - except for the links, the new theme is completely monochrome.  The fonts are also different.  The body text is Georgia; titles and incidental text are set in Hoefler Text or Constantia, depending on what you're using to look at us.

So look around, see what's different.  You will appreciate being able to scroll through all the content, rather than just the two most recent posts.  Email us on the contact page.  Click the magnifying glass in the top left corner to search.  Leave a comment and subscribe for notifications on that comment thread.

Because this bitch is under construction. Most features should be fully functional by sometime on Tuesday. In the meantime, please enjoy this 90% complete webpage, free of charge.

From boing boing:

Believe it or not, I'm redesigning Perfidy again.  I've had a whole bunch of design ideas I've wanted to play with, and I'm actually finding that I have a little bit of time and motivation to post again.

So go figure.  I've spent a whole day designing a website that I use once a month on average, and that no one else reads.  That's productivity, dammit!

When I was a boy, my grandfather had a beautiful brick farmhouse in rural southern Ohio.  It was built before the Civil War, and was one of the nicest homes in the county.  My grandfather had grown up, poor, not more than a mile from that house.  He moved away, got married, started a business, bought a brand new Cadillac every other year, and eventually, that gorgeous house.  Not bad for someone who never made it past 8th grade.

Now back when I was a kid, grandpa had a dog, Jeremiah.  Jeremiah was a tri-color collie, and fully the brightest dog I've ever known.  He understood English, even if he couldn't speak it.  He guarded the house, kept track of the kids, helped with the horses, and, on weekends, killed chickens on neighboring farms.

There was also a family in the neighborhood, the Wickhams.  The Wickhams were famous in the area for the staggering quantity of their offspring, and the amazing incidence of mental retardation in those very offspring.  The Wickhams were also renowned for their short tempers, alcoholism, lack of good manners and judgment, and poor fashion sense.  My grandfather used the Wickhams as a personal touchstone and tutelary exemplar.  Had he lived longer, he could have recast this as, "What would a Wickham do?  But he died before the WWJD craze hit, and so had to make do with charming stories of Wickham misadventures, the moral of which was invariably, "Never marry a Wickham."

Tommy Wickham was one of the dimmest of the immense and stupid Wickham brood.  He was dumb as paint but much more violent.  I'd guess he was somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 IQ - not dumb enough to be clinically retarded, but not smart enough to be useful.   I'd wager that Jeremiah was smarter, and I have no doubt that the dog was more useful, and had more sense, loyalty and kindness.  Except, of course, to chickens.

I told you that because Steve Jobs just announced the iPad.

I've read a lot of hot air about how the iPad is disappointing.  The announcement is just over 24 hours old, the actual product hasn't shipped, but we already here the familiar litany - much like this time three years ago, when they were aimed at the iPhone.  It doesn't do this, doesn't have that.  It's full of fail.  Lame.  You could get a netbook for less money, and be able to do more.  I'd like to address that latter complaint.

I've been moving the family over to Mac for a little more than a year.  I got the original iPhone back in 'aught 7, then a 13" unibody MacBook, then an iPhone 3GS, then a Mac Mini for a media server.  Since the mini stays hooked up to the tv, the MacBook is our primary computer.  If I'm working at home, no one else has access to the computer.  If I'm away for more than a day, I take the laptop with me - which means that no one has access to the computer.  The kids want to do video chats with grandma.  The wife or the kids want to play games.  The wife needs to check email.  Und so weiter.  For a significant amount of the time, we have less computer than we'd like.

Up until yesterday, I was thinking that we'd need to buy a whole 'nother computer.  At some point, when the stars align and omens are good, we'd perhaps get a nice 27" iMac, and I get the MacBook; or (more desirable) leave the MacBook on the desk and get a MacBook Air, which would be nice and lightweight and portable for when I'm away from home.  Either solution would cost in the neighborhood of $1800, which is a decent chunk of money.  Sure, I could get a cheaper laptop.  But I want light weight.  I could get a netbook, though that would mean going back to windows and I'd rather gouge out my eyes with a blunt spoon than do that.  Even Linux is less than ideal.  (For a perfect description of why I like the Mac, read this.)

But what we need is not another full computer.  I need to be able to write a bit.  And have access to the web, email, video, music, etc.  My iPhone gets me much of this, but by no means all, and in a cramped screen.   I need that something in between, that I can use profitably and easily - but yet is small and convenient enough to carry around and use on the subway too.

If someone gave me $500 and I could get either a netbook or an iPod, this is how I see it: assume that the processors, onboard storage, weight, battery life are all equivalent, or near as dammit.  Which do you choose?  If I'm going on a hike in rural southern Ohio, I could have my choice of traveling companions: Jeremiah or Tommy Whickham.  Both are about 85 IQ, can carry about the same load, have similar food and water requirements and take up about the same amount of space.  But one is highly intelligent and well adapted (except in regard to chickens), loyal, useful and friendly, a happy genius among dogs.

The other is just a retard.  Jeremiah would protect me from bears, warn me of trouble, and go get Timmy if I fell into the well.  Tommy Wickham would utter a constant stream of profanity, pick fights with the bears, and then fall into the well.

My choice is clear - at a similar price point and performance level - get the system that is supremely adapted to what it is.  Don't get something that is in essence a fat chick stuffed into size 0 spandex biking shorts.  A full operating system and apps aren't meant to run on a minimalist system made by commodity PC makers trying to cut every corner to scrape up some margin from the bottom of the barrel.

For half the cost - and in the case of the MacBook Air, half the weight - of buying a whole new computer, I could get the top line iPad.  It fits our particular use case perfectly.  If I'm at working at home, the wife uses the iPad to check email, surf the web, and use it for the kids' school.  If I'm at work, I take the iPad with me - and the wife uses the computer.  When I'm commuting, the iPad is infinitely better than a laptop on the metro.  I can carry it around easily.  If I'm staying at my Dad's house to shorten my commute I have access to the web, email, video, games, even work by way of iWork, and of course whatever wonders the app developer community comes up with.  (Textwrangler for iPad would be nice, hint, hint.)  I can even use a bluetooth keyboard.

And I'll be happy with a system designed by a fanatical perfectionist asshole.  It will be elegant, slick, carefully thought out and pretty.  It will make me feel pretty.  (I should have all my stuff designed by fanatical perfectionist assholes.  Just think of all the fanatical assholes who are wasted in the Muslim world!  Just think what they could accomplish if they turned their minds to design instead of underwear and shoe bombs.)

Best of all though, I can tell my wife that we can get the iPad and we'll be saving $800!!