By differential survivial, I believe he means, "the species as a whole surviving marginally better or worse" because of a gene. As he stated, that is not how evolution works. Species are archtypes that (to the genes and ultimately to evolution) simply represent large pools of genes. You and I are (from an evolutionary standpoint) a big bag of genes. Genes whose only goal is to make as many copies of itself as it can. Why do you think porn is such a big industry? Our genes are very very interested in making sure that their bags like sex. We like sex not because some metaconcept called "the species" "wants" to survive. We like sex because we have lots of genes that make us like sex.
Put it this way -- Any species that don't have survival as a goal don't last very long, by definition. Any species that is still
around has survived through adapting to their local environment in some novel way. Reproduction is the easy part --
continuing to reproduce in normally hostile environments is the tricky part.
Gah! Replace species with genes in your comment and you have the correct argument. Any gene that promoted the "greater good of the species" to the detriment of its (the gene's) survival would disappear right quick. Species are simply gene "streams" (to use R. Dawkins great analogy) whose flow is directed by the environment (and the behavior in the host organisms caused by the genes themselves). Reproduction is just a means for genes to continue their existence. Hostile environments are obstacles for the gene stream to flow around.
God, we need to start teaching evolution correctly in our schools. Half of the population thinks that evolution doesn't make sense cause it's "too random have made complex organisms" and the other half thinks that evolution means that "species trying to survive" is what drives evolution. Gahh!
Re:There is plenty of cost justification.
on
The Eyes Have It
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· Score: 1
I totally agree. Current airport security sucks, all flash and no substance. And most, if not all, of the current "anti-terrorism" laws that are getting passed won't do diddly. But, that doesn't mean that it can't be done. With dedication, clear thought, a lot of balls, and lots of money, it can be improved. But it will take more time and political courage that W. has. God I wish Powell were president (and me an independant with libertarian leanings!)
Re:Most of the tagged people will be innocent.
on
The Eyes Have It
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· Score: 1
You'd be surprised how much effort would be involved in getting a decent ground to air missile into position. Not that it would be impossible, but the number of people and the amount of resources that would have to be involved is much higher than one which doesn't require specialized equipment. This greatly increases your chance of getting found out (I think the intelligence community's rule of thumb is square the number of people who know the secret to get the chance of the secret being blown). Especially since some of the guys you need to deal with may double dip by selling information about you to the Mossad or CIA.
When I first heard that a couple of planes had hit the WTC, my first thought was that some crazies had chartered a couple of planes, loaded them with explosives and flew them into the towers. Never thought that it would be that easy to take over a commercial flight. Of course, it's going to be alot harder to get the pilots (and passengers) to give you the controls now. Now, the pilot could be a terrorist, but I expect those will be culled out through job interviews, security checks and racial discrimination.
In the end, the only real way to fight fanatics is to get good intelligence so you can catch them before they do too much damage which is impossible, especially if they are willing to die in the attempt. The best approach is to create an environment where people who become fanatics aren't dedicated, smart and crazy enough to 1. want to blow up your country, 2. figure out how to do it without getting stopped, and 3. not mind dying in the attempt. This is why almost all fanatical and effective terrorists come from politically and economically oppressed countries. In free countries with economic opportunity, the effective people are too busy starting their own companies, building factories or writing op-ed columns.
There is plenty of cost justification.
on
The Eyes Have It
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· Score: 1
I agree that travelling by air is pretty darned safe compared to driving, hitchhiking etc. (with the possible exception of taking the train in any country but the UK).
However, I believe there is plenty of cost justification on a large increase in airport security.
First, a fully loaded 747-400 can do many orders of magnitude more damage than your average SUV or greyhound bus (as was well demonstrated last year). It makes a pipebomb look like a shaken beer can. Airport security is neccessary the way that airforce airbase and nat'l guard armory security is neccessary. And yes, terrorists could build a chem. bomb or something but that takes money, time and expertise. With a plane, Airbus/Boeing and your airline have built, serviced, fueled and prepared your missile for you. The 9/11 attacks probably had the highest damage to cost ratio of any modern attack. Especially when you consider the secondary economic effects on the U.S. and the world as a whole. Which leads to my second point.
Second, if these fanatics are allowed to further erode confidence in air travel and security in general, the economy as a whole will suffer. For some of us, this may simply mean fewer games for our Playstations, but for alot of the world, a world-wide reduction in economic activity means political unrest, hunger, disease, increased poverty etc. Which will probably lead to more fanatics everywhere.
Most of the tagged people will be innocent.
on
The Eyes Have It
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· Score: 5, Insightful
10 million passengers. 10 bombers.
"Hello, do you have a bomb?"
"No."
Result: 1,000,000 innocent people incorrectly tagged as "liars". 8 bombers correctly tagged as "liars". Even with an order of magnitude improvement in accuracy, 100,000 innocent (easy blushing) people, 10 bombers. Of course, if they just use it to pick out people to do a detailed x-ray/explosives inspection of the bags, then it might help, supplemented with additional random searches of course. Unfortunately, most airports don't have any bomb-detection equipment installed yet, so only a hand search by incompetent security is available.
Let's face it. To get real aircraft security is going to cost a hell of a lot of money. Current airport security is a joke. Poorly thought out rules being implemented by semi-trained personnel with the cheapest possible equipment. We can't incrementally improve the existing security structures and expect that to work. In the end, we're all going to have to pay for bomb-sniffing machines/dogs properly trained security personnel, and have the whole thing organized and tested (continuously). Then I think it would be possible to make getting a bomb on board a plane at least two orders of magnitude harder than it is now. Of course, I'm among the few that think that flying is still safer than driving to the airport.
IANAL but as a layman, saying that Panasoanic may cause confusion with Panasonic is reasonable. Saying that Lindows may cause confusion with Windows is pushing it. Should the makers of "Deer Hunter" have been able to sue "Beer Hunter"? By this kind of reasoning, Apple (OS X) should sue Microsoft for XP. Maybe a Kalahari bushman might be confused by Lindows vs. Windows, but I believe that there is no "reasonable potential for confusion." Especially if the packaging and design doesn't emulate the "look" of Windows(tm). I just checked, their web site doesn't emulate Microsoft's, although it's still pretty ugly. If Lindows has the pockets to fight this, I think they have a reasonable chance of defending themselves.
If I were one of the founders, I would have considered that this would happen. This should be a planned for contingency. Of course, the planning would have to be in secret, 'cause an evidence of willful abuse would trigger punitive damages. Ain't the law grand?
The alternative is to roll over and play dead, go out of business and sell their IP back to the founders who could start up again named "Winux".
What's your point? Other than the fact that a former Apple employee started it and they employed alot of ex-apple employees (and who in the valley doesn't? My companies got 2 ex-Apple guys out of 20 developers), Apple had nothing to do with BeOS.
If Apple had bought Be, they would have bought a cool OS that had even less market share and mind share than they themselves had. What would the point of that be (no pun intended)? Going with NeXT was worth it, if only for getting Avie and Steve. And opening Darwin (and keeping it open) was also a pretty shrewd move.
Make that 100K customers at $70 a month minus overhead. Same as with Amazon, too much debt and the cost of servicing it is always a big problem when growth doesn't imeediately keep up with expectations.
First of all the radiator in you car and the type of heat pipes used in this CPU cooler are similar in principle but radically different in construction and efficiency. The radiator in your car is an open system relying on water+antifreeze. The heat pipe used in many industrial applications (including laptop cooling, my Dell CPx has one that I can see through a grill) is a SEALED pipe with a wick and liquid (usually alchohol) inside. The liquid vaporizes at the operating temperature at any place where there is heating going on and condenses where there is cooling going on. The cool thing about heat pipes is that the heat transfer happens REALLY REALLY fast. For home computing applications (<1 meter) it should be instantaneous. This allows you to move the heat away from where it can do damage to any place you want (within the limits of cost and space of course.). This is also why thin laptops don't fry their CPU's instantly: using heat pipes they can spread the heat sink around and away from the CPU.
Check out a NASA tech brief, Thermacore a company that makes them and MIC another company that makes them for more information.
I'm surprised he hasn't been mentioned yet. PKD explored some of the fundamental ideas still being hashed out by many current writers concerning the effect of technology on society and the individual. The ideas behind "A Scanner Darkly", "We Can Build You", and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" in addition to his short stories were added to the meme pool and remain to this day.
Ditto on the long battery life for Dells. I have a Dell CPx (650) with 256MB of memory (purchased back when that meant real money) with a 18GB toshiba HD and I have gotten 7+ hours of programming (vim, make, g++, gdb) with two batteries installed. It isn't a super light computer, but I really like the battery life. Currently dual booting RHLinux and W2000 although I haven't booted into Windows since I setup LILO and wanted to verify the setup:-).
And whoever this guy is, Short played him on several occassions (around 50 games altogether according to Short's post on usenet) and had his head handed to him every time. This wasn't just a couple of games.
One knows the lion by the stroke of his paw
on
Bobby Fischer Online?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"There's only one, highly reclusive and wacko Bobby Fischer, but many people could have learned to imitate his playing style and talk about things he would have known about."
That's like saying there's only one Wayne Gretsky but many poeple could have learned to imitate his playing style and talk about the Oilers and the NHL of his era. They may imitate, but that doesn't mean that those people are going to score hat tricks in an NHL game with the style and grace that Wayne played with. Imitating is one thing; doing is another. And this guy is doing.
After looking at some of the games, I, for one, think it's him.
As Bernoulli said on seeing Newton's solution to the falling body problem (in which he also invented the calculus of variations): "On reconnaît le lion à son coup de patte", "One knows the lion by the stroke of his paw." This lion definitely has struck some great players.
I guess the springboard slot from Handspring and a Compact Flash slot on the Trgpro haven't crossed your desk yet. Yeah, they're innovating, kinda the way Microsoft does.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Of course, when you get the 1400x1050 screen the weight jumps up to 5.2 pounds, which makes the weight difference <.2 pounds..., the price also jumps to $3899 with Win98 ($3999 with W2000). In terms of battery life, the PowerBook creams the ThinkPad despite the hefty screen size.
Due to my preference for more pixels, I think the PowerBook provides better value at the lower price point, while the IBM hits the sweet spot at the higher price point.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
ABS only brakes better on uneven/extreme slippage situations. If your ABS is going off on dry pavement, you aren't riding the edge of friction, you've passed it. Any F1 racer that tried to use traction control would get lapped by the 3rd lap. Ever seriously watched F1 race? Their tires slip all of the time, and alot of the time, it's deliberate. ABS and traction control are trying to minimize slip. Drivers are trying to go fast.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Reading the summaries, especially the research section. The persons involved obviously know something about driving, but know next to nothing about how to practically apply AI to it. Also traing problems. The quote:
The car's behaviour becomes extremely non-linear because all the tires are sliding. Again, AI-Andi needs to learn how to cope with these non-linearities even when we cannot explicitly describe them
really cracks me up. I guess they expect to crash lots and lots of cars (or maybe they're going to build their own tracks with all of the money people are going to throw at them).
They also seem to be treating "AI" as this big black box not dividing up the task levels as I would expect: high-level strategy ("Tire/Gas use strategy, push him now, hold back etc."); lap-by-lap decision making ("On my last lap the car felt kind of loose in this corner, I should take it easy in this corner"), and instantaneous decision making ("Rear wheels slipping unexpectedly, steering response").
The vague use of the phrases like "store all actions" shows way too much naivete for this to be a serious project. Seeing how they seem to be leaning towards "neural nets" as the AI implementation of choice, (and considering all of the training+experience it takes to become a halfway decent F1 driver), they're going to need lots of cars/computers/gps sensors/gyros/money.
I think they would be alot better off trying to build a stock car that could complete a circuit by itself in decent time. From there maybe they could build up to multi-car go-cart racing. And in 10 years, who knows? 10 years ago 10MB RAM was huge and 50MHz was inconceivable.
Verdict: If they're serious, and try to do F1 from the start, the startup $10 million should disappear right quick, never to be seen again.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
I have to disagree with this. All of our consciousness is based on metaphor. Are you going to propose an exact copy of the world exists in your mind? To (attempt to) coin a phrase: "All Consciousness Is Metaphor".
Starting with simple metaphors for the world (mom, dad, food, wet, warm, Barney) we construct ever more complex metaphors for the world as we increase the complexities of our thoughts and actions.
These are the statements of a man who has no fundamental understanding of how computers and the internet work. He seems to be under the impression that the business people are in charge and anything they mandate will be done. I was in a company where the executives thought the same way... until practically the entire engineering staff up and left in a span of a couple months.
Actually, I'd like to see him try. It would show more people what an incredibly corrupt methods record companies use to make money. It makes Microsoft's business practices look almost angelic.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Bolo was the greatest! I never tried any cheats and I never heard of anyone cheating. I wasted a fair amount of my time at school playing Bolo with other Mac users on campus. For a 2d game, you could get pretty complex defensive and offensive tactics going. Great game. Anybody know if it is still around? Does it still run on MacOS 9+?
Of course, for head-to-head twitch gaming, Armor Alley (aka Rescue Raiders) was good for quick games. I finally had to erase it off my disk to graduate.
Daniel
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
This is the way to handle occurances of this type which will happen more and more as GPL'ed code becomes more and more ubiquitous. My company is looking to use some GPL'ed tools in further development and I have found that there is alot of misunderstanding about GPL'ed code and tools. Hope everyone can learn from from this and other Really Big Companies can follow the example set by NVidia. Of course, this is assuming that they are as good as their word.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Lets face it, if someone has direct physical access to your computer/keyboard/network switch or router, you're pretty much hosed. For example, just a plain old motion activated camera watching your keyboard. You could even argue that two+ mics (strategically placed) with enough resolution could figure out what keys you were typing (especially if they could calibrate it). How 'bout a packet sniffer placed directly between your computer and your network? It used to be disgustingly easy to snoop packets/passwords from the network in the days of hubs or, to go further back, 10Base-2/5 (ah thinnet & t-junctions!).
In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson gives another example of snooping a computer by reading the EMF signal from a computer monitor/display.
Basically, if someone has physical access to your computer facilities, they have a hell of a lot more options to get through your security. Hey, you have to type your password in sometime.
Even if you use some "biometric" device to read your retina/thumbprint, unless the communication between the computer/device is secure both ways, someone can put a dongle between that and your computer and snoop their way in.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Appliance isn't really the right word
on
Linux Appliances
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· Score: 3
I don't know about other people but when I think appliance I think "something I use to make toast". Not "something I use for programming/web access/data storage/music/security/document creation etc." Linux's strong point isn't simplicity/web surfing/email. Linux's strong points are, IMHO, openness, power to do complex computation tasks, ease of programming simple to complex algorithms, stability and flexibility. Of these characteristics only stability seems to required by the market would want for a computing "appliance".
Of course, WinCE (or whatever it's called now) has even fewer redeeming features. But for use as an appliance, I think the PalmOS has much more going for it than the combination of Linux+X+Gnu+KDE/GNOME (which would be the minimum of what you would need).
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Slashdot Mirror
Gah! Replace species with genes in your comment and you have the correct argument. Any gene that promoted the "greater good of the species" to the detriment of its (the gene's) survival would disappear right quick. Species are simply gene "streams" (to use R. Dawkins great analogy) whose flow is directed by the environment (and the behavior in the host organisms caused by the genes themselves). Reproduction is just a means for genes to continue their existence. Hostile environments are obstacles for the gene stream to flow around.
God, we need to start teaching evolution correctly in our schools. Half of the population thinks that evolution doesn't make sense cause it's "too random have made complex organisms" and the other half thinks that evolution means that "species trying to survive" is what drives evolution. Gahh!
I totally agree. Current airport security sucks, all flash and no substance. And most, if not all, of the current "anti-terrorism" laws that are getting passed won't do diddly. But, that doesn't mean that it can't be done. With dedication, clear thought, a lot of balls, and lots of money, it can be improved. But it will take more time and political courage that W. has. God I wish Powell were president (and me an independant with libertarian leanings!)
When I first heard that a couple of planes had hit the WTC, my first thought was that some crazies had chartered a couple of planes, loaded them with explosives and flew them into the towers. Never thought that it would be that easy to take over a commercial flight. Of course, it's going to be alot harder to get the pilots (and passengers) to give you the controls now. Now, the pilot could be a terrorist, but I expect those will be culled out through job interviews, security checks and racial discrimination.
In the end, the only real way to fight fanatics is to get good intelligence so you can catch them before they do too much damage which is impossible, especially if they are willing to die in the attempt. The best approach is to create an environment where people who become fanatics aren't dedicated, smart and crazy enough to 1. want to blow up your country, 2. figure out how to do it without getting stopped, and 3. not mind dying in the attempt. This is why almost all fanatical and effective terrorists come from politically and economically oppressed countries. In free countries with economic opportunity, the effective people are too busy starting their own companies, building factories or writing op-ed columns.
However, I believe there is plenty of cost justification on a large increase in airport security.
First, a fully loaded 747-400 can do many orders of magnitude more damage than your average SUV or greyhound bus (as was well demonstrated last year). It makes a pipebomb look like a shaken beer can. Airport security is neccessary the way that airforce airbase and nat'l guard armory security is neccessary. And yes, terrorists could build a chem. bomb or something but that takes money, time and expertise. With a plane, Airbus/Boeing and your airline have built, serviced, fueled and prepared your missile for you. The 9/11 attacks probably had the highest damage to cost ratio of any modern attack. Especially when you consider the secondary economic effects on the U.S. and the world as a whole. Which leads to my second point.
Second, if these fanatics are allowed to further erode confidence in air travel and security in general, the economy as a whole will suffer. For some of us, this may simply mean fewer games for our Playstations, but for alot of the world, a world-wide reduction in economic activity means political unrest, hunger, disease, increased poverty etc. Which will probably lead to more fanatics everywhere.
Result: 1,000,000 innocent people incorrectly tagged as "liars". 8 bombers correctly tagged as "liars". Even with an order of magnitude improvement in accuracy, 100,000 innocent (easy blushing) people, 10 bombers. Of course, if they just use it to pick out people to do a detailed x-ray/explosives inspection of the bags, then it might help, supplemented with additional random searches of course. Unfortunately, most airports don't have any bomb-detection equipment installed yet, so only a hand search by incompetent security is available.
Let's face it. To get real aircraft security is going to cost a hell of a lot of money. Current airport security is a joke. Poorly thought out rules being implemented by semi-trained personnel with the cheapest possible equipment. We can't incrementally improve the existing security structures and expect that to work. In the end, we're all going to have to pay for bomb-sniffing machines/dogs properly trained security personnel, and have the whole thing organized and tested (continuously). Then I think it would be possible to make getting a bomb on board a plane at least two orders of magnitude harder than it is now. Of course, I'm among the few that think that flying is still safer than driving to the airport.
Yeah, I agree. Winux or Linnows seem like they would be a lot smaller targets.
If I were one of the founders, I would have considered that this would happen. This should be a planned for contingency. Of course, the planning would have to be in secret, 'cause an evidence of willful abuse would trigger punitive damages. Ain't the law grand?
The alternative is to roll over and play dead, go out of business and sell their IP back to the founders who could start up again named "Winux".
If Apple had bought Be, they would have bought a cool OS that had even less market share and mind share than they themselves had. What would the point of that be (no pun intended)? Going with NeXT was worth it, if only for getting Avie and Steve. And opening Darwin (and keeping it open) was also a pretty shrewd move.
Make that 100K customers at $70 a month minus overhead. Same as with Amazon, too much debt and the cost of servicing it is always a big problem when growth doesn't imeediately keep up with expectations.
Check out a NASA tech brief, Thermacore a company that makes them and MIC another company that makes them for more information.
I'm surprised he hasn't been mentioned yet. PKD explored some of the fundamental ideas still being hashed out by many current writers concerning the effect of technology on society and the individual. The ideas behind "A Scanner Darkly", "We Can Build You", and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" in addition to his short stories were added to the meme pool and remain to this day.
Ditto on the long battery life for Dells. I have a Dell CPx (650) with 256MB of memory (purchased back when that meant real money) with a 18GB toshiba HD and I have gotten 7+ hours of programming (vim, make, g++, gdb) with two batteries installed. It isn't a super light computer, but I really like the battery life. Currently dual booting RHLinux and W2000 although I haven't booted into Windows since I setup LILO and wanted to verify the setup :-).
And whoever this guy is, Short played him on several occassions (around 50 games altogether according to Short's post on usenet) and had his head handed to him every time. This wasn't just a couple of games.
After looking at some of the games, I, for one, think it's him.
As Bernoulli said on seeing Newton's solution to the falling body problem (in which he also invented the calculus of variations): "On reconnaît le lion à son coup de patte", "One knows the lion by the stroke of his paw." This lion definitely has struck some great players.
I guess the springboard slot from Handspring and a Compact Flash slot on the Trgpro haven't crossed your desk yet. Yeah, they're innovating, kinda the way Microsoft does.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Due to my preference for more pixels, I think the PowerBook provides better value at the lower price point, while the IBM hits the sweet spot at the higher price point.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Server connection dropped
Reestablishing connection...
logging in...
crash!
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
ABS only brakes better on uneven/extreme slippage situations. If your ABS is going off on dry pavement, you aren't riding the edge of friction, you've passed it. Any F1 racer that tried to use traction control would get lapped by the 3rd lap. Ever seriously watched F1 race? Their tires slip all of the time, and alot of the time, it's deliberate. ABS and traction control are trying to minimize slip. Drivers are trying to go fast.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Reading the summaries, especially the research section. The persons involved obviously know something about driving, but know next to nothing about how to practically apply AI to it. Also traing problems. The quote:
really cracks me up. I guess they expect to crash lots and lots of cars (or maybe they're going to build their own tracks with all of the money people are going to throw at them).They also seem to be treating "AI" as this big black box not dividing up the task levels as I would expect: high-level strategy ("Tire/Gas use strategy, push him now, hold back etc."); lap-by-lap decision making ("On my last lap the car felt kind of loose in this corner, I should take it easy in this corner"), and instantaneous decision making ("Rear wheels slipping unexpectedly, steering response").
The vague use of the phrases like "store all actions" shows way too much naivete for this to be a serious project. Seeing how they seem to be leaning towards "neural nets" as the AI implementation of choice, (and considering all of the training+experience it takes to become a halfway decent F1 driver), they're going to need lots of cars/computers/gps sensors/gyros/money.
I think they would be alot better off trying to build a stock car that could complete a circuit by itself in decent time. From there maybe they could build up to multi-car go-cart racing. And in 10 years, who knows? 10 years ago 10MB RAM was huge and 50MHz was inconceivable.
Verdict: If they're serious, and try to do F1 from the start, the startup $10 million should disappear right quick, never to be seen again.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
I have to disagree with this. All of our consciousness is based on metaphor. Are you going to propose an exact copy of the world exists in your mind? To (attempt to) coin a phrase: "All Consciousness Is Metaphor".
Starting with simple metaphors for the world (mom, dad, food, wet, warm, Barney) we construct ever more complex metaphors for the world as we increase the complexities of our thoughts and actions.
Credit for these ideas goes entirely to Julian Jaynes and his ideas of metaphor (metaphiers and metaphrands). His book, "The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" describes this idea very elegantly.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
These are the statements of a man who has no fundamental understanding of how computers and the internet work. He seems to be under the impression that the business people are in charge and anything they mandate will be done. I was in a company where the executives thought the same way... until practically the entire engineering staff up and left in a span of a couple months.
Actually, I'd like to see him try. It would show more people what an incredibly corrupt methods record companies use to make money. It makes Microsoft's business practices look almost angelic.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Of course, for head-to-head twitch gaming, Armor Alley (aka Rescue Raiders) was good for quick games. I finally had to erase it off my disk to graduate.
Daniel
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
This is the way to handle occurances of this type which will happen more and more as GPL'ed code becomes more and more ubiquitous. My company is looking to use some GPL'ed tools in further development and I have found that there is alot of misunderstanding about GPL'ed code and tools. Hope everyone can learn from from this and other Really Big Companies can follow the example set by NVidia. Of course, this is assuming that they are as good as their word.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
In Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson gives another example of snooping a computer by reading the EMF signal from a computer monitor/display.
Basically, if someone has physical access to your computer facilities, they have a hell of a lot more options to get through your security. Hey, you have to type your password in sometime.
Even if you use some "biometric" device to read your retina/thumbprint, unless the communication between the computer/device is secure both ways, someone can put a dongle between that and your computer and snoop their way in.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
Of course, WinCE (or whatever it's called now) has even fewer redeeming features. But for use as an appliance, I think the PalmOS has much more going for it than the combination of Linux+X+Gnu+KDE/GNOME (which would be the minimum of what you would need).
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself