He is quite correct in his assertion that Linux and BSD are not Unix. Without experience with real Unix systems, it would be impossible for him to verify that they exhibit the same behaviour. However, Mac OS X is Unix. I find it hard to believe that someone posting on Slashdot has not at least spent some time evaluating OS X, even if they ultimately decided it was not for them.
BSD is not unix.... but OSX is unix? FAIL.
BSD is direct descendant of AT&T UNIX, sharing the initial codebase.
OSX is a direct descendant of NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP - which is a direct descendant of BSD.
FDR has far too much praise heaped upon him if for no other reason than for threatening to stuff the supreme court to get his New Deal through constitutional review without having to go the long route of amendment. Every evil you hate about Bush is a direct descendant of FRD's extortion of the court.
Naturally, I am egocentric about this and believe that if anyone thought rationally about the role of government they would of course agree.
Unless of course they wanted to use the state to force others to behave according to their wishes. Then they would rationally think that we are on the right path - like most folks who vote. Of course, reasonable folks might disagree about what those wishes might be.... unfortunately there's not much disagreement about giving the state the power to enforce them, just about what we'd like to force people to do....
I'll shill for the man - MetroPCS has the LG Optimus M (Android 2.2) for $150 plus $50 per month (all inclusive), unlimited voice and data, no contract. Just bought one for the wife recently. It rocks. The only downside is no support for Adobe Flash 10.1 (processor not beefy enough). With WiFi data access most everywhere, the slow data network of MetroPCS' non-4G offering is no problem.
Android absolutely kicks butt. The integration with Google services is qualitatively different - all your gmail contacts seamlessly integrated with your phone, etc.
Word of advice - MetroPCS has earned its reputation as a cell-phone ghetto by providing dirt cheap, no credit check service. Better to deal with them via the web than in the store - they are always crowded with those paying bills in cash, and often surly and uninformed employees. Just don't go there and you'll never know that you are part of the hoi-polloi. Order and activate from home and live on in blissful ignorance of your place in the world. You can pretend that you went to the upscale Apple store and waited with the hipsters if you want...
I thought the "space balloon" idea was pretty cool. The idea is to use a series of balloons to lift very large payloads to the edge of space. The final balloon would be very fragile and huge (to handle the super-thin atmosphere) and shaped as a lifting body. Ion thrusters would slowly accelerate the craft (and payload) to orbital speed. I don't know how much unobtainium is involved in the construction of the balloons, but it sounds pretty cool any way. I don't know that anyone has ever spent any real money on testing the idea.
This is all very interesting but if you want to earn the big bucks, you start your own lottery.
But then you have the whole "seize and hold a territory" problem. Unfortunately the state beat you to that one, making the barrier to entry rather high...
Here in south Florida we have the same problem. There are no untriggered moisture sensors on cell phones or other portable devices in South Florida due to the high humidity. After some initial resistance years ago, the companies now honor the warranties without real trouble - at least for us. But we have a million dollar telco account so maybe our experience is a little different...
The corporations aren't able to do this. They didn't do this. The government, however, is able to do this. It is a government court that issued the order, and a government agent will enforce it. Sony just asked - it is the government that agreed with Sony and shut him down.
Funny you should mention that - in this case the person arrested was trying to file a complaint about police misconduct and ran into a bureaucratic wall, so she recorded her final attempt on her blackberry. Many months later they are still starting their investigation into the police misconduct, but they wasted no time in getting her arrested and charged for making the recording.
What conceivable situation would fulfill all three, ie. being oppression rather than good police work?
Here's an easy example, since we are talking about smartphones. The police are now arresting people for taking video on public streets with their cellphone. No, really.
The referenced articles will lead you to a trove of cases where there is no other reason for police action other than oppression. Why might you want to record something happening on a public street if you are not a criminal?
Still wondering why you might want to keep your cellphone private if "you have done nothing wrong"? Follow those links and you'll find plenty of cases where people were arrested (and later released) and evidence on their cellphone was destroyed by the police. Catching bad guys by searching cell phones is probably quite possible. Does that mean that you should give up your right to privacy and have the police rifling through your electronic papers every time you interact with them? Does the 4th amendment really mean nothing?
Why choose? Several of the new iPad competitors are in phone-style "slider" format. It's a tablet, and a laptop! With improvements in hardware and software we should have 18 hour run-time tablet/netbook/notebook things that handle everything - including phone calls if you want. With RDP back to your desktop (perhaps running in a cloud at a hosting service) and 4g/wi-fi you won't even have to worry about heavy lifting processing power. RDP already works well on iPhone/android devices for simple tasks. I haven't tried it on an iPad yet, but I'll bet it isn't a bad experience at all. Add in a slider keyboard and you've got everything you need, with all-day runtimes. Sweet!
While I agree with your overall point about business applications and interfaces, I can see how copy/paste between applications could be easier with touch than with keyboard/mouse. Given appropriate multitouch gestures you could "grab" a big chunk of spreadsheet and plop it into a document with an intuitive pick-up/put-down movement. Add in 3D input (Tom Cruise style) and you've got a pretty powerful PC interface.
And to the article's point - no, I don't think a PC and a tablet are different things. And no, intel is not threatened by mobile and tablets. They'll be happy to sell you chips to run in those devices too. I'd say a more appropriate analysis would be about the convergence of "everything is a PC". Phones, magazines (tablets), desktops, servers.... all running the same 3 PC-based operating system families - Windows, Linux/Android or OSX. With low power processors (available from Intel, among others) becoming more efficient and faster, the other embedded systems are under threat. Why maintain 50 specialty embedded operating systems when Linux (or windows, or OSX) scales to everything, and everything is powerful enough to run Linux, Windows and OSX.
The real question is whether Snapdragon and other high-end ARM instruction processors are a thrust at i386 dominance or a last gasp in the face of increasing power efficiency from Intel (and compatibles). Either way, with Linux as the OS, the user and developer don't have to care much one way or the other.
. Cancel your direct debit and pay the last payment by cheque. And NEVER give anyone the right to take money out of your credit card.
In the US at least it is the opposite. Don't use a direct debit, use a credit card whenever possible. There are many more protections for credit cards.
I'm with you. Comcast would be co-located with the peering networks at a network hosting facility such as Terra-Mark. They are amazing places with redundancy and security you can only dream of in your network closet. Bandwidth is super-cheap in these locations (comparatively speaking) because there is no last mile. Every carrier has a presence there, so interconnects between networks are done with a cat-6 patch cable or a fiber optic patch cable into a common router. Installation of an interconnect to the exchange costs on the order of $100. (of course you have to already have a presence in the co-lo to take advantage of that fact). If you don't like the price you are getting from one carrier, you can switch in minutes (at that point it is just a routing table update).
The co-lo hub marketplace is one of the great inventions of the internet age, and serves to significantly bring costs down. Unfortunately, the don't offer any solutions for those of us living at the end of some network's last mile. We still have little competition and little drive for innovation.
Seeing as the constitution limits what the government can do, your little diatribe makes no sense.
How quaint and pre-1938 of you. Since Wickard the constitution places no effective limits on the power of the government. It is taking a bit of time for the inexorable conclusion of that decision to take effect, but have no doubt it is taking effect. The legislature just needs to be a little careful in how it includes the magic words "interstate commerce" in legislation.
It's also activist to selectively strike down (or fail to strike down) law based on political preference.
I wouldn't agree with that at all. Judicial activism could be for good or for evil, but it exists outside of the constitutional mandate to interpret the law.
Judicially ordered busing of students in the 70's was activist. No law authorized any of the specific remedies they implemented, they just grabbed power and ran with it.
Judicial redistricting might be activist (depending on actual laws supporting their actions) - despite the despicable practices of racial and political gerrymandering our pols have undertaken.
These are examples of activism in the face of failure to act by the other branches of government.
Striking down a law as unconstitutional is perfectly within the judiciary's purview, even if they happen to be utterly wrong on policy or the law. Much worse than striking down a law in error is upholding a law in error because you believe in the policy. I wouldn't call that activist, but one might call it complicit in the expansion of the state beyond its constitutional limits.
For an easy example, look at Wickard v. Filburn. The government sought to control the price of wheat during war, and grabbed the power to regulate what you grow on your own property for your own use. Because the goal was so worthy, the supreme court found that the law and this interpretation of the law was constitutional under the commerce clause, despite the obvious fact that this was entirely untrue. Well, the best intentions and all, but now we have a set of jurisprudence that says that the Federal government has essentially unlimited power under the commerce clause. So unlimited that every odious bill introduced in congress will reference "regulating commerce" to ensure that it passes constitutional muster.
All of the power of the Federal government to regulate drugs comes from the commerce clause. Even if you don't buy or sell anything. See Gonzales v. Raich for a fine example of how ridiculous the "commerce clause" contention is. In Raich the courts held that growing weed in your back yard for your own consumption is "interstate commerce" and subject to regulation by the federal government. It is directly parallel to the Wickard decision on wartime wheat price controls. And so we see the damage that can be done by well intentioned legislation. Suddenly the Federal government has the power to outlaw all manner of plants and animals and natural derivative substances without any change to the constitution to allow such power.
Rather than rely on my own limited rhetorical powers, I'll leave it to a dissenting member of the supreme court in Raich:
If the Federal Government can regulate growing a half-dozen cannabis plants for personal consumption (not because it is interstate commerce, but because it is inextricably bound up with interstate commerce), then Congress' Article I powers -- as expanded by the Necessary and Proper Clause -- have no meaningful limits. Whether Congress aims at the possession of drugs, guns, or any number of other items, it may continue to "appropria[te] state police powers under the guise of regulating commerce....
If the majority is to be taken seriously, the Federal Government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives, and potluck suppers throughout the 50 States. This makes a mockery of Madison's assurance to the people of New York that the "powers delegated" to the Federal Government are "few and defined", while those of the States are "numerous and indefinite.
Federal healthcare mandates fall precisely in the same "well intentioned but clearly beyond constitutionally granted authority" zone. If the goals are so lofty, why not do it right and amend the constitution? That way the authority and mandate of the government will be clear and limited.
Your constitutional amendment would have to be championed by the people over the objections of the government, as there is no desire in the executive or legislative branch of government to see the constitution interpreted in a way that restricts the power of the government. They even have nice legalese terms for it, like "judicial deference to legislative interpretation" and other such nonsense.
With Wickard and then Raich, the courts have allowed the government nearly limitless power. ep32g79 is right about Wickard - this case will either be used by the courts to change a half-century of expansive government under the commerce clause, or (more likely) this will drive the final nail in the coffin of constitutional government. If you can seriously argue (and win!) that the government can regulate a non-activity like not buying insurance as an "inherently economic decision", then you can regulate anything. Heck, Mila Kunis' decisions about whether to do nude scenes are more inherently economic than your decision about not buying insurance, so I guess the court would be fine with a "Mila Kunis must appear nude in all of her films" law. (equal protection issues notwithstanding...)
That's an interesting observation. The innermost planet imaged is 14.5 AU from the star, placing it somewhere between Saturn (at about 9.5 AU) and Uranus (at about 19 AU) in distance. If the star had a mass similar to the sun, this would place the orbital period somewhere between 30 years and 90 years. So that probably explains it.
I did something similar to a major fiber backbone for several carriers. It seems that the stack of old, abandoned telecommunications equipment in our new building wasn't as old and abandoned as I was led to believe. It seems that by pulling those tiny knobs labeled "Sprint", "MCI", "AT&T" etc. to find out what they were for, I was disconnecting their fiber uplinks. Ooops. The tech who came out about an hour later was really puzzled when he couldn't find anything wrong. Well at least until I came back from lunch and found him in the wiring closet and he explained why he was there....
I don't know about any problems. I've been using it for the wife's computer for about 6 months. Seems pretty nice so far. They'll pop up and try to sell something every now and again, but it really isn't a big deal compared to the free service they provide.
I use clam anti-virus on linux for my laptop, and it seems a little more intrusive when scanning than Avast on the wife's PC - but that is probably due to the massive difference in spec between the two machines.
I sounds like the "chrome OS" that users see is really running remotely at Google, with only enough OS locally to support the browser. Basically, they've reinvented the thin client.
Slashdot Mirror
He is quite correct in his assertion that Linux and BSD are not Unix. Without experience with real Unix systems, it would be impossible for him to verify that they exhibit the same behaviour. However, Mac OS X is Unix. I find it hard to believe that someone posting on Slashdot has not at least spent some time evaluating OS X, even if they ultimately decided it was not for them.
BSD is not unix.... but OSX is unix? FAIL.
BSD is direct descendant of AT&T UNIX, sharing the initial codebase.
OSX is a direct descendant of NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP - which is a direct descendant of BSD.
FDR has far too much praise heaped upon him if for no other reason than for threatening to stuff the supreme court to get his New Deal through constitutional review without having to go the long route of amendment. Every evil you hate about Bush is a direct descendant of FRD's extortion of the court.
Naturally, I am egocentric about this and believe that if anyone thought rationally about the role of government they would of course agree.
Unless of course they wanted to use the state to force others to behave according to their wishes. Then they would rationally think that we are on the right path - like most folks who vote. Of course, reasonable folks might disagree about what those wishes might be.... unfortunately there's not much disagreement about giving the state the power to enforce them, just about what we'd like to force people to do....
I'll shill for the man - MetroPCS has the LG Optimus M (Android 2.2) for $150 plus $50 per month (all inclusive), unlimited voice and data, no contract. Just bought one for the wife recently. It rocks. The only downside is no support for Adobe Flash 10.1 (processor not beefy enough). With WiFi data access most everywhere, the slow data network of MetroPCS' non-4G offering is no problem.
Android absolutely kicks butt. The integration with Google services is qualitatively different - all your gmail contacts seamlessly integrated with your phone, etc.
Word of advice - MetroPCS has earned its reputation as a cell-phone ghetto by providing dirt cheap, no credit check service. Better to deal with them via the web than in the store - they are always crowded with those paying bills in cash, and often surly and uninformed employees. Just don't go there and you'll never know that you are part of the hoi-polloi. Order and activate from home and live on in blissful ignorance of your place in the world. You can pretend that you went to the upscale Apple store and waited with the hipsters if you want...
From the links at the bottom of TFA, the British team already has a body on their 200mph steam car. Looks a lot cooler too.
I thought the "space balloon" idea was pretty cool. The idea is to use a series of balloons to lift very large payloads to the edge of space. The final balloon would be very fragile and huge (to handle the super-thin atmosphere) and shaped as a lifting body. Ion thrusters would slowly accelerate the craft (and payload) to orbital speed. I don't know how much unobtainium is involved in the construction of the balloons, but it sounds pretty cool any way. I don't know that anyone has ever spent any real money on testing the idea.
This is all very interesting but if you want to earn the big bucks, you start your own lottery.
But then you have the whole "seize and hold a territory" problem. Unfortunately the state beat you to that one, making the barrier to entry rather high...
Here in south Florida we have the same problem. There are no untriggered moisture sensors on cell phones or other portable devices in South Florida due to the high humidity. After some initial resistance years ago, the companies now honor the warranties without real trouble - at least for us. But we have a million dollar telco account so maybe our experience is a little different...
Coporations should not be able to do this...
The corporations aren't able to do this. They didn't do this. The government, however, is able to do this. It is a government court that issued the order, and a government agent will enforce it. Sony just asked - it is the government that agreed with Sony and shut him down.
I was playing Wolf 3D at 11, killing nazis and dogs, you insensitive clod.
Well, I was playing pong at 11. Actually, we couldn't afford pong, so I was playing a Magnavox Odessy 2000. And we liked it!
Funny you should mention that - in this case the person arrested was trying to file a complaint about police misconduct and ran into a bureaucratic wall, so she recorded her final attempt on her blackberry. Many months later they are still starting their investigation into the police misconduct, but they wasted no time in getting her arrested and charged for making the recording.
What conceivable situation would fulfill all three, ie. being oppression rather than good police work?
Here's an easy example, since we are talking about smartphones. The police are now arresting people for taking video on public streets with their cellphone. No, really.
The referenced articles will lead you to a trove of cases where there is no other reason for police action other than oppression. Why might you want to record something happening on a public street if you are not a criminal?
Well, the cops might jump you, beat the crap out of you, charge you with felony assault on a police officer and then destroy the police surveillance videos that document the crime. In this case a cell phone video of what really happened surfaced and the charges were dropped. Lest you think this is a "one off", there are plenty of other cases where police video equipment mysteriously malfunctions just at the critical moment. You can find examples via the referenced articles.
Still wondering why you might want to keep your cellphone private if "you have done nothing wrong"? Follow those links and you'll find plenty of cases where people were arrested (and later released) and evidence on their cellphone was destroyed by the police. Catching bad guys by searching cell phones is probably quite possible. Does that mean that you should give up your right to privacy and have the police rifling through your electronic papers every time you interact with them? Does the 4th amendment really mean nothing?
You don't want to screw with the phone cops, man. They blew up a transmitter in Cincinnati back in the 70's when some DJ named "Dr. Johny Fever" got out of hand...
Why choose? Several of the new iPad competitors are in phone-style "slider" format. It's a tablet, and a laptop! With improvements in hardware and software we should have 18 hour run-time tablet/netbook/notebook things that handle everything - including phone calls if you want. With RDP back to your desktop (perhaps running in a cloud at a hosting service) and 4g/wi-fi you won't even have to worry about heavy lifting processing power. RDP already works well on iPhone/android devices for simple tasks. I haven't tried it on an iPad yet, but I'll bet it isn't a bad experience at all. Add in a slider keyboard and you've got everything you need, with all-day runtimes. Sweet!
While I agree with your overall point about business applications and interfaces, I can see how copy/paste between applications could be easier with touch than with keyboard/mouse. Given appropriate multitouch gestures you could "grab" a big chunk of spreadsheet and plop it into a document with an intuitive pick-up/put-down movement. Add in 3D input (Tom Cruise style) and you've got a pretty powerful PC interface.
And to the article's point - no, I don't think a PC and a tablet are different things. And no, intel is not threatened by mobile and tablets. They'll be happy to sell you chips to run in those devices too. I'd say a more appropriate analysis would be about the convergence of "everything is a PC". Phones, magazines (tablets), desktops, servers.... all running the same 3 PC-based operating system families - Windows, Linux/Android or OSX. With low power processors (available from Intel, among others) becoming more efficient and faster, the other embedded systems are under threat. Why maintain 50 specialty embedded operating systems when Linux (or windows, or OSX) scales to everything, and everything is powerful enough to run Linux, Windows and OSX.
The real question is whether Snapdragon and other high-end ARM instruction processors are a thrust at i386 dominance or a last gasp in the face of increasing power efficiency from Intel (and compatibles). Either way, with Linux as the OS, the user and developer don't have to care much one way or the other.
. Cancel your direct debit and pay the last payment by cheque. And NEVER give anyone the right to take money out of your credit card.
In the US at least it is the opposite. Don't use a direct debit, use a credit card whenever possible. There are many more protections for credit cards.
I'm with you. Comcast would be co-located with the peering networks at a network hosting facility such as Terra-Mark. They are amazing places with redundancy and security you can only dream of in your network closet. Bandwidth is super-cheap in these locations (comparatively speaking) because there is no last mile. Every carrier has a presence there, so interconnects between networks are done with a cat-6 patch cable or a fiber optic patch cable into a common router. Installation of an interconnect to the exchange costs on the order of $100. (of course you have to already have a presence in the co-lo to take advantage of that fact). If you don't like the price you are getting from one carrier, you can switch in minutes (at that point it is just a routing table update).
The co-lo hub marketplace is one of the great inventions of the internet age, and serves to significantly bring costs down. Unfortunately, the don't offer any solutions for those of us living at the end of some network's last mile. We still have little competition and little drive for innovation.
The game has an advantage for the human - you get as long as you want and you always get first crack. Still, there is this to underscore your point:
Answer: "Sing a song about one of these, a sailor's bag for small articles"
Watson: "What is 'Poppa's got a brand new bag.'"
(ditty bag was the correct answer)
Seeing as the constitution limits what the government can do, your little diatribe makes no sense.
How quaint and pre-1938 of you. Since Wickard the constitution places no effective limits on the power of the government. It is taking a bit of time for the inexorable conclusion of that decision to take effect, but have no doubt it is taking effect. The legislature just needs to be a little careful in how it includes the magic words "interstate commerce" in legislation.
It's also activist to selectively strike down (or fail to strike down) law based on political preference.
I wouldn't agree with that at all. Judicial activism could be for good or for evil, but it exists outside of the constitutional mandate to interpret the law.
Judicially ordered busing of students in the 70's was activist. No law authorized any of the specific remedies they implemented, they just grabbed power and ran with it.
Judicial redistricting might be activist (depending on actual laws supporting their actions) - despite the despicable practices of racial and political gerrymandering our pols have undertaken.
These are examples of activism in the face of failure to act by the other branches of government.
Striking down a law as unconstitutional is perfectly within the judiciary's purview, even if they happen to be utterly wrong on policy or the law. Much worse than striking down a law in error is upholding a law in error because you believe in the policy. I wouldn't call that activist, but one might call it complicit in the expansion of the state beyond its constitutional limits.
For an easy example, look at Wickard v. Filburn. The government sought to control the price of wheat during war, and grabbed the power to regulate what you grow on your own property for your own use. Because the goal was so worthy, the supreme court found that the law and this interpretation of the law was constitutional under the commerce clause, despite the obvious fact that this was entirely untrue. Well, the best intentions and all, but now we have a set of jurisprudence that says that the Federal government has essentially unlimited power under the commerce clause. So unlimited that every odious bill introduced in congress will reference "regulating commerce" to ensure that it passes constitutional muster.
All of the power of the Federal government to regulate drugs comes from the commerce clause. Even if you don't buy or sell anything. See Gonzales v. Raich for a fine example of how ridiculous the "commerce clause" contention is. In Raich the courts held that growing weed in your back yard for your own consumption is "interstate commerce" and subject to regulation by the federal government. It is directly parallel to the Wickard decision on wartime wheat price controls. And so we see the damage that can be done by well intentioned legislation. Suddenly the Federal government has the power to outlaw all manner of plants and animals and natural derivative substances without any change to the constitution to allow such power.
Rather than rely on my own limited rhetorical powers, I'll leave it to a dissenting member of the supreme court in Raich:
If the Federal Government can regulate growing a half-dozen cannabis plants for personal consumption (not because it is interstate commerce, but because it is inextricably bound up with interstate commerce), then Congress' Article I powers -- as expanded by the Necessary and Proper Clause -- have no meaningful limits. Whether Congress aims at the possession of drugs, guns, or any number of other items, it may continue to "appropria[te] state police powers under the guise of regulating commerce. ...
If the majority is to be taken seriously, the Federal Government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives, and potluck suppers throughout the 50 States. This makes a mockery of Madison's assurance to the people of New York that the "powers delegated" to the Federal Government are "few and defined", while those of the States are "numerous and indefinite.
Federal healthcare mandates fall precisely in the same "well intentioned but clearly beyond constitutionally granted authority" zone. If the goals are so lofty, why not do it right and amend the constitution? That way the authority and mandate of the government will be clear and limited.
Your constitutional amendment would have to be championed by the people over the objections of the government, as there is no desire in the executive or legislative branch of government to see the constitution interpreted in a way that restricts the power of the government. They even have nice legalese terms for it, like "judicial deference to legislative interpretation" and other such nonsense.
With Wickard and then Raich, the courts have allowed the government nearly limitless power. ep32g79 is right about Wickard - this case will either be used by the courts to change a half-century of expansive government under the commerce clause, or (more likely) this will drive the final nail in the coffin of constitutional government. If you can seriously argue (and win!) that the government can regulate a non-activity like not buying insurance as an "inherently economic decision", then you can regulate anything. Heck, Mila Kunis' decisions about whether to do nude scenes are more inherently economic than your decision about not buying insurance, so I guess the court would be fine with a "Mila Kunis must appear nude in all of her films" law. (equal protection issues notwithstanding...)
That's an interesting observation. The innermost planet imaged is 14.5 AU from the star, placing it somewhere between Saturn (at about 9.5 AU) and Uranus (at about 19 AU) in distance. If the star had a mass similar to the sun, this would place the orbital period somewhere between 30 years and 90 years. So that probably explains it.
I did something similar to a major fiber backbone for several carriers. It seems that the stack of old, abandoned telecommunications equipment in our new building wasn't as old and abandoned as I was led to believe. It seems that by pulling those tiny knobs labeled "Sprint", "MCI", "AT&T" etc. to find out what they were for, I was disconnecting their fiber uplinks. Ooops. The tech who came out about an hour later was really puzzled when he couldn't find anything wrong. Well at least until I came back from lunch and found him in the wiring closet and he explained why he was there....
I don't know about any problems. I've been using it for the wife's computer for about 6 months. Seems pretty nice so far. They'll pop up and try to sell something every now and again, but it really isn't a big deal compared to the free service they provide.
I use clam anti-virus on linux for my laptop, and it seems a little more intrusive when scanning than Avast on the wife's PC - but that is probably due to the massive difference in spec between the two machines.
I sounds like the "chrome OS" that users see is really running remotely at Google, with only enough OS locally to support the browser. Basically, they've reinvented the thin client.