Edward Piou's personal website

SO, A WHILE BACK I MENTIONED THE 10″ ASUS NETBOOK, but since then I’ve gotten one and used it enough to form an opinion. My opinion is that it’s a pretty neat little gadget. It’s only a little bit bigger than the 9″ Asus, but it feels a lot bigger. The bigger screen is nice, but it’s the keyboard — which goes from cramped-but-usable to nearly full-sized — that’s the big difference. And you get a lot for the $383 that Amazon is currently asking: Windows XP, wireless, webcam with microphone, a 160 GB hard drive, an Atom processor, and 1GB of RAM. Also, it has a surprisingly high-quality feel for the price — it doesn’t feel like a cheap netbook, it feels like a small laptop. The 9″ Asus is entirely usable, but at the 10″ size a lot of the compromises seem to melt away. Battery life is good, too — I’m not sure you’ll really get the claimed 6-7 hours, but I’ve gotten 4.5 hours with some time remaining so it’s pretty good for such a lightweight machine. And did I mention it’s cheap?

AND HERE I THOUGHT the “culture of corruption” was gone.

CONSUMER CHOICE saves “Dora the Explorer.” But I’m still in favor of it . . . .

ANNOUNCING THE automotive Darwin Awards.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: If You Dropped a Corn Kernel From Space, Would it Pop During Re-Entry?

THE PELOSI DOCTRINE: What’s good for her is good for America!

OKAY, CHRISTMAS IS OVER, and so is after-Christmas, but here’s a one-day-only toy sale in case anyone’s still interested.

FORBES: Clinton’s Iranian Connection. Surely the vetters will have looked at this . . . oh, wait—-

UH OH: New bird flu cases revive fears of human pandemic.

BAILOUT FEVER reaches the University of Virginia.

MAN POWERS HOME DURING ICE STORM using his Prius.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Sorry, Climate Change Wouldn’t Hurt America’s Economy.

Plus, how to turn the E.U. President into a “figurehead.” EU’s new figurehead believes climate change is a myth. Apparently, the Times hasn’t gotten the word about the new message discipline.

BUT DON’T CALL THEM “BARBARIANS,” because that would be rude. Comparing Hamas to the Nazis. “The Hamas founding covenant explicitly calls for the extermination of all Jews. Hitler never made total extermination an official plank of the the Nazi party platform.”

UPDATE: Rand Simberg wonders why so many on the left are indifferent to Hamas’s intentions. “What are the Israeli intentions? To live in peace, without a threat to their lives and nation, and to minimize casualties, on both sides, in any war waged against them. What are Hamas’ intentions? Their intentions (and not secret ones, but stated openly and proudly, as Ron Rosenbaum points out) are the most evil imaginable (other than the extinction of the human race itself). Their explicit goal is the extinction of all Jews in creation.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts here: “I have never seen these two or many of the Guardian writers go after Hamas or Hezbollah like they do Israel. . . . When your advice for peace is to give up, don’t be surprised when others look down at you.”

ETHANOL-POWERED MUSTANG reaches 252 mph.

ELENA KAGAN to be Solicitor General. Seems like a very good choice.

OBAMA’S NEW DEAL is sounding kinda familiar: “The Obama tax-cut proposals, if enacted, could pack more punch in two years than either of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts did in their first two years.” Meet the new boss, yada yada. But Jim Lindgren thinks it’s “smart policy.”

IN MINNESOTA: More ballots than voters?

RON COLEMAN, TWITTER GOD: “The fact is, I’m too good at social networking for my own good.”

MICHELLE MALKIN: Who says conservative bloggers don’t do reporting?

Meanwhile, Michael Silence explodes another base calumny.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Katie Granju. Nice to have so many folks from my local paper respond to charges that I’m a newspaper-hater.

IN THE MAIL: From Bruce Schneier, Schneier on Security. I’ve said repeatedly that homeland security is a joke, but Schneier does a better job of explaining why.