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Netbook gravy train starts to slow as euphoria fades Netbook shipments have started cooling after witnessing an explosive surge since late last year as customers started realizing its limits and looking for portable and affordable alternatives for full-size laptops. According to Xia Li, vice-president of Lenovo Group, growth in netbook sales during the second half of this year has slowed as consumers have started becoming more rational in their purchases. "Netbook sales surged in the past as consumers bought the product as gifts or as first laptops," he said. But with consumers starting to realize the limits of the products,...

House Democrats Seek To Block Performance Royalty VoteAugust 3, 2009 Late Friday, a group of 22 House Democrats sent a letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other House leaders, urging them not to move a vote on the Performance Royalty to the House floor. In a letter sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn and Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson, the 22 Democratic lawmakers wrote, "At this time, Congress lacks adequate information on the overall impact that this legislation could have on local radio broadcasters and the potential disadvantages to...

How would you rate Obama's job performance so far? Excellent Good Fair Poor AND Has your opinion of him changed over the past few months? Yes, it's improved Yes, it's worsened No

MSNBC may LOVE the Socialist-in-Chief, but hundreds of thousands of their viewers do NOT. Click on the URL, vote, see the results, and forward the link to others.

President Obama revealed what he might think we should be driving when he visited Tesla Motors , a firm building electric cars in San Carlos, California, while on his Tonight Show trip to the Coast. Unlike political rhetoric read from a teleprompter, cars are real. You can touch them and drive them and determine whether or not they're good, bad or indifferent. And the reality is that electric cars don't match the performance of conventional vehicles you're driving now. There's one major shortcoming, which manufacturers never seem to cover in detail, illuminated in a March 26 Silicon Valley Mercury News...

MSNBC has a live poll to grade Obama's performance as President, and we need to get some conservative voice showing up in the results! http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29493093 PLEASE VOTE AND THEN PASS THIS ON!!!

A) 31.5% B) 9.3% C) 7.2% D) 16% F) 36%

Poll to FReep, FReep. 57% give Obama an F @ MSNBC!!! BWAAA HAHAHAHAHA!!!

Frostie performs PERFECTLY in this video dancing to a lively medley of "I’ll Fly Away, Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Amazing Grace and I Saw The Light"

All that chocolate might actually help finish the bumper Christmas crossword over the seasonal period. According to Oxford researchers working with colleagues in Norway, chocolate, wine and tea enhance cognitive performance.

Olympic artists angry The Kung Fu pupils in the opening ceremony of the Olympics have spent the last year cooped up in a military camp outside Beijing. Conditions have been bad. "They weren't even given enough food," says their trainer. This news adds to the criticism of the Beijing Organizing Committee. Viewers from around the globe marvelled at the Opening Ceremony last Friday. One of the most spectacular features was the martial arts display by 2008 pupils from the famous Shaolin Centre in Henan province. With coordinated movements, they showed the Tai Chi variant of Kung Fu; a popular way...

For those of you running Vista, and have not set their systems to automatically download updates, I may have some good news for you. Today, my system DLed the SP1 for Vista, (It's large), and after installing and rebooting, many programs that opened/ran sluggishly, now start and perform, the way one would expect they'd run on a less than 1 yr old PC with 2 gigs of RAM.

He told little white lies ... and he took little blue pills. Roger Clemens, whose claims he never took steroids are under federal investigation, has apparently discovered the benefits of another performance-enhancing drug sweeping the sports world - Viagra. Clemens stashed the clearly marked, diamond-shaped pills in a GNC vitamin bottle in his locker at Yankee Stadium, according to a source familiar with the clubhouse, perhaps keeping the drug undercover to avoid the inevitable wisecracks about all the girlfriends he needed to please.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - A quarter mile past the finish line in the Kentucky Derby, a gallant runner-up effort by the filly Eight Belles was forgotten in an instant. In a freak accident that one experienced racetrack veterinarian said he had never seen before, the 3-year-old daughter of Unbridled’s Song apparently snapped both of her front ankles simultaneously as she galloped out after the race, sending her crashing hard to the Churchill Downs dirt racetrack. She was euthanized moments later, after vets determined there was no chance to save her. “She had finished the race and was around the turn at...

We could focus on the latest worrisome news in education: the results of an international test released last week that show American 15-year-olds don't know much about science and are falling behind their peers in other industrialized nations. But why get depressed? There is an aluminum foil lining: The test also found that our teens don't let their ignorance bother them. They may not know as much as students in Finland, Canada or New Zealand, but they think they do. When asked to rate their own scientific abilities, they put themselves at the top with their better-educated peers. This is...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30, 2007 – Early reports that credit Iraqi troops for taking the initiative during a Jan. 28 battle with insurgents near Najaf are heartening news, President Bush said during an interview with National Public Radio here yesterday. Bush also told NPR’s Juan Williams that the Iranian government shouldn’t be taking military actions in Iraq that endanger the lives of U.S. servicemembers deployed there. The Najaf battle “is an indication of what is taking place, and that is the Iraqis are beginning to take the lead,” Bush said. The fight involved Iraqi soldiers with U.S. military support engaging...

After two trying months marked by doping allegations, an assault on his reputation and his father-in-law's suicide, Floyd Landis doesn't wish for a stirring comeback so much as the simpler things in life. At this point, he will settle for a good night's sleep, free of pain. To help reach that goal, Landis had hip-replacement surgery last week. With his rehab under way, the 30-year-old American who won this year's Tour de France won't rule out a return to competitive cycling. "Things have been up and down for me," Landis said Monday in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'll...

A naked performance artist who says she experienced fantasies of "interspecies metamorphoses" while working with dead pigs has angered British animal rights activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals criticized an exhibition where artist Kira O'Reilly sits naked for hours with a dead pig, planned for Friday evening at the Newlyn Art Gallery in Penzance, southwest England.

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea has canceled a massive propaganda event because of floods that devastated the country this month, a North Korean diplomat said Saturday. The event known as the "mass games" features thousands of synchronized gymnasts and performers in a stadium where the stands are turned into a giant animated mosaic by children flipping pages of multicolored books. Han Song Ryol, deputy chief of North Korea's mission to the United Nations in New York, told The Associated Press by telephone that the event, which had been set for next month, "has been canceled due to flood damages."...

Mars and Venus in the Classroom By Richard Morin Thursday, May 18, 2006; A02 First the good news: One year with a male English teacher would eliminate nearly a third of the gender gap in reading performance among 13-year-olds. Now the bad: Having a male teacher improves the performance of boys while harming girls' reading skills. On the other hand, a year with a female teacher would close the gender gap in science achievement among 13-year-old girls by half and eliminate the smaller achievement gap in mathematics, says economist Thomas S. Dee of Swarthmore College, who examined data collected from...