PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW WHAT I THINK about this Asus 10″ notebook PC. I haven’t used one, but at $423 for an Atom-powered machine with XP, a bigger screen and keyboard than my quite-nice 9″ Asus, a 160GB hard drive and 7-hour battery life, it sounds good. I like my 9″ Asus XP machine a lot, but it’s not nearly as capable as this one and it cost nearly as much.

UPDATE: Reader Chris Feola emails:

Suggest you check out the new Asus netbooks from their notebook division, notably the N10 for an extra $6.

What you get is pretty much a 12-inch chassis notebook with a great keyboard, a terrific 10-inch screen and plenty of storage. I went whole hog and bought the loaded one: High-end nVidia graphics that can be switched off to save battery life; tons of cool stuff like the ability to log in via fingerprint and facial recognition; and the strangely speedy Windows Vista Business, which appears much better behaved than the Home variants. In effect, you end up with a terrific looking, tiny, highly capable ultra light laptop that runs forever on battery for about a third the price of the MacBook Air or those little Sony Vaios, with the tradeoff being the Intel Atom processor rather than a Core Duo. It’s good enough to be your primary machine as long as you’re not, say, processing video. (It runs Gears of War. No, seriously. Here it is running Crysis.) Recommended.

Thanks again for a fascinating site.

Thanks for your interesting email, Chris!

INDIANS CLAIM TERRORISTS took orders from Pakistan.

UPDATE: Complaints of strategic deafness.

AMITY SHLAES: The Krugman recipe for depression.

REJECT MEDICARE, and lose Social Security, too. Well, that makes sense . . . .

HMM: Mumbai photographer: I wish I’d had a gun, not a camera. Armed police would not fire back. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.” This whole unwillingness to shoot business is becoming a problem. On a related note, see my earlier thoughts on this situation here.

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Brown emails:

Having a lot of people in a group carrying would increase the odds of having an armed person who is willing to engage the terrorists. This would not only provide resistance but also spur others, i.e., frozen police officers, to engage. In an emergency, the first person to engage is the catalyst to move the crowd from onlookers frozen by indecision to action, either to provide assistance or in situation such as Mumbai, to confront.

Force Science Institute research at Minnesota State University found that even naive shooters are effective in mid to close combat ranges that such an attack would entail. Their research covered police engagements with inexperienced shooters but it has relevance here. Even a complete neophyte can be effective in a gun fight. What is needed is a willingness to engage.

This should come as no surprise to readers of Jeff Cooper. Or even Robert Heinlein. I suspect the problem is that the Indian police were trained, or at least acculturated, not to shoot without orders. That’s an approach that doesn’t work in fast-moving situations like this one.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts from SayUncle.

MORE: For those who didn’t get the Heinlein reference — shocking that such folk exist, but what can you do? — it’s this: “Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect.”

SACKLER PRIZE IN PHYSICS will go to nanotechnology researcher David Baker.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Obama may do more for George Bush’s reputation than anyone thinks.

ZELL MILLER CROSSES PARTY LINES AND endorses Saxby Chambliss. Much more here.

I notice that Chambliss is still pitching hard for donations.

WASHINGTON POST: Rangel Should Give Up His Chairmanship. “At a time when President-elect Barack Obama is holding frequent news conferences to reassure the markets and the American people that he is ready to lead the nation to economic recovery, the last thing he will need is a chairman of Ways and Means caught up in a swirl of serious allegations.”

NOW THEY TELL US (CONT’D): Obama’s small donor base image is a myth, new study reveals. “The reality of Obama’s fundraising was impressive, but the reality does not match the myth.”

A LOOK AT the Kenyans of Cayman.

IT’S AN AMERICAN THING, you wouldn’t understand.

TOM SMITH ON TALK OF A GREEN NEW DEAL: “Or is it the New Green Deal? Whatever it is, I think it is remarkable and my bet is it is going to be a big fiasco. I think all of the VC money going into it, and I think it is a lot, is spurred on more by the hope of government subsidies in one form or another than by real economics. It strikes me as a strange sort of mania. It looks like we are pouring a lot of money we don’t have into technologies that very well may not work to solve a problem we are not sure we have.”

A LOOK AT those “paranoid” gun owners.

IT’S A NEW EPISODE OF POLIWOOD, with Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwynd. It’s about James Bond, Mumbai, and more — well, sort of. Free to everybody, no registration required.

IN THE MAIL: Christopher Anvil’s War Games, a collection of classic space SF edited by Eric Flint.

CHINA FACES a sexual crisis.

FROM JOSE GUARDIA another overnight roundup of Mumbai news. Note the failed car-bombing aimed at the Mumbai airport.

HMM: Rubin, Under Fire, Defends His Role at Citi. “Under fire for his role in the near-collapse of Citigroup Inc., Robert Rubin said its problems were due to the buckling financial system, not its own mistakes, and that his role was peripheral to the bank’s main operations even though he was one of its highest-paid officials.” Sounds kinda self-serving, but since it’s still the Obama honeymoon he’ll probably get a pass. Though if he does, it will force the Dems to throttle back on their blame-Wall-Street talk . . . .