If you've been paying any attention to politics, you've no doubt heard about the town halls where the "tea partiers" have staged noisy protests. You hear comments like "Hands off my health care!" and rants about the growth of the Federal Government.

Most of these people seem to come from rural and suburban areas, and the 2008 election cartogram seems to confirm this. No, someone wasn't having a little fun with Photoshop. The larger areas of the map represent population. The most populous urban areas largely went for Obama in the last election, while the rural areas went for McCain.

I've been playing around with Syllable. It's a new open source operating system that's not Linux or BSD.

Here are some of the things it has going for it:

• It's very fast. The live CD boots up in about 30 seconds and the system is very responsive. (On the other hand, it's very slow when I try to run it in a VM.)
• It's small. The extracted LiveCD distro is only 150MB. It's way smaller than Ubuntu.