as you have no way to check, if all the facts you believe is true, doesn't it happen, that you believe in them without proof, just because it is explained in book and makes sense in you?

people like shiny shit.
there you have new, shiny hardware with multiple cores, shitload of ram, distro worth multiple gigabytes on hard disk, and all you do is use about 3 minutes cumulative processor time in hour, while reading slashdot. for 57 minutes processor is sleeping, ready to jump on whatever fancy calculation you might throw at it.

makes you wince, doesn't it? :-)

and then you found out that disk #3 wasn't reading.
talk about good times.

you need the bandwith to download the iso anyway, and you can avoid the bloat if you don't check anything in tasksel and apt-get by hand.
you will most probably get up and running faster, as you wont install the bloat you don't need.

ubuntu used to have net-install too (i haven't used ubuntu for a while, so i don't know if it's still true), but it was well hidden.

while, big business can use emacs, for what it's worth, hospitals in denmark, probably need an easy way to produce odf, as it's official standard for denmarks government bodies and lot of documentation flow for hospitals is with government.

libre office does that, so they can cut expenses on software rather than, say patient care or staff salary.

As a coincidence, i played with bios flashing yesterday, and it isn't so hopless, as you might think. There is user friendly tool - uniflash - weights 30k I believe, one could strip it heavily. Exploits can be as small as 100bytes and even less. Your average bios memory chip is 256-500k Yesterday i was able to reflash SST and intel bios chips on same motherboard, i believe i could do atmel's too, but i didn't try it, so i think routines for reflashing them are pretty much same across motherboards/bioses.

none, that i've noticed.

check your law again. here, in latvia it states that you can copy only content which you have acquired legally. i am pretty sure, that you have something similar.

i might offer some insight on this. i am not sure about brainwaves, but after waking up, often there is about 20 minutes period of which i can't remember. after that I "wake up" in a moment, fully awake, alert and rested. usually already in some sort of action be it smoking or reading mail. as far as i know, i can speak intelligible and think logical. i've had some problems about this, because people would talk to me and didn't suspect, that i am asleep or to be precise - without memory. on the other hand it might be some memory problem.