In fact, this semi-academic essay goes even further by arguing that OSes can and should be made completely resistant to malware, through things such as sandboxing (which you mention). Of course, there is no OS that fully achieves this—let alone conveniently—but that's no reason not to ask for it.

1. It's free as in beer.
2. Your distro comes loaded with apps that are free as in beer.
3. You can try it without giving up Windows.
4. It's orders of magnitude more secure against malware than Windows.
5. Even if it doesn't have the feature you want right now, community development means it probably will soon.

That last point is most likely the best way to promote the "freedom" side of it that will speak to people who will never see a byte of source code. We may think it's the best part of Linux, perhaps even its very essence, but advertisements should push the pragmatic benefits. I'm inspired by the approach that IBM took in its Linux ad, which should be an example for current efforts. But items #1 and #2 are the most desirable points to typical people, and item #3 makes it feasible to try Linux without doing scary things to your file system.

Also, the advertisements will really be more effective if they point newcomers to a particular distro. Audiences will balk if they decide to try out your product only to find that you're making them do the homework of researching distros first. Ubuntu is the best choice at present, especially considering #3 above.

(And yes, I freely admit I'm talking about what average users want when I myself am a programmer-geek. My guess is as good as anyone's, I suppose.)

No, sorry for being unclear. I was talking about the the one where you view the ASCII Star Wars animation through telnet. It's not an Easter egg in any piece of software, it's just viewing something on the Internet in an unusual way. (Also, I noticed after posting that I called the telnet thing "visiting a website". Technically, it's not; it's an Internet site.) The about: ones are indeed actual Easter eggs.

Like other commenters in this thread, I'm amazed that visiting a website counts even as an "almost" Easter egg. I guess you can sort of make it fit the pattern of a typical Easter egg: if you go into your Web browser—an innocuous, everyday application—and type the "special code" (i.e., some URL) into the address bar, you see funny cartoons. I guess it seems more like an Easter egg to typical Windows users if you use telnet, because it's unfamiliar and un-graphicky. God forbid they ever get a hold of Lynx, the whole damned Internet will count as a funny surprise.

The Emacs ones are almost as lame. Tetris and the psychotherapist aren't Easter eggs; they're documented features. And not the most offbeat ones in Emacs by a long shot. They even appear in the default pull-down menus in the windowed versions! A better, more obscure one for Emacs is M-x hanoi-unix, which is a countdown to the Year 2038 bug expressed as a puzzle.

Did anyone else notice the sets of nested quotation marks in the summary?

Those are scare quotes within a quotation within a quotation. Which I just quoted above. ("Ever-quotable" is right, I guess.) It reminds me of nested parentheses in Lisp, in a good way.

Indeed, the only time I ever see the sky is when I'm using Windows XP.

I've never seen a fish eat a bird, but it sounds interesting to watch, so I guess I like it too.

I think it might count as a single phoneme in its native Czech? Not sure, IANAL (I am not a linguist).

So you're saying we need to make sure that geographic limitations remain in force even in a medium where they are totally irrelevant? That kind of wastes some of the potential of the ol' information superhighway there, doesn't it?

Actually, the word "fanboys" comes to mind. For any given fictional franchise, there will inevitably be enough people floating around the Internet who care so much about the movie being good that (in their minds) it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, ironically, not the kind of languages that would start a word with the phoneme "dv".

From the summary, it seems like the software wasn't really sold though. They're trying to extract the money due to the user's agreement to a EULA, which (if that means in this context what it usually does) binds the user to some terms on the condition of using the copyrighted software. But, according to LGPL 2.1 (which is OOo's license):

Selling a copy of the software—with an up-front price, like you said—would be one thing, but it appears that they are trying to impose a secondary license agreement (the EULA) on top of the LGPL that contractually binds the user to some payment after the fact. The license, and all other versions of the GPL and LGPL, forbid that outright. In fact, that company may now be forbidden from distributing OpenOffice.org to anyone at all, since they voided the entire license for themselves. (Not a lawyer.)

Nice. More on the Newtonian level, my high school physics teacher said that police don't really issue speeding tickets, since the ticket will list your direction of travel at the time of the infraction. So it's really a velocity ticket.

Actually, he instructed us to correct the police officer on this if we were ever pulled over. He was a funny guy.

I think the GP's point was that politicians tend to act based not on whether "enough" people want it, but on what a particular small group of people wants. The silent majority may be more permissive about the sex-and-drugs-on-the-Internet issue than you think. I don't know either; it's hard to find a real dialogue on these "objectionable speech" issues in this society.

Your example may be undermined by the underlying issues around voters being able to override constitutional principles by passing amendments with only a simple majority. (That is: The supreme court is supposed to be able to make decisions like "equal protection implies that gay marriage is legal" and have it stick even if it's unpopular. A majority vote by the people is not the last word in a constitutional republic; it's subject to checks and balances like everything else. That a 52% majority had the power to circumvent that by amending the constitution is troubling.)

That's not true. The campaign for Prop 8 didn't owe its success to grassroots support; most of that work was paid for by out-of-state religious interest groups with deep pockets (who cared very strongly, for reasons I can't fathom, whether people neither from their church nor from their state could get married). The campaign against Prop 8 was quite ambitious, with many impassioned supporters whose lives were changed by its passing, which unfortunately wasn't enough.

It doesn't sound so bad when you phrase it that way, actually -- choosing between slavery and free soup. Does that work anything like "cake or death"?