Many people object to genetically engineered foods not because they fear that the end product is unsafe, but because of the impact that growing them has on farmers, the economy, and the environment.

I'm not concerned about eating genetically engineered beets.

The real problem with "eliminating the choice to eat non-engineered beets" is that it would make all sugar beets effectively proprietary: farmers have been successfully sued for growing genetically engineered crops even when that was due to contamination from adjacent fields.

Of course, a better way of dealing with all this would be to eliminate patents on genetically engineered crops altogether but ease the approval process.

I would like nothing more than to dump Windows, but I need wireless networking

Every laptop and desktop I have installed Ubuntu on over the last year has had wireless working. Most common wireless cards either have an open source driver or a proprietary driver that Ubuntu loads for you. (In a real pinch, you can use a $10 USB WiFi stick.)

phone sync,

No desktop phone sync I have used on Windows or OS X ever has worked quite right. The problem isn't the syncing itself, it's the different data models between the desktop apps and the phone, with the desktop apps usually being too complicated and out of step. FWIW, Linux supports SyncML, plus special purpose WinMo and Palm sync libraries.

But I have a better idea for you: join the 21st century and sync your phone to the cloud. It's easier and better. Nokia syncs to Ovi and Google, and most other phones sync at least to Google.

and 3D graphics first

Both nVidia, ATI, and Intel cards are fully supported on Ubuntu, 3D and all. Dual display works easily for some cards, but requires some playing around for others.

The rest I can play with.

The rest you don't need to play with at all, since "printer, webcam, bluetooth dongle, external hard drive" really just work.

I have a radical idea: maybe you should actually *use* Vista or Windows 7 before slamming it. Just a thought.

Vista, like previous versions of Windows, requires driver installs for any piece of hardware that I plug in. They seem to have short-circuited the dialog box so that for some hardware that I plug in, it looks for the driver itself somewhere and installs it. However, the process still causes things to pause for a significant period and is far from "just works".

For a lot of other hardware, it really requires driver CDs, and a lot of devices come with little stickers over their USB ports that say "STOP! Install driver CD first." Apparently, if you don't, bad things happen.

So, I'm sorry to say, it's you who is "completely wrong".

Yes, it's an easy claim to make. It's frustrating to watch computer science die under the thumb of unix zealots. The industry has become regressive.

Yes, it has, and Microsoft is chiefly responsible for that regression. In the 1980's and 1990's, Microsoft had an opportunity to deliver truly modern operating systems and development environments. What did they give us instead? Another bloated C/C++ kernel, GUI libraries written in C/C++, bad imitations of visual programming environments, and (lately) a Java clone.

Now the Microsoft pot (NT kernel, MFC, etc.) is calling the kettle (Linux kernel, Qt, Gtk+) black. Give me a break. Linux at least has an excuse for being cheap and old tech. But with its hundreds of billions sunk into Windows, Microsoft should have been doing a lot better.

If I have to use 1970's operating system technologies, at least I'm going to stick to the open source technology with the simpler architecture, instead of the overdesigned, overpriced, marketing driven corporate bloatware.

If Microsoft actually ever starts delivering 21st century software and software that isn't just a badly executed clone of someone else's ideas, then I'll give them another try.

[long diatribe]

You haven't given a single fact in your diatribe, all you do is state your religiously held beliefs as truth.

We have an entire generation of shoddy insecure servers and energy wasting devices now because of a mix of laziness, illogical penny-pinching, and a religious following behind Linux.

Actually, it's not penny pinching. People like me have given Windows a good chance, again and again, and it simply doesn't work well for our purposes. Your mistake is that you assume that a "superior" design or architecture would matter, even if Windows possessed it. There are far more important things than that.

Of course, I would disagree with your assertion anyway. Having used two of Cutler's systems extensively, my conclusion is that the guy is (to use your words) a complete "moron". He couldn't design a decent kernel if his life depended on it. The NT kernel exhibits the classical second system effect, building on the experience of an already completely overdesigned VMS kernel.

"This picture has been manipulated. The French president appears considerably taller than he is in real life."

(Heaven help us when there are French leaders who have issues with their height.)

The Windows kernel is tiny and modern. It's practically a microkernel and about a decade or two ahead of linux in architecture. When people complain about Windows, they're not talking about the NT kernel. There is no comparable open source equivalent.

And this "modern architecture" buys me... what? Is it easier to develop drivers for Windows? Is Windows more stable? Does it perform better? Does it require less time or money to develop? Is it cheaper to buy? The answer to all of those is, for practical purposes, "no".

Kernels are supposed to do only a few things: move bits back and forth between devices and users, manage memory, and keep users and processes out of each other's hair. That's not rocket science, and it doesn't require a complicated architecture or complex OOD.

Sure, Linux has some software engineering problems, but so does Windows. Both of them use inherently unsafe languages. On balance, there is very little real-world difference between the two.

One could design and implement a better, less bloated kernel than either Linux or Windows, one that has genuinely useful functionality that doesn't exist in either of them. But so far, nobody has bothered because it's not really worth the effort and there are more important things to spend one's software development time on.

Yeah, but when I installed Windows 7, my wireless network card, printer, 3D graphics, webcam, bluetooth dongle, external hard drive, dual displays, and Touch Diamond 2 mobile phone all connected and worked immediately.

Unless Windows 7 has changed radically how drivers work under Windows, those usually require user installation on drivers. So, in different words, you're bullshitting.

I've tried to get that all working (all hardware at least 18 months old now, except the phone) in Ubuntu since 6.x

Funny, on Ubuntu 9.04, all of those really do just work, with no driver installation or other kinds of user interaction.

Maybe you just got Windows and Ubuntu confused.

It can figure out that Little Tiffany is dangerous and deserved to die?

Sea slugs can learn under classical conditioning; it doesn't require consciousness or even a brain.

All the recent brouhaha about the "long tail" doesn't merely relate to the shape of the distribution (which has been known for a long time); it's about inferences people draw from that shape.

A lot of the inferences I have seen are unwarranted, and papers like this come to the same conclusion.

That song has been so overused in dystopic SF movies that it has taken on a rather menacing meaning.

It's the drivers' responsibility to maintain control of their vehicles and be cognizant of sudden dangers in the street.

It's everybody's responsibility to avoid accidents, not just the drivers of automobiles. Pedestrians and bicyclist can cause accidents, can be at fault in accidents, and can (and should) be held legally responsible for their actions just as much as everybody else. You don't get a get-out-of-jail-free card just because you choose one mode of transportation over another.

That is why Microsoft Visual Studios even with the abomination of .NET virtual machine garbage

I actully prefer the .NET virtual machine garbage to the Java virtual machine garbage, not because it's faster, but because it has features like pointers, structure return, and working templates.