"Customers will act rationally"

  I suppose there's a first time for everything.

Nevermind that... what was Eve's son's mother-in-law's name?

"gave them the exact same rights just under a different word" has never actually happened. Ever. So it's a little hard to verify your hypothesis.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, people are going to call it a duck. No matter how much you want them to call it a merganser.

I find this very amusing. The current state of affairs, in my experience/opinion, is that most printers (the list of exceptions gets smaller and smaller all the time) and scanners are far far easier to install in Ubuntu than in Windows. As in, plug printer in (or search for it on network... the search results turn up faster and more accurate than in Windows too, btw) and by the time you put paper in the tray, it is ready to use. Compare this to the clickfest of installing HP drivers for Windows, a process which will add extra crapware such as browser toolbars if you aren't careful. And god forbid you turn the printer on in Windows before installing the drivers, as you will most likely have an incorrectly recognized and difficult to remove printer object which will now prevent you from installing the correct printer.

Ease of printer setup is one of the main reasons NOT to use Windows.

The Taliban, as evil as they may be, did not attack the US. They allowed Bin Laden to lead Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. The US gave them the choice of turning Bin Laden over, which they refused. Bin Laden's reasons for hating the US are well documented, but chiefly had to do with the American military setting foot in Saudi Arabia.

This may seem like hair splitting to some, but misremembering history is not a good recipe for sound decisions.

My 14 year old has been using rythmbox (running on ubuntu) to sync music to her ipod for a couple of years. Mostly it is not a problem to copy the music back off the ipod.

This does not change the fact that the multitude of byzantine nested folders that the ipod creates are clearly designed to obfuscate. (By comparison, my sandisk sansa clip can store all my oggs, mp3s, and flacs in a single folder. Subfolders are optional.)

From personal experience, there are large numbers of older HP laserjets that absolutely do not just work out of the box in Windows 7. (Specifically, LaserJet 1100, 1200, 1300, 2100, 2200, and probably a few others). The HP "solution" Universal Printer Driver was a nightmare, though the latest versions seem to work a bit better.
OTOH, many Lexmark printers do not play well with Ubuntu. I had to manually edit part of the installer to get the driver for my Lexmark scanner working with Ubuntu 12.04. But at least I had that option.

Which doesn't work if you install Windows or whatever else afterwards. And yes, editing the damn Grub menu has been annoyingly complicated in Ubuntu at least since 9.10. On one system I have, the selection for Window has scrolled off the screen due to the number of kernel updates. Ok, maybe it's a good idea to keep one or two of those options in case of an emergency. But a whole screen worth? I do not consider this a pretty good solution.

Seriously? I heard of cholesterol as a health problem long before Lipitor existed, and before direct to consumer drug advertising was even a thing.

If you are relying on advertising for your information about the world, I don't like your prospects for health and well being in any case.

Well, I'd naively like to hope that if there were only 80 people for whom this drug were the best treatment, that 80 patients would have it prescribed. And if there were 200 patients for whom it were best, you'd have 200 customers. And so on. If I discovered that my doctor was prescribing my medications based on marketing rather than what's best for me, I'd switch doctors.

The only purpose of advertising is to increase demand, which in the case of health care should be purely driven by need. What seems worse to me is that the most heavily advertised drugs are those which are still under patent, and therefore the pharmaceutical company is the sole supplier. Since supply is already controlled, I can only assume the drug companies intend the advertising to result in higher prices.

That's crazy! Next thing you know, some nut will be asking the courts to grant 14th amendment rights to corporations!

If the statement that 26 vaccines are required in the US didn't set off your bullshit detector, it must be broken. If the article opens with such an obvious lie, the likelihood that any of the rest of it contains anything factual is probably near zero.

This is the internet. You don't have to believe everything you read. You can actually look stuff up.

Try this: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/child-schedule.htm#parents

Purely anecdotal, but I purchased a netbook for my 13 year old daughter about a year ago. It came with Windows 7 starter edition. I believe the very first thing we did was install an antivirus program, most likely AVG or Avast. After owning it for two days, it was infected with a virus, so I installed Ubuntu netbook edition. There were a few minor glitches (wireless drivers required a patch, adding new fonts is so convoluted that I had to create a script for that) but otherwise she has used it without complaint or incident ever since.

So on that one machine, for that one user, Windows averages an infection every 2 days, Linux never.