This isn't exactly a reputable newspapers. Although journalistic integrity has taken a severe dive in the last 30 years, I don't think most blog writers could even be held to any type of standard in comparison.

The phrase "Consider the source" comes to mind when reading a blog. It's someone's opinion with no fact checking and no peer reviews.

And by calling him "faggot" you're obviously showing your maturity.

Just keep reading for a few more years until you reach the age of 16 or so, then try posting again when you have some valid thoughts and opinions that don't use words displaying your obvious prejudice and lack of intelligence.

what if your family and friends already lived in Plaidlandia? What if the place you considered home, and everything you already knew, existed in this place whether you had polka-dot skin or not?

This isn't a migrant group of people coming from some far away land and being denied rights. This is your neighbor, my brother, the girl from accounting, the guy who sold you your car... people who already live here in california who go to work and pay taxes just like I do, but don't get the same rights.

Without laws providing rights to these people, they're unable to do things like share benefits after death, visit their loved ones in the hosptial, or practice power of attorney for their loved ones when they become unable to decide or speak for themselves. Without laws providing an equality to marriage (regardless of what you call it) to gay people, health insurance companies and federal benefits don't work with gay couples. It's a sad state of affairs that I hope passes soon. Not long ago, women couldn't vote. Not long ago, black people couldn't own property. Hopefully, not long from now, gays will be given civil rights also.

Finding a generic driver for windows anything seems nearly impossible.

Finding a manufacturer supported driver for linux anything seems nearly impossible.

You don't need to actually install Verizon's software to access teh intrawebz, you can create a PPPoE connection by playing with some config files and blacklisting a few things... but not what your average housewife is going to be able to do.

I'd partially blame Verizon for not providing her with the service she paid them for, but that's just me. We just use our own router with the local cable co instead, it's much easier to config for my linux, my gf's windows, and my kid's mac.

I was actually quite surprised by looking at the screenshots. It seems that with every new release of windows, it looks more and more like KDE.

My favorite saying was "if you want a very pretty operating system that doesn't work with all of your favorite old software, just install Kubuntu... er, I mean Vista!"

Well, US law actually if it's found that they're violating a patent. If you want to download repositories from another country, you have the ability to take that legal liability on for yourself... however none of these organizations or companies would have any of these features that were found to be in violation available to download on their default distros because of those violations.

Think along the lines of getting your dvds to work in Ubuntu or debian. You can't use the normal US distro and have those features available automatically because of copyright issues. You have to download packages that aren't officially maintained and run a script which installs the software for you.

And then immediately lawsuits are pressed against Canonical, Debian, Novell, and anyone else who allows patented material to be added to their distributions.

Free software still has to follow the law.

My mom used slackware for years and thought she was just on a different version of windows than her friends. I'd just upgrade it every year or so when I went up to see her a few states away. Considering how much easier ubuntu would have been, if it was an option, I would have given her that for sure.

Don't worry about what OS would be best for someone, worry about how easy something would be for someone to use if you're not already used to the windows interface and trained to know where everything is... gnome would be a heck of a lot easier to use.

The wow updater has the ability to download patches directly... in the case of universities blocking p2p traffic. It becomes insanely slow on small scale from what I understand since there is limited bandwidth and a handful of colleges across the country try to directly download these patches on patch day.

I'd imagine a whole country trying to do this would slow things to a crawl. Enjoy your tuesday patches aussies!!! (on friday when it finishes downloading)

It was possible, however bittorrent software, such as azureus, have now made it possible to transport these packets over a secure connection. Since it's no encrypted, they can no longer deem what's being transferred.

Throw out the baby with the bathwater it seems... no more wow patches, no more fast linux distro downloads on release day, no more pirated music. Sometimes government finds it easier to cut off it's own nose to spite it's face.

we have millions of people in prison who were made criminals under the current draconian drug laws

If these people are willing to feed their addictions knowing about how harsh these laws are, it's apparently too addictive to be let loose onto society.

Using this argument is stupid. If you'd like to point out that millions of people are in prison for drugs, you'd also have to point out that they chose to be there by using drugs in the first place. I think a better representation of this argument would be "millions of people didn't take the consequences of their illegal actions into effect before choosing to do drugs."

I'd be willing to concede that their judgment was clouded by the drugs they were using, but that hardly merits sympathy.