Oh you Apple fanbois, it's as if you have mouths for ears. You don't seem to be getting this. Carefully, in bold, here it is:

THIS IS NOT IPOD/LINUX INCOMPATIBLITY. THIS IS APPLE SAYING "LETS SPEND MONEY AND EFFORT LOCKING OUT COMPETITOR PRODUCTS" (DRM). THE TWO THINGS ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, EVEN IF THEY DO HAVE THE SAME SYMPTOMS.

It is the difference between manslaughter and pre-meditated (first degree) murder, or accident and sabotage, or disaster and attack. It is not simple petulance and want for instant gratification (instant gratification would be nice, but it's about YOU TOOK not I WANT). I'm not trying to put Gentoo on my iPod (what?), I'm just trying to get my iPod working with Linux. It's not an outrageous, unprecedented or unusual desire. Honestly, this is Slashdot - how do you not understand the arguments against DRM and/or that it's routine to see outrage over (often obscure or exaggerated) moral reasoning?

You mean that you bought hardware that is widely recognized not to work with your particular OS

Wrong, linux is fully compatible with previous generations of iPods. This new DRM scheme came right out of left field, but of course, any time Apple is egregiously and irrefutably NOT King Of The Consumer Electronics Industry, Sent Down From On High, you Apple fanbois pipe up with "WELL YOU SHOULD JUST ACCEPT IT DOOD HOW DARE YOU GET OUTRAGED AT APPLE WHATS WRONG WIF U GROW UP???!". If this were any other company, people here would be flinging poop and demanding public executions.

Oh, and the fact that the basis of your argument seems to be an ad hominem attack on my being a teenager (which isn't even true, I'm not even close to teen aged) only reflects badly on you.

Oh. My. God. No-one can possibly be that stupid.

What about this do you NOT GET? Not everyone wants to use iTunes, nor should they have to (inb4 DUHHHHH BUT DEY SHUDDNIT BUY DAR IPAD, I'm doing Apple a favour by buying an iPod, the least the "It Just Works" company can do is NOT go out of their way to make it harder to use - see: "evil", "2 faced hypocrites", "worse than microsoft"). But since you're such a goat's dick (and I'm not), I'll try and compromise by installing their bloated shit-poor excuse for a media player, just so I can get my paid-for iPod working:

sudo apt-get install iTunes
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package iTunes

What? iTunes isn't available for Linux! Shock horror! Well, at least Apple were good enough not to intentionally sabotage the iPod I gave them good money for, so that the folks at $NON_ITUNES_MUSIC_PLAYER_DEVELOPMENT_TEAM can find a way around Apple's deficiencies.

OH. WAIT.

Yes, good day sir. I wish to inform you that I shall NOT be refraining from raping your mother and eating your father. Please do not suffer the illusion that your parents will be left un-assailed.

There we are. Now I may ravage or consume your parents with utter impudence, because I never said I wouldn't (in fact, I strongly implied I would!).

Bother! It would STILL be evil, even if I proclaimed I were to do it! Amazing! Therefore, dishonesty is not necessarily a prerequisite of evil!

Wankbox [...] OggWankis

Ah yes, another crippling counterargument from a skilled orator. Well played sir, putting the word "wank" in your sentence sure annulled the fact that IT IS PRETTY DAMN EVIL TO INTENTIONALLY GO OUT OF YOUR WAY TO SABOTAGE PEOPLE WHO JUST WANT THEIR HARDWARE TO PLAY NICE WITH THEIR SOFTWARE.

[blockquote]how long until a couple of Arabs fly a plane into these things?[/blockquote]

I doubt they would. Terrorists are out to make our lives worse, not do us a favour by destroying eyesores.

Will this liquid wood be able to replace the vast number of different sorts of plastic we have today? There are some plastics with some fascinating properties out there, I'd like to imagine that we won't lose those properties forever when oil runs out..

Why not have the best of both worlds, and name servers using an easy-to-remember categorised naming scheme? For example, you could have the scheme "Alcohol", and make Sydney genre "animation". Then, your OS could be "boy=Windows1, girl=Windows2 (eg S2K3), man=Linux1 (eg S2K8) (eg RHEL), Woman=linux2 (eg Fedora), old person=BSD". Function could be specific show (eg, Simpsons=Production), and number could be alphabetical order. Given such a broad genre, you can utilise every letter in the alphabet once - so A(very Bullock), B(art Simpson), C(hris Griffin), D(ale Gribble). In this case, the server "Homer" would indicate the eighth production server in Sydney, which runs RHEL. That way, anyone familiar with your naming scheme would know all the details just from the name "Homer", and you would have all the advantages of mnemonic naming.

This is just an example, you could use any broad category - Celebrities (era, genre, medium, alphabetical), animals (family, habitat, diet, alphabetical), Technology (era of invention, cost range, function, size), alcohol (type, country of origin, colour, strength), companies (industry, city of origin, net worth in 2005, alphabetical). Anything that is common knowledge will work just fine.

It could be interesting to turn them into cheap TV tuners. Take them apart, solder an adapter to the relevant parts of the board, connect that to the COM port, and then feed the signal into your computer (I've yet to see a non-onboard video card still retailing without VIVO). Alternatives: replace the COM solder/controller with an IR stick, LIRC and feed the STB as if you were using a remote (capture from the included remote) - no dismantling required (a little boring)! Or, seeing if you can somehow get the video into the system through something like ethernet or USB (I'm wondering if you could do an unbelievably complex hack by using a hard disk caddy, a hard disk chipset and having the stream fed into the HDD chipset itself, as if it were from a hard drive. I don't know enough about the interface between hard disk and it's chipset, but I'd imagine you'd have to treat the stream somehow - as unlikely as it seems, it would be exciting if you could get the stream through this interface intact). Once you've got it as an OS-recognisable computer stream, it is ludicrously easy to translate that into networked video (VLC is your friend) or anything else useful.

"Houston, we have a problem.."

"Roger that, missiles launched"

As far as I'm concerned, there really is no point in drawing a line between human and animal. If we decide it's to be treated as a human, then it would obviously be deemed too destructive and unable to cope in society - as many people with mental issues are. At that point, we would segregate it from society in a humane habitat (as we do with mental patients, or at least the ones that can afford it :P). Now, obviously, no scientist would recieve funding for it's creation if it couldn't be studied (remember, it's not unethical to study human beings, if they aren't harmed and if it's consented to by someone with the mental capacity and authority to decide). If we decided it was an ANIMAL, obviously we would treat it like a zoo creature or pet (I'm sure no-one intends to eat this thing, even if that were legal). We would skip the mental evaluation and simply put it in a humane habitat, as we do with animals at the zoo or pets, and study it humanely (it's unethical and probably illegal to cut animals up for study). Either way, the end result is the same - the being is kept somewhere where it's not dangerous to itself or regular homo sapien sapiens, and studied. I don't understand why someone would wish to draw a line between animal and human for ethical reasons, when it would be treated the same due to it being mentally incapable of anything else.

Would you rather I ate your child or your cat?

Well you could try, but I suspect you'd be very hungry in either case (I have neither). However, if you're volunteering to eat people, I have some prime candidates for you - that guy that hoons down my street at 3am, Stephen Conroy, that fat guy that cut in at the movie foyer line and took the last of the popcorn...

I meant, "[in this case] there really is no point in drawing a line between human and animal."

Solution: Capture at twice the output resolution (eg, 1600x1200 for an 800x600 video), then correct jitter by moving the video window within the capture frame and using AI to determine whether something is jitter or intentional frame movement (eg. does the new direction return to near the old one within some time limit, is the camera focusing on an object I should be locking on to, does the new position of the capture frame force a static video frame outside of the capture frame, etc). Basically similar to the peripheral vision, except videos only have discrete capturing (either something's shown or it isn't, using various filters on the outskirting pixels looks strange) instead of continually diminishing awareness on the peripherals.

games, device support, office software, general acceptance in the business world. do i need to continue?

Better device support, you say? And given the other three are not an attribute of Windows' quality, but instead it's popularity (especially given that OpenOffice is at least as good as MS Word), I'd say you DO need to continue.

I can't speak for other countries, but that was certainly the case here in Australia - Obama was being discussed as if he were already president, and McCain was rarely mentioned (the Americans being interviewed had to keep reminding the Australian reporters that McCain even existed). Perhaps it has something to do with the excitement of the possibility of the first black president, or perhaps the political alignment of Australia made us favour Obama, who knows?