Norway has just approved "Datalagringsdirektivet" which is country wide surveillance of internet and phone traffic, a highly controversial law, only made possible via co-op from both left wing and right wing parties(Arbeiderpartiet and Høyre). In addition, we recently passed a law allowing private companies to have access to logs of IP addresses and connections from ISPs. Norway sucks.

Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden has lions on their coat of arms.

I made no such claim either.

Or you can rely on Red Hat doing the same support for free: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/red_hat_openjdk_6_leadership/ http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2013/3/red-hat-reinforces-java-commitment
OpenJDK though, but still.

Hahahaha! Oh wait, you're serious? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Any of the *BSDs kick Windows ass when it comes to both lean and stable.(Not mentioning Linux, since that's "not UNIX" for some people).

He may be a genius, but .NET and C# are still tools for Microsoft to create a vendor lock-in. Color me uninterested.

I highly doubt this. Source please.

Did it cease to be a turd when they polished it?

It's a time honored tradition in 'murica. The Glazers are gleefully practicing it.

I think the combination of a lot of those numbers comes from several servers that has basically died, and people simply giving up instead of transferring. Fix your broken servers Blizzard, you have too many.

Apples Global Service Exchange is quite accurate with regards to country of origin for their products with serial numbers.

CentOS tracks RHEL, that's about 10 years of guaranteed stability for free. Getting someone to do ./configure && make && make install is probably cheaper than $10k anyway. CentOS/RHEL will also happily keep chugging along even after EOL, and will probably be more stable/secure than XP.

Just because there's no stable internal ABI doesn't mean userspace gets broken, and if the driver of some sort of hardware is present upstream, great pains are taken to ensure it still works when there's some change in the kernel.

As said earlier, a stable internal ABI inside the kernel is not needed for backwards compatibility, there's nothing that stops you from shipping all your libraries and binaries in /opt and leave it there, I'm guessing it would survive all kinds of kernel craziness. Linus has a rule to not break userspace, it seems you've not paid that much attention. But I guess since you characterize people as 'zealots' you're not the most open minded person, and I doubt you even properly know Linux/Unix. You just learned to parrot some incorrect "fact".

If only The Big Bang Theory writers would get this.

Ah, incompetent, I see.

They have a netinstall, but sadly you can't decide which DE you want to install. There's only the standard or nothing. There is however, a few iso images with KDE, XFCE and LXDE you can download if you don't want GNOME3 to ever touch your workstation.