This is the video that might explain the attitude: it's Spielberg vs. Hitchcock in an epic rap battle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Whatever your opinion of the directors, you might find the video hilarious!

Europe is composed of socialist countries and has been for about 60 years or so for the ones that weren't communist and the rest became socialist when the communist regime fell. Germany? Socialist. France? Socialist. Sweden, the land of Ikea, Swedish meatballs, and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Socialist. Britain, that bastion of capitalism? Socialist. That big ass VAT they pay in Britain? That's to support their socialist regime. Take a look at the health care and welfare systems provided by the European countries. They're socialist.

Taking into account things like technology available to the common people, things like internet access and mobile phone technology, I would have to say that things are a hell of lot better than in the U.S.

So how exactly have they failed?

I just did a quick check for OCR software:

$ apt-cache search ocr | grep -v ^lib | grep -i ocr | grep -i -v language | grep -v motocross
fonts-ocr-a - ANSI font readable by the computers of the 1960s
fuzzyocr - spamassassin plugin to check image attachments
gimagereader - Graphical GTK+ front-end to tesseract-ocr
gocr - Command line OCR
gocr-tk - tcl/tk wrapper around gocr
python-gamera.toolkits.greekocr - toolkit for building OCR systems for polytonal Greek
hocr-gtk - GTK+ frontend for Hebrew OCR
python-gamera.toolkits.ocr - toolkit for building OCR systems
ocrad - optical character recognition program
ocrfeeder - Document layout analysis and optical character recognition system
ocrodjvu - tool to perform OCR on DjVu documents
r-cran-rocr - GNU R package to prepare and display ROC curves
tesseract-ocr - Command line OCR tool
tesseract-ocr-dev - transitional dummy package

What niche need does this app fill? If you're using Gmail, don't you already have access to your e-mail, calendar, whatever from any Android device and/or desktop? I'm trying to understand what's the point of this app? I'm a Linux user for example. What does this product give me that I don't already have for free on any platform? I don't use Windows so why should I (or anyone else for that matter) care? What's the killer app here?

So would it be fair to say then that this a hardware vendor issue at least in the case of the Lenovo laptop, as it seems that the Microsoft solution is to let just the GPU driver deal with the issue? It seems kind of strange to me though why would the GPU driver have the capability of dealing with the keyboard backlighting feature? Why would the graphics subsystem care about the keyboard? That seems kind of bizarre to me.

I think that's being too harsh. As the paper described in its conclusions of the 3 groups who make use of R, the largest and primary group is the users, people who don't do programming in R, but rather make use of it for generating and displaying statistics in an interactive environment. R is a much better language to work I think if one has to access to RStudio, the gui frontend to R.

Is R a good general purpose programming language in the sense of other programming languages such as C/C++, python, perl, shell scripting, etc.? No, I think it's clear it's not a good general purpose language, but for what it focuses on, namely make it easy to do statistical computations it's hard to beat the language.

For statistical analysis the only competitor I see for it is a mixture of ipython notebook + python statistical modules such as pandas, numpy, scipy, pymc, sklearn,statsmodel, pystan, etc.

From the tone of your comment it sounds like you've had some serious frustrations. Do you mind if I ask what flavor of Linux you were running, what the desktop(s) were and what were the issues you were getting? I ask because I've been exclusively using Linux for 18+ years and while I've had my share of issues (NVidia binary blobs caused kernel panics for a period of 3 years when enabling OpenGL on my X sessions. As a result it's been 6 years since I've used NVidia hardware.) I'm curious to find out what drove you to use Windows, and also why Windows instead of say one of the BSDs, or even Mac OS X?

I think the simplest explanation is that when you're at college you're just too busy studying to keep tabs on what's on TV. After college, you have more leisure time and you start watching again.

> isn't it standard practice for the injured party to work with prosecutors?
Yes, yes it is. What is **not** standard practice is for an "injured party" (is it clear that MPAA is an "injured party"?) to bribe prosecutors and write their legal briefs for them. Does that help to make it clear why this behavior is offensive to some, and probably illegal (hence the lawsuit by Google against the attorney general.)

It's a Celeron CPU. Office 365 is a rental. It's 2GB of memory. It's Windows. vs. http://www.google.com/intl/en/... and the OS is ChromeOS which is automatically updated. And it's not a rental. And you can install Ubuntu/Debian if you want in a chroot using crouton if you want a fully functional OS for programming.

Be sure to use RStudio as the front end: http://www.rstudio.com/. Using on R in a terminal is ok, but having the beautiful GUI frontend RStudio makes working with R sooooooo much better! The help system, plots, R markdown (knitr), and inspecting variables in RStudio is so much easier. As far as comparisons go,

1. R is no competitor to python for writing generic scripts.
2. Python (numpy, scipy, statsmodels, pandas, sklearn, matplotlib, ipython and ipython notebooks) is not yet ready to compete with R for doing statistical analysis but give Python a couple of more years and then slashdot should do a review of how it compares.
3. You can always call R from python using the r2py module. This is really easy within an ipython notebook using the %load_ext rmagic command.

For a nice video on using ipython notebook in data analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

For a nice selection of ipython notebooks for doing various type of data analysis: https://github.com/ipython/ipy...

But those tablets couldn't run windows (xp)! We can't have that!

Why, oh why, would anyone go through the trouble of making hardware that could survive those extreme conditions and then put Windows(!?!?!?!?) on it? Talk about the most pointless exercise ever. They couldn't be bothered to go check what the OS market share for tablets was? Hell, I wouldn't surprised if those tablets were running Windows XP. If you're going to choose to go stupid, might as well double down.

I can't help but think of the old saying "A fool and his money are soon parted."

I've seen postings from others as well that state that OpenOffice is inferior to Microsoft Office. Since Debian switched to LibreOffice a few years ago, I haven't used OpenOffice so I can't comment on the current version of OpenOffice vs. the current version of Microsoft Office.

However, I did a find web site which does publishes a comparison between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office 2013: https://wiki.documentfoundatio... Based on that comparison, I would have to say that Microsoft Office is actually inferior to LibreOffice. Does anyone know of any other published comparisons between the office suites?

I've heard other people say this too, but I don't see how that can be. Are there any stats that convincingly prove this? It seems to me that proprietary companies have some advantages when it comes to marketing. They can always sue people who claim they have found an exploit in the software. And there is no law obligating a proprietary company to announce when someone has found an exploit in their proprietary software and informed the company about it. So I would take claims that Microsoft has a "better" security record with a mountain of salt. Who is Microsoft being compared to? SCO? What is the metric? Where is the data?