Have you ever flown an RC helicopter? It's not all that easy. The easier ones add weights to help gyroscopically to stabilize flight. That particular RC copter only has a flight time of 4-7 minutes. http://rc.runryder.com/helicopter/t645325p1/ It would have been cheaper and better for them to get a quad copter that had a 15 minute flight time. The quad copter would probably be a little quieter too.

It seems that someone got work to purchase a hobby toy for them in the name of using it for work. Whoever that is will need a lot of time on the clock to train to fly it while the taxpayer foots the bill for the RC and his salary.

The stock version's only got 5-9 minutes of run time. http://rc.runryder.com/helicopter/t645325p1/

It would be easier, and much safer, to just get the same remote control unit, set to the same frequency, to override the controls and cause a crash. If you're not directly visible, it would be harder to identify the person responsible for the destruction of police property.

I know that a lot of janitors/custodial service as well as bus drivers that do that. Some people in retail and "health care"/assisted living places work that much too. White collar workers mostly have it "easier" because their jobs pay far more. 50 hours is a bit low, since many of them work weekends too.

You're not doing the kind of manual labor I was refering to. The type of jobs I refer to regularly top 35 hours a week for a measly hourly wage. Some of these people work 2nd jobs to make ends meet.

If you work at a computer, you're working a desk job, which in your case is half the time, which means you have access to a way to look busy without doing much work. (slashdot.)

People who do physical labor will work that much. Some people with 2 jobs work more.

I don't see a link for an article.

There's openvms http://www.openvms.org/

Kernel updates generally required reboots even in the unix/linux world. In Windows, you could also avoid a reboot if you stopped the services that are being patched and restart them after a patch was applied.

Some people are actually busy at home. I don't hire any gardeners, maids, or nannies and try much of that work myself. It serves as my exercise, plus I get to do the work to my satisfaction.

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You don't have to sweat heavily to maintain weight. There are things you can do that will help. The #1 thing to do is to stop ordering soda pop with your meals. That's just extra unneeded calories and can be quite a large part of your calorie intake throughout the day. Just drink water or tea or coffee. The 2nd thing to do is to go for a walk during lunch. I just get out of that seat of mine when I can. Don't walk so hard that you'll break a sweat, and slow down if you think you're going to break a sweat. A brisk 15-30 minute walk every other day was enough for me. If you work in a large office park, you can take a walk around to see what other businesses are around. If you work in a large corporate campus, take a walk around and visit people just see what other people are doing. If you work in a skyscraper, take the stairs to other floors and look around or walk around all the other cubicles. You might meet some people who might be doing the same thing during lunch. If your building is less than 5 floors, take the stairs all the time, skip the elevator. As I got older, I also stopped having candy bars between meals. I've done basically these 3 basic things and I had maintained my weight in the 15 years that I've done this. YMMV.

Set a timer to force yourself to remember to take a break at least every 2 hours and walk around the office. Make it every hour just to stand up and stretch for a minute. If you're in between thoughts and are paused at the keyboard, stretch your arms, crack your knuckles, stretch your toes, etc...

The other main thing to do is to stop going to the standard fast food chain stores. If you're overweight, you can skip a meal once in a while or just have a bagel or a simple peanut butter & jelly sandwich instead. Stop going out to every meal each day. Again, YMMV

I've added to each step as I've gotten older and I still fit into my college clothes. You don't have to stop all at once, you just have to reduce each step along the way. It requires some conscious effort, but if you keep at it, you'll remain fit. Unless you want a washboard stomach or bulging biceps, there's really no need to waste money to go to the gym. You can get plenty of exercise gardening if you just want to maintain basic muscle tone. Just pushing and pulling a mower one handed for half an hour is equivalent to lifting small weights. Remember to switch sides. If you have some trees, just trimming them with a manual pole cutter is quite a workout.

Edubuntu is more for 3-6 year olds. Kids get bored with the selection of the software pretty quickly when they get older. Ubermix seems to be actually geared for school age children, but my the time they're 10, they'll likely tire of some of the "educational" software and start using more of the "Apps" like skype, twitter, facebook, or whatever their replacements may be in the future.

Those generalizations are mostly accurate, but as with every generalization, there's always some exceptions.

Well, here's my anecdote/opinion to add to yours.

Folders are fixed on Windows for all Microsoft programs. It's the programmers that mess up things by using their own weird layout because they were still used to a single user system, mainly their own. Some open source programs like to place themselves in C:\ which is basically like putting it in directly in / on linux, a no-no in both worlds. There's some conventions you follow in both linux and windows, but there are far more programmers in windows that don't understand where user space should be because they're self taught or are still following the older Win95 single user or even DOS layout.

I've had to work on various linux distributions and every group likes a diffferent distribution. I hate that each one likes to package apache differently in different places and use different package managers. Not only that, each sysadmin/user might move packages into non-standard places. I'm currently working with a SUSE distribution where they've moved everything, and it's taking a little time to adjust to their schema after working on regular centos/redhat, then ubuntu/debian, then opensuse. Why does one distribution use /etc/apache2/ and another use /etc/http/ and yet another use /etc/apache/ for their configuration files? Then you have some users using /usr/local/apache2/ or /home/apache2 or /RANDOM_NAME_FOLDER/apache/. There's no standard to where people put apache or other software on their linux system.

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I guess it also depends on what you use more. I find Windows much more convenient for much of my desktop work use. I only tolerate a Mac desktop. I've recently lost the use of my Windows box and now rely solely on my Mac and I'm still adjusting. I hate the linux desktop for the same reason I hate the Mac desktop. It's missing keyboard shortcuts. Windows made their API after Macs, so they make every menu item accessible via the keyboard. Early Windows users didn't necessarily have a mouse, so every function is fully accessible via the keyboard. You can't do that on a Mac. Without a mouse, half the menu items are unavailble, because the Mac API requires the programmers to program each menu item keyboard shortcut.

I miss my keyboard shortcuts but have adapted to using all the ones that are available to me. You need to use more fingers together to replicate some shortcuts and some shortcuts are just missing. I really hate having to resort to the touchpad or mouse for some menu items. I actually used the keyboard almost exclusively on Windows and I prefer the Thinkpad Trackpoint, because my fingers, hands, and wrists don't need to move around as much. Also, I always enable the 2nd button, because a single button is just too limiting.

For the Windows command line, I download all the utilities I need to get the command line functionality I need. The first thing to always get is the resource kit, which gets most of the utilities that you need. The 2nd is to get cygwin and you can run all the same tools as on linux. If those weren't available, I'd probably slightly prefer a Mac.

There are just far more programs that I find useful on Windows. There are a few programs I'd like a Mac for, but the majority run on Windows. I also like the fact the my older Windows system allows me to keep a lot more windows open at the same time with less swapping than the Mac. I've had to restart my programs more frequently on the Mac, because they grow faster and keep swapping. I sometimes reboot to clear the system because it's faster to do that and get all my programs restarted. The same 4 GB on my Mac isn't enough to run and keep half as many programs open as on my Windows system.

I've been using Macs & Windows as far back as Win3.0 and OS6, and have always preferred using Windows and supporting other users on Macs. I was using DOS before then. Macs are just easier for other people to use, and easier for me to support, but I never liked them for myself. I found that Macs just crashed or froze more frequently. Even in the pre-Win2k days when you had to reboot Win95 daily and reboot WnNT weekly. People who believe that Macs were more stable back then probably didn't really run/use both systems and were likely just regurgitating PR. Back then, Macs also didn't have preemptive multitasking. and swapped memory to disk too often if you swapped programs.

Another advantage of Windows is Remote Desktop, which I find to be more responsive than VNC. I can keep a system running and just remotely connect to all my open windows with a single password. I don't have to run screen 20 times to connect to 20 severs. I also don't have to run Remote Desktop and enter 20 passwords. I can use any system and easily connect via remote desktop to Windows.

Basically, I prefer Windows as my main system even with all its idiosyncrasies. I like other people to use Macs, so the support problems are much easier to deal with and I like Linux as servers, because they're technically less complex than Windows servers. I can support them all, so doesn't matter which one is out there and I much prefer a diverse environment where every OS is used since that keeps overall costs down because of the competition. It also keeps be employed.

If it means expanding government spying, then I think it's already worth mentioning. I though all Americans were against government spying into people's personal lives if no crime was committed.

That would be true of any November ballots, if students even vote in large enough numbers. June ballots are not affected since students are out of town. The kooks are voted in because the town is full of kooks. A lot of people have settled in and taken root.