I'm responding to this, because I agree that LMMS is a great program. A little awkward to use sometimes but still cool. I would also like to mention to the Ardour doubters out there that using the Calf plugins makes Ardour a whole new piece of software http://calf.sourceforge.net/ .

People, keep asking why they would want a Steam box. I think you hit the nail on the head. Preconfigured, pretested, and optimized to run games. I go over to peoples houses and watch them boot their computer for 10-20 minutes into Windows just to play a game. It's obvious they don't know how to build or maintain their systems. I have been using Linux as my main desktop since about 97. Admittedly early on it was because I was a tech junkie, but I really don't work on my systems very often. My wife even switched to Linux this last year, and the amount of maintenance headaches I've had since then have dropped ten fold. I know there are people who have had nightmare issues with Linux, and I know people who have had none. I also know people that can't keep a Windows computer running properly for more than a few days, and even more that think it's normal to wait 3 to 5 minutes for an app to start.

But excuse the rant. I think the point is that if Valve is going to sell a steam Box, that you could dual boot with windows if you want(or not), or install other applications to use it as a desktop(or not). That will just work day in day out, without the fuss of windows. People will buy it.

I believe Valve is consciously creating their own environment here. Much like Xbox, and PlayStation, they want to be able to offer you an end to end experience, where the software and hardware are tuned for performance. This may mean that Steam OS will give up some features as a generic linux OS to gain performance for gaming. In the case of the Steam Machine, this will more than likely mean that the hardware will have specially tuned drivers pushing it.

So think of taking your Windows machine, and passing it to to a team of experts who would then strip the OS down, rebuild it, and tune it specifically for the hardware you have installed, so that it runs games at max performance. In this case your best Windows 8 machine may not perform as well as a mid level (hardware) Steam Machine.

0.00001% of world population cares about the accuracy of statistics surrounding people who may or may not enjoy yachting.. sadly those people are also avid slashdot followers

The "king post" is what keeps the bow sprit from moving aft when pressure from the sail is added to it. The only reason for adding weight to it in this situation is if the bow happened to be rising to quickly. The rules imply that any wing shape added to the keel/centerboard must stay in the same angle/plane for the duration of the race. Designers skipped this rule by creating a moveable lifting plane on the bow of the boat. Tilting this plane lifts the boat up off of the water. However, this is a balancing act. It takes a lot of skill and design compitence to create and run one of these rigs. The NZ team was the first to figure out the cheat, and everyone else has been playing catch up. Team Oracles boat designed by Paul Burke, was not designed with the lifting planes originally intended. In this case some of the team members took it upon themselves to level the feild by adding weight to keep the bows from popping up to quickly and losing control of when they would and would not plane on the hydrofoils. It is a bit picky, but those people involved knew well what they were doing and went through lengths to cover it up. If they had just put a hunk of lead up there, judges would probably just have said "hey you can't do that".. but instead it was found buried purposely put there. That is pretty much willfull defiance of the rules. I'm an american shipwright from the northwest where these boats are built, so I'm definately on the US side.. but I see the significance of the decision, both ways.

The America's cup is watched by millions. Team costs per syndicate are in the hundreds of millions making Indie racing or formula 1 a joke in comparison. What's more it is the least regulated form of racing (current situation not incumbering) of all the professional racing sports. 30 years ago they were racing mono-hull sailboats pounding through small waves. Now they are racing multihulls that litterally lift off the water on wings going faster than the traffic on the golden gate bridge and almost leaving the speed boats that trail them in the dust.
From my personal experience sailing a boat over 25knts the splashes start to feel like pebbles and then rocks hitting you.. the intensity of having a vehicle of that size moving at that speed is akin to taking Caterpillar 797 through a downhill from Pikes peak. It's amazing and a great sport at any level.

http://www.kde.org/workspaces/

I still remember when kde2 came out. There was all this talk about everything as a file, like plan9, but in a user oriented fashion. KDE4 did away with all that, but kept the idea of user functionality. If for you functionality is having a button in a specific place, or having settings preordained and hidden, then KDE is not for you. KDE allows for some amazing things, like workspaces. (I gaurantee that this concept will be picked up eventually by the major players as something they came up with)
KDE has in most cases at least two ways do do everything, if you can't find it in one place it's in another. This is a pain to some people, but to someone trying to figure out the system, it means that they have at leas two chances to figue it out before they go to the forums.
KDE is by far the most configuable DE bar none. Where other systems have hacks to change things KDE gives it to you on a platter. There is almost nothing that you cannot change to suit your needs.

While I understand the desire to have a simple desktop setup, any power user who has had more that a couple months with KDE will tell you, there is hardly any DE that can stand up to it for useability.

Actually atheists don't (by their very nature) worry about the afterlife. That's like saying dog's are worried about books, because they don't read them.
Many atheists these days are more vocal because of the growing attacks on science. If people want to believe that we can be healed from the sin of an ancient relative (who was talked into eating an apple by a talking snake), by a human sacrifice, where god had his own son (who is himself) killed. That's fine. Just stop trying to force it on everyone else.

Mine must be a fluke then. I'm writing this response from one and haven't plugged it in in three days. Admittedly I haven't been playing movies the whole time just surfing playing YouTube videos and the like but it lasts at least twice what my galaxy s2 does for the same usage. I've had other tablets and this one needs the least charging of any I've owned. 72 he's and still a third of a battery left.

McCarthur was pissing over the Yalu river from the start. He backed bombing runs into China to stop supplies coming in to NK. If you remember Truman was pretty pissed about it. McCarthur assured him that the the Chinese were a bunch of pussy's and not to worry about it. He was dead wrong on both counts. Truman was right to want to keep China out of the war. How long would you allow your people to be bombed in your own country before responding?

For those people unfamiliar with the patent wars. Think of it as two large spanish galions loaded with treasure recently pillaged from the new world. If they both make it home they have to share in the bounty, but if one takes the other ship. Then only one ship goes home with the plunder.

So now we have two ships circling each other firing canon at close range hoping the other will surrender or sink..

In this case MS sued Motorola, and it's actually Motorola's shitty h.264 patents you are talking about not googles... and I seriously doubt they are anywhere near as bad as the list of patents that Barnes & Nobles releases when MS went to sue them for not using Windows. Google to my knowledge has not initiated a patent war with any major company. It has however been fighting as hard as it can.

Interesting, that when I read your post I couldn't help but think that very same though about politics, and social engineering. People seem to think that any solution that looks good on the surface should work, and yet hardly ever bother to measure the result of any given solution. On the whole we understand that things are f'd up but understanding why is simply beyond us. Makes me wonder what solutions machine learning algorithms would come up with given more and more criteria, and if those solutions would seem reasonable to humans or not. Just don't allow it access to Petman..

Hrm.. funny I had read that on the web. Couldn't find the off. I tried it before and after posting here.. then I shot video of the settings to show I wasn't making it up, and while viewing the video before uploading, I saw it. Right at the top, blue button. I'd been looking at it the whole time, and just couldn't see it. God knows this is the biggest problem I have when writing code too.. just some dumb spelling error that takes me an hour to debug because I can't see it right in front of me...

I actually like some of the things google does.. but I had to unistall google+ from my phone because I couldn't find a way to stop it from uploading all of my photos, and videos. I don't like the fact that they took out the setting that allows you to only upload what you want to. I don't care that they don't automatically share. I don't feel like going through and deleting 50 million images and movies every time I log in to G+