Yeah, look at how awful countries like Norway and Sweden are with all their "nanny-state policies".... they only have the highest standards of living in the world.

Have they? With that moronic "Share" button where the useful "read more" link once was, I think we can be sure that they're just trying to bring back the horror show that was Beta one change at a time.

Dice hates its userbase just as much as Reddit's management did. This is what happens when you let sociopathic MBAs run a site. These evil beings think only terms of monetizing, so they can lubricate their way into fat payoffs and leave the sites they've screwed as smoking ruins.

I don't know about other KDE users, but I've never "hacked around with settings all day"; I've spent maybe 10-20 minutes hacking around with different settings, trying things out, and after that I've just left them that way for ages, because at that point I'm happy with them.

So instead of spending less than a half hour to play around with settings in KDE, you want me to write my own shell program so I can use Windows??? Are you fucking nuts?

I don't have to do any programming to use KDE and change it around to my liking. This is supposed to be a plus for Windows?

You sound like all the idiotic Gnome sycophants: "if you don't like the default Gnome settings, just write an extension! And when they break the API in the next release, just recode your extension for it!"

I write a C/C++ app that uses Qt. But people use GTK+ because its C and not C++.

GTK+ has C++ bindings and is used in C++ projects.

Or you know, have the balls to not send the money?

So how would you do away with the operating system and still enable people to 'get something done'?

That's easy: you go back to the days of MS-DOS (which was nothing more than a program loader). We got plenty of stuff done back then, it was just slower and crappier because changing tasks took so long: you had to save and exit your application, then start up the other application and load your work. If you had to constantly switch between two things, it was a real PITA.

But you could "get something done". Countless secretaries got lots of work done in WordPerfect in those days.

As always, the hard part is getting the data into the computer, which probably can't yet reliably tell the difference between an agitated warthog and an excited warthog, except under extremely controlled conditions; I bet you could do something slick just with audio signal processing if you had one warthog alone in a sound studio, but in the real world...

They said they were monitoring pigs, I'm trying to spruce it up with the warthogs

If you get an update, ever.

Much better arguments, really. Especially OSX. They just can't afford to look lame next to their only credible desktop competitor.

Competition reduces profit margins, but not to zero. It might force them to work to make their operations more efficient though. But still, they're not going to bother staying in business if they're not making a profit, and that generally makes CM more expensive (long term) than making things yourself.

I think it's pretty clear Varoufakis was turfed by Tsipras because the only hope in hell Greece now has of negotiating a deal with the Troika and remaining in the Eurozone and even in the EU is not having that man by his side. The price of even talking about a new deal and further bailouts is Varoufakis's head, which has been delivered to Merkel on a silver platter. This referendum was completely about Tsipras's political survival, and having achieved that, Greek voters will now witness just how utterly irrelevant the referendum was.

You've run Windows before, right?

Ok, so you don't agree with most people about the Terminator movies, but we're really talking about manufactured products here, not art (which is what movies are, a form of art). Lots of people have very different opinions about artwork. Some like Picasso, some like Rembrandt, some like Dali, but I doubt this maps very well with whether you'd buy a Zune or iPod, or whether you use a PC or Mac or Linux, or whether you use Android or iPhone or Windows Phone, or what kind of car you drive ; these choice, while there is some subjective component to them, also have a significant practical component, plus a big price component. As a Dali fan, I can buy Dali prints for a couple dollars easily, but if I like Ferraris, I can't afford one of those, plus I need a vehicle with some cargo space, so I have to buy a more practical vehicle. Movies don't have a price component: they all cost the same at the theater, whether you're watching a Terminator movie (good or bad), or a stinker like Gigli.

Do you have any actual examples of things you've bought that were duds?