Too powerful for normal users, too limited for power users.

I'm a semi-professional photographer, have had art shows & a couple of photos published. Everything I do, everything, goes through Gimp before the public sees it. There is a common misconception out there that the Gimp is limited to hobby use only. I've found that pretty much anything I could ever want to do can be done with Gimp if I only take the time to learn how. The same is true of Photoshop.

Douglas Adams already foreshadowed a scheme like this in order to be able to afford the fabulously expensive dinner at Milliway's.

Douglas Adams is only dead for tax purposes, BTW.

...ISP's have zero incentive to offer anything better. The bandwidth that I have available to me right now is actually less than what I was getting ten years ago in a different metropolitan market. If an ISP has a local/regional monopoly, and there is no competing option for 100Mbps synchronous rates, then they will continue to gouge us for the equivalent of a shared cocktail straw.

The last mile network is key. Separate the ISP services from the network connectivity. Make the last mile network fast, and encourage an environment where many ISP's can peer with the last mile network & compete for customers on level ground. Then you'll see real change.

Thank you. I've been saying this for years. Any combination of consenting adults ought to be able to form whatever form of civil union they see fit, and if they want to call it "marriage", that's not for anyone else to decide.

The marriage rights issue extends way beyond the LGBT community. There are, for example, fundamentalist mormons who were betrayed by their own church for political gain. They live in the outskirts of society now, shunned by their own faith, for practicing a fundamental tenet of their faith. But there is no reason for polyamory to be considered strictly a Mormon tradition, either.

Amateur Radio != short wave. Amateur radio has spectrum allocations extending well into microwave, and most local traffic is on UHF/VHF spectrum.

The computer should just be a small non-descript box in the entertainment center rack. The keyboard/touchpad should operate without cables, on commodity AA rechargeable batteries. I know this thing has some wireless capabilities but the ports on there are pretty useless to me. Put the expensive stuff in the rack, and let me have a cheap disposable keyboard/pointer on the table where it's likely to have beer or coffee spilled on it from guests.

I am not a gamer, but I shudder to imagine how many months of my life I have collectively spent playing Warzone 2100.

You watch, the hams are going to lose spectrum to facilitate commercial interests.

Please. This is not a tall order. A Lexmark 4039 purchased 15 years ago is still working today, you can still get toner for it, and it works fine with FOSS drivers.

The machine that they performed this test on was far from an average case. A difference of two seconds between FreeBSD & Ubuntu on this box might equate to a 10+ second difference on a typical Core 2 Duo desktop, depending on what kind of test we're talking about.

Benchmarks on superlative hardware don't impress me. Have a budget of $500 for a computer, go to Wal-mart and buy it, and run the benchmark on that. That's going to be far more typical of what most people have on their desks.

Put it on iPods and it becomes ubiquitous almost immediately.

The first iPods had Firewire connectivity. It wasn't until the Windows compatible version was released that the iPod picked up USB. It's not a slam-dunk. Many people want something that "just works". If their PC's don't already have this sort of connection, it might result in a lot of lost sales & returns of iPods that are not compatible without grandma paying someone to install a PCI card for her. Or in the case of netbooks & existing laptops, you're probably screwed.

We all know that Linux is great on hackers' workstations and on servers and in computing clusters, but not so great as a desktop system for average users.

Bollocks.

All of the tools for a typical office worker are already there. Immense scale Linux desktop deployments can be very easy. An apache cluster serving up the OS install media, clients boot up via PXE & start installing via initial image grabbed over tftp. Many thousands of desktops can be installed in a matter of hours. Basically how fast can your PFY's run around turning machines on? The rest is automated (kickstart!)

Authentication & authorization on UNIX-y platforms are mature technologies.

Automated management is available through a number of tools like cfengine, puppet, and others.

I have deployed 10,000+ seat Windows environments and somewhat smaller Linux environments. Deploying Linux was so much easier! And so was managing it after deployment! At a previous job I was managing about 3,000 Linux hosts as the only Linux sysadmin, and had so much free time that I was spending almost half of my day helping the Windows team manage a much smaller number of systems.

Disney pushed hard for nearly indefinite ownership of copyright & stifling the public domain. Now it's coming back to bite them on the ass. I love it.

.. is the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Pigeon?

I know a bearded lady that might change your mind. But my evidence is NSFW.