and you know how us Americans are with our Starbucks!

We Australians have no fucking idea how you are with Starbucks... Starbucks Australia went broke and had to basically exit the country almost as soon as it started opening stores, because compared to Australian coffee it was plain trash. You spent a week in Australia, I hope you realise how bad Starbucks coffee is now! Australia is renowned for having the highest standards for coffee.

Debt is just an operating cost as long the company can afford it. I don't see how it changes the equation?

You know there are open and free licenses for software which had nothing to do with Stallman, right? Many people, myself included, find that these often unencumbered OSS licenses are even better than GNU.

I think you just successfully demonstrated the viewpoint that the GP was referring to...

There's only solution I've found to the problem of people taking your disagreement as an insult, and that is to pose every concern as a question for more detail

I've personally adopted this strategy on internet 'discussions' and it works well a lot of the time. You do always get that one wingnut who dances around every question, quotes your every sentence and delivers a 100-page response though.

They both suck *as phones*, when compared to "dumb" phones. My old Philips had 3 weeks of battery life with my usage pattern and it took two pushes of a button (including unlocking) to call pretty much everybody I care about.

Many people (myself included) understand and accept this as a trade-off for the ability to carry an email/gps/web browser/media player comfortably in your pocket. I use all of the other features more than my actual phone anyway.

I think it takes way longer than that. If I remember correctly they open the shutter for a few minutes at a particular point in the telescope's orbit and catch a few photons. They then repeat this process every time the telescope swings around to that same spot, i.e. they can't just open the shutter for 2 million seconds otherwise there would just be a big smear of light. They actually add up small bit of a few seconds at a time, so it probably took more like months or maybe even years.

You missed the main point: Scientific research needs to be relevant in order to qualify for funding.

Previous high court rulings on the interpretation of the constitution mean we do in fact have free speech protections. We don't have this right through an act of parliament, but this is only one way we get laws in this country. Legal precedent is another.

Can't you just buy a powered USB hub?

For $30 I bought a media streaming device for my lounge room. I've been looking into a dedicated streaming box for a while now and there is nothing on the market which comes close to $30. I don't see how this isn't appealing?

No, I wouldn't really regard the Pi as a desktop replacement, but it can run one. I haven't really played around enough to see what happens when it starts swapping so I can't tell you I'm afraid. I would however imagine that this is heavily dependent on the read/write speeds of your SD card, which can be highly variable.

Well, mine was $35 plus I think $6 shipping, I plugged it into a spare phone charger I had lying around and it currently has no case, but I was planning on using a cardboard box. I haven't even had to buy a cable for it. So yeah I really honestly did spend a whopping $41, nothing like $85 (seriously is that even much money?).

Considering I was in the market for a HTPC and I was looking at AMD all-in-one fanless systems (~$150) with a nice case (~$150), I think I'm doing ok here.

Well mine is running XBMC very happily using raspbmc, and will output 1080p. It really wasn't that long ago that 256mb ram was decent. It isn't that snappy in a desktop environment, but really, we aren't talking about a particularly limited set of capabilities here.

I dunno, it sparked a pretty interesting flame war here on slashdot?

I would hardly call ~10% market share a market which has 'yielded'. Windows is absolutely the dominant platform on desktops, don't kid yourself. Servers are also less clean cut than you might think, Microsoft has a significant presence in the server market. Linux wins out in high performance scientific computing (clusters and the like) by an extremely wide margin, and high frequency trading for that matter. Not only that but 90% of mac's you see are running the office suite. Microsoft is hardly doing it tough, despite what you might like to think.