Not that I disagree with your point, but the cursor control did improve from 2.1 to 2.2 which has been wild for a while.

In fact, they just released a beta for a few additional features. Go valve!

I would check my GC game manuals, but all I have are "backup" copies.

electrolytes???

Do they like Vinegar and Sea Salt or plain? Seriously, the Navy could be buying computer parts with backdoors if this is what goes on.

VERY SMALL ROCKS! They're just bangin' them together!

You can't make me unhappy.

Wow, I had no idea the gaming community was dead on PC.. *slight sarcasm* Maybe it is dying, but I didn't notice. I see all kinds of games online through Steam coming out. And I know a lot of them didn't begin as console games. Yeah, anecdotal, I know, but I'm not worried. As for 2k for a gaming rig? It doesn't take that much to compete with the 360 for graphics. 8800GT and you're set. You cant play it all on high settings but I sure as heck can play Crysis with it looking good. I understand the exaggeration, but in my opinion the PC gaming market will not die anytime soon.

I got sprint for two years - it was the cheapest plan @ 35/mo. Ended up paying close to $60 every month.. and I hardly went over my minutes at all. Hidden fees and taxes out the ying yang.

Now I have ATT, wayy more minutes, better service, rollover, and I pay $45 or less every month.

Although a friend highly recommended verizon. What a vicious cycle of pain.

*Living in Alaska and Washington State.

And if they are clever enough to do otherwise, they don't deserve to be put in prison!

I think the idea is more that Linux is rock-solid because they don't have crappy closed-source drivers from every little hardware vendor. Suddenly Linux's lack of hardware vendor support is a plus, since writing their own drivers increased the stability. So Windows is pretty solid so long as you're using well supported hardware with well written drivers, but you get the BSOD when you install some crappy driver from some random hardware vendor and that driver goes AWOL.

Now I'm not a Windows fan, but I've supported Windows since WfW 3.11, and I believe that there's at least some truth to this idea. If you install Windows XP or anything after (maybe excepting Vista when it was first released) on good hardware with good drivers, the BSOD should be pretty rare.

And the thing with Macs isn't just that they only have to support a smaller selection of hardware, but that they get to control exactly which hardware and then test and approve the drivers. If there's some video chipset from a given manufacturer that isn't going to work well for their OS, they just don't include that chipset in any of their systems. It's true that neither Linux developers nor Microsoft have that luxury, and I believe it's at least partially responsible for Apple's reputation of being solid and that everything "just works". It's much easier to make a solid system where everything works out of the box if you're controlling both the hardware and the software.

At this points, in terms of meaningful UI alone, Chrome is a much better choice than Firefox, particularly for unexperienced users (whom you'd just want to move off IE). It just makes sense. Like Apple's stuff, only without the reality distortion field.

I didn't realize they measure to three decimal places - that's ridiculous. Considering the accuracy of breathalyzers is no where near that. My source? Heard it from a cop.

RobDude - I hear your frustration. Personally, it's been quite some time since I had a *serious* hardware problem. Yeah, I struggled, until about the time Suse 9 came out. With that download, everything "just worked" for me. Things have gotten better since then, as well. But, that doesn't help the guy with this thing, or that gadget for which there IS NO SUPPORT! So, I hear you.

Did you contact the vendor of the gadget that refused to work? Yeah - it's a pain, just one more pain in a long list of pains when the gadget doesn't work. But, I hope you DID contact the mfgr, and give them a good cussing out.

Doing so makes them aware that more and more of the world is using Linux, and that they can make money by supplying a driver for us. I've contacted several, myself. It ain't that big a deal, but if it helps to convince one mfr to support Linux, well, I've done a little bit for the community.

BTW - you are aware that not every distro and/or repository supports the same hardware? If you feel like experimenting, you might try some Live-CD's to see which if any makes your gadget work. Just an idea......

Um. This does happen around the time of every major OS release, especially with Apple and Microsoft.

Apple in particular has a somewhat poor track record for 10.x.0 releases, with the notable exception of 10.6.0. Application compatibility issues aside, Snow Leopard is the first major OS release I've heard of *ever* not to have at least occasional problems during an in-place upgrade. Even Windows service packs are known to break things from time to time.

My anecdotal experience with Karmic Koala has been "so far so good." No complaints here -- nice try trolls!

Really? 10 to 1 is a midrange? Indiscriminant? If you have a good information source, please share. I feel we both want the same thing - fewer dead civilians, but I suspect you are using very bad assumptions.

In the Human Rights Watch report "Troops in Contact" they go out of their way to say that planned strikes result in few civilian deaths, and that the bulk of civilian casualties come from coalition land forces coming under fire and calling in air strikes to take out insurgents who are using civilians as human shields. Unmanned drones, by their very nature, are slow and are not used for close air support of ground troops. A-10s, helicopters, fighters, and even B-2 and B-52 bombers have been used for close air support, some carrying heavy weapons.

Using your reasoning, there would be fewer precision strikes by unmanned drones (carrying missiles with 20 pound warheads) against evaluated targets, and more ground troops under fire screaming into their radios for close air support by aircraft carrying large bombs, resulting in more dead civilians. The whole reason for using precision laser guided missiles such as Hellfire II (used by Predator and other UAVs), is to limit civilian casualties.