Sounds like an incredibly shaky, arbitrary foundation upon which to build a system. I'd like to see someone come up with concrete, objective definitions of "obvious" and "technical area".

It's so superior, its Network goes down for weeks at a time while it and your credit card information are compromised!

Uh, it doesn't? What other console have you owned that locked you out of playing games for a week?

Since when is that the Republican goal? See: military/war/offense spending.

Eventually they will step on something you care about, and it'll be too late by that point since you'd already conceded so much ownership and control of the device you paid money to take home. Shortsighted, unprincipled, and arbitrary responses of "Sony better not remove something I personally like, but it's okay if they remove something I don't use" are great for Sony's objective.

Rational people generally are in the minority like that.

That isn't a "simple" solution. Adding that much configurability adds a lot of complexity to code, and in the end you have something like KDE anyway - a gigantic mess of unnavigable menus and GUIs, all for configuration of every last piece of minutia. If you like that, then just use KDE.

But honestly, anyone looking for personalized, super configurable desktops shouldn't even be using GNOME (which I do) or KDE. They don't exist to serve that purpose. You should install something like Arch Linux, install X, and begin perusing all the standalone window managers, taskbars, docks, launchers, widgets, etc, and you can mix-and-match them in any way you want, until you have exactly what you like. That's the unique, personalized *nix experience - many independent programs working together. (And eventually, once you get sick of maintaining all that, you can come back to something like GNOME or Unity and appreciate how much easier it makes your computing life.)

I was skeptical about Gnome 3 too until I started using it. (Fedora alpha)

The bolded is just, like, your opinion, man.

Oh look, another language that's practically identical to 99% of other languages in syntax, features, etc.

What an innovation! Time and money well spent by the folks that developed it.

(See: masturbation. "Look, we can recreate C++/Vala/Java/C#/etc. too! Just like everyone else has!" And this is why programming sucks. Only fringe academic groups are trying to take programming languages anywhere interesting.)

So that's where Eric the Midget came from.

I've heard people saying this about PulseAudio before. But Ubuntu 10.10 came out almost a half a year ago now, and I was having PulseAudio problems with it. I don't have any reason to believe it's any less broken now than it always has been.

Sure, if you're a casual music fan - CDs are priced for you. $12-17 per CD doesn't sound ridiculous when you only spend it a few times a year.

If you have a real interest in and passion for music (especially once you start exploring back through the decades) and aren't filthy rich, you'll likely take a different perspective. You'll have an epiphany and realize that there's no reasonable, rational, affordable way to pursue your legitimate interest without torrents and filesharing websites.

Let's be honest - it's not reasonable to charge that much for a CD anywhere.

Nope, that wasn't why it was designed. You can learn about the GPL here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html