That would be congressional *action*, would it not? If they hadn't acted to insert the 70 words, this wouldn't be a problem.

Tethering is built into the n900. I had no trouble providing internet for my home network via 3G during snowmaggedon last month, when my internet went down. I use Ubuntu, but I'm sure it would have been about as easy with Windows or Mac.

"99% of the time I'm correct. Linux has support for so many pieces of hardware out of the box that I don't even *need* a third party driver."

I'm glad someone, somewhere, is having this experience. I used Linux on the desktop from 1997 through mid-2003 (switched to Mac), and I switched back to Ubuntu last month. That's one of the things that has not changed: there's always something that doesn't work, and often multiple things that don't work completely (it used to be sound and network, and then it was graphics, wireless, and ACPI that always seemed to not work right, and after installing Ubuntu on my iMac, sure enough, it's the ATI video card and the wireless drivers that don't work correctly (though the gnome-power-manager also gets in the way, turning on my iMac's screen in the middle of the night for no apparent reason and leaving it on, but at least it'll stay killed until the next reboot, even though it doesn't obey the preference to not start on startup).

In the last six years, the Linux desktop has improved quite a lot (Gnome seems a lot more stable and somewhat faster, but not nearly as much faster as my machine is), but drivers are apparently still a major weak spot.

Oh, I wasn't saying that everything just works on Mac (though, really, most stuff does; not being able to do something at all is not the same as installing something and then finding that it doesn't actually do what it ought to have, and your examples point out that the built-in defaults work well enough that you'd like to use those programs for other things that they don't handle by default, too!). I'm just saying that the *default assumption* is that things do what they're supposed to, even if they don't do other things you'd like.

Once you've used Linux for a bit, your (well, "my") default assumption is that a given package will actually not do what it should do, hence my example of not wanting to uninstall the kubuntu-desktop package, even though I'm not using it, because the login screen still seems to be the kubuntu one, and my default expectation is not that it will either warn me or re-enable the Gnome login screen, but that I just won't be able to login without booting into runlevel 3 and fixing things (assuming runlevel 3 is still textmode). Oh, and the pointer and "wait" cursor are still the KDE ones, which is nice since I liked those better, but worrying because it's not clear why the Gnome ones wouldn't have come back.

I switched back in part because I noticed I was using mostly open source stuff instead of Mac stuff, and that was because I could make it do what I really wanted, instead of just accepting the few options I'm given. I knew what I was getting into, because I went the other way a few years back, and I'm not really complaining about that. Also, let me hurry to point out that Ubuntu really has come a long way from Debian ca 2003, but it appears that they've reached this point mainly by making things less configurable so that you're less likely to run into sharp corners, and that once you start doing any real changes to the system, you're on your own. :)

"packing as much energy as 2400 megatons of TNT"

That seems a bit low, doesn't it? Only two orders of magnitude more than what we've produced in a single nuke explosion?

That's not reliable. I installed Ubuntu, tried out kubuntu-desktop, xubuntu-desktop, enlightenment, and finally went back to Gnome (ubuntu-desktop). After installing the kubuntu-desktop, it's said kubuntu every time I log in, even though I'm logging into Gnome, now. I might be able to get it to stop by uninstalling kubuntu-desktop, or that might just make it so I can't log in at all; who knows?

I switched to Mac from Gentoo in 2003, and while I switched to Ubuntu a few weeks ago (since I now have the time to tweak my system every day again), I'm startled by how far Linux hasn't come. :( In Windows and Mac, there's an expectation that things will actually work, but after a few weeks back in Linux, I've reverted to the default expectation that things will not work without handholding and forum browsing.

I think this was way more realistic than it would have been if he'd suddenly had a change of heart in the lab; it wasn't really a place he could think about things enough for that. Near the end, when he protects the alien on the way back, it's not because he's had a moment of becoming moral, but because he finally sees the alien (and their child) as a *person*, and Wickus is someone who cares about people.

Well, that's Michael Scott. Good salesman, though, apparently.

If so, they could just fix it last summer if they discover any other problems, no?