That's an oddity of the American market and American carriers; in much of the rest of the world, people can buy phones and service separately.

And AT&T uses GSM, so you don't have to buy and use their locked down phones. I've been using an unlocked third party phone on AT&T for years, including tethering.

Android tends to be more popular with really geeky folks while the iPhone tends to be more popular with people that want their experience ready to go out of the box.

I have both, so let's see.

Android phone: turn on, type in Google account name and password (old or new), and everything works and stays in sync.

iPhone: turn on, and... then it gets complicated. You definitely need a desktop at some point, but then you have to decide... Do you want to sync with Google? That's complicated, you need to set up mail and an Exchange account. Do you sync with your desktop? On Mac, it sort-of syncs with the built-in applications (but not much else). On Windows, it supposedly syncs with Outlook. If you use both a desktop and a laptop, things get even more complicated.

Seems pretty clear which is better for "people who want their experience ready to go out of the box": get an Android phone and use Google's online apps. Apple's ecosystem is a complicated mess in comparison.

Every licensed hardware player has the same requirement, and it's a lot easier to implement in a piece of hardware. If Microsoft wanted to make it easy to skirt region restrictions, they could, and they could get away with it. They choose to make it hard.

Mostly they have been copying where Amazon, Sony and Apple have been copying as well: UNIX, Linux, and software built on those platforms.

Microsoft never did understand Lotus Notes. It was like a alien language. They just didn't get it.

Who would have thought... there is something Microsoft employees have in common with the rest of humanity after all.

Every single licensed software DVD player on the planet requires a DVD region code to be set on the drive

Yes, but unlike Microsoft, most of them don't seriously enforce it anymore. You put them into some kind "test mode" by typing a four digit code on the remote and it will never bother you again.

People need to see what our governments are doing, we need to understand it and we need to stop it before it is too late.

And we did what we could at the ballot box, and many people chose to go into politics after the experience of the Iraq war. That's how democracy works.

I'm also disappointed that Obama hasn't moved more forcefully in support of open government, disclosure, and withdrawal, but that's the president and Congress we got and voted for.

When we violate our own values, the terrorists win. If you kill a terrorist with a drone and in doing so take out a dozen innocents, you turn the friends and relatives of those innocents into terrorists.

True. But do you think the military doesn't know that? What do you want the US to do? Immediate, unconditional withdrawal? Policy makers aren't as stupid as you think they are; they know these consequences. They try to balance long term goals, short term pressuers, and getting reelected. And the outcome is what you see.

Now, if you have a bright idea about what to do about Iraq and Afghanistan, please share it.

Apathy? What do you want people to do? People know Bush lied, his party was voted out of Congress, and that's it. As for the wars, we started them, we can't just leave. And while they are a colossal waste of money, there are two evil and dangerous regimes less in the world, and two nations have a chance at a better beginning; it's kind of hard to get worked up about that.

professors' longevity 'would be determined by the community

In many places in the world, tenure doesn't exist anymore and "professors' longevity" is already determined by the community, through student evaluations and publication records. The result? Professors simplify subjects so that students are happy and conferences get flooded with bad submissions that overwhelm reviewers. That is not a good way of attracting good teachers or good researchers.

There is a solution for that: use Ubuntu Linux.

It also works for me under 10.10, so you might want to consider just upgrading to the latest version.

On an Ubuntu 10.4 system, I plug in my iPod Touch and it just shows up in Rhythmbox, allowing music to be transferred both ways. It works both on my laptop and my desktop; I didn't do anything special.

Have you tried starting up Rhythmbox?

Well, obviously, you should first convince them to switch to OpenOffice, Pidgin, and Gimp and then convince them to switch to Linux; the other way around is silly.

And given how crappy MS Office, Photoshop and iTunes are, it shouldn't be difficult to get them to switch.

Linux is very much alive on the desktop; it is very widely used inside corporations and universities. These "1% market share" figures are meaningless; they are usually based on device sales or web site statistics of popular web sites, neither of which tell you much about "desktop" Linux.

Linux hasn't grabbed much of the general purpose consumer desktop market, but that market is pretty much stagnant in itself. The new consumer market is tablets, netbooks, and smartphones, and Linux is grabbing a large chunk of that with Android and (in the near future) MeeGo and Chrome.

No need for Tux to look sad.

In that case I am going to figure you are a Wiccan, a faith that was invented in the 1950s.

No. Wake up, man, and learn something about the faiths of the world, many of them older than Christianity.

I can think of no faith that believing that homosexuality is not morally wrong and that Christianity is morally wrong are defining beliefs.

Where did I say they were "defining beliefs"? It's the idea that faith is an arbitrary set of rules handed down in holy books and revelations itself that is "wrong", in the same sense of "wrong" in which the flat earth theory is "physically wrong". If you like, that is a defining belief. Beyond that, we don't concern ourselves with Christianity any more than with flat earthers.