Until they get AdBlock for TV I'll continue to download the Superbowl from Pirate Bay so that I don't have to watch the ads.

When I look at all of the major variants mentioned - Gnome, KDE, Windows, Apple - I honestly don't see any great difference.

All of them offer:
- A desktop
- some kind of task bar (top, bottom, left, right - doesn't really matter)
- some form of menus for getting to stuff
- some kind of file manager application

There may be some things that are very different from one to the other (Lord knows that when I switched to a Mac I found some of their choices thoroughly obscure) but in the big picture most desktop systems are similar enough that Joe User can go to one or the other and figure out how to check his Yahoo mail account without problems.

As for why the GNOME variations seem to be prevalent? It's because some form of GNOME desktop was included as the default for the first widely popular "works out of the box" distros - Ubuntu, and Mint. the Son of Ubuntu.

People didn't install Ubuntu/Mint because of GNOME; they installed GNOME because it came along with Ubuntu/Mint. And 95% of those Linux users won't muck about and try different desktop systems because what they have just works.

Highly recommenced a pretty cool movie based on the same story: Devil's Pass. Netflix has it, plus the other usual places.

Then again, the US is unique is having thousands of over the air radio and television stations living in mortal fear of anyone, anywhere saying "fuck" on the air for fear of massive fines from the FCC.

You do realize that the rest of the western world kind of snickers whenever you do some dumb-ass thing like freak out over the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction?"

Seriously. Use the on board radar to spot idiotic behaviour and let 'er blast!

If they can send all of the "settlers" there, instead of into Palestine.

(Why am I imagine a mash up between Gil Scott Heron and Mel Brooks?

YMMV, but I had no problem with a Chrome/Mint Linux combo. Admittedly it took some rather irritating hunting (and multiple log-ins) to get to where I could change the password, but the actual change was no more or less easy than any other site.

And once again I was reminded that the only reason that I have a Yahoo e-mail/profile/thingy is because there is one, countem' ONE Yahoo group that I use. The actual e-mail account has nothing in it, not even random spam, after three or four months between log-ins.

I was thankful for the Yahoo Portal/ News page, because it got me all up to date on the latest Justin Bieber developments....

Damn. You had me right up to "boxed."

Seriously, there had be a "Y'all" joke somewhere.

Or moonshine. Or bluegrass.

Um, if you're suggesting that those "young people" don't know about vinyl records you're pretty much so far out of the loop that you likely don't have much to offer.

But hey, what do I know, at 58 years of age...

spending money on space exploration is a money pit, a drain on national coffers and more productive endeavors

I'll assume that's a troll, but will say "bullshit" nonetheless. The US space program was a key driver in 60s and 70s technological development, and the spin-offs from that investment are pretty much incalculable.

Of course in the current brain dead, uneducated, backwoods American political environment anything that smacks of "science" is considered evil and untrustworthy. (Canada too.)

My prediction is that the Chinese will turn that investment in space into a couple of decades of profit and growth, and will do what the Americans never did - establish a toe-hold on at least the moon and turn that into a money maker and a prestigious accomplishment.

Ok, I could just Google the damned thing, but if you're going to reference "Gmail outage from earlier this afternoon," can you at least link to page giving details of the outage instead of a generic Google Apps status page?

Grumble grumble....

We use a service to fake Netflix into believing that our TV is the US and not Canada. Many Canadians do this.

However, the service that we use replaces our ISP's DNS with OpenDNS.

Instead of presenting nicely a formed 404 message, with the offending URL in the location bar, OpenDNS offers up a useless message:

"Oops! www.bvyhuigyi.com is unavailable. Please check domain for spelling errors and try again."

And replaces the URL that you had entered with www.website-unavailable.com

In practical terms, it means that if you mistype a URL you can't just go "oops" and fix the one charter that was in error - you need to retype the whole damned address.

I'm sure that someone at OpenDNS could argue for this being a "feature," but I'd call it a bug.

I really wish it was possible (or at least easy) to turn off this thing and just get a regular 404 message. And yeah, having the option of clicking through to an archived version of page would be good.