From the outside, with you Free Speech Zones, it doesn't look like that.

For each music player "news" on /. someone complains about Foobar2000 on Linux...
Can you tell me what makes it superior to MPD?

AND excluding Libre Office.

Good one, mod this guy up!

In the particular case of Argentina, protests have done something...

2001 Riots took down the president.
Kosteki & Santillan deaths lead to early elections call.
125 Protest lead to the congress tie, the law wasn't passed.
Last year the (illegal) police strike and subsequent riot.

Similar events can be found through all latam

I believe that the main difference between US and latam is:

a) Latin Amerca has strong presidential systems. US has a strong party system.
So in Latin America presidents have more political capital to spend. In US the political capital isn't theirs but the party's.

b) From the outside, the US seems to have a really fucked up concept of free speech. Just the concept of "Free speech zones" is ludicrous to me. If there is no economical / social impact produced by the protest, no one is going to give a fuck about it.

c) Like anywhere else in the world, US media lies, but unlike anywhere else in the world, the US media AND the US government are both pro status quo, so the protest news are minimized or hidden.

d) The subsets of 'People that have the balls' and 'People that protest' don't seem to intersect frequently in the US.

Agree... But if we think about the scenario we have now you won't improve your office productivity with Linux tools because they don't exists. So you need to think the ( (weight factor) * productivity / cost ) ratio. The productivity lost by not having the right tools in Linux, vs the productivity lost caused by windows bad maintainance (That's one reason you'd switch) and the cost (of windows licenses + your current windows admin) vs ( linux admin cost).

I've seen lots of old XP PC's that crawl because of bad / null maintenance. That's a productivity loss also.

And so, in Linux that wouldn't be an issue, you wouldn't loose productivity because of maintenance, and that's what dancing pigs are about.
Some little guys don't have proper support. They just call some guy when it's needed, and sometimes they don't realize they need it . For places with little / null maintenance Linux is better.

This dancing pigs

With the rest I agree, but I still think there are cases for small size business were the migration could save you money... Exchange isn't ubiquitous, specially with this new 'cloud' trend. So if your office work flow doesn't depend on any crucial windows application, and you expect your company to grow, In a medium term (say 6 years) you'll be saving money.

If you require QuickBooks Pro 2013, then you require a newish windows / office, which require new hardware + new licenses...

I don't know of any useful userland linux program that hasn't been ported to windows...
You'd never switch to linux to increase productivity by upgrading your tools...
You'd switch to linux becasue:

1) It's easier to mantain than widnows, (for the little guys), and that reduces support costs.
2) It's more secure than for the user (not because of the os, but because dancing pigs won't be able to dance on linux). That also reduces support costs.
3) It provies longer life to your hardware, saving you money.
4) Its free and that saves you money.

The mayor obstacle for typical environments that don't require special sofware are the huge amount of VBA excell files. If your company doesn't use them much then with some windows boxes kept for those special case you'd befine.

Why QoS should prioritize VoIP over bittorrent? If both customers are paying equally, the bottleneck should apply to them equally.

have*

The Linux way would be to have a group per application, run the application with 'sg', and have an iptables rule per that group... SELinux should has fine grained networking, just google them.

What?????? I suppose you never heard of DDNS?

Notepad is horrible, it doesn't even recognizes the text encoding... WordPad, on the other hand...

steeper than the awesome?

You're proposing this from an american point of view... There are countries with other issues. Banks collapse in the rest of the world, and people don't get their money immediately back. As banks sometimes collapse in inflationary periods, you are effectively being stolen by banks and governments.

Wait until they launch yesterday shipping