So, on a standard US keyboard, is this sign a minus or a hyphen?: -

Right, because it's a daily problem I have that I want to put files called Polish and polish in the same directory. And I can't think of any way to differentiate them other than capitals.

What a dumb argument.

By the way, what about when you can't distinguish them by capitals? What if I want a file about my new table in the same directory as my table of figures? What do I do then?

Despite the fact that I think case-sensitivity is a Good Idea

Why? I've never heard a single good argument in favour. With programming, you often want case sensitivity to distinguish between a public Name and a private name, but the same need isn't there with files, and case-sensitivity is just more likely to lead to mistakes. I say POSIX should be changed to prefer case-insensitive filesystems.

I have source trees that I can't check out of an SVN server on windows because either the files get overwritten by different case filenames being aliased onto the same file

Windows' behaviour makes sense. What doesn't make sense is having Readme and readme in the same directory. What possible reason could one have for differentiating 2 files on nothing but case?

I do not consider myself to be US-centric nor uneducated, but prior to the incident at the Winter Olympics in 2010 where a luge athlete from Georgia was killed during a training run [wikipedia.org], and here in Vancouver, the host city for the Olympics that year, this incident was pretty major news. I had no idea previously that there was evidently a country that was also called Georgia, although I had certainly heard of the US state by the same name.

Sorry, but you sound pretty uneducated.

But today, Microsoft doesn't care about Windows

Them's pretty big words considering they still spend a huge amount of money developing and maintaining Windows on various different form factors.

This.

This is exactly why I really wanted to go all-Linux after Windows XP. I found I just couldn't do it; I do, after all, work as a .NET programmer which mandates Windows familiarity, and XP was just getting to be a major security risk.

Sigh. I might be able to hold on using Windows 7 for 20 years... perhaps. If there's no decent MS alternative by then, I'll probably be foreced to pay Microsoft a rent.

This doesn't seem unqiue to Australia. It seems right in line with what The UK, France, the US, etc. are doing.

If you want fast computer, get at least 16GB RAM. Turn OFF swap. Enjoy.

Until you run out of RAM and start losing data. :-)

You made a stupid choice

Not necessarily. They may have violated a stupid law.

A drug offense 5 yrs ago, with proof of a completed drug treatment program for instance isn't going to stop me from hiring a good IT worker.

What if it was marijuana and the guy wasn't actually, you know, harming society? You shouldn't even require a drug "treatment" program for that kind of "offence".

I don't know why you hold up the BBC as a shining example. They put out the line of the current government which, as it's conservative, involves regular scare stories and bullshit regarding euthanasia and cannabis.

* Internet connection required.
** Internet Explorer 12.1 or higher required
*** Requires Office365 or higher. Art cannot be inserted into other documents. Internet connection required to view document with clipart.

I think you forgot:
**** Service not guaranteed to be available 365 days a year.

Debian will probably continue on its way of becoming a desktop user distro.

I know I'll get crucified on Slashdot for saying this, but in my experience, Windows works OK at being both a desktop and a server distro. You have people using Windows 8 (yeah, it needs Classic Sell or something but that's a UI issue, not a fundamental OS problem) for desktops and Windows Server 2012 for servers, at an enterprise level. This doesn't seem to cause problems, and those 2 OSes I just mentioned are basically the same OS with different features turned on. One time a place I worked gave my Windows Server 2012 on a laptop I was to use for development (don't ask me why). The funny thing is, after I disabled some features and enabled some others, as well as installing some libraries, I basically had a Windows 8 desktop machine.

Is there really a need to have "server-oriented" and "desktop-oriented" OSes in this day and age when we have plenty of storage space, or can we have one OS that can just be configured to behave the way we want it to?

"Uan" is the Italian pronunciation of "One", as the website says.

Erm, but it's not actually the Italian for "one" (which is "uno"). So they're spelling it based on the Italian mispronunciation of an English word. Ugh.