that their licensing agreement with Microsoft, as Barnes & Nobel revealed when they refused to sign the NDA, prohibits them from upgrading to more recent versions of Android. This would lock them into an aging release, which would kill their future sales. With no where is to turn, they would be forced to put WinP7 on their hardware, which is the whole purpose of Microsoft's extortion.

In other news, Nokia's Lumina, their smartphone running Win7, was essentially ignored by consumers after its recent release. Microsoft has spent more than $500 Million in branding and marketing of WinP7, but not to worry. They've used worthless IP to extort about that much in "license fees" from vendors putting Android on their hardware.

Wow, windy fellow, aren't you?

Your rant has one HUGE hole. Your citations are about one-off manual attacks against Linux. Not a single case involves a large group of Linux boxes being compromised by with a single email sent out from a spam box.

Most attacks against Windows boxes are carried out by a simple email payload. That's how the 4,500,000+ Windows zombie bot farm was created last year within a couple of weeks. A Linux zombie bot farm was found last year as well. It contained only 700 boxes and it took the group of hacker who created it nearly six months to do so because they had to manually attack each machine. They ran dearjohn against who knows how many machines trying to find those with insecure root passwords. 700 in six months. They immediately secured those machines against all known exploits and used them for C&C machines to control much, much larger Windows bot farms because Linux IS secure. How many C&C Windows boxes have you heard about?

"Brute force" in only three tries? How logical is that?

Exactly.

Since I moved to Kubuntu, in Feb of 2009, I have downloaded only 3 apps from SourceForge. Everything else came from the repositories or the PPA's.

Not only that, over 5 billion trees are planted each year to replace those harvested to make paper. Tree farms for making paper is a appeals to famous people because it practices conversation.

Today, two trees are planted for every one taken, and now there are more trees in the USA today than there were when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. When settlers followed the Oregon Trail west from the Missouri River, along the Platte River, the first tree they saw was at "Lone Tree", now called Central City, Nebraska, which is about 60 miles North West of Lincoln. Now, a squirrel could almost travel from Lincoln to Central City via the trees alone.

All that said, perhaps the device that Sal Kahn uses to make his videos. From his FAQ:
"I use Camtasia Recorder ($200) + SmoothDraw3(Free) + a Wacom Bamboo Tablet ($80) on a PC. I used to use ScreenVideoRecorder($20) and Microsoft Paint (Free)."

Here is SmoothDraw3 in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZJAhfaZnUA

He writes text and equations and draws graphs with ease. Later, the graphic image file could be submitted to an OCR engine to extract the text.

Which gave rise to the cartoon which showed a lecture hall with the prof's tape record playing on the podium and the students tape recorders setting on the desks. No one was in the room.

You are fortunate!

The best deal I can get in Lincoln, Nebraska is 15Mb/s for $52/mo, no caps. But, that's 2 Mb/s download speed and 1 Mb/s upload speed.. InternetSpeedTest shows I have 14.8Mb/s usable bandwidth. IF I wanted to pay $100/mo for $50Mb/s I could triple my speed, but $100 for Internet only is too much for two little. A friend of mine in France pays $30/mo for a 40Mb/s connection that include 200 channels of TV and a 24/7/365 free phone call to anywhere in France.

Exactly!

For those who don't like ad-blocker, there is always a complete /etc/hosts file, available from here. It has entries that block over 9,000 sites and is easily expanded by the user if they encounter another nuisance site.

I was asked to install Linux on a DELL Inspiron 8200 laptop. I chose Kubuntu 11.10 and it slipped on like a silk glove. I had to use XRender to clean up some windows irregularities, and firmware-b43legacy-installer to connect to the old Broadcom 4306 wireless, but the Radeon video driver drove the 9000 chip very well. Sound was great. The Whittle bug mouse residing between the G, H and B keys worked nicely. So did the mechanical volume controls on the bezel. The CPU temp oscillated between 124F and 150F as the fan turned on and off. The old Dell pci wireless card worked nicely, too.

All in all, I'd say that Oneiric & KDE 4.7.3 ran about 10% faster than the XP Pro SP2 which came with it.

The Distrowatch page hit rankings are very misleading. When I was using PCLinuxOS 2007 (and the two releases before it), it was ranked #1 on the PHRs for almost a year. But, Ubuntu had significantly more downloads during that period and I consistantly encountered more Linux users using Ubuntu than any other distro. On their forum individuals would occasionally post messages encouraging users to goto Distrowatch and click on PCLOS. Dittos for the Mandriva forum, which I used after PCLOS. I prefer the KDE desktop and I switched to Ubuntu's orphan brother, Kubuntu, in Feb of 2009.

Since its release Ubuntu has been the most downloaded, most installed and most used version of Linux. And, it remains so today, despite the feelings of some Gnome users who dislike Unity. The reasons are simple.

First, Shuttlesworth has invested about $10M/year of his own money into Ubuntu's development, marketing and support. It's been pre-installed by OEM more than any other Linxu distro. I don't know of any other distro maker who is investing that kind of money in their product.

Second, until recently, Shuttleworth paid for the cost of mailing an install CD to anyone who asked for it, and he's supports the Ubuntu forum, which has a message volume several times larger than any other forum, regardless of the distro it supports. Compared to Ubuntu, all other distros are literally on welfare, in terms of their financial support, except for Fedora and SUSE, and who knows how long SUSE will last. Mandriva can't sell enough commercial boxed sets or ISOs to keep their doors open.

Third, with Natty and beyond, Canonical has Ubuntu offering more than just a distro, they have added content and services as well. While I don't run a Unity desktop I am using Ubuntu One's equivalent of DropBox, which I also use. Canonical has done more marketing and published more ads than any other distro maker. And, Canonical has and is doing advertising in Linux magazines as well as on several very popular Linux blogs. BUT, Canonical is now advertising for a "Product Marketing Manager, "to lead the marketing charge of establishing Ubuntu as a core piece of technology in businesses and supporting the efforts to provide for-pay services to those users." IF Shuttlesworth wants Ubuntu to be more than self-supporting and actually make a profit that is something they have to do.

Fourth, these are difficult economic times. The market is trending toward tablets and smartphones, at the expense of desktops and laptops, although neither of those two will disappear any time soon. But, supporting the development and maintenance of distros for each of those platform is costly, time consuming and over lapping. The current solution appears to be to create a desktop GUI which automatically detects the hardware it is being installed on (nothing new there) and then configure a common desktop interface so that regardless of what is before the user: desktop, laptop, notebook, netbook, tablet or smartphone, the user experience will be the same. This approach will end up releasing an ISO which is small enough to install on a smartphone, but with the aid of a network connection will download additional utilities and applications to fit the larger devices.

While problems often get a lot of press time because the press likes controversy, the Gnome vs Unity blow out will resolve itself the same way the KDE 3.x vs KDE 4.x did, and for the same reasons: software technology advances with the hardware. Now, you hear little from those who whined a lot about KDE 4, because KDE 4.7.x has made believers out of the majority of them. I am now running KDE 4.7.3, and it is far more powerful and easier to use than any previous desktop I've ever run, since I bought an Apple ][+ in the summer of 1978. When I am called upon by some XP, VISTA or Win7 users to help them out of their computer problems I immediately feel shackled in what I am allowed to do, and how it has to be done, in those environments. Those who took my advice and switched to Kubuntu, which are the majority, never return to Windows, and the number of times they have to contact me for help drop to near zero.

I use SAGE, an AWESOME math engine. I use the browser "notebook()" mode.
And, it works beautifully in my Kubuntu 10.04 LTS. I don't have to run it in a virtual guest OS.

Gaming does not glue users to Windows as much as some windows fan boys think it does.

As of this last August, Call of Duty 2 sold 22 million copies WORLD WIDE. According to Michael Dell, a month ago, there are 1 1/2 BILLION PCs in the world. Only 1.5% of those PC owners purchased Call of Duty 2. 1.5% is NOT a noteworthy anchor. Compared with the number of enterprise, SOHO and "Joe and Sally Sixpack" users of Windows, the number of gamers using Windows is equally small. That's because most gamers are male adolescent or teenagers, in mind if not body, of middle and upper class parents who can afford to pay for such luxuries. Most of them have moved to GameBox, XBox or PS2 for their gaming. And most of the trivial "gamers" have been lured by Angry Birds and similar games and apps to smartphones, most leaving their PCs behind.

Another reason why gaming is not a Windows glue is because gaming is spreading out and going to the Internet. MineCraft uses a platform neutral Java app. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory released a Linux version, as have several other game writers. Are Linux users jumping on the games? Probably not more than 1.5% of them, but I suspect that it amounts to a couple million sales, world wide. At $60 each, what company would turn down $60 to $120 million in additional sales and not develop for Linux, unless there was outside coercion?

When I bought my first computer in the summer of 1978, an Apple ][+, I had several other makes to choose from, each running their own OS and offering their own peripheral device cards. When IBM released their "PC" they included a disk operating system (DOS) which was a subset of Unix. There were several versions of DOS but the best one was DRDOS. Eventually, the other computers and operating systems faded away, and only Apples and PCs, and their clones, were left, along with DOS and other operating systems, which included Linux. The rich chose Apple. Everyone else bought PCs. After they bought their PC they purchased the Operating System they wanted to run on it. I chose OS/2. Later, in 1997, I installed Win95 but after five disastrous months with it I discovered Linux.

  There was a time when makers of peripheral devices for PCs thought it normal to include CPUs on their cards to handle IO so that they would be compatible with PCs running any DOS, OS/2, Linux or the others. You could buy a Hayes modem and plug it into the serial port of any computer, regardless of the OS it ran, and it would work. Printers hooked to the parallel printer port allowed them to work the same way. The OS didn't matter.

Then, Microsoft convinced modem makers to leave the CPU off of their devices and cards, and to rely on the Windows OS for the cards control. Thus was born the "WinModem". WinPrinters soon followed, blocking out large segments of the market who, at the time, were not using any Microsoft OS. This was before Microsoft acquired their 95% desktop market share. Leaving the CPU and intelligence off of their cards, but not lowering their prices, PC OEMs realized a larger profit by using the CPU on the computer replace the CPU on their cards, and letting Windows control the card. TO make things easy Microsoft at first began paying PC OEMs to install Windows on their computers. As Windows market share grew the amounts Microsoft paid dropped. When Windows acquired desktop dominance and PC OEMs were not pre-installing any other OS except Windows, Microsoft began requiring PC OEMs to pay for a copy of Windows for each PC they shipped. MS also instituted secret contracts with the PC OEMS which prohibited them from selling any PC without Windows pre-installed. The MS-DOJ trial eliminated that kind of contract but the PCs became commodities and their prices dropped into the basement. For several years now, most PC OEMS make a profit on the ad rebates they receive from Microsoft. Microsoft's monopoly has cost consumers billions in overcharges and restrained software innovation. However, slowly and surely the PC market is digging itself out from under Microsoft's thumb. Unable to trap the tablet/smartmphone market share the way they did the PC market share, the WP7 is sliding away from 15% and is seeking the 1% market share level. Microsoft is making up for it by taxing Android phone makers (and Linux) on the strength of unproven IP claims against companies that find it cheaper to pay the "tax" than to fight them in court.

If Facebook pays websites to require readers to create Facebook accounts to log into their comment sections do you think the "leveraging" will stop there? Those that keep several log in options, or their own, won't be receiving Facebook money and so will face more economic difficulties than those who take the money. (Sound like WinModem and WinPrinter makers versus those who didn't? How did that work out? With Microsoft owning a monopoly on the PC OS market. It cost consumers dearly.). In these economically tough times poor financing, or not being able to afford classier sites and services, will make independent sites less able to compete against sites taking Facebook money. Sooner or later, Facebook will acquire a monopoly on blogging access, and if the movie about the owner of Facebook has taught you anything it has shown you how ruthless and greedy he can be. He won't stop with the log ins. After they get hooked on the Facebook money they'll be asked to put Facebook controlled ads on their web pages,... or to make a Facebook web page the access portal to their site. Facebook never deletes anything you post to their site, EVEN IF you carefully delete every thing on your account using their tools. Re-register and all that stuff pops up again... and you thought it was deleted.

You do realize, don't you, that their EULA makes them the OWNER of everything you post or write on their site, and gives them royalty free rights to use it for any purpose they wish? You probably just clicked through without reading their EULA, and you have no clue as to what constitutional rights freedoms you've thrown away by doing so. That alone is why I don't use Facebook, and if Google goes the way of Facebook I shall discontinue using it as well.

was recently discovered in Nebraska.

"Quantum Rate Earth Developments (TSX-V: QRE; OTC: QREDF) acquired the rights to what the U.S. Geological Survey called one of the largest deposits of niobium globally. The rare earth property, a 14-square-mile track of farmland in S.E. Nebraska, could employ hundreds once the mine is developed. ..."

It's Linux, direct from 2005!