We have 2 wars, 10-20% unemployment, poverty, bad health care system, etc. But let's deal with copyright infringement for the wealthy. Everything else can be fixed later.

Non sequiter: this is slashdot.

Capitalism is still the greatest system in the world

That great Capitalist, Microsoft, spares no expense in its long-running effort to force everyone to use 100% MS products. Part of its effort is paying BestBuy employees to lie about Linux. I think there's an article about it somewhere on /. You might want to look for it.

Oh, and thanks for your comments, Mr Rove.

It's great that BestBuy wants to make money and that one of the ways they can make money is to "partner" with companies, like Microsoft, that will pay them to lie. That's Capitalism for you.

It's also a prominent reason that I, and most of my friends, don't shop at BestBuy. We all know we'll be lied to from BestBuy. It'd be great to go up to a salesperson and feel confident that any questions will receive carefully considered, honest responses. But, what we get are push-products-sold-by-Company-X-because-they're-our-partner responses. So, unlike 1999 when I went to BestBuy once a week, now I go there maybe once every year. I just don't like their B.S.

Well, that and their policy to DEMAND I listen to their spiel about extended warranties, with no regard to whether or not I, the customer, want to hear that crap.

I tried the vi command, but I get this weird error:

'vi' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Does this mean ROT13 is not compatible with Windows?

30,000 new hotmail.com accounts and 30,000 new Silverlight downloads.

I guess if you can't get people to try your crappy software and services on their own, you can shove it down their throat by gov't mandate. Nice.

Right on! The government needs to FORCE both the cable and telco companies to separate the data, television and telephone components. They should be regulated as separate companies and therefore separate monopolies. Grrrrr...

What I have in Western Washington (near Seattle) is Comcast and Verizon. They both charge basically the same price for all services. If there were TRUE competition, i.e., many different companies, there's NO WAY they'd be able to charge such high prices without losing customers. But, since there are only 2 companies, they basically have all the benefits of collusion, without any actual collusion. I mean, if one of them decided to charge some arbitrary fee, the other one would follow. Double-Grrrrr....

And I know many Linux users on the desktop are switching to Apple.
While I would be willing to lay my hand in the fire for Linux on the server, I would not touch a fire with a ten foot pole for Linux on the desktop.
Three years ago I completely gave up on Linux on the Desktop. I decided to focus on Apple, and Microsoft. I have to be frank in that I have not looked back AT ALL...

I've used various flavors of Windows since version 3.0, Apple since 10.4.x (Tiger), and various flavors of Linux since Fedora 4 (at least I think it was version 4, and I'm currently using Ubuntu). You may put me in the camp that prefers Linux to Apple. Although I can't use iTunes, Quicken and TurboTax on Linux, I find the overall GUI experience much friendlier in Linux, as opposed to the Mac. And the fact that so many Linux experts exist on the Internet that help me tweak the Linux GUI in ways that make me more comfortable is even better. With Apple, the tweakability factor is significantly less as so many GUI features are locked down. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that every OS has little annoyances, but Linux allows me to tweak the GUI to be less annoying.

Imagine a few thousand of these balloons being sucked into the engines of a microscopic space fleet. We win!