Amen to that. If you've ever read Brothers Karamazov and were not intimately familiar with Russian naming conventions in the 19th century, you're pretty much lost for half of the book. I spent the first 10 chapters sifting out that Ivan, Ivan Fyodorovich, and Vanya were all the same person. Having a nice little abstract at the beginning of the book would have worked wonders. Great book, by the way, if you have time for 1500 pages.

OR, we could adamantly claim he was born in the US despite overwhelming evidence that it was in Canada and go ahead and knight him anyway.

Well, that would work, except for one problem. Bill Shatner's Canadian.

This isn't exactly astronomy related like Niel deGrass Tyson's stuff, but when I was a kid I got an electronics set, complete with a bread-board, several LED's, a rheostat, heaps and heaps of resistors and capacitors, and several other things having to do with digital and analog circuitry. That was one of the best Christmas presents I ever got, and still from time to time wish I had it to pull out and tinker with. I remember one time I probably could have burned the house down had I not smelled the melting plastic on the set. What happened was that I had learned at school how to make an electromagnet out of a battery, a coil of wire, and a nail. Well, I did the same thing with the set when I got home, but then left it on for about an hour. As you well may know, connecting the two terminals of a battery without any resistor can cause the batteries to overheat, and most likely rupture. I think I probably caught the thing just before the batteries broke, because they were very hot. Anyway, I'm rambling, but you get the idea: I learned to love tinkering with electronics as a kid, and now am majoring in Computer Science.

Depends on the endian-ness of your architecture. I'm getting 0xFECABEBA on an intel architecture running linux.

Have you ever used OOo? It's a steaming pile of garbage. It might work on hobby linux boxes, but it is nowhere near the caliber of software that MS Office is, nor is it appropriate in a corporate environment. Whenever I use have to use OOo I end up spending half my time trying to figure out how to get automatic numbering to work correctly (the other day, it was trying to number things ai. bii. ciii., etc for me. That's not acceptable.). In addition, it's not accurate in it's representation. After trying to copy said screwed up list from OOo to a plain text editor, I got a list like 1. asdf 1. foo 2. bar .... where it was originaly 1. asdf 2. foo 3. bar in OOo. If I have to spend this much time to get something to work that's supposed to streamline your use of the software, something is horribly wrong. OOo is a direct analog of the GIMP: a noble effort to recreate a professional software suite that turned into an epic fail. Just like it's near impossible to create anything good in the GIMP in comparison with Photoshop, likewise it's near impossible to create anything good from OOo in comparison with MS Office.

And who uses WinZip anymore? Ever since Windows started including built in zip compression/decompression, I have seen no use at all for WinZip.

From the "report" cited in the article:

Yeah, I'd say that's a good foot to start off on, especially when you're a security company fearmongering people into buying your product.

For the apparently shoddy and buggy product that you describe as Ubuntu, it sure has done well. It has done what no other distro has done, which is to make Linux accessible to the non-hardcore user. I can't remember the last time I had to do a ./configure, make all, make install to install a program. Much like a mac, it just works. Now, I agree that it's far from the "install this on your grandma's computer" status, but it's a far cry from the first Linux I ever used (I want to say it was Mandrake 5 or 6 - helium was the code name). And even though I've gone through the wondrous joy of manually compiling a program, I still prefer a simple `sudo apt-get install foo`.

As for Canonical being an evil money-hungry corporation, honestly what do think they are in it for? Just because they happen to make a dime along the way doesn't instantly make it an inferior product. Take away the profit aspect, and you get a product with an unbearably long life-cycle run by volunteers (*cough* debian *cough cough*). Just be thankful that it hasn't devolved into the state that Red Hat did where you had to buy "support" just to get updates.

6. Fathoms

*mumble, mumble* insentive clod *mumble, mumble*

There's an interesting caveat to calling this element heavy. Just because it has 114 protons doesn't necessarily mean that it's "heavy". The "heaviest" elements are the densest ones, which tend to fall in the middle of the transition metals. If I recall correctly, 114 falls on the on the right side of the transition metals, so it might not be all that "heavy". There are reasons why this happen, something about the f-orbitals actually allowing atoms to get closer to one another, but it's been a long time since college chemistry.

They fixed that problem with IE. Here's the fix:

1. Open up Internet Explorer.
2. Go to http://www.firefox.com/
3. Click on the link to download the latest version of Firefox.
4. Install Firefox.
5. Use Firefox from now on.

See, it's not that hard, huh?

That's because the minute you start trying to be proactive against those, you generally starting infringing upon the bill of rights. I, for one, rather like my privacy and would rather not have government run security cameras on every corner, as the do in London.

Don't get me started on the crap I had to remove when I reinstalled from my HP restore discs. I must have removed 20 programs that no one in their right mind would ever use. I'm just curious how much Yahoo is paying HP to include the kind of blatant advertising that was in there (i.e. Yahoo toolbar on the task bar and in IE).

I'll go ahead and pass on that golden opportunity. Because I'm a student, I have access to MSDN downloads, and was able to download the RTM of Windows 7 already. On first glance, it was a pretty slick change (especially the new dock-style task bar), but after running it for a week or so I realized that it's little more than Vista with a UI upgrade and a few more driver issues. Specifically, I kept having a problem where the background on my desktop would look funny (almost like a bad jpg of the background picture). So for the meantime I'm back with Vista, and don't plan on upgrading until SP1 comes out.