But... but... but I just switched to ubuntu like, 8 months ago and its been the best desktop OS I ever used! But then again, I do have this habit of climbing onto sinking ships...

To be fair, I'd love to advocate linux to everyone I know, but e.g. the #1 reason they can't is that they use Photoshop, or Netflix, or Zune Marketplace, or whatever other flavor of application, so game over. The 'use gimp' argument is not even worth laughing at anymore. And the "use vmware" argument completely misses the point. And WINE just isn't good enough. And its not WINEs fault, really.

So yeah. Its not about the OS. Its about the applications. The number one barrier is not that the OS doesn't boot in 10 seconds. It's not the wallpaper. Its not the desktop usability. Its not the price. Its not driver compatibility (anymore). Its not network setup. Its not web browser. Its not the window style. Its not where the indicators are. Its not what edge of the screen the menus are on. Its not the presence or absence of a dock. Its applications (or lack thereof).
Until that changes, we'll get nowhere. Nobody mainstream cares about software freedom. Nobody mainstream cares about security. They only care that Netflix doesn't work and they can't sync their Zune, and Team Fortress 2 runs at 30 fps (or not at all) instead of 200fps.

Don't they know that in south africa its 50% off if you pay the police in cash when they stop you?

Its a good thing that all evil robots are required to have glowing red eyes or we'd be in serious trouble

I'd love to see them concentrate on startup speed and memory usage and rendering speed instead. On the windows machine I use at work, I have to run a third party service which runs in the background and keeps most of it resident, just so that it takes a couple seconds to start up instead of half a minute.

I'd be one of those subversives sitting on the ad-free internet, and enjoying every minute. Just like it was back before corporations took it over.

I like how folks are going on about how being able to rent / resell their games make it worth having it in disk form. Meanwhile, the big names in the industry are starting to do everything they can to prevent resale, or even rental. Its only a matter of time before they finally just go for it and make it so that they all ship with the one-time-use "premium content unlock code" and become demos without it. Ubisoft has already begun down this path - and so has EA. Soon your 60 buck game will have 0 resell value.

They'll just garnish your wages for the rest of your life. Welcome to slave labor for the RIAA, folks. And yes, it happens.

I prefer the simpler "For every new law you make two must be removed." It will be easy at first. And I'm talking law, the constitution is of course off limits :)

You're missing the fact that the chip itself gets an encrypted HDCP stream (that's the whole point of end-to-end encryption) and thus needs to be blu-ray (HDCP) compliant and needs to do decryption and thus have decryption keys from sony. To get those keys you (as a chip manufacturer) need to sign a ginormous 'you're screwed if these ever leak' document that is very scary.

You can't cut back on funding! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!