http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/images/07-minister.jpg

>> what more do you want?

> Amiga OS. I miss it. Or if I can't have that, a clone of the Windows OS so I'm no longer locked into the Microsoft Monopoly when running MS software. Something like Wine but bigger.

Aside from the fact that it is still in alpha 12 years after it was started, what you're describing is ReactOS: http://www.reactos.org/

But FYI, so long as you need to run apps designed for "the Microsoft Monopoly", you will always be locked into it in.

Please see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance#Addition_of_the_words_.22under_God.22
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk_Grove_Unified_School_District_v._Newdow#Quotations_and_legal_detail

Quotations and legal detail From the 9th circuit hearing:

        * Decided - the 1954 insertion of "under God" was made "to recognize a Supreme Being" and advance religion at a time "when the government was publicly inveighing against atheistic communism"--a fact which (according to the court) the federal government did not dispute. The court also noted that when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the act which added the phrase "under God," he also announced "From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty."

        * Judge Alfred Goodwin from the 9th Circuit remarked: "A profession that we are a nation 'under God' is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation 'under Jesus,' a nation 'under Vishnu,' a nation 'under Zeus,' or a nation 'under no god,' because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion."

They can be washed...

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/bizarre/7095561.html

"Low-denomination U.S bank notes change hands until they fall apart here in Africa, and the bills are routinely carried in underwear and shoes through crime-ridden slums. Some have become almost too smelly to handle, so Zimbabweans have taken to putting their $1 bills through the spin cycle and hanging them up to dry with clothes pins alongside their sheets and clothes."

Forget "cosmic dust"; at near-light speeds, even the occasional hydrogen atom becomes a menace. An excerpt from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/17/star_trek_scuppered/

---
Professor William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine explained to New Scientist that while interstellar space has just a couple of hydrogen atoms per cubic centimetre, as the crew of the Enterprise hit the gas pedal, a compression effect would greatly increase the number of atoms hitting the spacecraft.

As the spaceship reached 99.999998 per cent of the speed of light, "hydrogen atoms would seem to reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts", which for the crew "would be like standing in front of the Large Hadron Collider beam".

This is a very bad thing, because humans in the path of this ray would receive a dose of ionising radiation of 10,000 sieverts, and as Bones McCoy would doubtless confirm, the lethal dose is 6 sieverts.

The result? Death in one second.
---

FWIW, I note that some of the Atom-based motherboards seem to be fanless, e.g. Intel BOXD410PT:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121398

And its WAY faster than a Pentium 50! :)

"Copying is not theft.
Stealing a thing leaves one less left
Copying it makes one thing more;
that's what copying's for."

Source: http://questioncopyright.org/minute_memes/copying_is_not_theft

Can't; the link I was going to use was 404...

The ghost of Christmas future?
http://www.collapsemovie.com/

So if "Energy conservation or efficiency doesn't really save energy, but instead spurs economic growth and accelerated energy consumption." then the trick would be to create conservation/efficiency without spurring economic growth... so compensate with a tax at the same time?

e.g. mandate more fuel efficient cars and increase the tax on gasoline at the same time to make the average cost of driving cost/km the same in the future as it does now...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3942-masturbating-may-protect-against-prostate-cancer.html

"A team in Australia led by Graham Giles of The Cancer Council Victoria in Melbourne asked 1079 men with prostate cancer to fill in a questionnaire detailing their sexual habits, and compared their responses with those of 1259 healthy men of the same age. The team concludes that the more men ejaculate between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to develop prostate cancer."

As the dad of a four year old who uses flash in Ubuntu Linux, I have to ask, what distro/version are you running?

In 9.04 (and for the last few releases as I recall), when Ubuntu encounters a flash file in Firefox for the first time, it *offers* to install Flash.

When you set up the system, you could install the flashplugin-installer package which downloads and installs it for you. If you enabled the Canonical Partner repository when you set it up, you can install adobe-flashplugin and then its all done.

Xvid would require a codec download; similar to the flash plugin, Ubuntu will offer to do that when you try to run an Xvid-encoded video file without the codec installed; alternately just installing a big batch of gstreamer plugins when you first set up the system will ensure you don't have to install codecs later (I would recommend: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg, gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad, gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse, gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly, gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse).

DVDs are almost all encrypted and its a little more work; you need to add a suitable repository (Medibuntu) and install the libdvdcss2 package.

Now, if you can't be bothered to act as the OEM for your sons or invest a couple minutes figuring out how to help them, that's one thing, but this isn't 1999; Linux in general, and Ubuntu specifically, is easy to use and there's quite a lot of help available, e.g. http://ubuntuforums.org/

This, BTW, is why Windows systems are sometimes less expensive than their Linux counterparts; Windows is adding negative value to the system, while Linux can only hope for a $0 cost ;)

You think it's creepy in 2009? Imagine seeing something like that in 1940:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms
http://www.archive.org/details/Experime1940
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap1co5ZZHYE

The thing with Linux distributions is that while there are a huge number of them, there are only a few major ones (note how the 'popularity' rapidly drops off on DistroWatch). In fact, there are probably no more major Linux distros than Vista/Win7 versions. And even among those, they aren't all equally popular; see Google Trends There has basically been a single distro leading the pack since mid-2006: Ubuntu. So without forced interference, a single distro has emerged as the leader. A positive feedback loop with OEMs (e.g. Dell) should keep it in first place unless there is a major disruption. Now as for Vista/Win7... Really, all there is is Ultimate and various crippleware versions of it.