So the question is what ways you could waste the taxpayer's money to support a personal crusade? I suggest that you send threatening letters to other department's managers promising something bad if they don't switch to Linux. Or you can give away office supplies to Red Hat employees. Or something along the lines that's equally immoral, but that seems to be well aligned to your way of seeing the public administration.

Because they think at first that they will be fine with Linux. And they are not. Linux fanboys can continue claiming that it's Windows users that are deluding themselves, but they still won't see 30% of even their geek friends running Linux on their netbooks. Of the six Netbooks I saw my friends purchase, four came with Linux. None are running Linux as the primary OS now. I know, anecdoted v.s data, but I'm hearing the same all around.

There's a very simple answer tho this difference that is quite probably right: the definition of intelligence used by the sample (that is, by the general population) is not the same one used in IQ tests. That, which shounds quite likely at first glance, would perfectly explain these "surprising" results. It would be enough that the laymen definition of intelligence strongly weighted skills that men have more often than women (such as those related to spacial composition, manually building or fixing things or understanding mechanical processes) while giving less weight to those more frequent in women (like managing complex processes, understanding people's mental state or recalling ordered information) and have those skills weighted differently in the technical definition of IQ, and the results could easily be as observed. Personally I find the definition often used in such tests (the capability to solve complex problems) useless. And no, I do not consider that other definitions that reflect things such as social skills or artistic abilities as valid. What is missing in the definition, IMO, is the ability to FORESEE AND AVOID problems. An intelligent person not only solves problems, is also good at not getting into them. And that's completely missing in any IQ evaluation I've seen. While I personally score high in IQ tests (130 on average, though I've been rated everything from 120 to 145) I thing I would do worse if such capabilities were considered, and I think that would better reflect my real intelligence. Not that I'm dumb as a rock, but I'm not as well adapted for this "living" thing as my IQ would indicate.

Windows NT stack was limited to 40-60mbps in practice. Windows 2000 easily reached 200mbps (in hardware from that time), and Windows XP easily reached 300mbps in 2003 and 600mbps today. I've transferred 2Gbps in Windows Vista and Windows 7 on a fast machine with a 10Gbps link.

And I welcome you all to our end. No, seriously, I don't think it's likely something bad will happen, but I find it possible. And given the consequences (the whole world cracking and falling to its core now turned into a black hole) I think that's unacceptable. I find it terrifying the speech that I've seen on this subject. Some high profile scientists said "according to the standard model, you would need more than five dimensions for a black hole to develop, and even if it developed, it wouldn't last for long". Uh... IT IS THE FRACKING STANDARD MODEL YOU ARE TRYING TO REFINE!!! That line of reasoning, analyzing things with your current knowledge at hand applies to every possible situation int he universe BUT THIS ONE. Your "best guess" here is not good enough when it would be feasible that your model is wrong and the whole thing ends up with me being smashed with you in a single point. One scientist said "the chances of that happening are one in fifty million". What? Even if you apply no margin of safety, that's like shooting in the back of the head 120 people (considering that equivalent to one in 50.000.000 of killing six billion, it can be argued that the later is actually much worse even mathematically). And then they claim they have reasonable safety margins, and I can beleive that, but those are safety margins in their NUMBERS, not in their MODELS. A simple, tiny change in the standard model might make black holes not only likely, but inevitable. And you don't know that, as you haven't researched all possible models, and you couldn't. I've also heard scientists saying "similar collisions must happen in other parts of the universe, and we don't see that happening". Huh. How would you be able to "see" a tiny black hole? How do you know the missing mass in the universe is not formed by large amounts of small black holes created when such a high energy event occurred and ate whatever was around it? I'm not a fanatic. You can do that sort of bet when you are playing with models that are extremely well established. But when you are breaking new ground trying to validate your current knowledge, you can't make experiments that might destroy the whole planet if your model was wrong. I would even accept it if we couldn't even figure out what could go wrong, but when the stakes are so high, relying on the probability of the event occurring is plain wrong. It is whe most wrong than anyone has ever been in history. Even if in the end, their models turn out right and nothing happens (until they say "hey, nothing happened the last time, let's build a bigger one, with a chance of one in six!).

And why is that important? I boot my system perhaps every two months (the system boots itself monthly, but I'm probably sleeping at the time).

Let me tell you a story of an experiment I did many years ago that might help clarify this. About fifteen years ago there was this debate about LPs having better sound quality than CDs. While the CD sampling rate could have caused some frequency range issues for some people with very high frequency sensibility, I doubted that could cause an issue for the majority, and in any case thw distorsions caused by mechanical amplification in an LP would have been way higher. So I ran an experiment. I got the LP version and CD version of the same two pieces (one classical music, the other one classic rock), with the CD versions being a direct to digital recording (meaning that the LP had been recorded from the same source as the CD, though possibly without the same frequency range limitations in the original source). I then made a recording of the LP output to a recordable CD. That would in practice ADD the distortions of the CD to those in the LP. Then I played the three versions to a mixed bunch of people (the not too-scientific part of my experiment, as it was just a bunch of friends I had at hand, and there was no double blind process). The results were surprising (well, not to me as they just confirmed my hypothesis): the same people that claimed that the LP had the best quality actually said that the LP-recorded-to-CD had the same level of quality!!! So the reason why people were claiming that the LP had higher quality than the CD was NOT that the LP didn't suffer from distortions in the CD due to the limited frequency range, but that their ears had been trained to compensate the LP distortions over the years. So when listening to something that was not recorded in an LP, they heard it "wrong". When listening to something that had the LP distortions even if it was from a CD, they heard it right. So it's not that the LP had higher quality than the CD, it is that people trained to listen to LPs will be able to differentiate LPs from CDs and will prefer the LPs due to their ears (or their brains, actually) being adapted to them. Fast forward a decade. A generation trained to listen to lossy MP3 music prefers them in some cases to loseless FLAC files. Is that surprising? I would bet that if the output of a lossy MP3 was recorded in FLAC format, the same people that ranked the MP3 quality higher would rank the FLAC+MP3 file equally as high. Because their brains have been adapted to the distortions introduced by the MP3, the loseless FLAC files fill feel "distorted".

I upgraded the three computers I have, plus my GF and my parents computers. Not a single issue so far in any of those machines. While there must be bugs somewhere, they are obviously not as easy to hit as those in Vista (or in XP when it released). If you wait until SP1 you will just be suffering the bugs and limitations of what you are running today to avoid those you are unlikely to find in 7.

So if the term has contradictory interpretations and is not clear, let's stop using it. What's wrong with "it's easy to learn" and "it's difficult to learn"?

How can people be so dim! THIS IS NOT AN AD! It is an internal training video. Internal trainig videos at any company are typically like this. It is amazing that reporters will keep calling this an ad when they know it's not.

Not only paranoid, but unfair. If you do have a health problem when you go for insurance, why would the insurance company charge you less than what they estimate you will cost them based on all the information available? And if your health profile does not warrant such a rate hike, woy would they be so stupid to stop insuring you at a reasonable rate? This all stems from the misplaced idea that insurance aims at making health cost equal to anyone. Insurance is just that: insurance. You take it to prevent unforeseen events in the future from getting you broke, and to enable you plan your life based on your current knowledge without having to account for possible random events. It is just like insurance for your car or for your home: you don't expect those with lower risk profiles to subsidize your Ferrari, you just get insurance so you can drive knowing that your ownership cost will be more or less uniform and not go up 100x the year you have a crash.

OK, do really people expect that Amazon should remotely block the Kindle without any proof that Mr. Borgese is the current rightful owner? Without a court order, it would be simply irresponsible to do so. You wouldn't want to buy a used kindle just to have it blocked without reason. Amazon is doing the right thing, and Mr. Borgese is an a**hole.

Actually no. That's only in Black and White and without backlight, which is unuseable for video. In color mode and with backlight, it is only 693×520. Not exactly high definition in my book. It was a really crappy design when released, and it still is today. And expensive, if you look at the full cost including deployment and not counting subsidies.

I think you are mistaken. Reuced part counts and reduced numbers of unique pieces mean exactly the opposite of what you probably think. A decade ago you would see lego toys that were basically designed toys split in more or less blocky pieces, so it was basically a puzzle made to look like a lego. Everything was a custom piece. Now, everything is done from the same set of lego blocks. No "front end Ferrari spolier" block, no "X-Wing engine" block. It's all the same blocks. And that calls for much greater imagination, more challenging (and fun!) assembly and more flexibility. In fact, I have purchased for my children Star Wars X-Wing and Tie Fighter toys, a tank, the big Ferrati Enzo and a few other toys. And in each of them there were no more than three or four (generally minor) pieces that would not be used for other toys (maybe R2D2 legs, the X-Wing windshield and the Ferrari shock absorvers. All the rest was very ingeniusly built from stock pieces. That's ingenuity, and that's how it should be. And regarding the tie-ins, my children love watching the movies, then building sets based on them, or playing the games (which are uite innocent and educative, IMO, as they call for a good deal of thinking, at least for small children) and then attempting to build the objects they saw in the game. It looks like a very healthy franchise, and I hope they are doing more of it.