I have learned linux in 92 on a 486dx33 with 16 Mo RAM and 120 Mo hard disk. It was really fun. At that time drawing a rectangular text window did not require and expensive 3D graphical card.

All the newer computers at my society have the win7 license sticker (because new computer have that by default), but they are all reinstalled with windows xp pro. I am pretty sure many societies have the same policy and are probably (I guess) not correctly counted in the statistic.

Archos G9 windows tablet is not ARM. It is intel poulsbo. You are confusing with Archos 101 G9.

I have an ARCHOS G9 windows 7 tablet. It was very slow when I bought it. Now, it is almost unusable.

I live in France, and I work into the IT field. I have the complete opposite feeling than the post above. The CNIL has always demonstrated a very deep understanding of technology. Even if it is a state agency, it has provided very sound analysis and opinions on the recent laws (HADOPI, ...) that were demonstrating the stupidity of the proposed laws. The laws were adopted almost unchanged and all the analysis of the CNIL have been proven to be true.

The CNIL is not very powerful and can not go beyond its scope, but I have never been deceived by anything it has produced.

The main root of the CNIL is the history of France during the 2nd world war where some files were used against jews.

Wine works perfectly on my PC (photoshop, ...). I have also stone age crappy windows applications that are isolated in a virtual machine in order to keep my computer clean.
Browser, email, media player, libre office suite are identical or superior on Linux.
I think that Linux is not desktop ready, but it seems I do not have the same understanding of "desktop" as you.
2 weeks ago, I booted a ubuntu live CD and my nvidia video card was not correctly handled, it was unusable.
When I do a copy/paste, I have to cope with a mixture of windows and X conventions (Ctrl+CXV or mouse middle clicks).
There is no uniformity in application look and feel.
Gnome has put a layer that hides very well how things works. I have never found why hibernation was not working on my PC.
For me, individual applications are better on Linux than Windows, but the whole desktop experience is still not there.

SLS
slackware
redhat
mandrake
LFS
SUSE
Ubuntu
Debian
CentOS
Some short tries with knoopix, gentoo and gobolinux.

Different types of mind lead to different types of programmers, none of them being really superior.
I know some experiences developers who have problems with recursivity. I have already met some very fast developers who were producing very good and clean code but who had difficulties to understand the requirements and the explanations.
I really do not think that this is a question of intelligence. There are so many programming languages not only because of the different kind of problems to solve, but also because of the different kind of minds.
Programming requires logic and abstraction. This may be slightly more difficult for some people, but as said Chef Gusto, "anyone can cook".

I never click on a shortened URL. Maybe I am too old :-(

bring a new hard drive with you. Your father should first change all his passwords. You install Linux on the new drive (enable ssh for remote administration). Mount the old windows drive as read only and leave the task of retrieving his data to your father.

Uranium is very bad. It can be used for awful weapons. In order to clean the planet from it in a very efficient way, I suggest to disintegrate it in nuclear plants. Of course it will be only for ecologic purpose.

Sudoku is very efficiently solved using DLX (dancing links). It solves thousands of sudoku per second whatever the level of difficulty.

Sorry to contradict you. I am using ubuntu LTS and OpenOffice at home since years. I am using Word at work. OpenOffice crashes far more often than Word. I do not complain at all: OpenOffice has an excellent recovery of documents after crashing, I have never lost anything with OpenOffice. Word has also a recovery, but this does not work very well: it crashes again just after the recovery. I can not say for libre office, but OpenOffice crashes too often to deny it.

If google declares war to drug cartel and illicit network, it will become the enemy of many political groups and this will not increase the support from other political groups. Google is already a target of many criticism. With this movement, they either commit suicide or change radically the world.

In fact the core of the kernel has already been refactored many times and is of excellent quality. It represent only a very small percentage of the whole code. Most of the code is drivers. Many drivers are poorly written and may need to be rewritten, but developers are too busy coding the many missing drivers.

In fact there is no real problem in Linux code, just a recent increase in the number of developers.