The problem with this is that all of this done nowadays through CAFTA, NAFTA, and WTO. Just like the ACTA treaty. Most of the decisions made within these organizations completely bypasses every nation's legislative process. The people of any nation are completely excluded from this decision making process. That's the whole point. Free Trade organizations and the treaties and agreements they make, IMHO, should be completely null and void.. b/c it is simply the corporate and corporatist aristocrats making decisions that affect their home countries. There's no consequences for these people if it goes wrong or bad for the nation. Hell, most of the people making these agreements were not voted on or put in power by any voting populace in any nation. Furthermore the levels of transparency when most of these agreements are formed is a fucking joke. ACTA is a prime modern example, every nation..US, Japan, EU member states.. they all evoke "national security" or some such excuse to keep the entire thing from public debate. The entire globe has to live with the consequences of rules and decisions we have ZERO control over. It's bullshit. This is not the free market, this is the global ruling of the elite.

Windows might not be Open Source and MS business practices may be something to be desired, but they are an open platform. And when you look at the platforms that were around when Windows came to light, there really wasn't much that was that successful where just anyone could develop for it. Even today, companies like Apple, Nintendo, Amazon, Sony, (the list is rather lengthy) want to sell you a solid product. They want everything to be an appliance to you, like a dvd player or your tv.. where you don't notice, nor care about the software on it. An article a while back was describing why Windows Mobile and Android will, in the long run, destroy Apple in the phone market, and in the end, it will be because of the availability of applications for them. Apple and Nintendo and Amazon and so forth, want to be the gatekeepers of software and content, and frankly.. looking at the success of MS on the desktop, that approach doesn't seem to be a successful one. Video game systems will be the last bastion of this mentality though, i can promise you that.

umm, the defaults (fat32 formatted keys) work just fine in every distro automatically. Gnome and KDE are great at giving a way to automount in their file managers. What's the problem?

just to note, EVERY distro, except for gentoo (oddly enough) has vi installed.

then i hope you don't use pipes, grep, sed, awk, mutt, mpd, rtorrent, irssi, cat, vim, vi, or any traditional unix tools.

i have a cronjob that updates a list for me on my ipcop router and blocks it at the router level. Kinda nice as it does this for everything on my network.

you don't get it, keybindings can be much faster than buttons. Try out vimperator sometime.

what the fuck does OS X have to do with any of this? This was a conversation about browsers, i'm sure uzbl can run on OS X just as well as on Linux. Jesus you Mac tards are fucking assholes who just jump at the fucking chance to jam your feng shui tonka toys down peoples throats whenever you're not sipping on a fucking latte.

it has been my experience that everything regarding steep learning curves in *nix, ends up revealing benefits those who never try will never know of. Try explaining to the average windows user how vim is better than notepad vs watching someone learn vim and having their face light up everytime they figure out they can do something very quickly that's impossible in a standard text editor