I don't use SuSE, either. I wasn't happy with the way that Novell bought DR-DOS and basically laid there like a dead fish.

I've been planning to avoid MS Win8 from the beginning. If I wanted a tablet, i'd have one by now. If I have new hardware, I'll put the OS I want on it, and if I can't then I won't buy it. It's that simple.

This whole thing makes me pissed at RH/Fedora because they're effectively letting MS think they can turn this into a "win/win" situation: MS either makes money selling half-assed operating systems that hardware is locked into using or MS makes money by licensing access to that hardware.

Screw them, screw the hardware.

I think it sets a really bad precedence, to be perfectly honest, and I don't like it a bit.

As for the beer, don't lose sleep over it: I don't drink.

I disagree.

If its on Netflix, why would I even bother to download the torrent?

of course my corollary for that is....

If the content industry ever kills Netflix I am going to steal everything and pay for nothing.

In 14 years of driving it, I can't say I remember a time where I ever got the wrong function while using the single stalk in my truck. There are times when I've gone to turn off the high beam and pulled too far, triggering the beam flash, but I've never turned my wipers on only to trigger the turn signal. There are times, usually when it is really cold, that the multifunction switch doesn't want to work at all, but never does it trigger wrong for me.

But maybe I'm lucky and I got the only multifunction switch that isn't hard to mistrigger or maybe you're unlucky or there's something wrong with your technique. Every function except the wipers is a one finger thing for me, the wipers are three - my thumb, index and middle fingers as I roll it.

Err, what? The turn by turn directions will tell you what section are tolls and even allows you to avoid toll roads. This even works with google maps mobile. The two features I wish GMM had are cache along route (caching the tileset around a specific point is a start but it needs to be able to do it along an entire route). and route override (ie drag and drop route placement, sometimes I know a certain part of a route won't work and the only way to do this with GMM is to pre-plan the route on the PC and save it).

Uh, China is one of Iran's allies, so is Russia. India is on reasonably good terms with them as well. After spending 10 years and a trillion dollars the U.S. turned Iraq in to an Iranian ally too. They aren't really short of powerful friends and having lots of oil buys friends.

China is banking on getting Iran's oil when the EU stops buying it this summer, India probably is too. Sanctioning oil seldom ever works except to enrich people who trade in sanctioned oil, its a very fungible commodity so its almost impossible to embargo. It helped make Marc Rich very rich.

You left out cyber-industrial complex

No, there are 3GPP extensions (VoLTE and VoLGA) that optionally do this. Neither has any serious momentum in the US at the moment. Also it will be a long, long time before every tower in the country has a fiber backhaul to enable LTE so phones that can fall back to GSM/CDMA will be needed for the foreseeable future.

There are cordless phones with multiple handsets that will use your cellphone for the outgoing line.