Other than not watching it you mean? Or were you so blinded by your sense of entitlement to the works of others that that option didn't occur to you?

They are doing no such thing. Microsoft is not forcing vendors to ship computers with only MS approved keys

When's the last time you saw a non-Apple x86 computer for sale without Windows preinstalled?

So what do you do, as an artist, when you think that the 15-year-old with a $20 weekly allowance should only have to pay you $5 for your CD whereas a DJ who makes his living playing the same CD at weddings should pay you $100.

I'd say you should see a shrink. That's like charging Hertz $500,000 for the very same car that a private person can buy for $10,000. It's insane, and so are you for thinking it's rational or reasonable.

It also says you're an idiot for not realising that hearing your CD is likely to result in more sales for you.

Nope, sorry, Linux still has major issues with driver, upgrades breaking shit, and with the DE wars and pulseaudio being flaky.

Why do you keep repeating shit that simply isn't true, hairy? I haven't had had any driver issues in over half a decade (I understand that two video card vendors are pretty hostile to Linux), the only upgrade I had that ever broke shit was the latest upgrade; Flash will no longer work because the box only has 750 meg of memory and Flash now needs a gig, but a newer box wouldn't have that issue. As to pulseaudio, Wikipedia says you're full of shit.

Issues
Older versions of Pulseaudio sometimes started to distort the processed audio due to incorrect handling of buffer over-/underruns.

I know someone who absolutely positively believes that there is no such thing as God, yet she calls herself Catholic.

As to unknowable, yes, agnosticism is the only rational belief system until God reveals himself to you. Once you've seen an elephant, believing that elephants don't exist is highly irrational.

It's been my experience as well, complete novices have no more problem learning Linux than it is for them to learn Windows. However, going from any Windows OS to the next version is more of a learning curve than going from any version of Windows to KDE.

No, I don't think so. More likely the question in the survey was poorly worded, and TFA (which I haven't read) was probably as crappy as most non-scientist/statistician summaries of most research.

If the question was "do you believe God created man 10,000 years ago" 46% would be about right. Most people are pretty ignorant about paleontology, jusging from slashdot comments most people don't read enough to know the difference between their there and they're. Personally, I do believe God created it all, but 10k years is far too low; humans have been human for over 50K years and evolved form other apes.

You underestimate the abysmal state of public education in the US, and overestimate the ignorance of article writers. I'd like to see the actual research.

It won't work. There was a bar owner here in Springfield, IL who hired bands that played folk music; music that was no longer under copyright, and bands that played their own compositions. The organization that collects fees for songwriters (sorry, I can't remember the evil organization's name) from bars who hire cover bands and use jukeboxes refused to pay their extortion fees, and the cost of defennding his rights in court bankrupted him. His bar is no longer in business.

With all due respects, Dr. Cooper, are you on crack?*

Or do you just have a reading disability? He said win 7 will be like XP was, not that they're going to keep using XP.

*line stolen from a Nobel Prize winning physicist

Not everyone here is a native speaker. I'd assume English is a second language to him, and he did a far better job than I would if I were writing in Spanish. Mi Espanol es meirde.