What kind of a jackass sells an OS designed to be unable to share data with other OS's?

Someone who believes, "What's mine is mine, and what yours is mine, too!" In other words, control-freaks like Gates, Ballmer, and Jobs. YMMV.

+1 insightful ... if i had mod points

I still don't get it - why cars need so much software?

To drive up the price and profit margins. Silly goose.

very good. for non-speakers of French, merde means crap.

Use sid. First install sqeeeze, then add the sid (unstable ) repositories, # apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. Have fun. Don't bother whining to sid developers if you break your system. You could also try Sidux, based largely on Sid with such testing as is necessary. Don't use anything but apt-get to install packages or dist-upgrade; Sidux doesn't support any other package management system. Oh and you should be in init 3 to dist-upgrade. Works well. Sis is sid though, and sometimes things break ... just like in *buntu.

Sic semper tyrannis ... and pathological liars. (With apologies to both Cato and Brutus for using their noble words to refer to pond scum. :-/)

Oh do you mean making copyright eternal; destruction of the existing public domain by nullifying it and giving what has been in it to the RIAA, MPAA, and publishing houses? You are probably right. Bye bye Byron, Caesar, Shakespeare, et al.

The authorities "care" for the average citizen is roughly 0.000. Who says the don't allow scams, embezzlement and Ponzi schemes. Isn't all that what blew up the economy a couple of years ago?

Most of our customers don't even know what bricks and doorstops are. Why should they care if we turn their boxes into them?

Fuck e-books; fuck e-book readers, including, but not limited to the Kindle, the iFad, & all the others I've not heard of. May they all go belly up, bankrupt and take the crooked publishers with 'em. Why anyone would want a crippled computer to read crippled books which can be stolen back by the "publisher" on any whim, "Just because we felt like it ... Buzz off, Sucker!" completely escapes me. Preposterous.