WHAT "Education" system? What passes for the public "education system" now has become an "indoctrination system".. Instill "political correctness" in EVERYthing, make sure the children are molded into obedient little consumers, and NEVER question the state/powers-that-be.. My wife and I must have seen this coming when we got married in 1985, as we both decided to skip having children. I guarantee if we were younger and having children in today's screwed up world, they WOULD be home-schooled, no matter what sacrifices we needed to make to do that...

Apple + Windows = Nightmare... Imagine that iTunes crapfest on a Windows machine where there ARE no iPods/Phones and NEVER will be... Until Amazon came along with their MP3 store, if you wanted to buy individual tracks, iTunes was pretty much your only choice besides the Russian AllOfMp3 or Mp3Fiesta sites.. I remember going thru this same discovery process of all of the bloated-pig services that got installed on a system, ones that were absolutely useless unless you had an "iDevice", and all of the work to turn that crap OFF, JUST to be able to buy/download some individual album tracks... THANK GOD for Amazon's MP3 store.

Actually we have two sets.. for the hoi-poloi, the peasants, ie: US, you & me... and another set for the elites, corporations... In our set of laws, extortion is illegal, but in the "big-boys" set of laws, its perfectly ok... I think what might have happened with Team Prenda is they thought they were covered by the "big-boys" laws, but found out they're just peasants like the rest of us.. may they rot in hell for this...

BUT.. on this one, I gotta funny feeling that the court (or the uniformed parts of it, the parts with guns/handcuffs/mace/tasers) may be coming TO THEM... If so, it couldn't happen to a more appropriate bunch of "people".....

Or how about this one.. Somebody with lots of $$$ (or lots of backers with $$$$) decides to get with the GIMP crew and fund them to develop/add to GIMP the features/tools that make professional users of Photoshop stick with Photoshop, even though GIMP has, what? 80% of the features of Photoshop?? These somebodies who perhaps are fed up with Adobe and its bullshit antics, and wants to give them a comeupance???? It would be fun to watch...

THIS! Switched from Fedora to Ubuntu back in 2007, but with the steaming, stinky, slimy turd that is Unity, and now this spyware b.s., I've moved to MintDebian.. Just as easy to use, and NO Canonical/Shuttleworth to deal with... Ubuntu is DEAD TO ME... (ya I know... no one care..)

May I suggest then, AC from the UK, that you live in the good ole' USA then if you wanna get tickets for whatEVER the cop wants to give you one for...

At least in Arizona, around the Flagstaff/Coconino County area, if you get a ticket, and you haven't had one for a significant amount of time, you can take "traffic school", which keeps the ticket off your insurance, BUT you wind up paying as much in fees to the county for the priviledge of taking "traffic school" as the bail for the ticket.. Last trip to Flagstaff, we were on cruise control going towards the Grand Canyon, up US Highway 89, I had the cruise control set at 70, with the speed limit at 65. I went by this AHP car and as I went by, he took off after me.. When he pulled me over he claimed to have gotten an 80 mph off his radar. I knew that was bullshit, as the the car was a brand new 2012 Ford Escape and the cruise control was set AT 70... Of course, you never argue with a thug and his gun.. Of course, with Nevada plates on the car, he saw an easy mark that actually was going 5 mph over the limit (which EVERYbody else was doing also) and tacked on an additional 10 mph for good measure... Since I live in Las Vegas, there was no way in hell I was driving the 240 miles each way to go to court in Flagstaff, but I damn sure would have LOVED to, and challenge the calibration on his radar..

You want to talk about chicken-shit?.. When I was in the Army, I was stationed for a time at Yuma Proving Grounds, in Arizona. Since I was in the military, I kept my California license plates on my car and my California drivers license. So one day I was driving from the base to the city of Yuma, 26 miles of southwestern US desert, and a two lane highway. This was back in the late 70s, when 55 was the limit, and that's what US Highway 95 was signboarded at. I come around a corner and there is an Arizona Highway Patrol car on the shoulder with a radar. I quickly checked the speedometer, and according to it, I was between 50-55.. I see a cloud of dust in my rear view mirror and here he comes.. He pulls me over and asks "How fast do you think you were going?" .. I said, "less than 55"... He says "I clocked you at 56 MILES PER HOUR and I'm gonna have to write you a ticket".... What was hilarious and I had to bite my lip to keep from cracking up, was, after he'd started to write the ticket, and was committed, he noticed the "PO BOX XXXX US ARMY YPG, YUMA AZ" on my California drivers license. In my best "talking-to-a-cop" voice I advised him I'd be seeing him in court.. I completely understand WHY he pulled me over, which was the fact I had out-of-state plates on the car, which told him I'd pay the ticket and forget about it.. This idea evaporated when he saw my license and the local address on it, and I told him I'd be going to court... His demenor changed completely.. I'm gonna bet he was wishing he could just tear the ticket up, which is not legal under most states laws. He did show up on the appointed day at court and the judge reamed his ASS... Was TOTALLY worth taking a day off from work to go to court....

Perhaps you can tell us a country that is NOT "cruising down the road to a police state"... I'd sure LOVE to know, because, as much as I love America, I'm getting sick and tired of the destruction of it by BOTH sides of the political isle.. During my time in the Army in the 1970s, I went on RnR to Sydney Australia and was totally impressed with them, and in fact, considered emigrating there after I got out of the Army... Fast forward to 2013, and they're (along with ALL of the other "Commonwealth" countries) heading down that very same road to a police state.. Sure am glad I'm in my 60s, and likely won't live much more than maybe another 10 years, if that long... Its gonna MUCH worse before it gets better (if ever).....
 

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I DO! IDO! (waves hand!) .... Its because they're idiots.. I am the neighborhood tech support guy (probably cuz I'm retired and around the house most of the time), and since Windows 8 was shoved down everybodys throat, I hardly go a week without somebody in the neighborhood asking me "how do I get *something* besides this new Windows?"... There have been several neighbors who didn't ask me before going to WorstBuy or Frys and buying a new laptop and then finding it came with Microsoft's latest steaming turd, Windows 8. Universally, these poor folks agree with me that Windows 8 IS a steaming turd.. I've pointed those who ask to the Dell Outlet and purchasing one of the excellent factory refurb'ed Latitude laptops there.. They come with Windows 7 (at least for now) and have the same 3 year warantee as a build-to-order system, with a VERY nice discount.. For my own systems, they come from either the Dell Outlet or Dell Financial Services Off-lease sales.. A couple of months ago, I picked up an off-lease Dell Precision T3500 workstation, Xeon Quad-core processor, 4GB of ram, 160GB 10Krpm SAS drive, and an Nvidia Quadro FX580/512mb video card for $408. The system was originally $490, but I found a 25% off coupon on Slickdeals that brought it down to $408, including the $39 add-on warrantee. Another hundred dollars took the system to 12GB of ram. It came with Windows 7 64Bit. oops.. got a bit off-topic there... Anyway, Microsoft is going to HAVE to address their brain-dead Metro interface on Windows 8 IF they want corporate America to stop turning their noses up at it.. Your average corporate "cube-rat" doing spreadsheets/word documents and is currently using XP is gonna most likely be pulling his hair out by the roots IF his IT department takes away his XP system and plops down a Windows 8 system in its place.. Just before I retired, I worked on a temporary contract support job rolling out new Windows 7 systems to replace the companies old XP boxes.. Since I was a contract weenie, I just swapped boxes and got them working, I didn't deal with the following from users... "Hey! this looks different... How do I....".... But the regular IT weinies sure were getting a LOT it, and you gotta figure this was ONLY a move between XP and 7.. Can you flippin' imagine the questions from a XP to windows 8 rollout???????? With budgets as tight as they are, you're not gonna see any training on the new UI. Soo... Unless Microsoft
decides to admit they made a mistake, and replace the "Windows7-ness" of Windows 8, I strongly suspect you're gonna see Windows 8 become another Windows Vista...

I've been working with computers since 1985, and until about 2005, I had always built every machine I ever owned, but then I discovered the Dell Outlet, since the company I was working for at the time was a Dell shop. This discovery ended really quickly my desire to build machines, as I could not build an equivalent system for what I could get a Dell refurb'ed system for. Oh I guess I could have gotten fairly close -if- my time was worth nothing.. The machine I just retired, a Dell Optiplex GX620, a Pentium 4D, 2.8Ghz, I bought from the Dell Outlet in late 2005 for $419. Over the years I added memory, a second drive, video capture, several different video cards, and when I retired it, back in February of this year, it was still working just fine, but I had an urge to get something from Dell in the Precision/Workstation class. Did a bit of search and came up two fantastic deals.. A Dell Precision T3500 with a Xeon Quadcore, 4GB of ram, a 160GB Seagate 10K enterprise SATA drive, and an Nvidia Quadro FX580/512mb. This was a Dell Financial Services offlease system, and with the 25% coupon I found on SlickDeals, I got the system for $408, added another $100 and took the ram up to 12GB and dualbooted it with Win7/64bit and CentOS6... This machine will likely last me another 5-6 years, perhaps longer.. Why buy a new system, I ask??

You forgot "Disclaimer III:" .. When a legal system becomes such a morass that it requires someone with 8+ years of schooling to make ANY sense of it, and the common man, who is expected to know EACH and EVERY law he's subject to, has to pay extortionate sums of money to hire someone to figure it out, and *try* to protect this common man from being ground up and spit out by the "Justice system", said "Justice systen" is FUCKED UP BEYOND ALL HOPE OF REPAIR.. yeah.. I know I could have just said FUBAR and 99.99% would know what I meant.. but the FUBAR-ness of America's "Justice system" is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY beyond the mere old-school original military definition of FUBAR... Since our "representatives" no longer pay ANY attention to us, and when we do have an election, there is so much voter fraud.. such as dead people voting, or over 100% voter turnout in a given precinct, all of which occurred in the last election.. You will NEVER convince me that the 2012 election was not rigged by the left/unions... In short, we are well and truly screwed.. Its becoming apparent to anybody who is paying attention that BOTH sides of the isle are driving America over the cliff. I love this country, but its becoming apparent that staying here may not be an option for much longer, with no place to go thats not going down the same authoritarian road that America is.. I took "RestAndRecreation" leave in 1971 to Australia, and came very close to emigrating there after seeing the beauty of the country, but current events show they're going down the same road as we are, hell-bent on becoming a dictatorship, just like Obama's new America... I cry for America...

You have to realize that we are now living in an era when the law is WHATEVER the FBI/TSA and all of the other multitude of three-letter-acronymed agencies SAY it is.. I've given up hope that sanity and Consitutional freedom will return to America anytime soon.. I'm thankful I'm not a kid anymore having to live in what is quickly becoming what the old soviet union was..

The fact that Barack "Chamberlin" Obama, the appeaser, is ordering this, pretty much guarantees if NK *does* have the stones to lob a nuke at SK/Alaska/Hawaii, that Obama won't retaliate in kind.. I strongly suspect "Lil Kim" and his cronies have the wherewithall to hit SK pretty much anywhere, with whatever nuclear materials they have, and perhaps as far as Alaska/Hawaii... Lil Kim doesn't even have to aim it very well.. Get it close to Anchorage or Honolulu and do an airburst at 50K ft.. Can you say EMP? Those cities would lose their electronic infrastructure, and likely not very many casualties, except for electronics...

We learned in WWII from the original appeaser, Neville Chamberlin, that appeasing flat-ass crazy dictators didn't work.. Give em a inch and they take a mile.. We need another Eisenhower... He stood up to NK/China and put in place the armistise that survived until Lil Kim got ahold of it just now..

We is soooo screwed with Obama at the helm....