Living in Europe does not excuse you from obeying traffic laws.
No it does not (and I did not claim that). And it should not. But it is a difference wether the rental agency informs the police that I was driving (wich is the right way to do) rather than just simply paying the ticket and then billing me for it (how do I now get my money back if the ticket was wrong?)

We talked about the mDNS service on Windows, right?

I don't know about what protocols you are talking now. I doubt iTunes uses anything nonstandard.

Apples stuff run on Unix (Mac OS X is BSD Unix), they basically ONLY use official standards.

It is the Windows world that is always inventing its own shit and even blocks official standards.

You brew beer in quantities of at least 20 liters.
That is roughly 5 gallons. So the brew is circulating itself.
My point basically is: you read a thermometer and decide to either switch on the heater or switch it off or keep it as it is. Not a hard programming thing :D

Your points are valid though, but again this has nothing to do with programming or linux, but with your problem.

In europe you tell the police who drove the car, and that person then gets the ticket. (It is clearly written on the ticket what to do if you where not the driver) In case of speed or red light tickets the photo usually shows the driver anyway, so this is easy.

No, I think a rental company in the USA works like one on the rest of the world.
Actually I read my contracts. What do you think?

If the company gets a ticket for me, it informs thee police that I was the driver, then the ticket is sent to ME by the police. It is the exact same thing tat happends if you borrow my car and I get a ticket for you. Then I inform the authorities that YOU where driving and THEY go for YOU. I don't have to pay anything and ask it back from you. The same is true for a rental company. It does not obliege to pay my tickets, So it wont. Plain simple.

However this might be different in the USA ... poor guys there then :D

The old: "This is old and therefor good!"
The young: "This is new and therefor better!"

Honestly: on what do all those new shiny things run, like Web 2.0 or your Web 3.0 (what is that?), social networks and and and?

The run on unix/linux. As long as there is no Plan 9 or Hurd replacing them there won't be any new OS in big computing.

The law is pretty simple in the rest of the world.
If "someone" wants something from me, becauae I stepped the law, he has to address "me".
Contracts are irrelevant.
The rental company has no law full power to decide if I'm guilty or not. Hence it has no right to bill my credit card.
The only one who has the lawfull right is the judge or other entity of your state, or my state (in case Inleft country).
RegRdless of contract, if I rented a car in the USA and got a ticket, regardless if legitimated or not, and the rental company would "draft" the payment for it: I would challange my credit card company to repay it. And guess what: it would. Because my contract with the credit company contradicts your made up contract with the rental company.
And on top of that, under european law, the authority who made the ticket has to come for me! There can not be a company/contract to my disadvantage be placed in the middle!

I had plenty of car rentals.

And for strange reasons I had plenty of tickets.

And I payed not only none of them, but I ignored them. Unless my local police forwards me a foreign country request for a ticket, I have not to pay.

Plain simple.

If the USA is different in that it only shows how low level your citizen rights are.

You want to tell me, a car rental agency can make a contract to cover my traffic bills/tickets? Sorry, under european law this idea is not only rediculous but laughable ...

That is nonsense. First of all the credit card company does not get the ticket.
Secondly, if they did, they wheren not oblieged to pay it.
Third, if they would draft it from your credit card, you appeal to your credit card company, and you are done with it.
Your contract with the car rental agency is about renting cars, not about paying tickets.

There is no point in paying an USA parking ticket if you,ive in europe, either.
They habe no chance to get you and to pay it.

As valid as the question is, it does not really make so much sense.

Beer brewing is pretty simple. There is no real challange in the programming of a computer to comtrol the process.

However building a brewing device IS. The point is: you need a pot with heater and theromstat, the pot should be hygenic. Stainless steel is likely the choice. You need a way to measure the fill level (to replace evaporing water), you need to stirr the liquid. Finally you want to be able to seperate the waste from the beer.

All this is a mechanical and engineering challange. So first I would look how home beer brewing machines are constructed and how they work. Then I would ask my self how I can use a program running on linux to controll such a thing.

The point is: cleaning that brewing pot is pretty hard and awfull. So you want one which is easy to clean. Easy to clean means: the construction is thought out.

Running a heater for 55 minutes to keep the brew on 65 degrees centigrade is a joke for a programmer.

You seem not to gget it.
It is defined as the length of the distance at tthe equator defined by one arc minute. (Hint: why would the word equator be in the definition if it is just an arc minute?)
A nm is 1852.xxx meters, everywhere on the planet. Because that is the fraction of the circumference of the earth at the equator, cur by one arc minute. Pretty simple and straight forward.
Te speed of ships and planes is determined in nm/h, called knots (kt). Do you really think a plane flying 650kn has a different speed when it flies at the equator or when it flys from Moskow to Vancouver over the pole?
A unit of distance and speed would be completely unuseable for general purpose if it would change depending where on earth you are.

You do that only once, when you dowload it. Go to gutenberg.org and try it with a random book in epub format :)
After that the book is in the iBook library, just like any book.

Well, if you are a PC user and don't need synchronized AdressBooks etc. then you don't need iTunes.

Your ebook problem can easy be solved. Enable the laptop to serve the ebooks via a web server. Access the laptop via web from the iPad and choose "open in iBook" after the web page loaded.

The fact that you understand one of the main windows problems makes me wonder why you are still using windows.

Interesting link, thanks!