To be fair Stallman and several of the other FSF types have always been Marxist fanbois on a religious crusade. However they at least knew what they were doing.

The pile of steaming crap that Gnome, KDE, Firefox, and others have become in recent years is extremely annoying. My next laptop most likely will run either OS X or Windows 7 or 8. I might have a VM or two for firing up Linux (or windows if I go the OS X route), but the primary OS is going to be something commercial and supported. I may also toss Linux on my old laptop, but it won't be my primary machine.

The wisdom of HP spinning off its desktop and laptop division remains to be seen. However it would seem they aren't handling it as well as IBM handled spinning off its desktop and laptop division to Lenovo. HP is creating a lot of uncertainty that is just going to drive customers to other vendors.

If anything SuSE and OpenSuSE have been better about upgrades than either Debian or Ubuntu. They have all of the polish you've come to expect from Ubuntu. They offer LTS versions as well. The only real downside is some of the software like Debian/Ubuntu can be way out of date compared to Gentoo/Fedora.

Not to say there aren't some bad bugs as well. But I've yet to find a distro that doesn' t have at least a few annoyances.

an initiative was submitted only to be later found unconstitutional (assuming the income tax initiative passes and the courts toss it). Several anti-tax initiatives have been tossed out by the courts too.

I think the debate over I-1098 will cause will be healthy for the state. I think the results of the vote will prove informative for both sides no matter what the outcome is.

Who knows which way the courts will rule if I-1098 passes? I've seen good arguments on both sides from people who have a fairly good understanding of the Washington Constitution and how it is interpreted by the state courts.

My state is in relatively good shape. Though to hear some people whine you'd think this state (WA) was some cross between California and Greece. Even if the initiative to repeal the junk food and soda taxes passes there is still room to make cuts before the state has to stop paying its bills. Yes further cuts will cause pain, but not to the dire straits some states are in.

While Disney has a much larger market cap ($61B+), Steve Jobs is a Disney Board member and already owns 7% of the stock.

Disney would be much more of a pure content play than Sony too.

Canada? The bastards told me the job was in Bellevue. Though the health care and retirement are better in Soviet Canuckistan and they didn't have to bail their banks out so there may be something to be said for that.

Two things:
1. Some people including some credible economists are rather worried about a dollar collapse and possible hyperinflation. Particularly among those who view inflation/deflation as mainly an effect of the overall money supply. The money supply has expanded dramatically in the past 10 years, especially since the Fed stopped directly reporting M3. Many of the measures taken by the Fed in the past 2 years to stabilize the financial system amount to increasing the money supply exponentially.
2. Given the revolving door between especially Goldman Sachs and Citicorp and the Federal Government I wouldn't be surprised if they had access to intel most other companies don't. Even without the connection, the government has in effect signaled that protecting the big financial players is a matter of national security.

That really sucks. I think you did the right thing in posting though.

I hope your wife is OK and I hope she (and you too!) get the help you guys need.