I see multiple differences here.

No thunderbolt, no firewire, no USB 3.0 listed.

No multi touch track pad, no back lit keyboard.

720p camera, asus only says .3m pixel.

Magsafe power adapter, longer battery life

Also the mac runs windows, linux, AND OS X. The asus does not run OS X (without LOTS of effort to install and maintain)

The mb pro looks much much nicer.

All in all, quite a few differences. Add in all that stuff you missed, and you're nowhere near $749. The only two things it exceeds is hard drive size, and video card. You can get different set ups on the mb pro, but there is not point in discussing the asus any longer since it is no where near the specs of the mb pro you listed.

bind reads /etc/hosts. As far as I know any DNS server I've ever used on Linux reads /etc/hosts

I do it on the /etc/hosts level on my dns server. You can find large lists of ad domains that can be added to your hosts file with 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0 to cause them to fail. This covers all machines on your network that use your dns server. The one I use is http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt however they have become slow with updating it. You might want to invest some time in looking for one that is updated more frequently.

Exploding heart disease.

They may have cured cancer, but is their cure open source? Is it free of DRM? I'll pass.

Lots of articles. You can find them here --> slashdot.org

/. has never been a place for reasoned discussion. It's a place for group think.

I must have been thinking about my Atari 8-bit. XM301 300 bad modem.

My first Linux was Slackware. 300 baud. I remember having just enough floppies for the base and network. I also remember praying to all the gods that after I formatted my only hard drive that they all worked. It did, and I ran Linux (eventually Debian) for the next 11 years.

I hate it. Have an application that is in the bottom right hand corner of the screen? Good, I get to move the mouse clear to the other side of the monitor to get to the menu bar. Need to click on the menu bar for a program in the background? First, you have to bring it to the foreground, now you can access the menu bar. It only creates extra work, and aside from it always being in the same place I can't see any other benefits. Just extra work.

I think one of the big problems is some people see this as a liberal issue, and since everything liberal is wrong, climate change is to. And who needs to waste their time with facts when you have an agenda?

I sir, love your company!

By a dumb TV, set up MythTV.

Zimmerman is being charged with a felony crime, Trayvon isn't.

No, that's not a loop hole. Your contract is for the service. You can cancel, but you will still get hit with the early termination fee. Stolen phone will not change anything.