It depends very much on the individual kindergarten or school. The "Montessori way" is often fundamentally misapplied, resulting in kids that essentially do whatever they want whenever they want in whatever pace they want, which translates to an almost non-existent education. There are a few really good such schools, but I for one would rather not take that chance.

Oh, really? Please define "libertarian".

Define "gamers". I have yet to meet any PC gamer who speaks of GfW LIVE and all the other supposed gaming features in Windows without drawing extensively on the not so nice parts of their mental lexicons.

There is a difference between clean and butt-ugly. I consider Windows 8 the latter. The screenshots instantly reminded me of the setup in my old school's CS lab - under SuSE Linux 6.3.

Oh dear, I smell an attitude on this blog.

It is not that simple, I am afraid. I love Osmand, but it still has a long way to go. Searching for street names in cities that have been divided into districts - there are numerous examples in Germany (try Munich) and apparently Russia - is broken, offline routing fails more than it works. I enjoy the map display, and with an online routing service it is quite useful, but as a purely offline solution Osmand is not ready yet.

Disregarding the weight, I have seen an MBA go dead after a drop from a common work desk, while my ThinkPad T-60, bought refurbished, has survived 4 years in emergency services and disaster relief. I have stopped counting the drops and bangs. The case is scratched, of course, and the keyboard looks its part. But nothing is broken, deformed or lost its functionality. So I suggest you look beyond the mere material of a laptop at how it performs in the real world.

This comes up quite often in this discussion. The only current mainstream desktop OS available for x86 that will not run on anything but a Mac is OS X. And that is not due to the technical superiority of Macs but legal restrictions Apple has put on it.

Oh, I am sorry, what was your point?

Not Germany, the single most retarded court in the whole of Germany. Hamburg is to copyright suits what Texas is to patent suits. The decision will almost certainly be struck down in the next round. They virtually always are.

It is when the whole bloody lawsuit - or what is left of it - rests on just this one question.

How exactly is Google in on this?

If we only ever built technology that appeared immediately useful for at least 95% of the population we would still be trying to figure out how to transport messages across long distances without using a horse.

The reality is so objective, actually, that it seems to be a non-issue in those cultures. Nice talking to you.

Where a culture does not deny or even promotes something that it does not know or that it does not deem wrong, that culture is defined by other cultures who have those concepts and deem them wrong. Ancient Greece was in retrospect from our enlightened point of view a culture of slavery, because we have a concept of slavery, and this is seen as a bad thing because we, in our society, deem slavery bad. China is a culture of theft when it comes to "intellectual property" because we see it that way.