"BECAUSE THEY ACT AS IF THEY OWN MY MACHINE, NOT ME"

You should be glad that they don't act like they own you too? :P

You forget about wireless internet (over the cellphone net). In the best case, they would identify a computer, but then we have NAT, so in reality it's more like groups of computers...

You forgot the reference...

http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/jean-michel.muller/goldberg.pdf :-)

I'm working on embedded systems. Real men don't program desktop computers! :-P

Small embedded systems are often sans FPU. Fixed point arithmetic is orders of magnitude faster on such a platform (I'm not sure what the numbers on desktop processors are but I wouldn't be surprised if it's slightly beneficial even there).

http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/2007/05/latex-vs-word-vs-writer/

Please google for "BibTeX4Word". Word doesn't need to beat BibTeX, because BibTeX and Word can nowadays be used in combination...