We already have laws to cover most of the things EULAs are concerned about, making EULAs superfluous. The rest just is contradictory to existing laws and is unenforceable, so it doesn't apply. Not to mention that it's a one-way contract (in that you can't redact, as you can with normal contracts), so maybe it's illegal in and of itself. I'm glad I don't use software that has EULAs.

That's silly. When Novell bought SuSE, they gave away kits at nearly every consumer electronics show, including those in america, that's how I got mine. They also offered to mail them out free if you couldn't find one in your local area. That was for SuSE 9. I've still got mine. Prior to that, a friend had been paying for SuSE since 7 (I'm not sure what the deal was, apparently it was hard to obtain free because of YaST, or update services, or something?). At the time though, I was getting into Fedora and had a much easier time with it. I didn't want to use SuSE because you did everything through their proprietary configuration interface (YaST), and I wanted to learn a more "standard" way of doing things that would apply to all distros. Since I was just testing the waters at that point, I didn't want to have to learn something I couldn't use elsewhere. Not only that, but many how-tos would refer to editing .conf files, and YaST would throw up errors and try to replace my manually configured file every time I wanted to do something like this. It also seemed much easier to find .rpms for RedHat, or .debs for Debian.

Ultimately I ended up using Ubuntu, because at one point there was a controversy over Fedora with regards to versions not being supported very long or at all, or being bleeding-edge-only, and I wanted something a little more stable. I also got bogged down in RPM hell because I did want to try certain packages that were not officially supported, and repositories that packaged them didn't have common dependencies, and although I tried compiling the software myself, there were compile issues I had trouble resolving for certain software.

Now I'm trying out Debian, to gain experience and progress in my knowledge of the GNU/Linux platform on something that's not too far off from what I'm using now.

While they're at it, why not have these in police cars as well?

But they have android devices to push this on. That's a big audience. Now all they need to do is put out an android-based competitor to the iPod.

So how do you get the nutrients to cultivate the lab-grown meat?

They only care about scrambling to make the current quarter look good, they have no long-term view. You can't keep luring in suckers, eventually they'll get wise. It's better to smarten up now rather than prolong the bullshit until we can't even climb back up the hill because we're exhausted and everyone else is already at the top.

Rosegarden is a pretty good music program, but yeah, use what works well for you. Just letting you know what's out there.

I left Windows when XP was released. I was tired of ad-laden spyware-bundled software that I couldn't manage and update centrally (i.e. each piece of software was nagging me for updates), and hunting down drivers after the inevitable fresh install every 6 months. It was a PITA getting the correct driver combos to get my TV add-on card and all games to work properly with my video card driver. I didn't like being told I couldn't run certain software because of the OS version I was using, because the developer wasn't able to account for future versions of the OS and then dropped support for their software (this happened with games as well, such as Wipeout XL). Windows just started to be too much of a pain to maintain.

Then I switched to Fedora, and ran it alongside Windows 2000 for a while. I was blown away that running a program from a console would allow me to see error messages that I could resolve myself. System logs told me everything. Troubleshooting was never so painless. Still, maintaining Fedora was a bit of a pain too, and I frequently fell into RPM hell. There was no streamlined way to update the OS to a newer distro revision without breaking everything, and the desktop just wasn't there yet. Or maybe I wasn't experienced enough.

Anyway, Ubuntu came along and I never looked back. They polished the GUI and went above and beyond to make things as painless as possible for desktop end users, and that really kept me. I still had all the power and flexibility that Linux offered me, if I wanted it. But now it was optional, and the desktop was very painless.

For my gaming fix, I was happy with consoles. I never liked multiplayer much, nor FPSes, RTSes, and CRPGs. I prefer arcade-style games, platformers, racing games, rail shooters, shmups, and third-person shooters. Drop in a disc and go, it's very hassle-free.

Giant Bomb are known for their humor and often take jabs at the industry, they probably aimed for sarcasm, most of their "quick-looks" are quite long.

Exactly. Who cares who's fault it is. Why spend time figuring out what to blame when we can try to solve it? Perhaps in trying to figure out how to deal with it, we will find the biggest contributors and eliminate them, but we must at least try in the first place instead of standing still arguing.

The Gnome polish that Ubuntu introduced went a long way as well, including things like a working network manager that dealt well with wireless connections, supporting administrative tools like gparted, Synaptic Package Manager, and other printer/user/gui management tools was also a boon. They made sure users never had to go to the command-line, and provided defaults that were acceptable to the majority of desktop users. Their focus on the end user desktop experience really paid off. I'm not sure if Mint can carry that legacy, for now I'm happy enough just apt-getting gnome and sticking with Ubuntu. The fact that GUI packages such as Gnome and KDE want to re-invent the wheel for every major revision is a bit troubling, and I'm happy that projects such as Trinity exist, even though they are fringe products. I'm actually intrigued by Gnome 3, but that doesn't change my disappointment over leaving users who have gotten used to and like Gnome 2 out in the cold. XFCE never seems to change, only polish, and that's great. Too simple/bare-bones for me though.

That gas is anything but pristine.

For people to desire the product, they have to fit a niche, and for that to happen, they have to raise awareness to attract potential users. I haven't heard anything about the "Google TV experience", I just know that it exists and have no desire to pursue it because I'm happy with my own xbmc-PC based solution, not to mention my TV and PS3 which both store and play media from USB devices and memory cards, and netflix on PS3 as well (which I don't subscribe to, I primarily just rip my own media and use xbmc as a jukebox). I don't even want Apple TV and I know what that is, and to me, Google TV sounds like something similar because of the branding (i.e. being locked in to a single vendor's DRM format), but I have no idea. I am attracted to DRM-free and commercial-free solutions, with permanent ownership and unlimited format shifting. Right now, ripping my own media seems like the best route.

The iPods/iPhones with 'retina display' have a much higher resolution but the text is the same size. Just because you change the DPI doesn't mean everything else should appear smaller. A good GUI should be able to handle these things, and I'm sure Android can handle it.

That's because you're talking to software (or even firmware) that has hidden/obfuscated routines (i.e. you don't have the source). If it's open all the way, you can track down exactly what is happening, and even fix it, or it can even expose a flaw with the input you have provided. Either way, it's much easier to solve the issue.