Hah. You beat me to it. Exactly what I was going to say.

Nice to see them trying to bring G3 back to the usability levels of G2. They have a ways to go, but hey, at least they started. The more usable desktops we have to choose from, the better.

Actually, no. EULAs, TOS, whatever, which contravene actual laws, are invalid. You couldn't, for instance, bury a clause in a sale contract stipulating that by signing the buyer had agreed to be your slave. Or, you could, but it wouldn't hold up in court.

And that's the problem. Very few of us have the money, energy, or time to fight all the bullshit contracts we have to sign. So they haven't (yet) been thrown out of court. That doesn't change the fact that they're garbage.

I have an N900, mainly because I wanted a handheld computer, not a smartphone. If your requirements are light on the phone-iness of it all, then I recommend the N900 highly. I have all my work, music, etc, synced via bluetooth from my laptop. If I'm stuck for a few hours at an airport or somewhere, it's never a problem. It hops onto wifi networks seamlessly. I use it mainly as a voip phone over wifi, but it switches seamlessly to your cell carrier when wifi is out of range. So my phone bill is about $8 per month. And, afaik, no tracking, marketing, harvesting garbage at all. As somebody else said about Win phones, two or three people have N900s in the US, so no malware problems either.

just shouts "more money than brains." It was on /. a while back. (! yr? 2 yrs? more?) Somebody costed out what people were paying for texting, and on a per-byte basis, it cost more than what NASA paid to communicate with the space telescope. I never could understand people putting up with that. Voip + wifi for me since about 2005.

"Is anyone at Google still thinking?" Apparently, not. Unless it's "Nobody will bother re-doing their network to all new SSIDs. Bwahahaha."

I should add: one ought to be actively rewarded for citing sources. Definitely not penalized.

Google's way of coming up with pageranks is fundamentally flawed. It's a popularity test, not an information content test. It leads to link farming. Even worse, it leads everyone, even otherwise well-meaning people, not to cite their sources so they won't lose pagerank by having more outgoing links than incoming ones. That is bad, bad, bad, bad, and bad. Citing sources is a foundation of any real information system, so Google's method will ultimately end in a web full of unsubstantiated blather going in circles. It's happening already, but we've barely begun to sink into the morass.

An essential improvement is coming up with a way to identify and rank by actual information content. No, I have no idea how to do that. I'm just a biologist, struggling with plain old "I." AI is beyond me.

Haven't used Win-anything as my main OS in years, but doing taxes is easiest using one of the standard $10 tax programs. My taxes are a bit on the complicated side, and I don't like the privacy implications of making them cloudy. So there's XP on virtualbox which gets fired up once a year.

Yes. Exactly. Furthermore, you can even make the default whatever is "good for us." But make it customizable. Easily customizable. Right-click-and-done customizable.

Seconded. Thirded. Fourthed. I've been using Ubuntu as my main OS since Dapper, whenever that was (2006?) I've had to use Macs for my work (for a while, some automated sequencer software ran only on Macs). I never could understand in what universe a global menu made sense. You want the menu associated with the task to which it relates. Duh, right? And the business about having to do some indeterminate number of clicks and hunting, instead of just a couple of clicks through a menu tree. It's delirium to call the more tedious and time-consuming method "easier." After a while, I opened a terminal and used ctrl-r to find commands. And don't even get me started on those great huge clunky buttons all over the left side of my screen.

I switched to LinuxMint Debian and KDE.