That's why it's not defined at birth. In most US jurisdictions life is defined to begin when a fetus can survive by itself outside the womb (roughly six months into a pregnancy).

You would have a really good point if all the different linux distros were intended for the same crowd of people, but they're not. A great many of them are meant for niche markets where there are few options. In the grand scheme of things people who are thinking of a transition to linux might have heard of 2-3 distros, which is a manageable number of choices. It's not like you're going to see many ordinary folk trying to choose between some embedded linux and Ubuntu. I do agree with you that it behooves the linux community to have a minimum of distros trying to go mainstream at any given time.

And besides, unlike different distros of linux which oftentimes come with very different goals and processes to create them, the different "versions" of Win 7 are really just different features users might be willing to give up to get a better price.

Really this is what's the most baffling to me. I feel like Microsoft makes a product and then proliferates multiple stripped-down versions of it, whereas it would be so much better for everybody if they just made one single well-rounded product or perhaps two (home and pro) and no more. Kudos to them for only marketing a couple of them but there are still way too many flavours. Is it really necessary to have a media centre version and a tablet pc version? Why not just have drivers or separate software for those things and keep the experience consistent?

Cheap programmers are great for throwaway or non-mission critical software, but make sure you have at least some good programmers around who have the computer science background underlying their software engineering abilities to deal with the tough/complex stuff.

This is a really important point. There's nothing wrong with having inexperienced programmers around if you have a couple of more capable guys to guide them. I would say a programmer is only truly useless if they lack not only the proper background but also the ability to accept direction from more experienced programmers.

If you have a team of cheap programmers and no one to guide them or they're more lone wolf types who don't like direction, no amount of hardware will ever guarantee success.

That's 11lbs in addition to whatever you carry normally. I'm a strong guy and also in the target market (creative professional), but I don't think it makes me any less strong when I say this would be a major pain. I usually carry a sketchbook, pens and pencils, and a couple of small notebooks. I just don't have the capacity and if I'm on the road I don't need a second LCD. Soooooo I'm still wondering how well this thing will sell. Guess we'll see.

Burning hot pants sounds kinda sexy. Sign me up!

Let me start by saying that I'm just as unenthusiastic about Vista as the next guy. If your computer has 1Gb of free RAM then that 1Gb is wasted. It could be used for cacheing frequently used applications and/or documents. If you have all of your RAM being used but enough of it kept volatile so that it can be thrown out quickly, you are fully utilizing the resources given to you.

Okay that being said I still think it's pathetic if Windows Vista can't handle file copying with a bunch of applications open. Which makes me wonder if it's worth fully utilizing RAM if it can't do so responsibly.