The answer is simple

Will Linux run out of the box on this hardware: probably yes

Will Linux run well and completely and fully utilise all the features of this hardware : probably no

An example is graphics cards, almost all are supported out of the box (more than Windows 7 supports), very few are supported with full 3D acceleration (The ones that do support 3D acceleration do so only with an extra binary driver)

If I were to keep my cat tied down I wouldn't see the point in keeping one. It's a stark contradiction to their nature. Sure they can get killed just like any animal or human. That's life.

BTW, if you have your cat or dog chiped you can be contacted when a pound picks them up. No problem there.

Oh... so that's what they meant by The Ratpack....

So you missed 3/4's of the book and that'd be the whole bit about the alien entities circling the planet, the weapons deployed by them, the mission against them in orbit which is extremely cool, the relevance of parallel universes and theoretical math and all that then huh? I can see that Stephenson isn't for everyone but *objectively* awful? There's an awful lot of people that don't agree with you. Descriptive writing is 'waterboarding' for fans of "real" sci-fi? Does that go for characterisation too? I'm not trying to flame you at all - your taste is your own - but it does seem like your post says a lot about the reader and little about the author.

Generally people think there should be some sort of parity of pricing across countries for online distribution systems but this is wrong in the real world for a few reasons. Fundamentally you could break it down to intentional and mechanical.

On the intentional side, this is pretty obvious. Companies exploit the strength of local economies by pricing goods per market. They also have to deal with weak markets. Usually you get some guff about "additional operating costs" but while that's partially true it's mostly intentional price setting. We all know that Good X is cheaper in country Y than your home country Z story. I'm surprised people think companies wouldn't do it to an online distribution system too and expect parity. The nice thing for us as consumers is we can spot it. Look at the effective USD cost in Swiss Francs in that table there - ouch.

Secondly, mechanical. Managing currency exposure is fairly complicated for most businesses and many of them do a not very good job at it. Certainly Steam is woeful at it. FX markets move very very very fast and the nature of the forward contracts you have to purchase to hedge foreign currency exposures also complicates things *a lot* for non expert businesses. If I have most of my earnings in dollars and I'm selling products in Euro, I don't simply convert Euros back to dollars each business day and not mind what is happening to the EUR / USD exchange rate. If the exchange rate keeps on collapsing against me, I would be getting less and less dollars every day. You don't want your non-dollar goods giving you 20% less than you expected at the beginning of the year because of a 20% decline in the exchange rate.

What I should do is hedge my expected earnings in EUR with, say, a three month FX forward contract so that for every dollar I "lose" when the EUR / USD exchange rate falls against my dollar interests, I make a dollar in profit when the FX forward contract expires three months from now. So even if the exchange rate goes against me by 10%, while the USD40 I thought I would make a month from now on the euro sale of a single copy of my game actually becomes USD36 due to adverse currency movements, then I would get back the 4 dollars from the profit on the foreign exchange rate forward. Airlines do the equivalent hedging fuel exposures.

Banks do this all the time and decent currency management would solve a lot of these problems. Games businesses just don't get it right mechanically with decent hedging and frequently it's plain old intentional price differentials too.

FWIW I don't like rubber-banding in my games. Done too rigorously it can be a real put off on a game as it stretches to your level and makes stuff too hard. I want a nice arc of growing difficulty throughout the game governed by the usual meta-level of easy, normal, difficult, hardcore etc. Normal too normal? Fine, I'll set it on difficult and see what happens. Sometimes there's a lot of pleasure blasting through stuff and not having much problem with that - I don't need everything to be an effort and a trial. Actually maybe I'm just a pussy, thinking about it, I think what I'm saying is I don't want the level ratcheted up on me, but I don't find it too objectionable if you ratchet down when I'm flailing around and dying for the umpteenth (but not first or second) time...

"If Spotify dropped the ad-supported model, I'd stump up for the monthly subscription in an instant." - ummm but that's one of the major features of the premium, monthly-subscription service - there are no ads. Ads are only on the free trial version...

Lets be clear there are an absolute hat-full of major countries that don't *use* the SI day to day whatever they may have 'adopted'. Forty four years on from UK adoption, my car has a speedometer which is in mph as are the road signs. There are public outrages on central european efforts to prosecute small shop owners for being unwilling to sell fruit and veg in grams yet I have never heard anyone ask for '200 grammes of carrots'. People talk about their weight in stones and pounds and the only time you hear kilos is in international sports. Aircraft power is rate in lbs per square inch....

Do you mind? It's just taken us 8 years to get a fossilised dinosaur out of the Oval Office....

No I don't think that works at all. If signing more artists would increase the profit of a business they would do it regardless of any constraining factor. It's just straight forward p&l. Each unit of production is either profit positive or in loss. The number of units of revenue additive positive production you engage is not affected by piracy - you'd have them already!

It is truly crippling to see the mental fails that keep being propogated by the press and even supposedly academia here. "Piracy (filesharing) was the driving force behind increased creative output". It's simply not true that one caused the other. There isn't an artist or an amorphous group of artists who are outputting more per artist because they are thinking ex-ante "shit I'm going to get paid less than I used to so I better produce more". That might work for widgets and industry but for artistic output? Total rubbish. I'm not entering into the debate about the pros and cons of filesharing by the way but this sort of causative fail is just depressing and so utterly prevalent.

Much better; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1192503/Close-encounter-rock-kind-Schoolboy-survives-direct-hit-meteorite-travelling-30-000mph.html/