If art critics and movie critics would just blindly follow the popular opinions, there would not be much point in having them around.
We can check what's in the IMDB Top 250 without needing their help.

Same with Picasso... I'd much rather look at a peaceful picture of mountains than his morbid creations. It takes a critic to like it.

I did just that: bought a cheap laptop which had windows. Then I created a bootable linux mint usb, and installed it. It runs like a charm. :)
So, my purchase was just the PC, and definitely not windows 8.

I have to say that Microsoft have a pretty sweet deal that they get paid for that. I would have bought the laptop if it came pre-installed with DOS 5.0 too - as I would have installed Linux anyway. It seems that the only way not to pay for windows is when you build your own desktop computer.

That is true, unless they can blame another country for something it didn't do!

They didn't use Flame to spy on just the French president.

The Dutch railroads are among the best in the world, with huge double-decker passenger trains between major cities with the frequency that some large cities don't even get on their metro lines. The cost of a ticket on Dutch trains is significantly lower than on the French or UK trains, and they are easier to get (from the machines), without the need of a stupid reservation. Even if a train is delayed, this delay is mostly measured in mere minutes. Only real accidents or failures will result on longer delays. And snow. Snow f***s everything up, because the Dutch don't invest enough to avoid that. But this is a sensible choice, not a failure. It just happens that it snowed in the last 2 years.

I never understand why the Dutch complain so much about their train system. I guess this is just because they never take the trains abroad.

The VVD may be wrong on many things, but they haven't messed up the trains.

Arianespace is a private company, with private shareholders.

http://www.arianespace.com/about-us-corporate-information/shareholders.asp

You will be surprised to find people in favor of this model of "freedom". Unfortunately, they really exist.

And there is no politician or CEO who will risk his career to reduce the amount of rules. It's safety first. Modern leadership is all about avoiding responsibility. Leadership is a skill where you hide behind a set of rules which seem to create the greatest security for the general population. The rules may obstruct progress, they may reduce freedom. But progress and freedom are abstract things, while one dead child or a lost job is a very concrete thing.

You're not a baby-killer, are you? Imagine it was your child...

Aww! 4 $/gallon??

It's the 100 $/barrel that should raise eyebrows, not the consumer price.
The 40 billion dollar profits that some oil companies have booked should raise eyebrows, not the country that is loosely associated with an oil company.

The US is indeed run by a bunch of morons. And so are most other countries, btw. But they are not in control. In most Western countries, the big industry have a powerful lobby. And they are the ones making profits from the wars in the Middle East. Big Oil, Big Weapons and Big Security firms are gaining a sh*tload of money from those wars. And they don't really care which government is helping them, as long as that government is listening.

Looking at the capabilities of mobile phones today, I would suggest the tricorders arrived before the cloaking.

What I am saying is that it's one thing to develop an invisibility cloak. It's another thing altogether to avoid being tagged while wearing it.

No, this was a very sensible poll. We all know that the large majority of the people here never read the articles, so I guess that we all want to know what they did read (if anything) before responding.

It's either that, or all those comments saying RTFA are meant to be humorous. :-)

I don't know much about Gabon, but I would not be surprised if their small economy needs American support. Either for receiving donations, IMF loans (and the interest level connected to that), or just imports/exports.

Compared to the threat of reduced economic stability, suspending one domain name is peanuts. I bet they were bullied into this suspension of the domain name.

In a very safe country, where the large majority of people die from diseases (mostly at old age), the appearance of safety is as important as the real safety.

We have never really grown up. Instead of monsters under the bed, there is terrorism and rogue states. All we need is someone to tell us that things have improved. Reality is irrelevant.

Obviously, it really helps that the media first gave us the feeling of insecurity in the first place.

If I were the military, then I would argue that the drones are able to avoid any aircraft, and therefore do not need to carry a transponder themselves.

Not sure, but I guess that the reason is that you have a special chapter in your lawbooks regarding mobile phones, and a separate one regarding the internet?
Even though the mobile apps are essentially just a piece of software, it needs to be put into the right lawbook to have an effect in the right way. Bureaucracy, you know.

There was a time when it was easy to distinguish between a phone and a computer, and completely different laws applied. That has changed now, but the lawbooks may still lag behind a little.

Just guessing. I'm not from California.

All you have to do to understand the true capitalist way you can deal with garbage is go to Napoli in Southern Italy, where the mafia own the garbage business.