So how does one buy a large enough monitor that is incapable of receiving broadcasts? Perhaps the UK market is different, but all the living-room-size monitors I see in the USA are capable of receiving broadcasts.

Actually, I glossed over. You merely have to not use it for receiving broadcasts. It's prefectly legal to own an unused receiver without a license. Capita (the licesing people) don't like to tell you this since they rely on the license for their money---the BBC gets a fixed free and Capita keep the difference.

Also, they've never prosecuted a single person who hasn't let them in and owned up.

Openoffice is just too slow, on my Linux box I use google sheets and gnumeric.

Speaking as someone with a slow computer (eee 900), what computer are you running???

I've tried FF and Chromium and there is no way that those hogs + a huge ajaxy web 3.2.4-beta page is faster than LO.

But yeah, I usually use gnumeric even on bigger machines because it's fast.

But LO is acceptable on an eee 900. Not super snappy but not terrible either.

And while the free Office products are sufficient for most people's normal use (i.e. homework),

That's a subtle troll. Well done.

I love how you dismiss everyone who doesn't need vastly complex features (LO has some pretty involved ones) and their work by comparing it to nothing more than schoolwork.

If you need more complex features on a semi-regular basis, it's worth paying the price (but if all you do is type in text and change the font, stick with free).

I'll clue you in on something from the world of "real work"(tm) where people do "real things" for "money" which makes it much more important than "schoolwork": almost noone knows how to use word beyond changing fonts and typing text.

Actually this is one of the things that aggravates me about people who refuse to conemplate the idea of moving to another system because "they know word": almost always they don't even know how to use it beyond the absolute basics.

I understand that DRM has legitimate purposes,

No it doesn't.

What it does is annoy the paying customer and serve as no impediment to the pirate.

I would disagree. In fact if I was legally allowed the option. I would cancel my TV license and subscribe to netflix which is less than half the price :)

So do it then, that's perfectly legal. I own no TV (i.e. broadcast receiver), but watch plenty of non live stuff online and DVDs. It's 100% legal too.

If every licence-payer paid an extra £7 we wouldn't need to protect that content.

selling DVD and audio recordings

They already have no need to protect it. Audio is now DRM free by default and the DRM on DVDs is so bad that it may as well not exist: there are hundreds of free and commercial programs for ripping DVDs and it's easy to buy unrestricted players off the shelf.

Furthermore all the video and audio recordings worth anything at all are already on TPB, yet they still sell them.

So, if every license payer paid an extra £0, we wouldn't need to protect the content.

Try the Mint or Arch computer science degree. Much better than the Canonical one.

Are you American?

No, I'm English.

I ask only because I think only an American would expect that saying "Aman who inaccuratelyhits the spacebar?" would be an acceptable answer.

Really? It seems unlikely that a sarcastic response to typo nazism would be the sole domain of Americans.

Anyway, the question is rhetorical;

okey dokey.

I know you're an American

uh huh. Good luck with that.

because only an American would write such an absurd

I can assure you that absurdity is very popular in England.

response and have the hubris, or ignorance (or most likely both -- you and your countrymen are known the world over as being particularly stupid with an average IQ of less than 80), and expect people to accept it as valid or sensical.

Really, you were genuinely asking what "noone" was? The genuineness if it ever existed was lost in the bizarre nonsequiteurs.

Who is "noone", by the way?

Aman who inaccuratelyhits the spacebar?

This is exactly how all this nonsense started

No, the nonsense started because someone thought it was a good idea to buch the meanings used in the rest of the world and use kilo==1024, not kilo==1000.

1000-based units WERE created just to make hard drives look bigger than they actually were.

Invoke Poe's law.

I honestly can't tell.

There is no big grand conspiracy of evil marketing people versus the grand world of computer people.

1G = 10^9 in every area.

1Gbit/s = 1e9 bits per second (noone complains)
1GHz = 1e9 cycles per second (noone complains)
1GT/s = 1e9 transfers per second (noone complaines)
1GB = 1e9 bytes (oh the horror! the evil marketing oh woe woe woe)

The only reason it that 1GB = 1GiB every caught on is because RAM really relies on a power of 2 address bus, so it's always very closely tied into powers of 2 and it's convenient to round that to its nearest decimal equivalent in order to talk about it succinctly.

There was never any reason to do it for anything else, and hard disk manufacturers pretty much never used GiB when they meant GB.

And even the venerable 3.5" floppy was an unholy mixture of KB and KiB multiplied together.

What are these group policies that Linux can't replicate? I'm curious: I looked it up on google, but the descriptions are fairly high level and seems like they'd translate reasonably well.

Also, a restart manager?

I don't think this is strictly true, even though I believe it should be. We have ideas like string-theory and m-theory which, while promising ideas in the field of science, currently clearly fall under the category of a scientific hypothesis or conjecture. There is not overwhelming evidence supporting them, there s some evidence supporting them.

String and m theory are theories in the mathematical sense like number theory and set theory. There's not a shred of scientific evidence to support them since they make no testable predictions. The hope is (still) that they will one day.

Einstein changed "open and shut case" Newtonian physics.

This is wrong for several reasons. Firstly, Newton himself wasn't happy with the implied action at a distance part of his theory. Secondly, it was known since Maxwell that there was no way that EM equations could support a standing wave from any frame of reference. Third, there was an anomaly in the orbit of Mercury that was inexplicable according to Newtonian mechanics.

Hardly open and shut at all.

Copernicus and Galileo changed the "open and shut case" of a flat earth.

Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the earth over a thousand years before they were born.