Normally, I wouldn't nitpick to this degree, but you seemed to place great emphasis on this point. Are you saying that you've never encountered a Windows user complaining that their printer just "stopped working?" It seems to me that every nontechnical person I know has expressed this frustration to me at one time or another.

Why is it always assumed that--for instance--pharmaceutical patents, technological patents, and software patents all have to follow the same patent law?

Wouldn't it be best to tailor the law to what's practical in each particular field?

What makes you think that there wouldn't be two major competing DEs, both using the same toolkit? KDE and Gnome are different enough, philosophically, that we'd likely still have both.

Truth be told, I don't follow them, either. The summary leads one to believe there's an interesting technology article somewhere in there, but there really isn't anything of the sort (which is probably why I don't find mobile phones very compelling in the first place--for such a potentially-important class of technologies to be hindered by some inexplicable need to be tied to a phone service does not make sense to me).

True.
Blimpin' ain't easy.

Both are blocked outright on DoD networks, along with all other mainstream music/video distribution sites, so no worries.

I tried to RTFA, but apparently the author assumes that I spend day and night reading his website and know the story behind all his half-alluded-to technologies. The only bit of coherent information I was able to garner from that pile of misspelled words, glued together with condescension, was how great the author thinks he is for being all "insider" and stuff.

A dental health network:

Invest! Invest!

Agreed! Also, the source code for the language (written in C) is very digestible, well-commented, and easy-to-read. A great second step.

That quote sums it up perfectly. There's just something about the language that "just works" for me, at least.

Recently tried OpenRPG. Was okay, but we've since moved to rptools (rptools.net), which is open-source, very actively developed, and fantastic.

Apparently it does, since that's the price that was set by industry. I'm pretty sure the difference is made up by the fact that there are many more people paying that price than there are employees.