I can answer this one! Yes, the only way to change your desktop background is to install linux over windows xp.

I would mention that you dug up an astoundingly horrible analogy. Most people would feel safer in a 35+ year old car that they'd driven every day than they would in a new one, simply because it hasn't failed yet... and you know they don't build them like they used to.

In fact, after taking your analogy into account I'd advise Russia not to replace their reactors, as they haven't failed yet-at least the ones that haven't failed haven't failed. The ones that did... well, they were clearly shoddy craftsmanship.

And man oh man is that marketing effective... Have you seen the numbers of new interested customers who think FF is solid as a rock?

This I disagree with, management is aware of the cost cutting benefits of shipping jobs over seas, and they're slowly becoming more aware of the costs of it. However working from home won't make you more exportable if you continue to work at a level expected by your pay grade. It may however lead to you getting offered an opportunity to quit or move overseas and keep your job for a lower salary that is proportionally higher compared to the local livable wage, as per IBM.

Well a EULA summary would just make things more complicated, either it would be just as long and explain everything the EULA did, or it would have no legal bearing and companies could put whatever they wanted in it.

I, personally, wouldn't mind being re-compensated by companies for the length of their EULAs, but that is just a feeble token gesture that customers would end up paying for anyways.

For the campaign element, at least, I'd suggest you try looking into Battle for Wesnoth, it's an RPTBS. But in general I agree, a lot of the open source games still seem driven by the idea that they are written by coders for coders. And apparently we coders don't care about graphics at all.

How could that possibly be considered overpayment?

Close... I think a fair expansion on this example is to assume GM also allowed you to replace the gas tank for free in any gas station ever, and that their gas tank was included as a service rather than their cars being sold without a tank and consumers left to their own devices to drive the car tankless to someplace to get one...

Microsoft certainly pushes IE and other products on consumers but this lawsuit is ridiculous, the wide range of windows software makes a package manager silly [and, if implemented would only result in worse favoritism concerning whose software made the cut] and forcing your grandmother to figure out how to FTP Firefox via the command line before she can check her email is just silly.

I hate M$ as much as the next guy, but seriously Opera, don't be unreasonable, FF hasn't had any trouble breaking into the browser market, maybe you're just doing something wrong?

Err, third time around you mean, of course.

Pretty much any MuD that calls itself an RPI, here are a pair which I recommend highly.
Shadows of Isildur
Harshlands

Nah, start them with Scheme and really scare them away from programming languages. On a more serious note, stay away from Java, cin beats (new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in))).readLine(); any day of the week.