Not sure where this became a bad plot device. I think the biggest problem with the original trilogy was that the Jedi were made out to be intellectually infallible (Obi Wan and Yoda), and the best (only good?) part of the new trilogy was the realization of the concept that the Jedi were a diverse group of sentient life forms, some of whom suffered from the same illusions of grandeur, ignorance, or poor decision making as non-Jedi. The Jedi pre-Clone War were self-absorbed and so dependent on the Force telling them everything, they failed to actually observe their surroundings; other than Obi-Wan and Yoda, of course, who could tell something was up but just didn't understand the magnitude.

This same concept is found all through other Star Wars lore.

They already cloned Windows 7. It's called KDE4.

Seriously, though, I used KDE and loved it until 4 came out. It was unstable, bloated, and difficult to use. I switched to Gnome2 and loved it. Then a dist upgrade put Gnome 3 on my laptop and suddenly my laptop was less usable than with KDE4. I switched to Fedora's KDE spin, more so because of a need to run some commercial software that was much better supported under Red Hat RPM-based distros. I realized that in the time I was away, KDE4 slimmed down somewhat and was much more stable. More importantly, I was able to fully customize my eye-candy unlike Gnome or even Windows 7.

I still think the KDE group's philosophy of making KDE 4.1-4.4 a prolonged, nasty beta period was a terribly poor idea and I hope they seriously reconsider when looking forward to KDE5. However, now that the beta period is over and we now have KDE4 release candidates (4.6-4.8) I think it's worth a second look for a lot of *nix users.

You are definitely the archetype... of people who really trust The Cloud (tm). I do not.

1) I used to have Netflix. Then they jacked up their price and lost something like 60% of their already mediocre streaming selection. Their boneheaded CEO is still there. I have not seen a press release from Netflix that has convinced me it's time to go back.

2) All of the Internet providers in my area are media companies that want to sell you TV service and have basically announced they don't believe in net neutrality. My service comes with a yet unenforced 250GB cap per month. If I were to go back to Netflix or a similar service, the majority of my movie viewing will be in high definition. I'm too lazy to do the math, but my streaming, my g/f's streaming, and our other Internet use (like Skype) would probably chew up our allotment pretty quickly. My future children will definitely make this a lot worse. Maybe caps will be raised by that point...

3) I like to own my movies and music. I'm such a luddite that I actually prefer having a physical copy that I can rip to disk, back up, and cuddle as I fall asleep.

I'm actually looking to put together a multi-terabyte FreeNAS server to serve as a backend to an XBMC console in my living room as well as convert my other servers to Xen virtual machines. Based on how popular home theater PC hardware is right now, along with the popularity of software like Windows Media Center, MythTV, and XBMC, I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.

And the most of the rest appear to be either unions (police and labor) and the content owners themselves like MPAA, ABC, CBS, NFL, and Disney (i.e. the usual suspects). GoDaddy seemed to be the only Internet based company on that list. I'm not sure I understand the motivation for all of the major drug and cosmetic companies, except to say that they rely heavily on copyright and patent to maintain their business models (no pun intended for the cosmetic companies).

Honestly, I was expecting that PDF to be a huge download, not 3 1/3 pages of companies I pretty much fully expected to see. If that's a mostly comprehensive list, I'm baffled as to why this sees so much support in Congress. The dollars must really be flowing from the usual suspects mentioned above.

You might be right. I'll be honest and say I've never really given FreeBSD much attention beyond the pretty wrapping paper of things like pfsense and FreeNAS. However, on my local LUG mailing list there used to be a guy who made no attempt to hide his love of FreeBSD and marginal disdain of Linux. I think he participated on the listserv just because our LUG was the closest thing to an open-source form/community in our area. He constantly referred to Linux distributions as 'forks' and when the topic of FreeBSD was discussed, it was made to be superior to Linux. Looking back, I don't think he was really trying to anger anyone, but after a while he did. Eventually he was shunned to the point of leaving the listserv. My conversations about FreeBSD and its user base almost always ended up with people saying "I tried it, but got tired of the condescending tone when I tried to get help."

I really try hard not to stereotype or generalize people, but the tone of your post falls right in line with this. Also, you say FreeBSD is "great for server daemons, clusters, DB, and can run Xorg." I'd like to point out that the first three things are exactly NOT what this article is about. Instead of bashing people, talk about how FreeBSD can run desktop environments just like Linux can, and talk about the virtues of portage. I know you're probably just venting so what I'm saying isn't exactly fair, but sadly perception is reality.

Yes. I use Gentoo and absolutely love it. That is, until an emerge of a package hoses my system and I spend the next six hours troubleshooting it. The Gentoo forums are sometimes helpful, but not always depending on the root cause of the problem. If I didn't read a news item after syncing my portage tree I can usually find the answer along with a proper scolding for not RTFM. If the problem is a Gentoo ebuild issue or an upstream bug, finding an answer is usually more difficult.

Because Gentoo is geared more towards a seasoned, savvy Linux user, I never would recommend it to someone switching from Windows, and hardly would recommend it to someone who's been using Ubuntu for the last year. I've been using Linux since 1998 and Gentoo since about 2003, and I struggle at times (see previous paragraph). I think that disqualifies Gentoo as a general-purpose desktop Linux distribution.

Also, remember that the Gentoo portage system is a direct kin of FreeBSD's ports. I guess you don't *need* FreeBSD around since it's the concept and not the code that makes portage, but what a slap in the face.

I haven't purchased a Linksys product since Cisco bought the company and promptly started pile driving them into the ground. My company has standardized on Cisco, but I am nowhere near involved in networking equipment purchases. I know I'll get blank stares if I bring this up to our Cisco rep the next time he steps in the building. Other than simply being outraged, I'm not sure what else to do.

You must have never played Warcraft. Blizzard will not ban anyone for this. From their website: