Reality-check-trivia time: who holds the trademark for "Ron Paul" in the United States?

Answer: nobody right now, let alone the politician Ron Paul (source: US Patent & Trademark Office online trademark search system). The trademark argument doesn't apply here; and remember, Ron Paul has already tried and failed to make bogus "common-law" trademark claims against YouTube and Twitter users who were critical of him and had all, part, or some variation of "Ron Paul" in their usernames.

Ron Paul wanted to get rid of the Department of Education, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Federal Reserve—to scratch the surface. If he had his way, the UN and by extension the WIPO wouldn't exist either, and he would have to play by the rules being set down by the current (and legitimate) owners of the domain name. He's using an arm of an organization he hates to circumvent the very system he wanted to force on everyone. I have zero sympathy for him, and hope whoever at the WIPO records his complaint puts it at the bottom of a very tall stack of incoming work and takes a comfortable vacation with his or her family, before telling Mr. Paul that his claims are—once again—bogus.

The company has "starter" licenses for JIRA and Greenhopper; both are installed and have been sparsely and experimentally used by a single developer, but have never seen active use. For a web-based interface, would it be better to stick with JIRA and Greenhopper and add Fisheye, or to switch to Trac or Redmine?

The company has "starter" licenses for JIRA and Greenhopper; both are installed and have been sparsely and experimentally used by a single developer, but have never seen active use. For a web-based interface, would it be better to stick with JIRA and Greenhopper and add Fisheye, or to switch to Trac or Redmine?

Gotta have Dr. McNinja. http://drmcninja.com/

Exactly. There's "benchmark fast", and then there's actual usability fast. If you do a pure by-the-numbers benchmark of Vista and 7 on the same system you'll get almost identical numbers, and they probably won't be much different from XP's numbers on that machine--because it's all the same hardware, and most benchmark suites won't register much of a difference between different operating systems on the same hardware.

The difference in performance is in usability. XP is generally snappy all-around; Vista is generally ass-slow. From my experience, 7 is much more responsive in everyday use than Vista ever was, and is much closer to XP's user interface performance and stability. I've said since the 7 beta came out that the beta was better than Vista SP1; 7 RC is another several steps forward, and the fact that it's essentially a free copy of 7 until the middle of next year is a big PR plus for Microsoft.