Yeah, you save a ton of dough by picking subscriptions very precisely by what you want to watch rather than lazily accepting you need 600 channels of reality TV so that you "have something to watch".

I did some figurin' about two years ago, and it looks like I still spend about $27 a month for sports and a few shows I particularly enjoy. And I feel like that's extravagant. ;^)

Just depends on where you like to put your money, I suppose.

Just today during my biweekly Hotmail check I realized that Hotmail's Junk folder is the only spam dump I check every time I'm on to ensure that I haven't missed something from someone I know. (Or something from someone I knew back when I regularly used Hotmail.) No spam filter filters more non-spam than Hotmail's junk.

Or something like that. In other news, I'm happy to see Slashdot is still doing well. ;^)

Wow. Four digits.

I feel lame with my low-ish six-digits.

Regarding id Tech 5 and Rage, id titles are usually ported to Linux relatively late in the development process when the programmer has the time, but they've always been ported. There were also these statements from Carmack at QuakeCon last month:

http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200708/N07.0803.1731.12214.htm?Page=1

GI: Will this engine support any DX10 features?

Carmack: No, not currently. We're not expecting to. We're not sure if we're going to be a Vista title or not. There will be some support benefits by being Vista only. It depends when we get the game done what the adoption has been. But it's a OpenGL title on the PC and Mac right now, obviously D3D on the 360, and the PS3 it's kind of an in between where it's Open GLES but we do a lot of direct command buffer writing there. If necessary we can move the PC version over to DX10, but there's not much strong pull for us to do that. All of the toolset is in OpenGL, I wouldn't want to convert everything over.

http://www.linuxgames.com/news/feedback.php?identiferID=9374&action=flatview

Q: I wanted to say thank you for open-sourcing the Quake 3 engine, it's made a huge difference to the community. I wanted to ask your opinion about the future of Linux and open source gaming.

A: I do take a great deal of personal pride and satisfaction with what I've been able to do with getting so much of the stuff out. Sometimes I think about it, and while I know it's not something I'm generally considered for, I may be one of the most prolific open source authors considering all the code that I've written over the last 15 years that I've made open source, or have made open source there. I do think it's very valuable. I'm very happy when I see both user gaming community stuff, or research universities, or people doing simulation tests, or bringing up things. Every new piece of hardware ends up having Doom or Quake titles used as an early form of test application. So I'm very happy to have done that. It's certainly going to continue. I mean I won't commit to a date, but the Doom 3 stuff will be open source. We still make those decisions even today when we're doing the Rage code when we have decisions about "do we want to integrate some other vendor's solution, some proprietary code into this". And the answer's usually no, because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we're not going to integrate stuff that's going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release. We can argue the exact pros and cons from a pure business standpoint on it, and I can at least make some, perhaps somewhat, contrived cases that I think it's good for the business, but as a personal conviction it's still pretty important to me and I'm standing by that.

The id-produced title coming out at the end of the month, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, will have a Linux dedicated server and client as well:

http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/etqw/

Linux client?

When it's done. We have beta testers, they are doing a great job, you don't need to apply. There is still some work to be done before it matches id quality standards, and we won't commit to any dates.

In summary: Don't panic.

Zonk, thanks for the link to Curmudgeon Gamer. Could you please fix it?

Correct link

Good points all around. Apple's very familiar with DRM, and I'd wager most DRM'd content on most Windows and Macintosh OS running hardware was provided by Apple. Microsoft's approaches, though less practically successful on the popular media front, are certainly more successful on the OS front, as another post slightly earlier has pointed out (quoted after this post).

Here's the rub, taking us back to the OP (and away from the Zune vs. iPod discussion this thread has taken):

None of the reasons given suggest Macintosh or Windows OSes would be less "DRM loving" (OP) than Linux. In fact, all we've determined is that both Macintosh and Windows already support "DRM loving policies" (quote from OP).

I don't use Linux daily. I'm not a Linux fanboy. At the same time, if your top priority is a DRM-free "policy" for your OS, learning Linux and forcing it onto your laptop [1], is going to be the best option.

[1] This in response to the troll-esque phrase in the OP trying to ensure that this would be a MS vs. Apple flamewar, "I like Linux, but it may not work with my laptop, so I don't really want to risk it." [emph mine].

===

Microsoft doesn't just want to own your media - they want to oen [own?] your whole system and have the ability to shut your OS down remotely. Hell, Microsoft even tries to put DRM on your pre-existing content - for example, if you rip a CD with Windows Media Player. And their "PlaysforSure" DRM is way more restrictive than Apple's.

Just because Microsoft hasn't been particularly successful with their plans, doesn't mean they aren't trying.