Posting from Finland. I think a flat 60% tax rate is only applied if you haven't submitted any sort of tax card (and nowadays employers' HR departments get it automatically from the Finnish IRS with default values). Otherwise, income tax is determined progressively. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or 28 minutes by train according to the HSL Journey Planner, plus some walking from the airport to the train.

It can, but it doesn't have to. I watch Netflix using HTML5 in Chrome on my Linux box.

They mean Microsoft.

Although typically, you wouldn't make an OS run the software, you'd make the software run on the OS.

Reaper with Wine on Linux. It's an inexpensive piece of quality software without the need for a proprietary operating system. As for point 2), the selection of synths is the entire Windows VST catalog, limited by Wine compatibility.

Still a little offtopic, sorry, but I'd like to recommend Reaper as a DAW / sequencer / Windows VST host under Linux and Wine. It has worked well enough that I even felt comfortable paying for a license. As for games, nothing is keeping me from using Linux, but maybe I would have liked to try Black Mesa when it came out. Maybe I'm fortunate, because modern games don't seem to attract me much at all. And it almost seems while boring big budget games stay Windows exclusive, while cool and original games like Amnesia, Super Meat Boy and Frozen Synapse seem to gravitate to the Linux market.

Sorry to be offtopic, but: I know that TFA is to blame here, but it's Hyppönen, not Hypponen. I wonder if even the Olympics got it right this year. It's not even about charsets anymore, so I guess nobody just ever puts in characters that aren't on their keyboards. Kind of unprofessional journalism, I'd say.

The Vimperator extension allows turning almost all GUI elements off, including tabs. It is also quite configurable, and a solidly cross-platform solution. I suppose the UZBL project, which by default provides just Webkit and extremely few UI options, could suit your needs, although it probably demands a lot of work and might be difficult to prepare for all platforms.

I'm considering making a donation, but it seems hopeless as long as either: - One needs any money at all to get justice - One can use money to get injustice through any kind of trickery in court - In other words, as long as 'resources' play a significant role in court decisions. OTOH, I don't expect recent IP and anti-hacking laws to be consistent or sound, and investments like this may be required to eventually level them out...

My box is probably in the "slower device" category: Athlon 64 3000+, always enough RAM, running Ubuntu 10.04 and Firefox 3.6.13. After the update, Slashdot seems to be working much faster. Opening a couple of stories in new tabs from the front page doesn't freeze the browser anymore, and scrolling is better in all conditions. Also, I don't see any of the wild CPU usage that others have reported. So, it's now a lot more usable for me, but less so for others, for some reason. I'm not visually inclined, but I think it also looks nicely 'fresh' now.

Everyone is going to be like "that's no moon" if you use open source graphics programs to plan your flight. But Gimp has a "sparks" brush for the stars.

How about someone like Steve Yegge?? I believe he's "cool". He has a modern sense of humor, he writes about computer memory by using Mario Kart as an example and admits to smoking pot, and all that. He writes well, and could perhaps be considered a "journalist", which is what the summary suggests as an example to kids. But if someone can sit down and read over 500 words text, aren't they already more nerdy that average? And in any case, how are even the cool nerds supposed to present themselves, if the medium has to be non-nerdy and non-compulsory?

Perhaps it's sometimes more effective for people who aren't primarily geeks to show their nerdy side. I remember how nice it was when Pink Floyd presented the synthesizer they used in the Dark Side of The Moon, although it wasn't necessary to enjoy the music that was their main focus.

As for education, having Wolfram's Rule 90 as a part of an art class might interest someone in procedural 2D graphics. It's quick and easy to plot on graph paper using simple rules.

Apart from reading and education, what they could do is put cool hackers in movies. And even then, they should be creative. Usually movies depict hackers as someone who basically uses or works around someone else's product (The Matrix, Die Hard 4, I think), which is the idea that non-technical people have of computers in general. That is, they probably don't think they use computer _programs_ - they think they use software _products_. So, instead of being able to just work with existing systems, maybe it would be cool if they also did something original. For instance, someone could set up a time bomb using some kind of sleep(x) command, or something. Use a simple while(true) loop to do... something. Indefinitely. I don't know what, because I'm not cool.

I think that by far the most substantial difference between Ubuntu and the other distros is the semi-automatic installation of proprietary multimedia libs and hardware drivers. I used to run Fedora from FC2 to FC6 as well as Suse 9.x, and had to deal with ATI's installer and custom repos a lot. These are the primary reasons why I use Ubuntu nowadays, as all other differences these popular distros seem quite trivial. It doesn't seem very important which DE each distro ships with, as you can always install whichever you like afterwards. Same thing with default apps like IM clients, though it may take a bit of reconfiguring to integrate them with others apps. Basically, the review just seemed to compare the distros out-of-the-box, without assuming they'll ever be configured, which is kind of boring, and perhaps only of interest to inexperienced users. Speaking of which, how were they able to "manage each of them from other PCs with the OpenSSH remote control program"? I thought Ubuntu has never included sshd by default.

r200 cards should work fine using the open source driver. I used to have one. Ati (or AMD) has stopped supporting it with their proprietary drivers (they do that a lot, they just stopped supporting my new r430-based card!), but the open source driver should get the most out of r200 and r300 cards, and nowadays r400 and r500 too. If you really want to use fglrx with your old Ati card, you need to get an ancient version from Ati's website. Ubuntu isn't going to offer old fglrx drivers based on your card model, because they typically wouldn't be compatible with new kernels and XServers.