If you for some reason want to do the same thing, but more efficiently, you can go to a hardware store or janitorial supply store and purchase muriatic acid. No idea why they call it that - It's just OTC hydrochloric.
The rules may have changed, but I purchased the tub in my garage when I was 16 (early 90's). No ID, no name given, paid cash. Probably speed up the time it takes for your Works bombs too.
It had never occurred to me to harvest the hydrogen coming off of my experiments. I can't believe that, as a teenage explosives nut, I for some reason always considered the hydrogen a waste product.
Well, now I know how I'm filling balloons for my boy's next birthday party. =)
In NM you can certainly get in the supermarkets provided that you're 18. Back in my youth I popped a few 2/3-liters and had some fun. Nowadays, I only use it for shipping frozen green chiles to friends/family around the country or to take home, drop in some warm water, and entertain the kids.
If you're blocking civilian access to sites advising them on emergency procedures or preventing them from accessing medical assistance, that's pretty shady.
But it makes it easier to rack up collateral damage. Think of it as shock and awe.
You've got to be really careful if you're doing anything that makes it appear that you're punishing "both guilty and innocent alike". Some countries consider it tacky.
(In case you're curious, both Georgia and Russia are included on the linked list of signatories. Along with 194 others.)
Sorry for the self-reply, but TFS just got more interesting with the computerworld thing.
Assuming that Russia cyber-bombing Georgia's sites is a valid war-time maneuver, is it also OK for them to do the same thing to the servers in Poland and Estonia that are now hosting the offending sites? If those sites are dangerous enough to be considered targets, can hosting those sites be viewed in the same way as supplying weapons to Russia's enemies? Methinks that we'll see some ugly traffic between Russia and these Estonian and Polish servers (that Russia will of course disavow all knowledge of).
Of course, the US is hosting too. Surely none of our Communist comrades would ever be brazen enough to launch attacks on servers hosted here?;o)
It seems to me that it depends on the situation. If the war's on our soil, blocking communication with the enemy seems fine. It also seems just fine to block our troops access to our enemies sites when they're on enemy soil. Also, if we're on their soil, blocking access to our sites seems fine. Basically, you want to interfere with orders being issued to a saboteur or similar and make sure that your citizens aren't subjected to foreign propaganda (only domestic propaganda).
Note that that's a very different thing than launching DDoS attacks on servers that blocks your enemies from accessing their own servers or communicating internally. That may be fine too depending on the situation. If you're disrupting military communications, that's probably OK. If you're blocking civilian access to sites advising them on emergency procedures or preventing them from accessing medical assistance, that's pretty shady.
they yanked it for political reasons or for their logo? That seems a little messed up if it's just the logo...
You would rather have them pull a protest video off for political reasons? The IOC is nuts about defending those rings and when they've gone to the mat to defend them, they win. It's a little bizarre, but I much prefer that to the idea that they would pull this video to effect political sway.
I'm intrigued about this Tibet/China angel you mention. Angels, although prominent in many traditions and beliefs, aren't that popular in most Tibetan or Chinese cultures (I think - IANA religious scholar). Perhaps that's why this angel has done such a lousy job taking care of the monks.
On a more serious note, I think you nailed it. You put the rings anywhere or on anything and you can expect to be hammered by the IOC. And, at least in the US, the IOC will win. I haven't watched the video, but from the description it sounds like a simple edit would get the IOC to back off.
We (citizens of the rest of the world) weren't annoyed about space junk; frankly most of us couldn't care less about orbitting [sic] debris.
That should piss you off. You're obviously looking much more toward short term military/political goals than long term planet-usability.
But by all means put it down to "US bashing". After all, why should the US have to live up to the same standards as everyone else when it can go around bullying everyone, right?
The US proved its ASAT ability in 1985 and hasn't touched it since. It wanted to protect national secrets and used this hazmat fuel as an excuse. Saber-rattling? Maybe, but the US proved competence in this arena long ago and used anti-ICMB tech rather than ASAT tech like the Chinese. Nobody who knows anything about the subject would compare the two (although I admit that the headlines compare nicely). I'm not a US apologist - Iraq pisses me off as much as anybody. But they played this one absolutely right.
Well if shooting down ICBM's was so fucking simple we'd already have a fully functional Star Wars implementation by now.
Shooting down ICBMs would be a helluva lot easier if we had as much notice about their intended positions and velocities as we had with USA-193. If only we would require ~1-month advanced notice before anyone lights one off.
In the US shot, they converted a non-functional satellite into basically nothing. In the Chinese test, they converted a (presumably) functional satellite into 2317 trackable pieces of space debris and increased the number of trackable pieces of space junk in Earth orbit by more than 22%. So the consequences of these two shots aren't even roughly equivalent because the end results are vastly different. If the only side you're looking at is the potential arms race, then sure, we both shot down satellites. But China made a huge mess while they were showing off while we did it pretty cleanly. And the US didn't even really need to flex its satellite killing power, since we already did that back in 1985.
So I really don't see any correlation with your "cheating on your wife with a single woman = cheating on your wife with a married woman" analogy. This, to me, seems like cheating on your wife and spreading gonorrhea all over town vs burying your wife after she's passed away.
I swear, sometimes it seems like people try to be dense.
we didn't clutter up useful orbit space with a bunch of debris when we were done
Just how was that achieved?
When we (the US) shot ours down, it was in a rapidly decaying orbit and it fell into the atmosphere after being blasted. The Chinese satellite, however, was still in a maintained orbit and when they took it out, it was the "largest recorded creation of space debris in history with at least 2317 pieces of trackable size (golf ball size and larger), thereby increasing the total number of currently tracked objects in earth orbit by more than 22%.." Source.
The end result is exactly the same and has nothing to do with US bashing.
The end result of the Chinese shot is a huge amount of space-junk cluttering up an otherwise useful orbit. The end result of the US shot was the relatively tidy destruction of a spy satellite with no risk of accidentally allowing sensitive components to be recovered.
I fail to understand how these are "exactly the same".
That may be partially true, but the Chinese shot was way more difficult (albeit messy) than ours. We, of course, had no reason to get nearly as fancy as the Chinese did when they took theirs out and it would have been silly to even try (unless we just had a fancy satellite-killer that we just wanted to try). But, to the eyes of most of the world, I'd imagine you're right. They showed that they could do it, so we did too. Despite the fact that they were radically different shots and circumstances.
The risk of shooting it down and, at least the way I see it, our big reason for having to justify it was that we had so recently criticized the Chinese for shooting down one of theirs.
Of course, the technology we used was wildly different than the technology that the Chinese used. And we didn't clutter up useful orbit space with a bunch of debris when we were done. But these things don't always matter to people just looking for a reason to US bash. There are a lot of folks out there that were calling the US hypocrites for shooting down their satellite after bashing the Chinese for doing "the same thing".
I know everyone is making with the jokes,but I for one really don't like the idea of this. Yet again,we have scientists seeing if they CAN do something,rather than if they SHOULD do something. As aggressive as the US has been lately,does anyone really want gunships,fighter jets,and whole squads of special forces rendered invisible?
Hear hear! Perhaps we should revise the Geneva convention. From now on, all snipers must jump up and down waving their arms and yelling "Look at me" before taking their shot. All submarines must have PA systems that continually blast Rick Astley music when they're submerged. All spy drones must broadcast Flight of the Valkyries when on a mission.
I understand your point but, as long as the world has weapons, governments will be spending money on improving them (range/cloaking/accuracy/flexibility/etc.) If you go to the government leaders who control weapons funding and ask them "Should this weapon be improved?", once they're done laughing the answer will certainly be "Yes." And, assuming that this product would be fielded for military use as you imply, it would be seen as a measure to both increase our effectiveness on the battlefield and protect our troops. That would change the government's answer from "Yes" to "Hell yes." Right? Wrong? Doesn't matter - just the world we live in.
Don't know about the patent, but I can claim prior art. I have an invisible cloak that I wear all the time at home. I used to wear it in public, but kept getting arrested.
Is there an emperor out there looking for an outfit for a parade? I have a spare that I'm willing to sell.
Wait until the drones start hypermiling and catching the draft of passing jets. Then we will see MPG figures increase.
That would actually use more fuel overall - Try it you'll see.
The drone may save a little bit of fuel, but you also have to factor in the fuel consumed by the fighter jets that get scrambled when the 747 pilot radios in to report the unmanned craft tailing him.
That is an excellent argument for rights that humans want. Also an excellent argument for rights that humans should have. Also an excellent argument for rights that humans should fight to acquire and defend.
But I still think that it falls short of an argument for rights that humans have inalienably.
XP's a perfectly decent product. Same with MS Office.
If Office is a perfectly decent product then please explain to me how to, using only Excel, export a pipe-delimited csv using single-quoted strings in UTF8.
This is not an unusual or unreasonable request for a full-featured spreadsheet app.
Excel is a great tool, but it is not a "full-featured spreadsheet app". It's a widely featured and easy-to-use spreadsheet app. I would assume that anyone with needs as specific as yours would know how to use sed or Perl and handle your need in a single line of script.
Apparently, you're just not part of Excel's target market, but a lot of people are.
These same people who moved reluctantly to XP from 98 will quite likely move to Vista *eventually* even if they're aware of other options. A small percentage will move to various other OS choices as they did when they started announcing the EOL for 98. Right now XP has become so entrenched that there are more people using it than any other OS in the history of the world. It is only natural that people will claim that they're unwilling to move to another OS and only more natural when they have a perception that the new OS sucks. But, well, these are the same types of people who weren't going to move to XP.
I'm one of those. I run XP and Linux depending on what's going on, but am primarily booted into XP. It meets my needs, so I see no reason to "upgrade" to Vista. But my wife's laptop came with Vista and it seems fine. I've got some gripes with it, but she gets done everything that she needs to and I don't notice any speed problems for her apps (mostly MS office stuff, Thunderbird, and Firefox). Eventually, I'll probably buy a box that has Vista on it - But not soon. I run a franken-box that I've just been upgrading and repairing as pieces die with new (typically refurbished) components. For my wife, however, I buy assembled hardware with the OS already installed because it's typically just more stable than my box of random parts. So yes, eventually we'll probably have a Vista desktop in the house. So it goes.
[OT]You realize of course that, in 2 successive posts, you warned somebody that they were responding to a Twitter sock-puppet and responded to a Twitter sock-puppet, right? Although a newer one. I have no problem with that - I'll respond to anybody that has something interesting to say. If he wants to use a dozen names to try to evade the M$ spies that plague him here, so be it - I don't care.[/OT]
I don't understand the Windows hate - XP's a perfectly decent product. Same with MS Office. I run either Windows or Linux depending on what I'm doing. I can understand disliking MS because of their business tactics, but that doesn't imply that everything they make is crap. It seems that a lot of Windows bashers are just looking at Linux/Mac with rose colored glasses or knocking points off of Windows because of MS-hate.
I use Windows at work: 1) The company pays for it 2) They buy the software 3) It works just fine and is easy to network with other company resources 4) I like MS Office better than Open Office. OO is fine, but there are small differences that annoy me. 5) Even if I wanted to switch, they wouldn't let me because a lot of the things they use don't have Linux counterparts that are able to interact You can argue that my company should switch, but that's not up to me. And transitioning more than 100 thousand employees would be pretty painful, even if done in small pieces. That's beyond my pay grade, so I won't debate on whether that would be a good move for them or not - I just do what works for me.
I use Windows at home when doing anything multimedia intensive - Music, movies, DVR, pr0n, games, etc. It has wide support, nice, free (except for requiring a commercial OS) applications for handling music/movies, and games are always tuned first to work with Windows with everything else as a side-note. The XP Professional install cost me ~$80 OEM and MS Office cost me $20 thanks to my company kicking in for any of us that want to use it at home. So, a ~$100 price tag for a good OS with good software. I don't remember what I paid for my copy of Paint Shop Pro 8, but it wasn't a lot (~$30?) and has been serving my image manipulation needs very well for several years. Irfanview is also an excellent, free tool for browsing. I don't know what you're shelling out $700 for. [As a side note, I haven't actually gamed in some time - Young kids pretty much wiped out my gamer side, but I assume that XP is still a solid platform for modern games.]
I also use Linux at home. Slackware was easy to install and runs great. Unfortunately, there are no drivers for some of my hardware, so I lose access to a lot of stuff that I use regularly under Windows. But, it's a great coding environment - So when I want to get serious and knock out some code to support my various hobbies, I boot Linux.
If I was serious about movie/sound editing and such, I might consider Mac as I've heard it's good with that stuff. I've heard it's good for coding too. But, my dual-boot machine supports all my needs just fine so I'll stick with it.
Different tools for different applications. I'm neither MS/Linux/Apple fanboi nor too proud to sleep around on my OSes, so I use the tools I feel meet my needs best in whatever situation I'm in.
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If you for some reason want to do the same thing, but more efficiently, you can go to a hardware store or janitorial supply store and purchase muriatic acid. No idea why they call it that - It's just OTC hydrochloric.
The rules may have changed, but I purchased the tub in my garage when I was 16 (early 90's). No ID, no name given, paid cash. Probably speed up the time it takes for your Works bombs too.
It had never occurred to me to harvest the hydrogen coming off of my experiments. I can't believe that, as a teenage explosives nut, I for some reason always considered the hydrogen a waste product.
Well, now I know how I'm filling balloons for my boy's next birthday party. =)
In NM you can certainly get in the supermarkets provided that you're 18. Back in my youth I popped a few 2/3-liters and had some fun. Nowadays, I only use it for shipping frozen green chiles to friends/family around the country or to take home, drop in some warm water, and entertain the kids.
If you're blocking civilian access to sites advising them on emergency procedures or preventing them from accessing medical assistance, that's pretty shady.
But it makes it easier to rack up collateral damage. Think of it as shock and awe.
You've got to be really careful if you're doing anything that makes it appear that you're punishing "both guilty and innocent alike". Some countries consider it tacky.
(In case you're curious, both Georgia and Russia are included on the linked list of signatories. Along with 194 others.)
Sorry for the self-reply, but TFS just got more interesting with the computerworld thing.
Assuming that Russia cyber-bombing Georgia's sites is a valid war-time maneuver, is it also OK for them to do the same thing to the servers in Poland and Estonia that are now hosting the offending sites? If those sites are dangerous enough to be considered targets, can hosting those sites be viewed in the same way as supplying weapons to Russia's enemies? Methinks that we'll see some ugly traffic between Russia and these Estonian and Polish servers (that Russia will of course disavow all knowledge of).
Of course, the US is hosting too. Surely none of our Communist comrades would ever be brazen enough to launch attacks on servers hosted here? ;o)
It seems to me that it depends on the situation. If the war's on our soil, blocking communication with the enemy seems fine. It also seems just fine to block our troops access to our enemies sites when they're on enemy soil. Also, if we're on their soil, blocking access to our sites seems fine. Basically, you want to interfere with orders being issued to a saboteur or similar and make sure that your citizens aren't subjected to foreign propaganda (only domestic propaganda).
Note that that's a very different thing than launching DDoS attacks on servers that blocks your enemies from accessing their own servers or communicating internally. That may be fine too depending on the situation. If you're disrupting military communications, that's probably OK. If you're blocking civilian access to sites advising them on emergency procedures or preventing them from accessing medical assistance, that's pretty shady.
they yanked it for political reasons or for their logo? That seems a little messed up if it's just the logo...
You would rather have them pull a protest video off for political reasons? The IOC is nuts about defending those rings and when they've gone to the mat to defend them, they win. It's a little bizarre, but I much prefer that to the idea that they would pull this video to effect political sway.
It has nothing to do with the Tibet/China angel.
I'm intrigued about this Tibet/China angel you mention. Angels, although prominent in many traditions and beliefs, aren't that popular in most Tibetan or Chinese cultures (I think - IANA religious scholar). Perhaps that's why this angel has done such a lousy job taking care of the monks.
On a more serious note, I think you nailed it. You put the rings anywhere or on anything and you can expect to be hammered by the IOC. And, at least in the US, the IOC will win. I haven't watched the video, but from the description it sounds like a simple edit would get the IOC to back off.
We (citizens of the rest of the world) weren't annoyed about space junk; frankly most of us couldn't care less about orbitting [sic] debris.
That should piss you off. You're obviously looking much more toward short term military/political goals than long term planet-usability.
But by all means put it down to "US bashing". After all, why should the US have to live up to the same standards as everyone else when it can go around bullying everyone, right?
The US proved its ASAT ability in 1985 and hasn't touched it since. It wanted to protect national secrets and used this hazmat fuel as an excuse. Saber-rattling? Maybe, but the US proved competence in this arena long ago and used anti-ICMB tech rather than ASAT tech like the Chinese. Nobody who knows anything about the subject would compare the two (although I admit that the headlines compare nicely). I'm not a US apologist - Iraq pisses me off as much as anybody. But they played this one absolutely right.
Well if shooting down ICBM's was so fucking simple we'd already have a fully functional Star Wars implementation by now.
Shooting down ICBMs would be a helluva lot easier if we had as much notice about their intended positions and velocities as we had with USA-193. If only we would require ~1-month advanced notice before anyone lights one off.
The end result was a non-functional satellite.
In the US shot, they converted a non-functional satellite into basically nothing. In the Chinese test, they converted a (presumably) functional satellite into 2317 trackable pieces of space debris and increased the number of trackable pieces of space junk in Earth orbit by more than 22%. So the consequences of these two shots aren't even roughly equivalent because the end results are vastly different. If the only side you're looking at is the potential arms race, then sure, we both shot down satellites. But China made a huge mess while they were showing off while we did it pretty cleanly. And the US didn't even really need to flex its satellite killing power, since we already did that back in 1985.
So I really don't see any correlation with your "cheating on your wife with a single woman = cheating on your wife with a married woman" analogy. This, to me, seems like cheating on your wife and spreading gonorrhea all over town vs burying your wife after she's passed away.
I swear, sometimes it seems like people try to be dense.
You have no idea how well that's coming across.
we didn't clutter up useful orbit space with a bunch of debris when we were done
Just how was that achieved?
When we (the US) shot ours down, it was in a rapidly decaying orbit and it fell into the atmosphere after being blasted. The Chinese satellite, however, was still in a maintained orbit and when they took it out, it was the "largest recorded creation of space debris in history with at least 2317 pieces of trackable size (golf ball size and larger), thereby increasing the total number of currently tracked objects in earth orbit by more than 22%.." Source.
It's Defcon 2.0. They're trying to jazz up their image a little bit and make it more inter-webby.
...showing Goons, hardware and sniffer dogs.
These guys must be extremely high-tech if their security dogs can sniff wireless!
Now that was uncalled for (emphasis added for emphasis).
Oh! So that's why you add emphasis.
Libya's flag has been upside down every time I've ever seen it - They must be a very distraught country.
Japan seems to be pretty panicky too...
The end result is exactly the same and has nothing to do with US bashing.
The end result of the Chinese shot is a huge amount of space-junk cluttering up an otherwise useful orbit. The end result of the US shot was the relatively tidy destruction of a spy satellite with no risk of accidentally allowing sensitive components to be recovered.
I fail to understand how these are "exactly the same".
That may be partially true, but the Chinese shot was way more difficult (albeit messy) than ours. We, of course, had no reason to get nearly as fancy as the Chinese did when they took theirs out and it would have been silly to even try (unless we just had a fancy satellite-killer that we just wanted to try). But, to the eyes of most of the world, I'd imagine you're right. They showed that they could do it, so we did too. Despite the fact that they were radically different shots and circumstances.
The risk of shooting it down and, at least the way I see it, our big reason for having to justify it was that we had so recently criticized the Chinese for shooting down one of theirs.
Of course, the technology we used was wildly different than the technology that the Chinese used. And we didn't clutter up useful orbit space with a bunch of debris when we were done. But these things don't always matter to people just looking for a reason to US bash. There are a lot of folks out there that were calling the US hypocrites for shooting down their satellite after bashing the Chinese for doing "the same thing".
I know everyone is making with the jokes,but I for one really don't like the idea of this. Yet again,we have scientists seeing if they CAN do something,rather than if they SHOULD do something. As aggressive as the US has been lately,does anyone really want gunships,fighter jets,and whole squads of special forces rendered invisible?
Hear hear! Perhaps we should revise the Geneva convention. From now on, all snipers must jump up and down waving their arms and yelling "Look at me" before taking their shot. All submarines must have PA systems that continually blast Rick Astley music when they're submerged. All spy drones must broadcast Flight of the Valkyries when on a mission.
I understand your point but, as long as the world has weapons, governments will be spending money on improving them (range/cloaking/accuracy/flexibility/etc.) If you go to the government leaders who control weapons funding and ask them "Should this weapon be improved?", once they're done laughing the answer will certainly be "Yes." And, assuming that this product would be fielded for military use as you imply, it would be seen as a measure to both increase our effectiveness on the battlefield and protect our troops. That would change the government's answer from "Yes" to "Hell yes." Right? Wrong? Doesn't matter - just the world we live in.
Don't know about the patent, but I can claim prior art. I have an invisible cloak that I wear all the time at home. I used to wear it in public, but kept getting arrested.
Is there an emperor out there looking for an outfit for a parade? I have a spare that I'm willing to sell.
Wait until the drones start hypermiling and catching the draft of passing jets.
Then we will see MPG figures increase.
That would actually use more fuel overall - Try it you'll see.
The drone may save a little bit of fuel, but you also have to factor in the fuel consumed by the fighter jets that get scrambled when the 747 pilot radios in to report the unmanned craft tailing him.
That is an excellent argument for rights that humans want. Also an excellent argument for rights that humans should have. Also an excellent argument for rights that humans should fight to acquire and defend.
But I still think that it falls short of an argument for rights that humans have inalienably.
XP's a perfectly decent product. Same with MS Office.
If Office is a perfectly decent product then please explain to me how to, using only Excel, export a pipe-delimited csv using single-quoted strings in UTF8.
This is not an unusual or unreasonable request for a full-featured spreadsheet app.
Excel is a great tool, but it is not a "full-featured spreadsheet app". It's a widely featured and easy-to-use spreadsheet app. I would assume that anyone with needs as specific as yours would know how to use sed or Perl and handle your need in a single line of script.
Apparently, you're just not part of Excel's target market, but a lot of people are.
These same people who moved reluctantly to XP from 98 will quite likely move to Vista *eventually* even if they're aware of other options. A small percentage will move to various other OS choices as they did when they started announcing the EOL for 98. Right now XP has become so entrenched that there are more people using it than any other OS in the history of the world. It is only natural that people will claim that they're unwilling to move to another OS and only more natural when they have a perception that the new OS sucks. But, well, these are the same types of people who weren't going to move to XP.
I'm one of those. I run XP and Linux depending on what's going on, but am primarily booted into XP. It meets my needs, so I see no reason to "upgrade" to Vista. But my wife's laptop came with Vista and it seems fine. I've got some gripes with it, but she gets done everything that she needs to and I don't notice any speed problems for her apps (mostly MS office stuff, Thunderbird, and Firefox). Eventually, I'll probably buy a box that has Vista on it - But not soon. I run a franken-box that I've just been upgrading and repairing as pieces die with new (typically refurbished) components. For my wife, however, I buy assembled hardware with the OS already installed because it's typically just more stable than my box of random parts. So yes, eventually we'll probably have a Vista desktop in the house. So it goes.
[OT]You realize of course that, in 2 successive posts, you warned somebody that they were responding to a Twitter sock-puppet and responded to a Twitter sock-puppet, right? Although a newer one. I have no problem with that - I'll respond to anybody that has something interesting to say. If he wants to use a dozen names to try to evade the M$ spies that plague him here, so be it - I don't care.[/OT]
I don't understand the Windows hate - XP's a perfectly decent product. Same with MS Office. I run either Windows or Linux depending on what I'm doing. I can understand disliking MS because of their business tactics, but that doesn't imply that everything they make is crap. It seems that a lot of Windows bashers are just looking at Linux/Mac with rose colored glasses or knocking points off of Windows because of MS-hate.
I use Windows at work:
1) The company pays for it
2) They buy the software
3) It works just fine and is easy to network with other company resources
4) I like MS Office better than Open Office. OO is fine, but there are small differences that annoy me.
5) Even if I wanted to switch, they wouldn't let me because a lot of the things they use don't have Linux counterparts that are able to interact
You can argue that my company should switch, but that's not up to me. And transitioning more than 100 thousand employees would be pretty painful, even if done in small pieces. That's beyond my pay grade, so I won't debate on whether that would be a good move for them or not - I just do what works for me.
I use Windows at home when doing anything multimedia intensive - Music, movies, DVR, pr0n, games, etc. It has wide support, nice, free (except for requiring a commercial OS) applications for handling music/movies, and games are always tuned first to work with Windows with everything else as a side-note. The XP Professional install cost me ~$80 OEM and MS Office cost me $20 thanks to my company kicking in for any of us that want to use it at home. So, a ~$100 price tag for a good OS with good software. I don't remember what I paid for my copy of Paint Shop Pro 8, but it wasn't a lot (~$30?) and has been serving my image manipulation needs very well for several years. Irfanview is also an excellent, free tool for browsing. I don't know what you're shelling out $700 for. [As a side note, I haven't actually gamed in some time - Young kids pretty much wiped out my gamer side, but I assume that XP is still a solid platform for modern games.]
I also use Linux at home. Slackware was easy to install and runs great. Unfortunately, there are no drivers for some of my hardware, so I lose access to a lot of stuff that I use regularly under Windows. But, it's a great coding environment - So when I want to get serious and knock out some code to support my various hobbies, I boot Linux.
If I was serious about movie/sound editing and such, I might consider Mac as I've heard it's good with that stuff. I've heard it's good for coding too. But, my dual-boot machine supports all my needs just fine so I'll stick with it.
Different tools for different applications. I'm neither MS/Linux/Apple fanboi nor too proud to sleep around on my OSes, so I use the tools I feel meet my needs best in whatever situation I'm in.