Quicktime - It's both a terrible media player and it is insanely unwilling to be removed. Apple's central design concept seems to be preventing the user from doing what he wants. If I delete qttask.exe, it means I don't want that file anymore, not that I want it to be resurrected. If I disable it in msconfig, it doesn't mean that the next time Quicktime runs I want it to get a new startup entry.
iTunes - ituneshelper.exe is about the same as qttask, and iTunes is even worse at playing music than Quicktime is at playing movies. It's the single most bloated piece of software I've ever used. The iTunes store is another reason to avoid it, not to use it. It also crashes way too much on a new MacBook Pro, and since I don't know what Apple compatible software is a good replacement for it, I can't just replace it for my friend as I would if he had Windows.
Apple Updater - Everyone I know just installed Safari. They didn't mean to.
Flash - Thank you, Flashblock, for making the internet useable again. Thank you, bad web designers, for sticking retarded flash "intro pages" on your sites so I can see that they've been blocked and then avoid your company on principal.
HP Printer Philosophy - Thanks to you, too, HP, for making a printer that needs an IP to be set via a web interface in order to access that same web interface. Thanks to my neighbor for having a parallel cable sitting around so I could access it in a more traditional way.
Windows Desktop - Why do you lose my icon placement every time your resolution changes? Luckily, there are countless little freeware apps to save icon positions.
Real Player - You basically invented the Apple "if you uninstall me but I will grow more powerful than you can possibly imagine" routine, so you get extra evil points for originality.
Logitech Mouse Drivers - My mouse drivers are now 100 megs. Finally they fixed the two year problem of needing to run them manually after booting (running on startup caused them to fail), but they still involve two separate taskbar icons and take up a ton of RAM.
Word - I know how to make you do what I want, but it took years to learn how to both stop your autoformatting and then put in the formatting I want. I hate the way you place images. I hate the way you resize my stuff after I've already locked it down.
Verizon Phone UI - My phone had a great UI and lots of nice capabilities when it was made. You removed bluetooth file transfers so I'd have to pay you to get photos off my phone, and you made the interface ugly. You removed the ability to vibrate and ring at the same time. I'm glad my phone was so easily hackable.
Flash (again, but bear with me) movie players - The only reason you exist is to keep me from saving video to my hard disk. Guess what. I can still do it. Meanwhile, you're slow, often not resizable without using a magnifying tool to manually zoom onto your little box, and you require me to enable flash.
I know how to fix or replace all of you, but you kill me every time I have to use a new PC and wade through your bloated code again.
I think they want to piss people off, and they don't want to be reasonable. They certainly do this to the point of sabotaging their mission. Idealism's a bitch.
Oh so by "sensible" sized you mean crampt and uncomfortable? No thanks.
Stop preaching about Europe unless you live there and have experienced first hand the new Stalinist regime of unelected life-long beaureucrats and dear leaders, living lives with all expenditure paid for by the populace and dictating to the majority how we should live.
Increased "fuel efficiency" in Europe is just smoke and mirrors. Cars have better mileage in Europe because they are lighter, not because their engines are better. Manufacturers just cut corners wherever possible, and the end result is weak, light cars, and more serious accidents and road deaths. Waydago!
More than big Oil, I'm far more worried about Big Green: another bunch of self-appointed Stalinists with huge income from vested interests, dictating policy of all governments from America to China to India to Russia, based on theories that have a greater weighting of emotion than real scientific evidence.
European cars have much better safety performance than American cars. There are more accidents per 100k miles in Europe (they suck at driving in much of Europe) but fatalities are lower because the cars are safer. Much of European fuel efficiency comes from the use of diesel engines, which no longer produce significant particulate exhaust thanks to great new filters. I even drove a large Ford sedan around Europe a couple years ago and got 40 mpg doing it.
Fortunately, there are great gains to be made not just by driving tiny "crampt [sic]" cars, but by driving large spacious cars with tons of room for four people instead of eight when we have only four people in the car. Soccer moms in Hummers may be fun to laugh at, but they also are part of the reason your fat and ugly children will be as poor of pocket as you are of mind.
The first environmental complaint I saw against apple was regarding the vastly oversized boxes they used to package products. I think they started cutting back on this waste sometime after the gen 1 nano, but since I haven't purchased an iPod since then, I'm not sure.
I like your point. Imagine if you will that some other advanced civilization is exploring the galaxy. If they're clever, which we'll assume, they might do it by sending out robotic explorers that automatically move to new regions of space, replicate themselves, and move on, but can be directed via communication from the homeland. These robots will take millions of years to go anywhere very far from home, so waiting for light speed communications isn't a big delay in the scheme of things. I think that one of the biggest factors influencing the light speed communications debate is the short lifetime of humans in comparison to the time required to communicate with other star systems. Why shouldn't alien life live ten times as long, or a thousand times as long? If we lived a hundred thousand years, I don't think we'd be so impatient about interstellar travel.
Threatfire considers tracking cookies, like the ones from Google (aka Doubleclick) to be a 2 on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of severity of malware. This is a junk article and really shouldn't have been posted.
Yes, Threatfire labels tracking cookies as malware, and yes, that means this story means nothing. I'm not fan of tracking cookies, but they're not a big deal to most people.
I was just thinking last night that DRM seems to, for the most part, have never actually happened, and then I tried to purchase some music on iTunes, saw the DRM on the tracks I wanted, and went to Amazon instead.
The only thing I enjoyed about raiding was being in charge. Eventually even that got dull and the repetition and need for a perfect performance from every member of the raid got to me. My guild would lose at least half of our attempts because of disconnects, not from chronic bad connections, but just from random people. That could be so demoralizing.
Also, repetition didn't just mean going to the same instances to do the same fights each week. It also showed up in the fights themselves. Most raid bosses have what, two to four stages? Within each each you usually repeat some 10-45 second pattern again and again. If my guild showed it could repeat the same thing perfectly 5 times in 3 minutes, that didn't mean we were necessarily on the verge of success, because a typical fight would involve ~10 minutes of that repetition. Someone gets disconnected on repetition 8? Everyone spends 15 minutes to die, respawn, run back to the boss, buff, and retry. All of the repetition isn't there because it's more fun to repeat the same actions in the fight for 13 minutes than for 3, it's there because it makes the encounters artificially slow to master, meaning they take longer to master, meaning you keep playing the game for longer without needing more content.
Lots of people complain about arena pvp, but it was always my favorite. I have a netherdrake on my defunct rogue from 3v3. This is another area where WoW does pretty well. There are 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 arena matches with serious in game rewards. The difference between 2s and 5s is huge. Then there's BG pvp, and then depending on server, open world pvp. BGs mostly killed that, though, which is a pity.
Lots of your comments are spot on, but the game really does get better. The biggest complaint you seem to have is that you right click and auto-kill things. At more advanced levels of the game, you might use 10 special (manually activated) abilities in a single solo fight, some of them requiring very precise timing and contextual decision-making.
If your only goal is to level or finish a quest, you might use fewer abilities and not have to think, but if you somehow get into the game (I'm sort of baffled at how many people, like me, did) then you can actually care about making yourself 20% more effective by thinking on your toes and strategizing beforehand (pvp is one of the more obvious cases of this).
Most MMOs are like that, and if you don't seem to like it right away, don't bother trying to make yourself like it. It's an expensive and time consuming hobby.
I'll have trouble playing another MMO (I quit WoW 6 months ago after playing since beta and raiding since MC was novel) unless it offers the degree of UI flexibility that WoW does. I dislike the UI in most games, but it doesn't bother me too much because I can work around it. I tend to like minimalist UIs if they're not going to be perfect, so something like GTA4 is pretty nice for me. But when I actually care about being competitive, which is something I've only felt in an MMO, default UIs never hold up. MMOs by design offer vastly different types of characters, and what's good for 90% of them won't be good for me. Being able to design my own UI, or use a popular and configurable one, allowed me to perfect my playing experience in WoW like in no other game. I'd love to play another MMO, this time for ~5 hours a week instead of...well, much much more than that, but I don't think I'd be able to get over a preconfigured UI.
I've been in science for 15 years. On my present salary, I can barely afford the same standard of living as when I started science, even after a PhD and an exemplary career so far. If a "shortage" actually existed, then pay would increase concomitantly. Since pay hasn't increased, the shortage, by definition, does not exist. It boggles my mind to see obvious BS like this. You're confused. The shortage in Japan, also claimed in Europe and the US, is for engineers willing to work for peanuts. Your pay hasn't increased because immigration allows a steady stream of engineers who will work for peanuts, and employers prefer a partial shortage and peanut-wages over a fully staffed, highly skilled engineering team paid as much as their bosses.
Let's face it. People are lazy and getting a bogus humanistic degree is much easier than an engineering one. It depends on where you go to college, I imagine. In my experience, at top American universities (like top 5) humanities degrees are at least as difficult to earn as engineering degrees. The easy ones are econ and poly sci, which I think aren't what you mean by "bogus humanistic degrees." Science degrees are certainly easier than engineering, but not by much.
Ballmer is an executive leading a company. The job of such a person is to immediately make a large and costly change in the company. The change itself is determined almost at random - these people aren't particularly good at analyzing this sort of thing. Just take a look at the success rate of this sort of project taken on by a company's new CEO. Sometimes it works, and a bit more often it doesn't. It's just a roll of the dice.
The point is that if it doesn't hurt MS, Ballmer comes off looking good. He did something that shaped the industry, and it didn't fail. If it turns out great, then Ballmer is a visionary. If it fails miserably, he takes his massive fortune and gets a job either with a lower profile company (ooh, our new CEO is the guy who just ran MS!) or with a politician (like Carly Fiorina and McCain). They don't know what will work going in, but they win no matter what. They excel at one thing: advertising themselves.
There are exceptions. Bill Gates, no matter what else you say about him, wasn't a wild gambler. He cared about the company itself, for obvious reasons. Ballmer, though, is no Bill Gates, and to him MS is a company, not an identity.
I think there is a difference between a sponsored link and your generic web ad that one might get on site frequently visited for information and that gets updated daily like a news site. Most people probably ignore those out of necessity since they visit the site too often to waste time on the ads.
However, there have been times when I've been interested in some item, like a particular kind of pen I'm partial to, and Google will return retailers' links. Granted, these are not your typical web ad but more of a simple (paid for) link. But I have clicked on them simply because I want to buy the product.
Gerry When you want a particular product, go to its website or a website of a supplier. NEVER click on ads of any form. Doing so just encourages more ads. If there's something you absolutely want and there's a text ad sitting there taunting you, go search for it. DO NOT CLICK THE AD.
...to all athletes that have to drag their lower legs at each step, and not having the benefit of springlike limbs. I thought the same thing, and that it will be very hard to draw a line between "replacement" and "enhancement" limbs, but then I remembered that the Olympics are absolutely retarded and without value. If there's some one time inspiration to be drawn here, it's worth it.
Frankly, the only reason I can think of someone wanting the illiterate to vote is if they are planning on tricking them into voting as part of their hoard.
having them vote may be democratic, but having the uninformed vote is not good for democracy, and its really hard to be sure you're informed if you can't check sources (ie, read). Republicans get a many votes from the people they benefit (the wealthy), but since the concept behind the party is to benefit the few at the expense of the many, they need to "trick" millions of borderline illiterate people to vote "as part of their hoard," as you say. It's all there in the GOP charter.
I recently spent a day with someone at the supplier of 90+% of the world's hydrogen gas, and as you say, they produce it from methane. He pointed out that the amount of CO2 released while producing the hydrogen equivalent of a gallon of gasoline for automobile use is about twice the CO2 released from directly burning the gasoline. He said that the switch to an environmentally friendly production method would be monumental but likely to occur in the next few decades, but that the even bigger problem in his opinion was developing a distribution network for this hydrogen.
I'm glad you've proven in your post that CO2 doesn't cause global warming. From the 8th grade science project I did that showed the greenhouse effect in an adiabatic calorimeter all the way to the consensus among the vast majority of geologists, I was getting pretty worried. Thanks!
Furthermore, and not sarcastically, is increasing the number of people Earth can support really all that good? If we doubled Earth's capacity to support human life, then that would push back our reaching that by by maybe 30 years, and then we'd have the same catastrophe we're headed toward now but affecting twice as many people. And what if it scales faster than linearly?
It's a pretty flimsy excuse. They could always do a few runs on camera, a thousand runs off camera, and then state the results. I've seen a dozen episodes and I've never seen one where they actually showed evidence that came remotely close to demonstrating their conclusions. Typically, they can't even come up with an experiment that has much to do with the "myth" they're testing.
I'm so tired of Mythbusters. They have no idea how to do science because they don't understand statistics. Their typical experiment is to try something five or ten times and then say that they've made some conclusion ("70% of the times the toast landed butter up!"). Next comes another similarly statistically irrelevant time waster. I see more blind faith in their show than I do in the average non-scientist I know.
You say it makes sense for Asus, and that it doesn't matter for Linux Nation, but you don't mention the people it benefits the most - users. Even if no one uses it as a primary OS, having built in Linux on the motherboard could completely revolutionize hardware troubleshooting and system recovery.
Is there much prospect of the price of wireless broadband becoming affordable? It's very irritating to have ubuquitous technology that practically nobody can afford (or is willing to spend that kind of money) to use. You can get unlimited data and text and 500 minutes of voice for $30/month on Sprint if you get the plan that's been floating around a lot of Hot Deals forums across the net for the last year. You can get it, for instance, with the HTC Mogul, which acts as a wireless router (with modding) to allow however many laptops you have nearby to access the net. In my area speeds are around 800 kbps because we don't have great coverage here. The Mogul also has GPS (works great with Google Maps for live satellite views of your location) and gives you your choice of iPhone style 2 finger zooming in Opera (with modding) or (my preference) single tap zooming.
In summary, there are cheap, good plans out there, but they're quasi-secret.
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NOT in order of annoyingness:
Quicktime - It's both a terrible media player and it is insanely unwilling to be removed. Apple's central design concept seems to be preventing the user from doing what he wants. If I delete qttask.exe, it means I don't want that file anymore, not that I want it to be resurrected. If I disable it in msconfig, it doesn't mean that the next time Quicktime runs I want it to get a new startup entry.
iTunes - ituneshelper.exe is about the same as qttask, and iTunes is even worse at playing music than Quicktime is at playing movies. It's the single most bloated piece of software I've ever used. The iTunes store is another reason to avoid it, not to use it. It also crashes way too much on a new MacBook Pro, and since I don't know what Apple compatible software is a good replacement for it, I can't just replace it for my friend as I would if he had Windows.
Apple Updater - Everyone I know just installed Safari. They didn't mean to.
Flash - Thank you, Flashblock, for making the internet useable again. Thank you, bad web designers, for sticking retarded flash "intro pages" on your sites so I can see that they've been blocked and then avoid your company on principal.
HP Printer Philosophy - Thanks to you, too, HP, for making a printer that needs an IP to be set via a web interface in order to access that same web interface. Thanks to my neighbor for having a parallel cable sitting around so I could access it in a more traditional way.
Windows Desktop - Why do you lose my icon placement every time your resolution changes? Luckily, there are countless little freeware apps to save icon positions.
Real Player - You basically invented the Apple "if you uninstall me but I will grow more powerful than you can possibly imagine" routine, so you get extra evil points for originality.
Logitech Mouse Drivers - My mouse drivers are now 100 megs. Finally they fixed the two year problem of needing to run them manually after booting (running on startup caused them to fail), but they still involve two separate taskbar icons and take up a ton of RAM.
Word - I know how to make you do what I want, but it took years to learn how to both stop your autoformatting and then put in the formatting I want. I hate the way you place images. I hate the way you resize my stuff after I've already locked it down.
Verizon Phone UI - My phone had a great UI and lots of nice capabilities when it was made. You removed bluetooth file transfers so I'd have to pay you to get photos off my phone, and you made the interface ugly. You removed the ability to vibrate and ring at the same time. I'm glad my phone was so easily hackable.
Flash (again, but bear with me) movie players - The only reason you exist is to keep me from saving video to my hard disk. Guess what. I can still do it. Meanwhile, you're slow, often not resizable without using a magnifying tool to manually zoom onto your little box, and you require me to enable flash.
I know how to fix or replace all of you, but you kill me every time I have to use a new PC and wade through your bloated code again.
I think they want to piss people off, and they don't want to be reasonable. They certainly do this to the point of sabotaging their mission. Idealism's a bitch.
Oh so by "sensible" sized you mean crampt and uncomfortable? No thanks.
Stop preaching about Europe unless you live there and have experienced first hand the new Stalinist regime of unelected life-long beaureucrats and dear leaders, living lives with all expenditure paid for by the populace and dictating to the majority how we should live.
Increased "fuel efficiency" in Europe is just smoke and mirrors. Cars have better mileage in Europe because they are lighter, not because their engines are better. Manufacturers just cut corners wherever possible, and the end result is weak, light cars, and more serious accidents and road deaths. Waydago!
More than big Oil, I'm far more worried about Big Green: another bunch of self-appointed Stalinists with huge income from vested interests, dictating policy of all governments from America to China to India to Russia, based on theories that have a greater weighting of emotion than real scientific evidence.
European cars have much better safety performance than American cars. There are more accidents per 100k miles in Europe (they suck at driving in much of Europe) but fatalities are lower because the cars are safer. Much of European fuel efficiency comes from the use of diesel engines, which no longer produce significant particulate exhaust thanks to great new filters. I even drove a large Ford sedan around Europe a couple years ago and got 40 mpg doing it.Fortunately, there are great gains to be made not just by driving tiny "crampt [sic]" cars, but by driving large spacious cars with tons of room for four people instead of eight when we have only four people in the car. Soccer moms in Hummers may be fun to laugh at, but they also are part of the reason your fat and ugly children will be as poor of pocket as you are of mind.
The first environmental complaint I saw against apple was regarding the vastly oversized boxes they used to package products. I think they started cutting back on this waste sometime after the gen 1 nano, but since I haven't purchased an iPod since then, I'm not sure.
I like your point. Imagine if you will that some other advanced civilization is exploring the galaxy. If they're clever, which we'll assume, they might do it by sending out robotic explorers that automatically move to new regions of space, replicate themselves, and move on, but can be directed via communication from the homeland. These robots will take millions of years to go anywhere very far from home, so waiting for light speed communications isn't a big delay in the scheme of things. I think that one of the biggest factors influencing the light speed communications debate is the short lifetime of humans in comparison to the time required to communicate with other star systems. Why shouldn't alien life live ten times as long, or a thousand times as long? If we lived a hundred thousand years, I don't think we'd be so impatient about interstellar travel.
Threatfire considers tracking cookies, like the ones from Google (aka Doubleclick) to be a 2 on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of severity of malware. This is a junk article and really shouldn't have been posted.
They're called cookies, not malware.
Yes, Threatfire labels tracking cookies as malware, and yes, that means this story means nothing. I'm not fan of tracking cookies, but they're not a big deal to most people.
I was just thinking last night that DRM seems to, for the most part, have never actually happened, and then I tried to purchase some music on iTunes, saw the DRM on the tracks I wanted, and went to Amazon instead.
The only thing I enjoyed about raiding was being in charge. Eventually even that got dull and the repetition and need for a perfect performance from every member of the raid got to me. My guild would lose at least half of our attempts because of disconnects, not from chronic bad connections, but just from random people. That could be so demoralizing.
Also, repetition didn't just mean going to the same instances to do the same fights each week. It also showed up in the fights themselves. Most raid bosses have what, two to four stages? Within each each you usually repeat some 10-45 second pattern again and again. If my guild showed it could repeat the same thing perfectly 5 times in 3 minutes, that didn't mean we were necessarily on the verge of success, because a typical fight would involve ~10 minutes of that repetition. Someone gets disconnected on repetition 8? Everyone spends 15 minutes to die, respawn, run back to the boss, buff, and retry. All of the repetition isn't there because it's more fun to repeat the same actions in the fight for 13 minutes than for 3, it's there because it makes the encounters artificially slow to master, meaning they take longer to master, meaning you keep playing the game for longer without needing more content.
Lots of people complain about arena pvp, but it was always my favorite. I have a netherdrake on my defunct rogue from 3v3. This is another area where WoW does pretty well. There are 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 arena matches with serious in game rewards. The difference between 2s and 5s is huge. Then there's BG pvp, and then depending on server, open world pvp. BGs mostly killed that, though, which is a pity.
Lots of your comments are spot on, but the game really does get better. The biggest complaint you seem to have is that you right click and auto-kill things. At more advanced levels of the game, you might use 10 special (manually activated) abilities in a single solo fight, some of them requiring very precise timing and contextual decision-making.
If your only goal is to level or finish a quest, you might use fewer abilities and not have to think, but if you somehow get into the game (I'm sort of baffled at how many people, like me, did) then you can actually care about making yourself 20% more effective by thinking on your toes and strategizing beforehand (pvp is one of the more obvious cases of this).
Most MMOs are like that, and if you don't seem to like it right away, don't bother trying to make yourself like it. It's an expensive and time consuming hobby.
I'll have trouble playing another MMO (I quit WoW 6 months ago after playing since beta and raiding since MC was novel) unless it offers the degree of UI flexibility that WoW does. I dislike the UI in most games, but it doesn't bother me too much because I can work around it. I tend to like minimalist UIs if they're not going to be perfect, so something like GTA4 is pretty nice for me. But when I actually care about being competitive, which is something I've only felt in an MMO, default UIs never hold up. MMOs by design offer vastly different types of characters, and what's good for 90% of them won't be good for me. Being able to design my own UI, or use a popular and configurable one, allowed me to perfect my playing experience in WoW like in no other game. I'd love to play another MMO, this time for ~5 hours a week instead of...well, much much more than that, but I don't think I'd be able to get over a preconfigured UI.
Ballmer is an executive leading a company. The job of such a person is to immediately make a large and costly change in the company. The change itself is determined almost at random - these people aren't particularly good at analyzing this sort of thing. Just take a look at the success rate of this sort of project taken on by a company's new CEO. Sometimes it works, and a bit more often it doesn't. It's just a roll of the dice.
The point is that if it doesn't hurt MS, Ballmer comes off looking good. He did something that shaped the industry, and it didn't fail. If it turns out great, then Ballmer is a visionary. If it fails miserably, he takes his massive fortune and gets a job either with a lower profile company (ooh, our new CEO is the guy who just ran MS!) or with a politician (like Carly Fiorina and McCain). They don't know what will work going in, but they win no matter what. They excel at one thing: advertising themselves.
There are exceptions. Bill Gates, no matter what else you say about him, wasn't a wild gambler. He cared about the company itself, for obvious reasons. Ballmer, though, is no Bill Gates, and to him MS is a company, not an identity.
However, there have been times when I've been interested in some item, like a particular kind of pen I'm partial to, and Google will return retailers' links. Granted, these are not your typical web ad but more of a simple (paid for) link. But I have clicked on them simply because I want to buy the product.
Gerry When you want a particular product, go to its website or a website of a supplier. NEVER click on ads of any form. Doing so just encourages more ads. If there's something you absolutely want and there's a text ad sitting there taunting you, go search for it. DO NOT CLICK THE AD.
...to all athletes that have to drag their lower legs at each step, and not having the benefit of springlike limbs. I thought the same thing, and that it will be very hard to draw a line between "replacement" and "enhancement" limbs, but then I remembered that the Olympics are absolutely retarded and without value. If there's some one time inspiration to be drawn here, it's worth it.having them vote may be democratic, but having the uninformed vote is not good for democracy, and its really hard to be sure you're informed if you can't check sources (ie, read). Republicans get a many votes from the people they benefit (the wealthy), but since the concept behind the party is to benefit the few at the expense of the many, they need to "trick" millions of borderline illiterate people to vote "as part of their hoard," as you say. It's all there in the GOP charter.
I recently spent a day with someone at the supplier of 90+% of the world's hydrogen gas, and as you say, they produce it from methane. He pointed out that the amount of CO2 released while producing the hydrogen equivalent of a gallon of gasoline for automobile use is about twice the CO2 released from directly burning the gasoline. He said that the switch to an environmentally friendly production method would be monumental but likely to occur in the next few decades, but that the even bigger problem in his opinion was developing a distribution network for this hydrogen.
I'm glad you've proven in your post that CO2 doesn't cause global warming. From the 8th grade science project I did that showed the greenhouse effect in an adiabatic calorimeter all the way to the consensus among the vast majority of geologists, I was getting pretty worried. Thanks!
Furthermore, and not sarcastically, is increasing the number of people Earth can support really all that good? If we doubled Earth's capacity to support human life, then that would push back our reaching that by by maybe 30 years, and then we'd have the same catastrophe we're headed toward now but affecting twice as many people. And what if it scales faster than linearly?
It's a pretty flimsy excuse. They could always do a few runs on camera, a thousand runs off camera, and then state the results. I've seen a dozen episodes and I've never seen one where they actually showed evidence that came remotely close to demonstrating their conclusions. Typically, they can't even come up with an experiment that has much to do with the "myth" they're testing.
I'm so tired of Mythbusters. They have no idea how to do science because they don't understand statistics. Their typical experiment is to try something five or ten times and then say that they've made some conclusion ("70% of the times the toast landed butter up!"). Next comes another similarly statistically irrelevant time waster. I see more blind faith in their show than I do in the average non-scientist I know.
You say it makes sense for Asus, and that it doesn't matter for Linux Nation, but you don't mention the people it benefits the most - users. Even if no one uses it as a primary OS, having built in Linux on the motherboard could completely revolutionize hardware troubleshooting and system recovery.
In summary, there are cheap, good plans out there, but they're quasi-secret.
It's been awhile since a Google post on Slashdot has focused on the company improving our privacy. Good work!