In the 19th century the invention of the automobile was delayed by restrictive legislation in Britain. File sharing may well be the future if the internet, I agree with you in that, but a legislation that tries to freeze the past could delay considerably the progress.
the majority of Muslims would be left alone to live in peace if that's their desire
The problem is that a "moderate Muslim" is really an oxymoron. Islamic law very explicitly says that it *must* be applied to every circumstance in life, without exception.
This situation is very well analyzed in this book. Islamic scholars like Sayyid Qutb have put the situation in the following terms:
1) One must choose between evil or good
2) If one chooses the path of good, one must be consisten in it
This is a logical argument, no one can say anything against it. The problem is when people like Sayyid Qutb and his followers assume that "good" is equal to Islam, and any deviation from the strictest interpretation of Islam is evil.
Unfortunately, this interpretation is consistent with a careful reading of the Quran.
Differently from the Bible, which is a compilation of writings from different authors from many different times and places, the Quran was written in a short time at one place. The Bible has reports of historical and legendary events, intermixed with moral teachings. The Quran is mostly moral teachings alone.
Reading the Quran leaves many people with a strong sense of duty to perform those acts, to lead a life of moral righteousness, much more than the Bible does because it's much more concentrated on the moral commandments. I have read a translation of the Quran and was impressed on how those commandments seem to be worded in such a stronger way than in the Bible.
There are also some extremely radical Christians, it's true, but they have never reached such a high number of sympathizers as radical Muslims, at least not in the last few centuries.
I believe that if someone want to be a Muslim without following the radical path, then he must make an effort to study and analyze the Quran, like the radicals have done, and try to verify in which manner the moderate interpretation can be validated by the text. It seems to me that the radicals have been more successful in putting forward their interpretation.
The original Tree of Ténéré was replaced by a sculpture made of discarded metal parts, made by an anonymous artist. Perhaps that was much better than a planned monument.
If there were millions of cameras, how many analysts would be needed to go through the videos? People have been watching too many movies
Overall, I'd say surveillance cameras are much like guns, only less lethal. Yes, they can be used for bad things. Should we outlaw them? No. Just have a reasonable control over them, alway keeping in mind that they aren't guns, you don't need as much camera control as you need gun control.
People who hate or fear cameras have never lived in a bad neighborhood. I lived in Colombia for a few years when I was a kid. I was mugged in daylight in an upper middle class neighborhood getting home from school when I was nine years old.
Big brother doesn't scare me. I'd rather have the right to walk fearlessly through the streets that my taxes maintain.
can anyone tell me why a good, cheap, quick solution to replacing the current Hubble isn't to take that same design + upgrades that are even too complicated to accomplish in space, and launch it?
You're absolutely right and, ironically, it would cost less to launch it with a non-reusable rocket like the Ariane 5. Unfortunately, real life doesn't work like that.
The problems is with that "upgrades" thingie. They would never get a team of experts to agree on a sensible list of upgrades and launch that. There would always be one more thing, one more feature and the final cost would be, well, "astronomical" is the only word that comes to my mind.
Nasa's problem is that they have to be innovative, it's their mission. They can never let good enough alone. If they had just kept making small improvements to their systems, maybe we would have all the space colonies Popular Mechanics predicted fifty years ago by now.
If you want to quote big speeds against something, that should be something *near* you, something that runs the risk of crashing. 17000 mph against the earth that's hundreds of miles away is totally meaningless.
Now, if you want to quote some "absolute" velocity, then the only reference that can be considered valid, according to Mach's principle would be against the "fixed distant stars", which means cosmic microwave background.
Then we can say we are all moving at 370 km/s towards the Virgo constellation (note the link says the whole Milky Way galaxy is moving at 600 km/s towards Centaurus but we have to subtract the speed of the earth relative to the galaxy as a whole. Longer explanation here).
Eee PCs are a nightmare for authenticated Wireless setups (802.1x). eee pc require compiling kernel modules, magic spells etc. I can have a windoze / mac setup in 10 minutes.
And the camera? What about power saving modes etc. Why isn't all this setup and working...?
Huh? What are you talking about? All those things work out of the box in a Linux eeePC.
If Linux netbooks aren't ready to go out of the box, the vendors are doing a poor job.
What the TFA mentions that "Linux, even if you've got a great distribution and you can argue which one is better or not, still requires a lot more hands-on than somebody who is using Windows" is blatantly false. I unpacked my Linux eeePC, plugged it in, turned it on, and started working, something I never managed to do with any Microsoft computer.
In windows you always need to get and install all the software you need to actually do something with the computer.
In my case, I do a lot of Python programming, and that was there. I also found Kate, my favorite editor for programming. Plus OpenOffice, a media player for music and video, a bunch of icons for starting Firefox in several different modes, which means 99% of what I need for work and play was already there. Let me see a windows netbook that comes with all that pre-installed.
The only complaint I have about the eeePC is that the keyboard should be just a little bit bigger, other than that it's an excellent machine. But, of course, one can always have a thinner, lighter netbook, with longer lasting batteries. That would be my choice of directions for evolution.
The "tragedy" of having old textbooks is not really that severe
I think it's much worse.
Two problems: digital data is *much* more compact than paper and your searching ability is limited to the index.
I have an 8 GB pendrive, which is by no means very spectacular these days, but a King James Bible has about 5 MB of data. Have you ever tried carrying 1600 bibles in your pocket?
When in doubt, I google for an answer, or look into wikipedia for a clue. How do you index your paper books? Before the internet, I used to look it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (again, a BIG volume of paper), but too many things do not have Britannica articles.
If you think from a very limited viewpoint, paper books are OK and are much better than illiteracy. They are better than computers in many aspects, reading in bed, they do not need batteries, are easier to annotate, you can dogear them. I do have a big "dead tree" library.
But paper is no substitute for a computer. I think we must learn how to extract the most intelligence from both media, the ideal learning environment would be one that has both paper and digital data. Let's keep the printed books, but don't belittle the worth of computers either.
In fact, the article opens with Kennedy v. Louisiana, where blogging was a tremendous help. In this case, the Supreme Court's ruling was based on wrong information, and the bloggers pointed this mistake out.
What if that mistake were in the personal interest of the blogger? How can one be sure he didn't omit some crucial detail? A court of law is supposed to be neutral with both sides having equal access. If the judge reads one blog, shouldn't he read *all* of the millions of blogs on the internet?
Of course, judges are trained in evaluating testimony and all that, but even then it's not good to let an outside opinion influence the judge's mind in any way. If an attorney thinks a blog is important to the matter, he's free to quote from that blog in his statements in court. It just should be presented in such a way that both parts are aware of the arguments and allowed to present counterpoints.
Lawyers often read a judge's past decisions to understand better that judge's thinking process, that's part of the game. It wouldn't be fair to let that thinking process change in an unknown way during the trial.
I don't see this as a question of freedom of speech because everyone is free to speak but no one is forced to listen. I think judges should not read any external opinion on any case during the course of a trial, and that includes newspapers and magazines, too.
Intel reproduces Nikola Tesla's 1894 implementation and Prof. John Boys group's 1988's experiments by wirelessly powering a light bulb with 75% efficiency
The problem is 75% of which power?
Unfortunately, it was 75% of received power, not transmitted power.
About 99.99% of the transmitted power went to other directions, it heated neighboring rocks and nothing else.
Unless you have a directional antenna, any sort of wireless power transmission will waste a lot of power. And, to have a directional antenna, you need to know in which direction your receiver will be. Then it starts to look pretty much like a wired power transmission setup...
I think I didn't make myself clear, as you and several others pointed out. What I meant is that when you google for windows problems you find forum after forum with the same useless answer: "download an updated driver" or something like that. When googling for linux problems you very quickly get to the place where experts meet and find a useful answer.
That's the biggest advantage of open source. Even if you don't know how or don't have the time to mess with the source code, you can easily find people who are familiar with it.
As for the relative likelyhood of needing an expert intervention on both systems, let me tell you this: I was *very* familiar with the internals of windows before I started using linux. I was known as "the windows guy" before people started calling me "the linux guy". I know both sides of the equation, and I switched sides for a good reason. Linux is less demanding for the same functionality. It takes much less effort to keep a linux system working smoothly.
"with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person"
Hmmm, right, to "cause substantial emotional distress to a person", eh?
The simple fact that someone could propose such a bullshit law causes substantial emotional distress to a person, namely me. I feel coerced, intimidated, harassed.
This cannot go on. Please, arrest Rep. Linda T. Sanchez at once!
If someone is obviously and intentionally harassing someone else, I have no problem with them having legal recourse.
So, you are obviously and intentionally harassing all of us who believe in free speech. How do you plead? Would you like a jury trial or are you willing to make an agreement?
Aside from running Photoshop and Quicken, it does everything a computer should do, perfectly. I run work and entertainment applications. Play movies, browse the web, play music, invert matrixes, find eigenvalues, do fourier transforms, administer databases, etc.
And what I don't need to do: no need to run virus scan, no need to defrag disks, no need to buy memory upgrades, no need to buy software, no need to run regedit, etc.
What windows can do but is much easier in Linux: run a web server, run a mail server, run a file server, run *any* server.
No hassle, no regedit, no googling forum after forum looking for answers, no downloading drivers, no reformatting, no reinstalling. The "and more" that Linux does perfectly now is what a computer should do, it runs year after year without any intervention. I have a Linux server running without *any* input at all since 1992. It does its simple task exactly as it was meant to.
On the desktop side, the "and more" means I can configure my desktop and icons in the way I prefer without any problem, I just select whatever I want without having to worry about "security". The system is secure because it was designed that way, I don't need to buy or download anything. I can configure the way the desktop works. I can select between several different desktop managers. High performance (KDE), easy to configure (Gnome), low hardware requirements (IceWM), you name it.
And, if something doesn't work the way it should, I have no need to reformat and reinstall, download newer drivers, repeat, ad infinitum. With Linux there's always one more resource, google the problem and you'll find a forum somewhere with the answer, even if it means you'll have to recompile something. It's better to recompile than to fall back to reformat and reinstall...
OS/2 tried to be a $500 way of running Windows applications while Windows was a $100 way of running Windows applications
If Ubuntu were a $0 way of running windows applications it would take over the world.
Ubuntu shouldn't be *just* windows, it should be windows and more. The problem is that the "and more" part Ubuntu already does perfectly but the "just windows" part is still not complete.
If wine could run every relevant windows applications, people could forget the applications and concentrate on what the system itself does.
Linux is so much better, so much more powerful, easier to use, secure, and stable than windows it's a shame so many people are turned off Linux because their work requires exactly this or that application.
When I was a kid, about ten years old, I knew some guys, my father's friends, who had fought in WWII. I asked them about their war experiences, and there's one thing all of them said: the first kill is the most difficult. They had seen guys die because they hesitated, in war those who cannot shoot first die.
There are many situations in war where restraint is called for, but it's very difficult to train 18-year-olds to have the appropriate judgement when needed. Training them to kill remorselessly is a way to let them survive, at the expense of less trained 18-year-olds in the other side.
Windows' sleek UI and excellent vendor driver support save the user time worth more than the entry price over its lifespan, plus Microsoft offers tech support for its products.
You could just have linked to the appropriate Microsoft marketing page instead of copying and pasting this text.
With Linux it's inevitable that an end user will be forced to do something at the commandline, and realistically that's a huge time sink or maybe a deal breaker for the average user.
Funny, but I have an eeePC with the original Xandros and I had to Google it to find how to get a command line. You can do anything at all within the limits of the hardware without a command line.
For example, I recently switched got a new broadband connection at home and the difference in effort to configure the eeePC compared to my older Compaq nx9005 with XP was amazing. In Linux all it took was a couple of mouse clicks in clearly marked buttons, a very intuitive process. "Internet" -> "Network" -> "Create..." -> "Local Area Network" -> "Static IP Address" and then enter the address, subnet mask, and gateway they gave me.
In XP I had to click "Start" -> "Control Panel" -> "Network Configuration" to start he wizard. Now the freaky part begins. One has to click on several pages that show only some warning text. You need to click on a box to make it disregard disconnected network hardware (WHY? I'm not changing the hardware, just the network address). Enter the computer hardware description and name (WHY? I'm not changing that, just the network address). Type a workgroup name. Tell it if I want to change disk and printer sharing (NO! I just want to change the network address!!!). Another nag screen asking me if I want to create a configuration disk (NO!!!). Then it tells me I need to reboot the computer (WHY? I just want to change the network address...)
All in all, configuring Linux is simpler, easier, more intuitive, and quicker than XP.
But, of course, having the command line available is handy when you have one of those "unsolvable" problems and you know what you are doing. For instance, we had an old monitor at work that was left over from a discarded VAXstation. It was a nice monitor, still in very good condition, but it didn't work with any PC because it had non-standard sync timing. With Linux it was just a matter of editing/etc/X11/xorg.conf and create the appropriate Modeline parameters.
All in all, when you kick the Microsoft habit and learn to disregard those marketing blurbs you posted, Linux is both easier to use and more powerful.
4 GB of DDR2 Kingston Value RAM is $50... The hardware requirements and software incompatibilities that look so forbidding at launch of a new Windows OS - fade away into insignificance a year or so later.
For most of us it will take a lot more inflation until $50 fades into insignificance.
Should the US adopt the environmental regulations of China and India? Or, perhaps the military of Brazil or Ireland?
And your point is??...
"Environmental regulations" is rather vague, but I don't think the US stance at global warming would set it as a model.
About the military expenditures, I checked Wikipedia and cannot find anything exceptional about the two countries you mentioned. Did you just pick two countries at random, or are you trying to make a point?
Brazil is 13th among 171 countries in total military spending, putting it near the top of the list, and 61st as a percentage of GDP, making it more or less average. Ireland is 65th in total spending and 146th as a percentage of GDP, making it more or less average on both counts.
Do you mean the US should spend about the same other countries do spend on the military? Yes, I should say so, it sounds right.
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In the 19th century the invention of the automobile was delayed by restrictive legislation in Britain. File sharing may well be the future if the internet, I agree with you in that, but a legislation that tries to freeze the past could delay considerably the progress.
hmmm, I wonder how could that be?
The problem is that a "moderate Muslim" is really an oxymoron. Islamic law very explicitly says that it *must* be applied to every circumstance in life, without exception.
This situation is very well analyzed in this book. Islamic scholars like Sayyid Qutb have put the situation in the following terms:
1) One must choose between evil or good
2) If one chooses the path of good, one must be consisten in it
This is a logical argument, no one can say anything against it. The problem is when people like Sayyid Qutb and his followers assume that "good" is equal to Islam, and any deviation from the strictest interpretation of Islam is evil.
Unfortunately, this interpretation is consistent with a careful reading of the Quran.
Differently from the Bible, which is a compilation of writings from different authors from many different times and places, the Quran was written in a short time at one place. The Bible has reports of historical and legendary events, intermixed with moral teachings. The Quran is mostly moral teachings alone.
Reading the Quran leaves many people with a strong sense of duty to perform those acts, to lead a life of moral righteousness, much more than the Bible does because it's much more concentrated on the moral commandments. I have read a translation of the Quran and was impressed on how those commandments seem to be worded in such a stronger way than in the Bible.
There are also some extremely radical Christians, it's true, but they have never reached such a high number of sympathizers as radical Muslims, at least not in the last few centuries.
I believe that if someone want to be a Muslim without following the radical path, then he must make an effort to study and analyze the Quran, like the radicals have done, and try to verify in which manner the moderate interpretation can be validated by the text. It seems to me that the radicals have been more successful in putting forward their interpretation.
In Africa there once stood what was considered the loneliest tree in the world. People respected it and no one dared to damage it. Until a truck crashed into it and broke it.
The original Tree of Ténéré was replaced by a sculpture made of discarded metal parts, made by an anonymous artist. Perhaps that was much better than a planned monument.
Not necessarily. Perhaps it's so much easier to sell things to extremely stupid people that advertisers always target their ads at them.
If there were millions of cameras, how many analysts would be needed to go through the videos? People have been watching too many movies
Overall, I'd say surveillance cameras are much like guns, only less lethal. Yes, they can be used for bad things. Should we outlaw them? No. Just have a reasonable control over them, alway keeping in mind that they aren't guns, you don't need as much camera control as you need gun control.
People who hate or fear cameras have never lived in a bad neighborhood. I lived in Colombia for a few years when I was a kid. I was mugged in daylight in an upper middle class neighborhood getting home from school when I was nine years old.
Big brother doesn't scare me. I'd rather have the right to walk fearlessly through the streets that my taxes maintain.
You're absolutely right and, ironically, it would cost less to launch it with a non-reusable rocket like the Ariane 5. Unfortunately, real life doesn't work like that.
The problems is with that "upgrades" thingie. They would never get a team of experts to agree on a sensible list of upgrades and launch that. There would always be one more thing, one more feature and the final cost would be, well, "astronomical" is the only word that comes to my mind.
Nasa's problem is that they have to be innovative, it's their mission. They can never let good enough alone. If they had just kept making small improvements to their systems, maybe we would have all the space colonies Popular Mechanics predicted fifty years ago by now.
If you want to quote big speeds against something, that should be something *near* you, something that runs the risk of crashing. 17000 mph against the earth that's hundreds of miles away is totally meaningless.
Now, if you want to quote some "absolute" velocity, then the only reference that can be considered valid, according to Mach's principle would be against the "fixed distant stars", which means cosmic microwave background.
Then we can say we are all moving at 370 km/s towards the Virgo constellation (note the link says the whole Milky Way galaxy is moving at 600 km/s towards Centaurus but we have to subtract the speed of the earth relative to the galaxy as a whole. Longer explanation here).
Huh? What are you talking about? All those things work out of the box in a Linux eeePC.
What the TFA mentions that "Linux, even if you've got a great distribution and you can argue which one is better or not, still requires a lot more hands-on than somebody who is using Windows" is blatantly false. I unpacked my Linux eeePC, plugged it in, turned it on, and started working, something I never managed to do with any Microsoft computer.
In windows you always need to get and install all the software you need to actually do something with the computer.
In my case, I do a lot of Python programming, and that was there. I also found Kate, my favorite editor for programming. Plus OpenOffice, a media player for music and video, a bunch of icons for starting Firefox in several different modes, which means 99% of what I need for work and play was already there. Let me see a windows netbook that comes with all that pre-installed.
The only complaint I have about the eeePC is that the keyboard should be just a little bit bigger, other than that it's an excellent machine. But, of course, one can always have a thinner, lighter netbook, with longer lasting batteries. That would be my choice of directions for evolution.
I think it's much worse.
Two problems: digital data is *much* more compact than paper and your searching ability is limited to the index.
I have an 8 GB pendrive, which is by no means very spectacular these days, but a King James Bible has about 5 MB of data. Have you ever tried carrying 1600 bibles in your pocket?
When in doubt, I google for an answer, or look into wikipedia for a clue. How do you index your paper books? Before the internet, I used to look it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (again, a BIG volume of paper), but too many things do not have Britannica articles.
If you think from a very limited viewpoint, paper books are OK and are much better than illiteracy. They are better than computers in many aspects, reading in bed, they do not need batteries, are easier to annotate, you can dogear them. I do have a big "dead tree" library.
But paper is no substitute for a computer. I think we must learn how to extract the most intelligence from both media, the ideal learning environment would be one that has both paper and digital data. Let's keep the printed books, but don't belittle the worth of computers either.
What if that mistake were in the personal interest of the blogger? How can one be sure he didn't omit some crucial detail? A court of law is supposed to be neutral with both sides having equal access. If the judge reads one blog, shouldn't he read *all* of the millions of blogs on the internet?
Of course, judges are trained in evaluating testimony and all that, but even then it's not good to let an outside opinion influence the judge's mind in any way. If an attorney thinks a blog is important to the matter, he's free to quote from that blog in his statements in court. It just should be presented in such a way that both parts are aware of the arguments and allowed to present counterpoints.
Lawyers often read a judge's past decisions to understand better that judge's thinking process, that's part of the game. It wouldn't be fair to let that thinking process change in an unknown way during the trial.
I don't see this as a question of freedom of speech because everyone is free to speak but no one is forced to listen. I think judges should not read any external opinion on any case during the course of a trial, and that includes newspapers and magazines, too.
Indefinitely, you surely mean. I wouldn't mind some of my cells splitting a few extra generations.
The problem is 75% of which power?
Unfortunately, it was 75% of received power, not transmitted power.
About 99.99% of the transmitted power went to other directions, it heated neighboring rocks and nothing else.
Unless you have a directional antenna, any sort of wireless power transmission will waste a lot of power. And, to have a directional antenna, you need to know in which direction your receiver will be. Then it starts to look pretty much like a wired power transmission setup...
I think I didn't make myself clear, as you and several others pointed out. What I meant is that when you google for windows problems you find forum after forum with the same useless answer: "download an updated driver" or something like that. When googling for linux problems you very quickly get to the place where experts meet and find a useful answer.
That's the biggest advantage of open source. Even if you don't know how or don't have the time to mess with the source code, you can easily find people who are familiar with it.
As for the relative likelyhood of needing an expert intervention on both systems, let me tell you this: I was *very* familiar with the internals of windows before I started using linux. I was known as "the windows guy" before people started calling me "the linux guy". I know both sides of the equation, and I switched sides for a good reason. Linux is less demanding for the same functionality. It takes much less effort to keep a linux system working smoothly.
All the way.
Hmmm, right, to "cause substantial emotional distress to a person", eh?
The simple fact that someone could propose such a bullshit law causes substantial emotional distress to a person, namely me. I feel coerced, intimidated, harassed.
This cannot go on. Please, arrest Rep. Linda T. Sanchez at once!
So, you are obviously and intentionally harassing all of us who believe in free speech. How do you plead? Would you like a jury trial or are you willing to make an agreement?
Aside from running Photoshop and Quicken, it does everything a computer should do, perfectly. I run work and entertainment applications. Play movies, browse the web, play music, invert matrixes, find eigenvalues, do fourier transforms, administer databases, etc.
And what I don't need to do: no need to run virus scan, no need to defrag disks, no need to buy memory upgrades, no need to buy software, no need to run regedit, etc.
What windows can do but is much easier in Linux: run a web server, run a mail server, run a file server, run *any* server.
No hassle, no regedit, no googling forum after forum looking for answers, no downloading drivers, no reformatting, no reinstalling. The "and more" that Linux does perfectly now is what a computer should do, it runs year after year without any intervention. I have a Linux server running without *any* input at all since 1992. It does its simple task exactly as it was meant to.
On the desktop side, the "and more" means I can configure my desktop and icons in the way I prefer without any problem, I just select whatever I want without having to worry about "security". The system is secure because it was designed that way, I don't need to buy or download anything. I can configure the way the desktop works. I can select between several different desktop managers. High performance (KDE), easy to configure (Gnome), low hardware requirements (IceWM), you name it.
And, if something doesn't work the way it should, I have no need to reformat and reinstall, download newer drivers, repeat, ad infinitum. With Linux there's always one more resource, google the problem and you'll find a forum somewhere with the answer, even if it means you'll have to recompile something. It's better to recompile than to fall back to reformat and reinstall...
If Ubuntu were a $0 way of running windows applications it would take over the world.
Ubuntu shouldn't be *just* windows, it should be windows and more. The problem is that the "and more" part Ubuntu already does perfectly but the "just windows" part is still not complete.
If wine could run every relevant windows applications, people could forget the applications and concentrate on what the system itself does.
Linux is so much better, so much more powerful, easier to use, secure, and stable than windows it's a shame so many people are turned off Linux because their work requires exactly this or that application.
When I was a kid, about ten years old, I knew some guys, my father's friends, who had fought in WWII. I asked them about their war experiences, and there's one thing all of them said: the first kill is the most difficult. They had seen guys die because they hesitated, in war those who cannot shoot first die.
There are many situations in war where restraint is called for, but it's very difficult to train 18-year-olds to have the appropriate judgement when needed. Training them to kill remorselessly is a way to let them survive, at the expense of less trained 18-year-olds in the other side.
Then what you need is some way to convert coal to methane.
You could just have linked to the appropriate Microsoft marketing page instead of copying and pasting this text.
Funny, but I have an eeePC with the original Xandros and I had to Google it to find how to get a command line. You can do anything at all within the limits of the hardware without a command line.
For example, I recently switched got a new broadband connection at home and the difference in effort to configure the eeePC compared to my older Compaq nx9005 with XP was amazing. In Linux all it took was a couple of mouse clicks in clearly marked buttons, a very intuitive process. "Internet" -> "Network" -> "Create..." -> "Local Area Network" -> "Static IP Address" and then enter the address, subnet mask, and gateway they gave me.
In XP I had to click "Start" -> "Control Panel" -> "Network Configuration" to start he wizard. Now the freaky part begins. One has to click on several pages that show only some warning text. You need to click on a box to make it disregard disconnected network hardware (WHY? I'm not changing the hardware, just the network address). Enter the computer hardware description and name (WHY? I'm not changing that, just the network address). Type a workgroup name. Tell it if I want to change disk and printer sharing (NO! I just want to change the network address!!!). Another nag screen asking me if I want to create a configuration disk (NO!!!). Then it tells me I need to reboot the computer (WHY? I just want to change the network address...)
All in all, configuring Linux is simpler, easier, more intuitive, and quicker than XP.
But, of course, having the command line available is handy when you have one of those "unsolvable" problems and you know what you are doing. For instance, we had an old monitor at work that was left over from a discarded VAXstation. It was a nice monitor, still in very good condition, but it didn't work with any PC because it had non-standard sync timing. With Linux it was just a matter of editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and create the appropriate Modeline parameters.
All in all, when you kick the Microsoft habit and learn to disregard those marketing blurbs you posted, Linux is both easier to use and more powerful.
The plural of Nazi is Nazis. "Nazi's" is a possessive.
Speaking of possessives, it's possessive, not posessive.
For most of us it will take a lot more inflation until $50 fades into insignificance.
And your point is??...
"Environmental regulations" is rather vague, but I don't think the US stance at global warming would set it as a model.
About the military expenditures, I checked Wikipedia and cannot find anything exceptional about the two countries you mentioned. Did you just pick two countries at random, or are you trying to make a point?
Brazil is 13th among 171 countries in total military spending, putting it near the top of the list, and 61st as a percentage of GDP, making it more or less average. Ireland is 65th in total spending and 146th as a percentage of GDP, making it more or less average on both counts.
Do you mean the US should spend about the same other countries do spend on the military? Yes, I should say so, it sounds right.
Well, since American companies cannot compete with products manufactured in China anyhow, I don't see that this would make any difference.