That is beautiful - and yes; of the three (out of four) events that can make you eligible for inclusion in the 900 (boy, then girl; girl, then boy; boy, then boy), two include a girl.
What makes this counterintuitive is that you treat children as unordered, but they're not - in fact, your (boy, girl) case actually mixes (boy, girl) and (girl, boy), which are both equally probable.
Maybe I am confused, but wouldn't then (boy,boy) also include the two cases (boy, boy) and (boy, boy) (i.e. the son which is shown could be the older or the younger child, and the other one also a boy), which are ALSO equally probable? So you have four event: this boy then other boy, other boy then this boy, boy then girl, girl then boy. Two of these caves have a boy as the other child, other two cases have a girl as the other child.
Best piece of electronics I've owned, bar none. Sip telephony, answering machine, nas, print server, fax, dsl modem, dect base station, wireless N 300 mbps with triple antennas, usb port for 3g modem fall back connectivity, vpn server, firewall, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some features here.
Runs linux, and hacker community has extended firmware to run p2p daemon for example.
Yes, the AVM routers are damn nice. If you can live without having a DECT base station, there is also a cheaper version of this router (ca. 100 euro) http://www.avm.de/de/Produkte/FRITZBox/FRITZ_Box_WLAN_3270/index.php - although I can find that one only on the German version of their website. Using the community firmware and some attached USB storage, this is one extremely versatile piece of hardware.
From TFA: One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to "tweets" or "tweeting.”
"tweet" is simply not yet well-known enough. It is a term only a specific group of people knows and uses, those who regularly use Twitter. Would your mother know what the word "tweet" means, apart from the sound a bird makes? Probably not. Would she want to read that word in an article then, not knowing what it means? Probably not. While this might be shocking news to some, Twitter is not yet well-known enough to make it and the weird words surrounding it mainstream knowledge. And that's why any self-respecting journalist should not use the word "tweet" - if your readers are "normal" people, then you should write in such a way that normal people can understand you. On a side note, I know Twitter and use it, and I never used the word "tweet" so far (mainly because I think it sounds stupid when somebody uses it, I just say "I put that on Twitter").
Going from 10 mpg to 20 mpg is exactly double the mileage. Going from 33 to 50 is LESS than double (double would be 66).
Consider an example of going from 10mpg to 20mpg vs. going from 20mpg to 50mpg then, and the "American Way" ("hey, 20 to 50 mpg is MORE THAN DOUBLE!") would give you the wrong answer:-)
10 to 20 mpg saves 5 gallons over 100 miles 20 to 50 mpg saves 3 gallons over 100 miles
It is really sad that people in the US do not like diesel cars. Where they use their big SUV because they need space for kids and stuff, we here e.g. in Germany use stuff like the Touran ( http://www.volkswagen.de/vwcms/master_public/virtualmaster/de3/modelle/touran.html ) which has more than enough space for a family with 3 kids AND all the stuff they want to lug around for a holiday. And it is available with the same engines as a Golf, e.g. a 170hp TDI or a 105hp TDI Bluemotion, so it gets similar fuel economy (e.g. 6.6l / 100km for the 170hp diesel). I have looked at the US Volkswagen website, and it seems they have the "Routan", which looks like the Touran, but they only offer big fat petrol engines with 18-20 mpg. Sad. And silly. The 3.8l/197hp engine they offer on the US Volkswagen page makes the car go from 0 to 60 in 10.2s, while the German 2l/170hp diesel makes the German Touran go from 0 to 100km/h in 9.0s.
I pay 45 euro per month for my 3GS with unlimited data (yes, there is a throttling after a couple hundred MB/month, but that is completely irrelevant for web/mail etc.), unlimited phone calls and free use of their hotspots. No tethering allowed though.
As someone who is going through caffeine withdrawal right now (notice that I don't use quotation marks because it's real), I have a really simple answer.
My splitting headache and lethargy are due to the the fact that I consume at least two pots of coffee a day until yesterday. If you've never heard of anyone getting caffeine withdrawal outside the US, then you've never met anyone who has consumed enough coffee on a regular basis to become addicted.
Yes, caffeine withdrawal definitely is real. I notice it myself when I take a few days off from work. At work, I drink a LOT of coffee, but when I am at home, sleep in, do some house work, go shopping etc. and then it's early afternoon without me having had the usual few cups of coffee yet, I usually notice a headache coming up. Then I get myself a nice cup of coffee, and everything is OK again.
The explanation for the withdrawal symptoms that I have read about sound convincing. Caffeine is an antagonist for adenosine, and the body reacts to an increase in the caffeine intake by producing more adenosine receptors (to "even out" the caffeine effect, i.e. to get back to normal). So when you stop drinking coffee, there is too much of an adenosine effect. And since adenosine has an effect on blood pressure, this causes a headache.
Back in the good old days of the Commodore 64, I loved those long single player games, like the Ultima series, Bard's Tale, the AD&D stuff like pool of radiance or whatever. You had the "quick and fun" stuff you could play together with friends who came over to your place (shooters etc.), and when you were alone, you could pop in the Ultima 3 or 4 disk and cartograph out the latest dungeon all night long. I spent weeks on those RPG, exchanging maps of dungeons, location of npc and other info with my friends at school. But now when I have REALLY time to play at the computer, I log on to my MMORPG and play there. When I just have a little bit of time to play a single player game, I want one which I can start, play for five minutes and then quit again. Yes, I enjoyed the Baldur's Gate series a lot, but that was before I started playing MMORPG. These days, I would not start a game like that anymore, because playing online with friends definitely beats playing alone for hours. So for me it's not that I want "simpler" games because long games are too difficult etc., the problem is more that when I really have time to play, I want to spend that time playing with online friends and not alone.
Oh, that griefers want to be famous badasses isn't what I'm disputing. What I'm saying is that for the badass-vs-posse scenario you've proposed, someone has to play the posse. And it's there I'm seeing a problem. Most people don't want to play a posse to start with. And most people couldn't give a damn that there's a posse somewhere, when they're still getting their open instance event ruined by a jackass. That someone will then go and play cops-and-robbers with the jackass doesn't really do anything for them.
Exactly, that is 100% the problem. The problem in creating a game which makes both griefers and non-pvp players happy is that any "incentive" for the non-pvp players to willingly go hunt down the griefer simply does not exist. Because hunting down the griefer would involve something the non-pvp players by definition do not want to do: pvp. If I log on and look forward to partying with my friends and xping in the dungeon of ultimate doom, I do not want to interrupt that to go hunt down some griefer for an hour. Not even if I get some reward for it. Simply because that is not what I wanted to do that evening. Even with some incentive for killing that bastard, he STILL managed to impose his way of playing the game onto me and forced me to do something I did not want to do. And if that happens too often, the non-pvp players will not find the game entertaining anymore and leave, causing the griefer to leave, too (because there are not enough victims anymore). That's why most western MMO with completely open pvp either fail or stay at low subscriber numbers. Not because the designers suck and cannot find a good system of making pvp players and non-pvp players both happy, but because it is not possible.
Also, there seems to be a problem with western gamers mentality. If you CAN do something (e.g. stand outside a newbie town with your uber char and simply kill anybody for hours who wants to go kill his lvl 1 mobs), someone WILL do it. You would not find something like that on e.g. Korean servers.
To those above who commented that "games with open pvp are a success in Korea" - consider e.g. Lineage 2 - a niche game with completely open pvp here on our western servers, and a huge success with millions of players in Korea. Here on the western servers you will find all kinds of griefers, gankers, whatever type lowlife you look for, you will find it. On the Korean servers, people are helpful, pve together in peace, party up with people from other clans and usually ONLY pvp during announced siege times. This seems to be because most players there play in internet cafes, so you cannot hide behind your online anonymity, and you usually also have others watching your screen over your shoulders, commenting on what you do. That simply works as some kind of "control". If you were to go and grief other players, it would not be unlikely to have your RL name on some messageboard soon afterwards, and somebody might come around to punch you in the face. So it's not that the players in Korea like open pvp more than us western players, it's that in Korea there is some kind of self-control, while around here in Europe/US, players can hide behind their online anonymity - and so the Korean games can get away with pvp rulesets which would lead to endless griefing if they had western players.
Also, the floppy is reusable so while you may not be able to buy new disks, at least you can erase and reuse old ones for some time
Where are you getting these super-high-quality floppies from? The ones I can get generally develop bad sectors within a year or maybe six uses, whichever comes first.
Probably nobody makes quality ones any longer, since there's no money in the things.
So true. The company I work at still orders 3.5" disks from some supplier, because those disks are still needed for some REALLY old machines. It is not unusual to get a fresh box of ten disks, and 4-5 of them fail with bad sectors when being written to the first time. They are just complete crap, but apparently it is hard to find another supplier.
Sometimes it is easier to not use any "complicated" maths. If you need more than 2/3 of the votes to pass, that means that you need more than twice the votes of those who vote against it. You do not even need to do any calculations involving possible rounding errors. Just look at the "no" votes, multiply by 2, and compare to the "yes" votes. Are the "yes" votes more than that? Congratulations, you have more than 2/3 of the votes. No need to even calculated what EXACTLY 2/3 of the votes would be.
In this case: 136 "yes", 70 "no". 136 is less than 140, so the vote does not pass. Done.
...and guess what! I'm almost sure I have had enough of free software.
Not to say that it odes not do its work but because there is no incentive "not to break stuff", read 'continued revenue streams', folks just do as they please and we get hurt.
Heck! Is this the "freedom" you want?
What would you rather have, the software being deactivated, so that you NOTICE something is wrong and are able to fix it, or the software keeping running with update error messages in the logs (which you obviously never read, else you would have noticed the error message which WERE there for months now), and in another couple months your whole company is screwed and data is lost because of some virus/trojan which got through the non-updated virus scanner?
McDonalds also said during discovery that, based on a consultants advice, it held its coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees fahrenheit to maintain optimum taste. He admitted that he had not evaluated the safety ramifications at this temperature. Other establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures, and coffee served at home is generally 135 to 140 degrees.
Interesting. In Germany, insulting somebody is something you can be fined for - not only for insulting police officers, also private persons. Fines vary of course according to circumstances (e.g. your income), but can easily reach several hundreds or thousands of euros. According to some websites I just checked, flipping off a police officer has already cost some people up to 4000 euros.
I do not understand the problem. Why is it "bad" if one of the browsers appears on the far right side instead of the far left side? I know it would not influence my choice, what WOULD influence my choice is if I had heard from friends/colleagues etc about one or more of the browsers before. Whether Firefox is on position 2 or 3 or 4 is totally irrelevant. Maybe they could just present the browser choices in a big circle instead of a horizontal list...
If there actually WERE contrasting theories, maybe. But in most situations, there is only one scientifically supported theory and a bunch of religious beliefs.
Actually, the article says "At CES, the device's battery, which I believe was precharged with Wi-Fi power, was able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% power to full power in about 90 minutes." Note the "which I believe was PRECHARGED" part. So they managed to charge a Blackberry from a pre-charged external battery in 90 minutes. Yay. But they never actually said how long it takes to charge the battery in the Airnergy device via wi-fi signals - probably for a good reason, because that would take probably a couple hundred days or more.
My card is working fine, but my parents had this problem today - both my mother's and my father's card did not work at the ATM with (for them) cryptic error messages, so they had to get money over the counter. What's most annoying about this is that when they got home, they checked their online banking website to see if there were any news there and saw that even though my mom's card got rejected at the ATM, it still showed the 100 euros she wanted to get at the ATM as having been withdrawn, even though she did not receive any cash.
That's the thing. There are so many people asking "how do I do this on Windows", "why does this not work" because all the "computer illiterates" are using Windows. They do not use Linux because they never even HEARD of it. They would ask the exact same things, and probably ten times more often, if they had Linux.
The old windows license agreement told people to "give the CD back for a refund" if they did not want to use Windows, but it seems the new license agreement as quoted above is a bit more detailed and leaves it up to the pc vendor if he wants to accept a return of only the windows license or not. So it might be that the days of buying a cheap (because of mass sales) notebook with Windows and then getting even more money back by returning the windows license might be over, if the vendor decides to only accept a return of the complete system.
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I'd be appalled if anyone found out I used to program in Smalltalk.
I had to program in COBOL at one point. Luckily, I managed to destroy any evidence.
That is beautiful - and yes; of the three (out of four) events that can make you eligible for inclusion in the 900 (boy, then girl; girl, then boy; boy, then boy), two include a girl.
What makes this counterintuitive is that you treat children as unordered, but they're not - in fact, your (boy, girl) case actually mixes (boy, girl) and (girl, boy), which are both equally probable.
Maybe I am confused, but wouldn't then (boy,boy) also include the two cases (boy, boy) and (boy, boy) (i.e. the son which is shown could be the older or the younger child, and the other one also a boy), which are ALSO equally probable? So you have four event: this boy then other boy, other boy then this boy, boy then girl, girl then boy. Two of these caves have a boy as the other child, other two cases have a girl as the other child.
http://www.avm.de/en/Produkte/FRITZBox/FRITZ_Box_Fon_WLAN_7270/index.php
Best piece of electronics I've owned, bar none. Sip telephony, answering machine, nas, print server, fax, dsl modem, dect base station, wireless N 300 mbps with triple antennas, usb port for 3g modem fall back connectivity, vpn server, firewall, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some features here.
Runs linux, and hacker community has extended firmware to run p2p daemon for example.
Yes, the AVM routers are damn nice. If you can live without having a DECT base station, there is also a cheaper version of this router (ca. 100 euro) http://www.avm.de/de/Produkte/FRITZBox/FRITZ_Box_WLAN_3270/index.php - although I can find that one only on the German version of their website. Using the community firmware and some attached USB storage, this is one extremely versatile piece of hardware.
From TFA: One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to "tweets" or "tweeting.”
"tweet" is simply not yet well-known enough. It is a term only a specific group of people knows and uses, those who regularly use Twitter. Would your mother know what the word "tweet" means, apart from the sound a bird makes? Probably not. Would she want to read that word in an article then, not knowing what it means? Probably not. While this might be shocking news to some, Twitter is not yet well-known enough to make it and the weird words surrounding it mainstream knowledge. And that's why any self-respecting journalist should not use the word "tweet" - if your readers are "normal" people, then you should write in such a way that normal people can understand you. On a side note, I know Twitter and use it, and I never used the word "tweet" so far (mainly because I think it sounds stupid when somebody uses it, I just say "I put that on Twitter").
The European way:
Gazoline need for 100 miles:
@10 mpg: 10 gallons
@20 mpg: 5 gallons... saved: 5 gallons, 50%
@33 mpg: 3 gallons .... saved: 1 gallon, 33%
@50 mpg: 2 gallons
kinda more intuitive.
The American Way:
Going from 10 mpg to 20 mpg is exactly double the mileage.
Going from 33 to 50 is LESS than double (double would be 66).
Consider an example of going from 10mpg to 20mpg vs. going from 20mpg to 50mpg then, and the "American Way" ("hey, 20 to 50 mpg is MORE THAN DOUBLE!") would give you the wrong answer :-)
10 to 20 mpg saves 5 gallons over 100 miles
20 to 50 mpg saves 3 gallons over 100 miles
It is really sad that people in the US do not like diesel cars. Where they use their big SUV because they need space for kids and stuff, we here e.g. in Germany use stuff like the Touran ( http://www.volkswagen.de/vwcms/master_public/virtualmaster/de3/modelle/touran.html ) which has more than enough space for a family with 3 kids AND all the stuff they want to lug around for a holiday. And it is available with the same engines as a Golf, e.g. a 170hp TDI or a 105hp TDI Bluemotion, so it gets similar fuel economy (e.g. 6.6l / 100km for the 170hp diesel). I have looked at the US Volkswagen website, and it seems they have the "Routan", which looks like the Touran, but they only offer big fat petrol engines with 18-20 mpg. Sad. And silly. The 3.8l/197hp engine they offer on the US Volkswagen page makes the car go from 0 to 60 in 10.2s, while the German 2l/170hp diesel makes the German Touran go from 0 to 100km/h in 9.0s.
Pretty much the same in Germany: http://www.t-mobile.de/iphone/tarife/0,18383,22271-_,00.html
I pay 45 euro per month for my 3GS with unlimited data (yes, there is a throttling after a couple hundred MB/month, but that is completely irrelevant for web/mail etc.), unlimited phone calls and free use of their hotspots. No tethering allowed though.
As someone who is going through caffeine withdrawal right now (notice that I don't use quotation marks because it's real), I have a really simple answer.
My splitting headache and lethargy are due to the the fact that I consume at least two pots of coffee a day until yesterday. If you've never heard of anyone getting caffeine withdrawal outside the US, then you've never met anyone who has consumed enough coffee on a regular basis to become addicted.
Yes, caffeine withdrawal definitely is real. I notice it myself when I take a few days off from work. At work, I drink a LOT of coffee, but when I am at home, sleep in, do some house work, go shopping etc. and then it's early afternoon without me having had the usual few cups of coffee yet, I usually notice a headache coming up. Then I get myself a nice cup of coffee, and everything is OK again.
The explanation for the withdrawal symptoms that I have read about sound convincing. Caffeine is an antagonist for adenosine, and the body reacts to an increase in the caffeine intake by producing more adenosine receptors (to "even out" the caffeine effect, i.e. to get back to normal). So when you stop drinking coffee, there is too much of an adenosine effect. And since adenosine has an effect on blood pressure, this causes a headache.
Back in the good old days of the Commodore 64, I loved those long single player games, like the Ultima series, Bard's Tale, the AD&D stuff like pool of radiance or whatever. You had the "quick and fun" stuff you could play together with friends who came over to your place (shooters etc.), and when you were alone, you could pop in the Ultima 3 or 4 disk and cartograph out the latest dungeon all night long. I spent weeks on those RPG, exchanging maps of dungeons, location of npc and other info with my friends at school. But now when I have REALLY time to play at the computer, I log on to my MMORPG and play there. When I just have a little bit of time to play a single player game, I want one which I can start, play for five minutes and then quit again. Yes, I enjoyed the Baldur's Gate series a lot, but that was before I started playing MMORPG. These days, I would not start a game like that anymore, because playing online with friends definitely beats playing alone for hours. So for me it's not that I want "simpler" games because long games are too difficult etc., the problem is more that when I really have time to play, I want to spend that time playing with online friends and not alone.
Then they have to provide a computer so that you can do that.
Oh, that griefers want to be famous badasses isn't what I'm disputing. What I'm saying is that for the badass-vs-posse scenario you've proposed, someone has to play the posse. And it's there I'm seeing a problem. Most people don't want to play a posse to start with. And most people couldn't give a damn that there's a posse somewhere, when they're still getting their open instance event ruined by a jackass. That someone will then go and play cops-and-robbers with the jackass doesn't really do anything for them.
Exactly, that is 100% the problem. The problem in creating a game which makes both griefers and non-pvp players happy is that any "incentive" for the non-pvp players to willingly go hunt down the griefer simply does not exist. Because hunting down the griefer would involve something the non-pvp players by definition do not want to do: pvp. If I log on and look forward to partying with my friends and xping in the dungeon of ultimate doom, I do not want to interrupt that to go hunt down some griefer for an hour. Not even if I get some reward for it. Simply because that is not what I wanted to do that evening. Even with some incentive for killing that bastard, he STILL managed to impose his way of playing the game onto me and forced me to do something I did not want to do. And if that happens too often, the non-pvp players will not find the game entertaining anymore and leave, causing the griefer to leave, too (because there are not enough victims anymore). That's why most western MMO with completely open pvp either fail or stay at low subscriber numbers. Not because the designers suck and cannot find a good system of making pvp players and non-pvp players both happy, but because it is not possible.
Also, there seems to be a problem with western gamers mentality. If you CAN do something (e.g. stand outside a newbie town with your uber char and simply kill anybody for hours who wants to go kill his lvl 1 mobs), someone WILL do it. You would not find something like that on e.g. Korean servers.
To those above who commented that "games with open pvp are a success in Korea" - consider e.g. Lineage 2 - a niche game with completely open pvp here on our western servers, and a huge success with millions of players in Korea. Here on the western servers you will find all kinds of griefers, gankers, whatever type lowlife you look for, you will find it. On the Korean servers, people are helpful, pve together in peace, party up with people from other clans and usually ONLY pvp during announced siege times. This seems to be because most players there play in internet cafes, so you cannot hide behind your online anonymity, and you usually also have others watching your screen over your shoulders, commenting on what you do. That simply works as some kind of "control". If you were to go and grief other players, it would not be unlikely to have your RL name on some messageboard soon afterwards, and somebody might come around to punch you in the face. So it's not that the players in Korea like open pvp more than us western players, it's that in Korea there is some kind of self-control, while around here in Europe/US, players can hide behind their online anonymity - and so the Korean games can get away with pvp rulesets which would lead to endless griefing if they had western players.
Also, the floppy is reusable so while you may not be able to buy new disks, at least you can erase and reuse old ones for some time
Where are you getting these super-high-quality floppies from? The ones I can get generally develop bad sectors within a year or maybe six uses, whichever comes first.
Probably nobody makes quality ones any longer, since there's no money in the things.
So true. The company I work at still orders 3.5" disks from some supplier, because those disks are still needed for some REALLY old machines. It is not unusual to get a fresh box of ten disks, and 4-5 of them fail with bad sectors when being written to the first time. They are just complete crap, but apparently it is hard to find another supplier.
Sometimes it is easier to not use any "complicated" maths. If you need more than 2/3 of the votes to pass, that means that you need more than twice the votes of those who vote against it. You do not even need to do any calculations involving possible rounding errors. Just look at the "no" votes, multiply by 2, and compare to the "yes" votes. Are the "yes" votes more than that? Congratulations, you have more than 2/3 of the votes. No need to even calculated what EXACTLY 2/3 of the votes would be.
In this case: 136 "yes", 70 "no". 136 is less than 140, so the vote does not pass. Done.
...and guess what! I'm almost sure I have had enough of free software.
Not to say that it odes not do its work but because there is no incentive "not to break stuff", read 'continued revenue streams', folks just do as they please and we get hurt.
Heck! Is this the "freedom" you want?
What would you rather have, the software being deactivated, so that you NOTICE something is wrong and are able to fix it, or the software keeping running with update error messages in the logs (which you obviously never read, else you would have noticed the error message which WERE there for months now), and in another couple months your whole company is screwed and data is lost because of some virus/trojan which got through the non-updated virus scanner?
You mean this http://collateralmurder.com/en/resources.html rocket launcher marked "Canon"?
Read the summary on the wikileaks page. And welcome to the real world, where most mass media willingly participates in coverups.
McDonalds also said during discovery that, based on a consultants advice, it held its coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees fahrenheit to maintain optimum taste. He admitted that he had not evaluated the safety ramifications at this temperature. Other establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures, and coffee served at home is generally 135 to 140 degrees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee#Preparation
The ideal holding temperature is 79 to 85 C (174 to 185 F) and the ideal serving temperature is 68 to 79 C (154 to 174 F).
Don't think McD can be blamed for serving coffee of the RECOMMENDED temperature. It needs to be that hot, or it does not taste good.
Interesting. In Germany, insulting somebody is something you can be fined for - not only for insulting police officers, also private persons. Fines vary of course according to circumstances (e.g. your income), but can easily reach several hundreds or thousands of euros. According to some websites I just checked, flipping off a police officer has already cost some people up to 4000 euros.
I do not understand the problem. Why is it "bad" if one of the browsers appears on the far right side instead of the far left side? I know it would not influence my choice, what WOULD influence my choice is if I had heard from friends/colleagues etc about one or more of the browsers before. Whether Firefox is on position 2 or 3 or 4 is totally irrelevant. Maybe they could just present the browser choices in a big circle instead of a horizontal list ...
The right to bear arms? Bring in the bears, I'll take five arms please!
If there actually WERE contrasting theories, maybe. But in most situations, there is only one scientifically supported theory and a bunch of religious beliefs.
Actually, the article says "At CES, the device's battery, which I believe was precharged with Wi-Fi power, was able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% power to full power in about 90 minutes." Note the "which I believe was PRECHARGED" part. So they managed to charge a Blackberry from a pre-charged external battery in 90 minutes. Yay. But they never actually said how long it takes to charge the battery in the Airnergy device via wi-fi signals - probably for a good reason, because that would take probably a couple hundred days or more.
My card is working fine, but my parents had this problem today - both my mother's and my father's card did not work at the ATM with (for them) cryptic error messages, so they had to get money over the counter. What's most annoying about this is that when they got home, they checked their online banking website to see if there were any news there and saw that even though my mom's card got rejected at the ATM, it still showed the 100 euros she wanted to get at the ATM as having been withdrawn, even though she did not receive any cash.
That's the thing. There are so many people asking "how do I do this on Windows", "why does this not work" because all the "computer illiterates" are using Windows. They do not use Linux because they never even HEARD of it. They would ask the exact same things, and probably ten times more often, if they had Linux.
The old windows license agreement told people to "give the CD back for a refund" if they did not want to use Windows, but it seems the new license agreement as quoted above is a bit more detailed and leaves it up to the pc vendor if he wants to accept a return of only the windows license or not. So it might be that the days of buying a cheap (because of mass sales) notebook with Windows and then getting even more money back by returning the windows license might be over, if the vendor decides to only accept a return of the complete system.