Sadly, it's basically the next form of spam.... It will be a shame to see message boards and blogs, etc, filled with this kind of crap (blogs are already targeted by spammers).
It always puzzled me why/. never seems to get as much spam as other message boards that allow anonymous cowards. Was this ever a problem, and how was it solved?
Send a single photon towards the slits, record which slit it passes through, and then cover up the slit that it passed through so that there is now only one slit.
Ah, but that's when the weirdness of Quantum Mechanics kicks in. You see, if you put a detector to determine which slit the photon (or electon, which has been done) passed through, then the interference pattern disapears! You end up with a distribution that agrees with classical statistics without quantum effects. This is explained in detail in the last chapter of Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces and the first chapter of volume three of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Both are good books (the former requires basic algebra, the latter needs vector calculus) and I highly recommend both.
The reason being that even with single photons you get the same pattern on the wall.
Well, That's not completely correct. You only get the same pattern on the wall if you plot the statistical distribution for the photons. Although SINGLE photon won't make an interesting interference pattern, the probability of where the photon hits follows that pattern (thus a statistical record of many photons will produce the image).
I'm just preemptively clairifying this point, since this confused me years ago when I first learned about the experiment.:-)
Thanks. My field of expertise is not economics. (Although sometime I pretend it is.):-) I just thought it was interesting that an anomalous amount of trading occurred right before the peak, and I wondered what it meant.
Here's something I don't get. SCO's one year stock chart show the highest rate of daily trading right before its slip downward. Why is that? Are those smart investors or shady insider traders?
Capitalism is based on the notion that the value of all goods can be measured monetarily
Is this premise valid in the real world? Warning: I'm going to restate the obvious in the response. Sorry.
Certainly, societies with economic systems based on simple barter (for instance, a farmer and blacksmith trading food for tools) still follow capitalistic principles. The traded goods represent value for each person. Now the perceived value may be different for each person involved in the trade, but overall (of the society) the value follows capitalistic models.
The idea behind money, on the other hand, is based on the notion that the value of those goods can be quantified by a standard measure. And that the measure can be stored and exchanged at a different time. For instance, the farmer can sell food to any person in exchange for an IOU for something with the price of the food (measured value of the food). Then later he gives that IOU to the blacksmith in exchange for tools. Then the blacksmith cashes in on the IOU for something else (the third party has to produce something of value to barter, after all). This is more efficient than simple barter.
However, some things can't be exchanged this way. Like you stated, reputation in one person's eyes (AKA prestige) must be "bartered" by the other person's actions by definition (actions with that person's value for a good reputation). It's still capitalistic, but trade is just not based on monetary compensation. However, the behavior of society as a whole can still be modeled with capitalistic theories.
Don't bother with email. These guys get slashdotted every day (imagine a half million people knowing your email address), so the sad fact is that nobody on the hill reads email.
I'm a little skeptical of this statement. I occasionally email my Senator and have received a personalized response via postal mail every time. The relevant bills were referenced in those replies and the Senator signed each one. Although there is room for a little bit of suspicion (a staff member may have ghostwritten them), the senator must have read my letter and the reply since he signed it, right?
That's actually a good point. However, it still means that the LASER was worth developing. If reflective strips can be developed to protect against attack by this weapon, then - to account for the extra weight - those rockets must (in addition to the cost of those reflectors):
Reduce the size of the payload. This means that a smaller bomb must be used.
Increase the power of the rocket. Then the rocket is more expensive and harder to deploy.
Be maintained better in the theater of operations, or the reflective surfaces could degrade
In all these cases it becomes more expensive (per weight and hence destructive ability) to wage war. That's a good thing, as it lessens the chance of it.
I nearly killed myself too; however, my motives were different. I felt that all I ever did was harmful to others, and I was too bad a person to ever do anything worthwhile. So I tried to take my own life out of shame and to spare my friends and family from my existance. I didn't realize that they didn't see me that way, and killing myself would just hurt them.
Nobody realizes just how hard it is to get help - I just wanted to get away from everyone (and that was exactly the wrong thing to do). I also had - sometimes still have - some of the same symptoms as you did such as trouble waking up. (Did you know that difficulty sleeping is often a sign of a lack of serotonin in the brain. That's thought to be one of the causes of depression. It's also a result of Extacy use - one reason I can't understand why people willingly take it.) Depression is a very bad disease.
Re:What in God's name...?
on
Core CSS (2nd ed.)
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I can't imagine a serious book on CSS talking about IE CSS extensions.
Why not? It is important to know what extensions are aviable for the major HTML engines (Opera, Gecko, KHTML, Tasman, and Trident) for several reasons. If you're writing software specific for a particular web browser, then it becomes extremely important to know about such engines. Or when most browsers support part of the standard, and a simple hack can add the other one to the list. Or when you're writing software to add some CSS support to IE (like Dean Edwards does in IE7). When is a little more knowledge ever a bad thing?
The only solution is to be more efficient, not to try and generate more power.
On this point I agree with you in spirit, but have to point out that it will simply never work. Google for "The Tragedy of the Commons" if you want to know why. Simply put, any person/organization which tries to consume less energy puts himself at a competitive disadvantage. It sucks, but it's the way economics work.
I am aware of the tragedy of the commons, but your application doesn't make sense. Any person that consumes less resources with the same productivity than his or her competitors is at an advantage with less costs. That is what being more efficient means: doing more or the same with less resources. The premise of the tragedy only applies when individuals become less efficient compared to their competitors from helping the common good. So I reiterate: It is cheaper for individuals to be more efficient, because that is the definition of efficiency!
Indeed, that used to be the standard practice of scientists and mathematicians. Niccolo Tartaglia for example tried to keep secret an algorithm for determining cubic roots. Fortunately, his work was leaked to the world by Girolamo Cardano and eventually lead to the understanding of complex numbers. (Interesting factoid: Cardano was the illegitimate son of another mathematician, and his mother tried to abort him.) In another strange case, Robert Hook published his famous theory as a Latin Cryptogram: CEIIINOSSSTTUV! What kind of sick mind would think of that!:-) He determined the relationship that describes the behavior of simple harmonic oscillators.
Wouldn't all the complaints about the rich being taxed go away if we instituted a VAT or national sales tax instead?
It is much much harder to implement such a sales tax, and there are lots of potential problems. For instance, it would drive inflation through the roof (higher prices on everything would make small price increases less noticable by consumers, and thus more stable). They are also harder to enforce than income tax - people selling stuff unofficially (like selling something to a friend at a reduced price) or "under the counter". They are less equitable too, because it makes the cost of products a higher percentage of income for the poor compared to the rich without complicated rebate schemes (which have problems of their own, see below). In general, sales taxes are good for adjusting the cost of a product to account for externalities (for instance, gas taxes can add enviromental damage and road upkeep costs), but they suck at funding unrelated services.
Hell, provide a way for people to get back the first X thousand they pay in sales tax (to help out the poor).
How do you implement that? Most people don't keep their receipts to determine if they qualify for such rebates. There is also the risk of an invasion of privacy. It is also complicated - the middle class certainly can't afford the same taxes as the very wealthy.
Then when the rich guy goes out to buy his multi-million dollar yacht, there's no way for him to hide his income.
Most millionares don't hide their income. What are you talking about?
Wow, we had almost the same introductory sentences. Neat!:-)
You can't tax wealth you already have, just wealth that you will later accumulate.
What about property tax?
we have absolutely no right to tax anyone: income is not meant to be dispersed but earned.
The government was granted the right to tax income by an ammendment to the Constitution. You don't have an inalienable right of no income tax after all! I view income tax as a fee from the government for providing services (protection, stability, insurance, etcetera). If I disagree with my current government's tax policy too much, then all I really have to do is "shop for another one" (i.e. move to a different country or set up my own like that Aussie fellow did).
Who cares if the poor make 15k a year now instead of 2 or 3k, when the wage of the wealthy is increasing 10x, 100x, or even 1000x times.
Who cares what the wealthy make! What's important is the wealth of the poor relative to their cost of living. Remember that although a wide gulf between the richest and poorest is usually a property of widespread poverty, it certainly can occur for prosperous societies as well. The important problem is how to reduce the burden on the poor, not increase the burden of the rich.
Re:Thanks, unions, government, and greedy employee
on
Train Your Own Replacement
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree with some of your points. However, this doesn't make much sense:
The poor have been getting steadly richer, and the rich have been getting richer as well.
What do you mean by richer? Richer as weighted by the cost of living? Or as weighted by inflation? Or in absolute terms? Or relative to the most probable income? The distinction is very important as some imply a more equitable situation than others.
I'm a new Linux user too (since November 2003), and Fedora Core worked well for me. Granted there are a few useful packages missing from a the distribution; however, I found the missing ones easy it aquire and painless to install. (Of couse, I practiced installing Fedora before permamently adding it to my hard drive. So I may have glanced over bugs that caused you trouble.)
Furthermore I haven't had many hardware problems with it. My MS Intellimouse and keyboard both work really well on the USB port. In fact, they're daisy-chained via a hub built into the keyboard (reminds me of my old Apple ][ computer). All in all, only my modem gave me lots of trouble - but I bought an external modem for only $20.
I don't understand how everyone's experiences can be so different from mine.
And until Linux has native support for some of the consumer technologies that make the iPod so cool (i.e., DirectX) what is the point of installing Linux on it?
What does the Apple iPod have to do with Microsoft DirectX?
Unfortately, it's that "You've gotta type a command to do that!" mentality that keeps average desktop users away.
I agree in general, but a command line interface is better than a GUI for several situations. From the perspective of a programmer or administrator, programs with a CLI are generally more understood (i.e. what makes a good CLI vs. a bad one) and easier to automate (i.e. scripting) than programs with only a GUI.
CLI can also help users to make less dangerous changes to their computer. System administration for example should only be performed with caution and complete understanding. However many windows programs have an extremely easy UI for changing settings. Careless users can make disastrous changes with impunity! On the other hand, the perceived difficulty of a CLI often forces a user to review the documentation, plan out and practice their actions before attempting any configuration changes. The hard things should be a little hard to do.
Finally, I have found BASH and the rest of the GNU utilities to be more powerful yet also easier to use than their MS Windows CLI counterparts (with the exception of an easy text editor, of course:-) ). If your experience is only with the command prompt from Microsoft, then you're missing out on a lot. Try BASH for a few weeks, and you'll understand.
FYI, SuSE produces Knoppix-like bootable CD called "SUSE LINUX for i386 Live-Eval". I revieved a copy via a magazine. It is kinda slow and not the best for using from the CD-ROM, but it provides a good intro and demo of SuSE Linux without having to install it to your hard drive.
Notes: I recommend that you try it if you have enough memory - 256MB isn't enough,but 512MB or 768MB should work well (since it has to be loaded into RAM with no HDD install). I perfer FedoraCore 1, but my advice should give you an easy way to try SuSE.
You have the wrong approach toward learning Linux
on
The Paradox of Choice
·
· Score: 1
But the thing is that with Linux, you can always back out to Windows, which in this day and age, is just a fine choice. So if I'm gonna install Linux, then be presented with 13 web browsers, 3 desktops, and 5 office suites, I'm much more likely to throw up my hands and say "fuck it" and re-install windows, then to try to deciper everything in Linux.
I think you had the wrong approach when learning Linux. I just recently switched almost exclusively from Windows to FedoraCore 1, and it isn't that bad! You simply can't expect to learn how to do things the "UNIX" way in a day or two. It's just different enough from MS Windows to be confusing.
In contrast to a "cold-turkey" approach, I viewed my transition as learning a new skill. I read the first three or so chapters of few books, magazines, and TLDP tutorials before even installing the operating system. That way, I had a pretty good overview of the big picture. Things like the command line, shell scripts, and configuration.files weren't unexpected or scary. (Note: that dot is not a typo.) I knew about the limitations in hardware support by googling in advance for the documentation and user experiences. Thus many of the nuances and differences - like the unusual clipboard behavior - wasn't unexpected and allowed me to determine a fix or solution in advance. I understood Linux's inability to reliably write to NTFS partitions and planned my partitions accordingly. Then I partitioned, installed, and tried to break Fedora Core. I tried corrupting configuration.files and databases. I tried manually changing settings and installing hardware. I attempted uninstalling and reinstalling software. I played with dangerous uses of the root account and command-line tools (dd, rm, fdisk, etc...). I tried mixing parts of different desktop environments. I tested examples from my books and notes. In essence, I learned Linux before switching.
Granted there were a lot of things to learn, but I planned on a long transition period. The process never ends, but in about two months I learned a heck of a lot. At least it was enough to understand both the big picture and also the little details needed to accomplish routine tasks. Proper preparation was worth it too: I previously tried changing "cold-turkey" to Linux (over a year ago) and gave up after only two days!
There's a point to my previous three paragraphs other than to document another Linux switcher's success story. Instead of a confusing array of options, I looked at the 13 web browsers, 5 desktop, 3 office suits, 30 text editors and 101 dalmatians as a chance to evaluate my preferences with this new approach. There was time to try out each one and get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses. I previously had no preferences by definition - being new to Linux. This helped me settle in with Fedora Core and enjoy its benefits compared to MS Windows rather than be annoyed by its differences.
You know, I agree with your premise, but your arguments are just as good as Microsoft's - that is, they aren't well formed! Your first mistake is to state counter-arguments as facts. They don't have to be true to be facts. A fact simply exists irregardless of its validity to the real world. A better label should use "Counter" instead. Here are a few better counter arguments.
License cost is a significant part of the cost at $369-479 per PC (per CDW.com) for MS-Office 2003 Standard/Professional.
It's significant compared to what? If the TCO is about $10.K +/- 20% then those prices aren't very significant by definition! Better counter arguments to Microsoft's talking points for TOC arguments (point #1 in their brochure) include:
The installation and deployment of OO.org can be significantly less costly than MS Office. OO.org integrates less into a 'fresh' computer's underlying OS, and thus there is less risk of third-party software breaking from differences with the new libraries and settings.
(Both MS's and my arguments assume upgrades of another suite.) Data testing with new versions MS Office is the same with OO.org. By definition, most users use the basic features; therefore, most incompatibility possibilities are clustered around those features. Experience has shown that OO.org has very good compatibility with MS Office for those features. This implies - but does not prove - that in general data testing costs are similar for upgrades from an existing office suite to OO.org or MS Office. Data migration costs depend of the results of these tests and cannot be easily predicted. (This counter argument does not take into account MS Access, which is not in the scope of OO.org's goals.)
Macros are generally the source of most security vulnerabilities in MS products, so most environments are encouraged not to use them. For situations where Macros are necessary, computer systems are generally locked down from (or have severely limited) most features, and software upgrades are not performed for many years - occasionally decades. For these situations, an extreme amount of time is required for testing. This means there is a large (time) window for macro evaluation and development, which lowers the relative cost of this migration. (i.e. The old proverb: chose two of speed, quality, and price; a long development cycle can allow lower price and higher quality software.)
Your counter arguments are good wrt retraining costs. Furthermore, every version of MS Office since 2000 has included many new features and a more radical UI changes than previous versions. Although I find some of these to be worthwhile improvements, they require lots of retraining. All in all, both suites have similar and intuitive interfaces; the only major deficiencies with OO.org's default UI are the ugly icons (and these are changed in many distributions).
There are no software keys or other serial numbers to deal with in Open Office....
You are correct; however, it is a good idea to keep track of OO.org installations for legal, support, and upgrade purposes. Furthermore, individual distributions from other companies may have "serial numbers" for support and tracking purposes.
Of course, I can pay Microsoft for support if I really need it. After spending $125 I usually have to wait on hold for over an hour to speak with someone with an accent so bad that I have to get everything spelled to understand the answer.
According to SUN, support costs per incident - after 60 days free support - are $20 via email and $25 via phone. According to Microsoft, professional support costs per incident - after installation the first two problems, which are free - for Office Professional 2003 are $99 for email and $245 via phone. Personal support is available for $35 per incident. That is all that needs to be said.
Slashdot Mirror
CSS-only menus can now work in IE (demo only) thanks to a hack. IE is actually pretty extendable, but you're right that MS should have implemented better support for modern standards.
It always puzzled me why /. never seems to get as much spam as other message boards that allow anonymous cowards. Was this ever a problem, and how was it solved?
Ah, but that's when the weirdness of Quantum Mechanics kicks in. You see, if you put a detector to determine which slit the photon (or electon, which has been done) passed through, then the interference pattern disapears! You end up with a distribution that agrees with classical statistics without quantum effects. This is explained in detail in the last chapter of Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces and the first chapter of volume three of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Both are good books (the former requires basic algebra, the latter needs vector calculus) and I highly recommend both.
Well, That's not completely correct. You only get the same pattern on the wall if you plot the statistical distribution for the photons. Although SINGLE photon won't make an interesting interference pattern, the probability of where the photon hits follows that pattern (thus a statistical record of many photons will produce the image).
I'm just preemptively clairifying this point, since this confused me years ago when I first learned about the experiment. :-)
Thanks. My field of expertise is not economics. (Although sometime I pretend it is.) :-) I just thought it was interesting that an anomalous amount of trading occurred right before the peak, and I wondered what it meant.
Here's something I don't get. SCO's one year stock chart show the highest rate of daily trading right before its slip downward. Why is that? Are those smart investors or shady insider traders?
Is this premise valid in the real world? Warning: I'm going to restate the obvious in the response. Sorry.
Certainly, societies with economic systems based on simple barter (for instance, a farmer and blacksmith trading food for tools) still follow capitalistic principles. The traded goods represent value for each person. Now the perceived value may be different for each person involved in the trade, but overall (of the society) the value follows capitalistic models.
The idea behind money, on the other hand, is based on the notion that the value of those goods can be quantified by a standard measure. And that the measure can be stored and exchanged at a different time. For instance, the farmer can sell food to any person in exchange for an IOU for something with the price of the food (measured value of the food). Then later he gives that IOU to the blacksmith in exchange for tools. Then the blacksmith cashes in on the IOU for something else (the third party has to produce something of value to barter, after all). This is more efficient than simple barter.
However, some things can't be exchanged this way. Like you stated, reputation in one person's eyes (AKA prestige) must be "bartered" by the other person's actions by definition (actions with that person's value for a good reputation). It's still capitalistic, but trade is just not based on monetary compensation. However, the behavior of society as a whole can still be modeled with capitalistic theories.
I'm a little skeptical of this statement. I occasionally email my Senator and have received a personalized response via postal mail every time. The relevant bills were referenced in those replies and the Senator signed each one. Although there is room for a little bit of suspicion (a staff member may have ghostwritten them), the senator must have read my letter and the reply since he signed it, right?
That's actually a good point. However, it still means that the LASER was worth developing. If reflective strips can be developed to protect against attack by this weapon, then - to account for the extra weight - those rockets must (in addition to the cost of those reflectors):
In all these cases it becomes more expensive (per weight and hence destructive ability) to wage war. That's a good thing, as it lessens the chance of it.
What a waste of a perfectly good drink coster. ;-)
I nearly killed myself too; however, my motives were different. I felt that all I ever did was harmful to others, and I was too bad a person to ever do anything worthwhile. So I tried to take my own life out of shame and to spare my friends and family from my existance. I didn't realize that they didn't see me that way, and killing myself would just hurt them.
Nobody realizes just how hard it is to get help - I just wanted to get away from everyone (and that was exactly the wrong thing to do). I also had - sometimes still have - some of the same symptoms as you did such as trouble waking up. (Did you know that difficulty sleeping is often a sign of a lack of serotonin in the brain. That's thought to be one of the causes of depression. It's also a result of Extacy use - one reason I can't understand why people willingly take it.) Depression is a very bad disease.
Why not? It is important to know what extensions are aviable for the major HTML engines (Opera, Gecko, KHTML, Tasman, and Trident) for several reasons. If you're writing software specific for a particular web browser, then it becomes extremely important to know about such engines. Or when most browsers support part of the standard, and a simple hack can add the other one to the list. Or when you're writing software to add some CSS support to IE (like Dean Edwards does in IE7). When is a little more knowledge ever a bad thing?
I am aware of the tragedy of the commons, but your application doesn't make sense. Any person that consumes less resources with the same productivity than his or her competitors is at an advantage with less costs. That is what being more efficient means: doing more or the same with less resources. The premise of the tragedy only applies when individuals become less efficient compared to their competitors from helping the common good. So I reiterate: It is cheaper for individuals to be more efficient, because that is the definition of efficiency!
Indeed, that used to be the standard practice of scientists and mathematicians. Niccolo Tartaglia for example tried to keep secret an algorithm for determining cubic roots. Fortunately, his work was leaked to the world by Girolamo Cardano and eventually lead to the understanding of complex numbers. (Interesting factoid: Cardano was the illegitimate son of another mathematician, and his mother tried to abort him.) In another strange case, Robert Hook published his famous theory as a Latin Cryptogram: CEIIINOSSSTTUV! What kind of sick mind would think of that! :-) He determined the relationship that describes the behavior of simple harmonic oscillators.
It is much much harder to implement such a sales tax, and there are lots of potential problems. For instance, it would drive inflation through the roof (higher prices on everything would make small price increases less noticable by consumers, and thus more stable). They are also harder to enforce than income tax - people selling stuff unofficially (like selling something to a friend at a reduced price) or "under the counter". They are less equitable too, because it makes the cost of products a higher percentage of income for the poor compared to the rich without complicated rebate schemes (which have problems of their own, see below). In general, sales taxes are good for adjusting the cost of a product to account for externalities (for instance, gas taxes can add enviromental damage and road upkeep costs), but they suck at funding unrelated services.
How do you implement that? Most people don't keep their receipts to determine if they qualify for such rebates. There is also the risk of an invasion of privacy. It is also complicated - the middle class certainly can't afford the same taxes as the very wealthy.
Most millionares don't hide their income. What are you talking about?
Wow, we had almost the same introductory sentences. Neat! :-)
What about property tax?
The government was granted the right to tax income by an ammendment to the Constitution. You don't have an inalienable right of no income tax after all! I view income tax as a fee from the government for providing services (protection, stability, insurance, etcetera). If I disagree with my current government's tax policy too much, then all I really have to do is "shop for another one" (i.e. move to a different country or set up my own like that Aussie fellow did).
Who cares what the wealthy make! What's important is the wealth of the poor relative to their cost of living. Remember that although a wide gulf between the richest and poorest is usually a property of widespread poverty, it certainly can occur for prosperous societies as well. The important problem is how to reduce the burden on the poor, not increase the burden of the rich.
I agree with some of your points. However, this doesn't make much sense:
What do you mean by richer? Richer as weighted by the cost of living? Or as weighted by inflation? Or in absolute terms? Or relative to the most probable income? The distinction is very important as some imply a more equitable situation than others.
I'm a new Linux user too (since November 2003), and Fedora Core worked well for me. Granted there are a few useful packages missing from a the distribution; however, I found the missing ones easy it aquire and painless to install. (Of couse, I practiced installing Fedora before permamently adding it to my hard drive. So I may have glanced over bugs that caused you trouble.)
Furthermore I haven't had many hardware problems with it. My MS Intellimouse and keyboard both work really well on the USB port. In fact, they're daisy-chained via a hub built into the keyboard (reminds me of my old Apple ][ computer). All in all, only my modem gave me lots of trouble - but I bought an external modem for only $20.
I don't understand how everyone's experiences can be so different from mine.
What does the Apple iPod have to do with Microsoft DirectX?
I agree in general, but a command line interface is better than a GUI for several situations. From the perspective of a programmer or administrator, programs with a CLI are generally more understood (i.e. what makes a good CLI vs. a bad one) and easier to automate (i.e. scripting) than programs with only a GUI.
CLI can also help users to make less dangerous changes to their computer. System administration for example should only be performed with caution and complete understanding. However many windows programs have an extremely easy UI for changing settings. Careless users can make disastrous changes with impunity! On the other hand, the perceived difficulty of a CLI often forces a user to review the documentation, plan out and practice their actions before attempting any configuration changes. The hard things should be a little hard to do.
Finally, I have found BASH and the rest of the GNU utilities to be more powerful yet also easier to use than their MS Windows CLI counterparts (with the exception of an easy text editor, of course :-) ). If your experience is only with the command prompt from Microsoft, then you're missing out on a lot. Try BASH for a few weeks, and you'll understand.
Doh! I ment "received" when I wrote "revieved". Sorry about the slip.
FYI, SuSE produces Knoppix-like bootable CD called "SUSE LINUX for i386 Live-Eval". I revieved a copy via a magazine. It is kinda slow and not the best for using from the CD-ROM, but it provides a good intro and demo of SuSE Linux without having to install it to your hard drive.
Notes: I recommend that you try it if you have enough memory - 256MB isn't enough,but 512MB or 768MB should work well (since it has to be loaded into RAM with no HDD install). I perfer Fedora Core 1, but my advice should give you an easy way to try SuSE.
I think you had the wrong approach when learning Linux. I just recently switched almost exclusively from Windows to Fedora Core 1, and it isn't that bad! You simply can't expect to learn how to do things the "UNIX" way in a day or two. It's just different enough from MS Windows to be confusing.
In contrast to a "cold-turkey" approach, I viewed my transition as learning a new skill. I read the first three or so chapters of few books, magazines, and TLDP tutorials before even installing the operating system. That way, I had a pretty good overview of the big picture. Things like the command line, shell scripts, and configuration .files weren't unexpected or scary. (Note: that dot is not a typo.) I knew about the limitations in hardware support by googling in advance for the documentation and user experiences. Thus many of the nuances and differences - like the unusual clipboard behavior - wasn't unexpected and allowed me to determine a fix or solution in advance. I understood Linux's inability to reliably write to NTFS partitions and planned my partitions accordingly. Then I partitioned, installed, and tried to break Fedora Core. I tried corrupting configuration .files and databases. I tried manually changing settings and installing hardware. I attempted uninstalling and reinstalling software. I played with dangerous uses of the root account and command-line tools (dd, rm, fdisk, etc...). I tried mixing parts of different desktop environments. I tested examples from my books and notes. In essence, I learned Linux before switching.
Granted there were a lot of things to learn, but I planned on a long transition period. The process never ends, but in about two months I learned a heck of a lot. At least it was enough to understand both the big picture and also the little details needed to accomplish routine tasks. Proper preparation was worth it too: I previously tried changing "cold-turkey" to Linux (over a year ago) and gave up after only two days!
There's a point to my previous three paragraphs other than to document another Linux switcher's success story. Instead of a confusing array of options, I looked at the 13 web browsers, 5 desktop, 3 office suits, 30 text editors and 101 dalmatians as a chance to evaluate my preferences with this new approach. There was time to try out each one and get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses. I previously had no preferences by definition - being new to Linux. This helped me settle in with Fedora Core and enjoy its benefits compared to MS Windows rather than be annoyed by its differences.
It's all about attitude and approach!
You know, I agree with your premise, but your arguments are just as good as Microsoft's - that is, they aren't well formed! Your first mistake is to state counter-arguments as facts. They don't have to be true to be facts. A fact simply exists irregardless of its validity to the real world. A better label should use "Counter" instead. Here are a few better counter arguments.
It's significant compared to what? If the TCO is about $10.K +/- 20% then those prices aren't very significant by definition! Better counter arguments to Microsoft's talking points for TOC arguments (point #1 in their brochure) include:
You are correct; however, it is a good idea to keep track of OO.org installations for legal, support, and upgrade purposes. Furthermore, individual distributions from other companies may have "serial numbers" for support and tracking purposes.
According to SUN, support costs per incident - after 60 days free support - are $20 via email and $25 via phone. According to Microsoft, professional support costs per incident - after installation the first two problems, which are free - for Office Professional 2003 are $99 for email and $245 via phone. Personal support is available for $35 per incident. That is all that needs to be said.