Horse shit. Add payroll tax to that - both halves - state income tax, state sales tax, local income tax, local sales tax, property tax, and taxes masquerading as fees such as water, sewer, automobile registration, automobile insurance surcharges funneled straight into state coffers, and so on ad nauseum. I'm not much concerned with how high the top federal income tax bracket is. I'm more concerned with the total tax burden on the middle class.
Finally there's the unfairest tax of all - inflation. That's the one you get when the federal gangsters print money to cover their unrealistic runaway budget.
Bullshit. Gold, silver, copper, and aluminum all have approximately the same extremely low electrical resistivity (high electrical conductivity) for all practical purposes. And when you are talking about plating, the distance through which the current has to travel makes the resistance of the plating material completely negligible. Gold plating is on the order of 1/5000 to 1/2000 mm (0.2 to 0.5 microns) thick.
Heck, mercury switches and contacts were used for a long time; less so now for environmental reasons. They work fine, even though mercury has 40 times the resistivity of gold, and the design calls for current to travel through a far greater path length in the mercury.
And nothing is "incorruptible," not even gold or platinum. Current arcing, even minute in degree, can burn gold plated contacts over time. Atoms from the substrate metal can migrate into the gold over time, changing its properties.
But surface condition IS of great importance for contacts, and it is for this reason that gold and platinum are frequently used for this purpose. They have superb corrosion resistance.
Note that platinum and tin are perfectly serviceable as platings on electrical items such as component leads. Their resistivity, which is far higher than gold, is nonetheless so slight as to be entirely negligible.
Fukushima reactor 1 is (oops; was) rated at 460 MW electrical, so it would have produced in excess of 920 MW thermal running full bore. The initial decay heat production after a scram from full-output operation would be 7% of capacity, or 56 MW thermal. That is the equivalent of a raging fire burning some 4.5 tonnes of heating oil per hour. It is not hard at all to visualize such a blazing furnace, with no effective cooling except radiative and convective (with some conduction through the walls of the containment into the supporting structure), boiling away the water in the core and reaching an extreme temperature.
While zirconium has a high melting point, it will oxidize fiercely at lesser but still-high temperature in the presence of steam - i.e., essentially, burn. This reaction, in turn, adds to the heating in a kind of thermal runaway. With the oxygen in the water/steam reacting with the zirconium, the hydrogen is freed as a gas - hence the powerful explosions.
Not that it matters, since the melting has been established, but I don't find it at all surprising that massive melting of the fuel rod contents occurred. I think most of us were pretty sure from the early days of the disaster that very significant melting was occurring.
Bullshit. You fail the mathematics of elementary inverse geometric progression. Nothing magic happens after five half lives. If the half life is 8 days and you wait 45 days, you end up with 1/32 of the starting radioactivity. If it started out at at 16x max "safe" radioactivity, then yeah, after 5 half lives it will be 0.5x max "safe" radioactivity. But if it started out at 1024x, you will still be at 32x. You better wait ten half lives in that case. If it started out at 1,048,576x, you better wait fifteen half lives. On the other hand, if it starts out at 0.5x, guess what; you won't have to wait at all.
There is NO length of time you can wait after which there will be "no" radioactivity. Eventually it will be immeasurable in comparison to background radiation, and after an even longer "eventually" (a very substantial "eventually"), the last particle of an initially finite release of radioactive material will decay, but that doesn't happen magically after five half lives.
It's also a given that the distribution of released radioactive substances or particles, even in a comparatively small area, will never be uniform. There will be hot spots. So it's not at all straightforward to determine "how much" radiation is even "there" at a given point in time.
Now for the fun part. Given the commonly accepted working hypothesis that there IS NO absolutely safe threshold (a hypothesis that has never been disproved), the concept of "safe" gets pretty hard to determine and nebulous. Is the likelihood of 8.7 eventual premature cancer deaths over and above the nominal expected rate per 100,000 population "safe?" How about 1.1? How about 0.1?
Concentration in the food chain also throws elementary half life calculations out the window.,
Five half lives is a completely baseless and useless rule of thumb. Now, if you want to talk about dissipation due to progressive dilution due to physical processes, the situation becomes even more complex, variable, and difficult to predict.
"Shame" is an obsolete word used in long lost times to denote a feeling of having acted dishonorably. Sorry, "dishonorable" is also an obsolete word. It's kind of difficult to define such words which have no relevance to modern life in the post-responsibility industrial-political complex.
How about nVidia ION plus Penryn in 180 x 166 x 61 mm (7.1 x 6.5 x 2.4 in) including 8 GB DDR3, 2.5" HD, and slim optical? Screw that Atom crap and the designs that just can't cool themselves adequately. This has no oddball hardware and runs any distro you can name. Mine idles at 21 W AC input to the power brick. Here you go
Wasn't there a story once about a turtle racing a rabbit?
I don't think that story ended in a way that reinforces your thoughts. In the story, the turtle won. It is the US which is currently the turtle in space. Or maybe the three toed sloth. Or the insignificant amoeba. Not just because of the US' current funk in space exploration and exploitation, but much more fundamentally than that, because the US is history as an economic powerhouse, and could never dedicate the resources necessary.
However, by 2050 China as an economically significant force could well be a distant memory anyway. It could be all about India by then. Or Africa.
Killing a murderous criminal in the act of resisting arrest using deadly force is hardly assassination. Your attempt to draw the parallel is ludicrous. Bin Laden was hardly a political leader. As to your conspiracy leader, you failed to present it a comprehensible manner, so I'll pass on that.
Your humor would go over a lot better if you had the slightest modicum of knowledge of history. Lenin died in 1924. It was Stalin who started the Cold War in 1945. Stalin died in 1953, and yes, the Cold War did not die with him.
The Shah, for all the domestic failings he may or may not have had, oversaw a prosperous, pluralistic nation which was a good international neighbor and not consumed by hatred for scapegoats. Iran did not participate in either the War of Israeli Independence, Sinai War, Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War.
The Ayatollah appealed to the basest instincts and transformed a nation with a rich history into a one dimensional den of hatred and troublemaking.
Before and after, the majority were muslim, but the "after" brand is unrecognizable compared to the "before."
Douglas said what he said. You are trying to torture it illogically. Unlike yours, his logic is very clear. I'll go with Douglas on this and not you, thank you.
Entirely, comprehensively incorrect. In the US, constitutionally protected freedom of speech is not circumscribed by the line marking the limit of what is provably true. It is certainly not punishable to state that the earth and the universe were created in 7 days at around 4000 BC, or deny the same, or that smoking marijuana is a terrible danger to health, or that smoking marijuana is completely harmless. It is not punishable to say that people and governments that criminalize victimless crimes are stupid and should rot in hell. It is not even punishable to say that Governor Goodguy or radio personality Joe Somebody suck and are the doom of the nation, because they are public figures. It is practically impossible to be convicted of libel or slander against a public figure, unless you really make a point of trying to be convicted.
It is NOT protected to knowingly cry "fire" in a crowded theater. The question is whether the published material under discussion is in any way comparable to that.
The right to falsely "shout fire in a crowded theat[er]" principle is upheld in Brandenburg v. Ohio
You are completely misrepresenting the case. In fact you've got it backward, as well as making the most tortured parallel imagininable. Brandenburg v. Ohio was about what constitutes incitement to violence, in this particular case, white supremacy. On appeal to the US Supreme Court, the finding was to overturn the guilty verdict because the government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of violence as it does not rise to the level of imminent danger. In fact, far from your assertion, Justice William O. Douglas' concurrence with the unanimous ruling specifically cites "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic" as the only sort of case where prosecution would be constitutional - i.e., you're dreaming; you better believe you do not have that right.
In brief, it's protected (though evil) to say that Amish people suck and are a dangerous enemy to right-thinking people someday they might get what they deserve, but it's not protected to incite rash action which you know full well will put people in immediate danger and to no purpose.
Or, certainly, that was the situation in 1969, but more recent shenanigans with outlawing "hate speech" may have expanded the set of things that are not OK to say. Certainly not the direction you are going.
Do I think any of this specifically bears on the subject of TFA? No, for a variety of reasons.
Like most other things in life, you get out of an education what you put into it. One thing you undeniably do get with a "higher" education is a golden opportunity to meet some brilliant and stimulating people (professors and fellow students) and to learn from them, not just in the classroom. This can be otherwise difficult to do for many people. On the other hand, while TFA undoubtedly measures "better educated" in terms of degrees achieved, you are right, that is not a very good measure. The internet means that there is little barrier to self education. In my day the barrier was higher, because you had to have access to excellent libraries and the time to avail yourself of them. It was pure luck that I had easy access to the wonderful and comprehensive Boston Public Library, but I still owe a lot to my education at Northeastern University.
In those days you could largely finance a college education with what they called the co-op plan of work-study, and at the same time get your foot in the industry door.
That is a most interesting link. I pretty much agree with Linus on everything. You want formal design, you get hurd. Or rather you DON'T get hurd. Not in our lifetime (mine anyways). You follow Linus' evolving ideas and methodology and you get an excellent working product which evolves better and better.
All I can say about the guy in the basement is, yeah, there are lots of them, and yes, they keep up fine with Linus' ways and the difficulties you mention. I can't explain to you how this all works, because I'm not completely up to understanding it, let alone doing it, but it clearly does work, and I don't see any push whatsoever to fork linux for the purpose of freezing interfaces that do not have to be frozen. I mean, hey, the proof is in the pudding. There aren't many people who would argue Windows on the technical merits is better for servers than linux.
I believe the time is not long when the same will hold true on the desktop and the laptop.
It's not clear to me what fundamental difference APUs will mean, if by APU you mean the integration of the CPU and GPU on the same package or even same die. It's still a CPU and a GPU. OK, the interconnect is different, but there's nothing that says it automatically means the two pieces will be radically different than they are now.
"Your mileage" will always vary. All I can say is that I have to wrestle with linux less than I had to wrestle with Windows back when I actually cared about it and had to use it.
Linux doesn't need the "Find Driver" button (which NEVER ONCE worked for me in XP or Vista), because it already has an unimaginably rich set of drivers included right in the distro. I will readily admit I make my hardware purchase decisions based on what is likely or certain to be supported, in the sense that I always shy away from crappy off-brand network and wireless adapters. If you stick with Intel in those particular areas, you're in good shape. Having said that, I've been forced to violate that rule at times, and results in those cases have been getting steadily better in recent years, not worse.
Why would anyone want to run linux on a laptop? Well, I run linux on my laptop. At first I had it set up to dual boot, but after months of not using the Windows partition I canned it and have never missed it. During the period I had both operating systems set up, I could compare them. Windows (Vista as installed at the factory) was dog slow and buggy (and before you poke fun at Vista, XP was just as bad on other laptops as received). Linux was snappy, remarkably stable, and supported the hardware very well with the exception of the oddball fingerprint reader which was a crappy idea anyway. It is a Lenovo X301 with SSD. If you stay away from Dell crap, 95% of laptops are pretty routine for linux. Even a lot of Dells are fine, but too many of them have oddball crap that is problematic.
I have successfully installed and run various linux distros on a Compaq/HP X1000, an HP2133 mini, a Samsung X460, and the Lenovo, as well as maybe a couple of dozen desktops, including pretty-much-black-box Shuttles and Aopen minis, as well as oddball home-builts, over the last 10 years or so. Things have gotten a lot better over the last several years in terms of video and wireless support. Hardware support is so good currently that it is far better than Windows, where you have to track down drivers for every piece of hardware on your own.
Having said that, my nephew has no trouble at all wiping the OEM Windows off of his laptops, one after the other, and installing his own fresh retail copies of Windows. He claims it performs much better without the bundled crap. I don't have the patience for that myself, and can't divine why anyone would WANT to run Windows, anyway.
I do think you miss the point when you claim that it is a waste of "resources" for linux to go to a lot of work to support a myriad of hardware. The resources you speak of are open source software engineers who are basically in it for the love of the challenge. Most of them are not interested in working on boring apps, anyway, and the non-hardware-related kernel proper has plenty of manpower working on it. The part of the kernel that is not hardware related doesn't even need a lot of manpower. Those are guys with vary special knowledge. The development resources available to linux are basically unlimited. Yes, the software engineers paid by corporations to work on linux make important contributions, including hardware support, but a lot of guys, particularly in hardware support, are independent geniuses on their own time. A lot of pieces of hardware owe their linux support to these individuals donating their time as a sideline because they relish the work, and individually are interested enough in some particular piece of hardware for their own use to figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, because excrement floats to the top.
Horse shit. Add payroll tax to that - both halves - state income tax, state sales tax, local income tax, local sales tax, property tax, and taxes masquerading as fees such as water, sewer, automobile registration, automobile insurance surcharges funneled straight into state coffers, and so on ad nauseum. I'm not much concerned with how high the top federal income tax bracket is. I'm more concerned with the total tax burden on the middle class.
Finally there's the unfairest tax of all - inflation. That's the one you get when the federal gangsters print money to cover their unrealistic runaway budget.
Do you really think that infinitesimal noise is going to flip a bit in a DIGITAL signal like HDMI?
P.S., shitty slashdot wouldn't render the omega symbol for ohms. The above figures are all nano ohm-meters.
Bullshit. Gold, silver, copper, and aluminum all have approximately the same extremely low electrical resistivity (high electrical conductivity) for all practical purposes. And when you are talking about plating, the distance through which the current has to travel makes the resistance of the plating material completely negligible. Gold plating is on the order of 1/5000 to 1/2000 mm (0.2 to 0.5 microns) thick.
Heck, mercury switches and contacts were used for a long time; less so now for environmental reasons. They work fine, even though mercury has 40 times the resistivity of gold, and the design calls for current to travel through a far greater path length in the mercury.
And nothing is "incorruptible," not even gold or platinum. Current arcing, even minute in degree, can burn gold plated contacts over time. Atoms from the substrate metal can migrate into the gold over time, changing its properties.
But surface condition IS of great importance for contacts, and it is for this reason that gold and platinum are frequently used for this purpose. They have superb corrosion resistance.
Electrical resistivity:
Silver 15.87 nm
Copper 16.78 nm
Gold 22.14 nm
Aluminum 28.2 nm
Nickel 69.3 nm
Platinum 105 nm
Tin 115 nm
50-50 tin-lead solder 156.7 nm
Mercury 958 nm
Note that platinum and tin are perfectly serviceable as platings on electrical items such as component leads. Their resistivity, which is far higher than gold, is nonetheless so slight as to be entirely negligible.
Fukushima reactor 1 is (oops; was) rated at 460 MW electrical, so it would have produced in excess of 920 MW thermal running full bore. The initial decay heat production after a scram from full-output operation would be 7% of capacity, or 56 MW thermal. That is the equivalent of a raging fire burning some 4.5 tonnes of heating oil per hour. It is not hard at all to visualize such a blazing furnace, with no effective cooling except radiative and convective (with some conduction through the walls of the containment into the supporting structure), boiling away the water in the core and reaching an extreme temperature.
While zirconium has a high melting point, it will oxidize fiercely at lesser but still-high temperature in the presence of steam - i.e., essentially, burn. This reaction, in turn, adds to the heating in a kind of thermal runaway. With the oxygen in the water/steam reacting with the zirconium, the hydrogen is freed as a gas - hence the powerful explosions.
Not that it matters, since the melting has been established, but I don't find it at all surprising that massive melting of the fuel rod contents occurred. I think most of us were pretty sure from the early days of the disaster that very significant melting was occurring.
Bullshit. You fail the mathematics of elementary inverse geometric progression. Nothing magic happens after five half lives. If the half life is 8 days and you wait 45 days, you end up with 1/32 of the starting radioactivity. If it started out at at 16x max "safe" radioactivity, then yeah, after 5 half lives it will be 0.5x max "safe" radioactivity. But if it started out at 1024x, you will still be at 32x. You better wait ten half lives in that case. If it started out at 1,048,576x, you better wait fifteen half lives. On the other hand, if it starts out at 0.5x, guess what; you won't have to wait at all.
There is NO length of time you can wait after which there will be "no" radioactivity. Eventually it will be immeasurable in comparison to background radiation, and after an even longer "eventually" (a very substantial "eventually"), the last particle of an initially finite release of radioactive material will decay, but that doesn't happen magically after five half lives.
It's also a given that the distribution of released radioactive substances or particles, even in a comparatively small area, will never be uniform. There will be hot spots. So it's not at all straightforward to determine "how much" radiation is even "there" at a given point in time.
Now for the fun part. Given the commonly accepted working hypothesis that there IS NO absolutely safe threshold (a hypothesis that has never been disproved), the concept of "safe" gets pretty hard to determine and nebulous. Is the likelihood of 8.7 eventual premature cancer deaths over and above the nominal expected rate per 100,000 population "safe?" How about 1.1? How about 0.1?
Concentration in the food chain also throws elementary half life calculations out the window.,
Five half lives is a completely baseless and useless rule of thumb. Now, if you want to talk about dissipation due to progressive dilution due to physical processes, the situation becomes even more complex, variable, and difficult to predict.
"Shame" is an obsolete word used in long lost times to denote a feeling of having acted dishonorably. Sorry, "dishonorable" is also an obsolete word. It's kind of difficult to define such words which have no relevance to modern life in the post-responsibility industrial-political complex.
How about nVidia ION plus Penryn in 180 x 166 x 61 mm (7.1 x 6.5 x 2.4 in) including 8 GB DDR3, 2.5" HD, and slim optical? Screw that Atom crap and the designs that just can't cool themselves adequately. This has no oddball hardware and runs any distro you can name. Mine idles at 21 W AC input to the power brick. Here you go
Wasn't there a story once about a turtle racing a rabbit?
I don't think that story ended in a way that reinforces your thoughts. In the story, the turtle won. It is the US which is currently the turtle in space. Or maybe the three toed sloth. Or the insignificant amoeba. Not just because of the US' current funk in space exploration and exploitation, but much more fundamentally than that, because the US is history as an economic powerhouse, and could never dedicate the resources necessary.
However, by 2050 China as an economically significant force could well be a distant memory anyway. It could be all about India by then. Or Africa.
Killing a murderous criminal in the act of resisting arrest using deadly force is hardly assassination. Your attempt to draw the parallel is ludicrous. Bin Laden was hardly a political leader. As to your conspiracy leader, you failed to present it a comprehensible manner, so I'll pass on that.
Your humor would go over a lot better if you had the slightest modicum of knowledge of history. Lenin died in 1924. It was Stalin who started the Cold War in 1945. Stalin died in 1953, and yes, the Cold War did not die with him.
You're kidding, right? We're taking about CORPORATIONS here.
That's funny. An intelligently designed autonomous underwater vehicle seems to have no trouble getting GPS fixes when surfaced.
go jump in a lake
Darwin can only wish.
Napoleonic law. Brought to you by the country which brought you Napoleon. Let's hear it for the French. [sound of zero hands clapping]
Where in the U.S. Constitution does it say that the government has the power to deem that corporations should have these protections and rights?
A's hardly ever RTFA. If they did, they would be less likely to be A's.
The Shah, for all the domestic failings he may or may not have had, oversaw a prosperous, pluralistic nation which was a good international neighbor and not consumed by hatred for scapegoats. Iran did not participate in either the War of Israeli Independence, Sinai War, Six Day War, or the Yom Kippur War.
The Ayatollah appealed to the basest instincts and transformed a nation with a rich history into a one dimensional den of hatred and troublemaking.
Before and after, the majority were muslim, but the "after" brand is unrecognizable compared to the "before."
Douglas said what he said. You are trying to torture it illogically. Unlike yours, his logic is very clear. I'll go with Douglas on this and not you, thank you.
Entirely, comprehensively incorrect. In the US, constitutionally protected freedom of speech is not circumscribed by the line marking the limit of what is provably true. It is certainly not punishable to state that the earth and the universe were created in 7 days at around 4000 BC, or deny the same, or that smoking marijuana is a terrible danger to health, or that smoking marijuana is completely harmless. It is not punishable to say that people and governments that criminalize victimless crimes are stupid and should rot in hell. It is not even punishable to say that Governor Goodguy or radio personality Joe Somebody suck and are the doom of the nation, because they are public figures. It is practically impossible to be convicted of libel or slander against a public figure, unless you really make a point of trying to be convicted.
It is NOT protected to knowingly cry "fire" in a crowded theater. The question is whether the published material under discussion is in any way comparable to that.
The right to falsely "shout fire in a crowded theat[er]" principle is upheld in Brandenburg v. Ohio
You are completely misrepresenting the case. In fact you've got it backward, as well as making the most tortured parallel imagininable. Brandenburg v. Ohio was about what constitutes incitement to violence, in this particular case, white supremacy. On appeal to the US Supreme Court, the finding was to overturn the guilty verdict because the government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of violence as it does not rise to the level of imminent danger. In fact, far from your assertion, Justice William O. Douglas' concurrence with the unanimous ruling specifically cites "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic" as the only sort of case where prosecution would be constitutional - i.e., you're dreaming; you better believe you do not have that right.
In brief, it's protected (though evil) to say that Amish people suck and are a dangerous enemy to right-thinking people someday they might get what they deserve, but it's not protected to incite rash action which you know full well will put people in immediate danger and to no purpose.
Or, certainly, that was the situation in 1969, but more recent shenanigans with outlawing "hate speech" may have expanded the set of things that are not OK to say. Certainly not the direction you are going.
Do I think any of this specifically bears on the subject of TFA? No, for a variety of reasons.
Like most other things in life, you get out of an education what you put into it. One thing you undeniably do get with a "higher" education is a golden opportunity to meet some brilliant and stimulating people (professors and fellow students) and to learn from them, not just in the classroom. This can be otherwise difficult to do for many people. On the other hand, while TFA undoubtedly measures "better educated" in terms of degrees achieved, you are right, that is not a very good measure. The internet means that there is little barrier to self education. In my day the barrier was higher, because you had to have access to excellent libraries and the time to avail yourself of them. It was pure luck that I had easy access to the wonderful and comprehensive Boston Public Library, but I still owe a lot to my education at Northeastern University.
In those days you could largely finance a college education with what they called the co-op plan of work-study, and at the same time get your foot in the industry door.
That is a most interesting link. I pretty much agree with Linus on everything. You want formal design, you get hurd. Or rather you DON'T get hurd. Not in our lifetime (mine anyways). You follow Linus' evolving ideas and methodology and you get an excellent working product which evolves better and better.
All I can say about the guy in the basement is, yeah, there are lots of them, and yes, they keep up fine with Linus' ways and the difficulties you mention. I can't explain to you how this all works, because I'm not completely up to understanding it, let alone doing it, but it clearly does work, and I don't see any push whatsoever to fork linux for the purpose of freezing interfaces that do not have to be frozen. I mean, hey, the proof is in the pudding. There aren't many people who would argue Windows on the technical merits is better for servers than linux.
I believe the time is not long when the same will hold true on the desktop and the laptop.
It's not clear to me what fundamental difference APUs will mean, if by APU you mean the integration of the CPU and GPU on the same package or even same die. It's still a CPU and a GPU. OK, the interconnect is different, but there's nothing that says it automatically means the two pieces will be radically different than they are now.
"Your mileage" will always vary. All I can say is that I have to wrestle with linux less than I had to wrestle with Windows back when I actually cared about it and had to use it.
Linux doesn't need the "Find Driver" button (which NEVER ONCE worked for me in XP or Vista), because it already has an unimaginably rich set of drivers included right in the distro. I will readily admit I make my hardware purchase decisions based on what is likely or certain to be supported, in the sense that I always shy away from crappy off-brand network and wireless adapters. If you stick with Intel in those particular areas, you're in good shape. Having said that, I've been forced to violate that rule at times, and results in those cases have been getting steadily better in recent years, not worse.
Why would anyone want to run linux on a laptop? Well, I run linux on my laptop. At first I had it set up to dual boot, but after months of not using the Windows partition I canned it and have never missed it. During the period I had both operating systems set up, I could compare them. Windows (Vista as installed at the factory) was dog slow and buggy (and before you poke fun at Vista, XP was just as bad on other laptops as received). Linux was snappy, remarkably stable, and supported the hardware very well with the exception of the oddball fingerprint reader which was a crappy idea anyway. It is a Lenovo X301 with SSD. If you stay away from Dell crap, 95% of laptops are pretty routine for linux. Even a lot of Dells are fine, but too many of them have oddball crap that is problematic.
I have successfully installed and run various linux distros on a Compaq/HP X1000, an HP2133 mini, a Samsung X460, and the Lenovo, as well as maybe a couple of dozen desktops, including pretty-much-black-box Shuttles and Aopen minis, as well as oddball home-builts, over the last 10 years or so. Things have gotten a lot better over the last several years in terms of video and wireless support. Hardware support is so good currently that it is far better than Windows, where you have to track down drivers for every piece of hardware on your own.
Having said that, my nephew has no trouble at all wiping the OEM Windows off of his laptops, one after the other, and installing his own fresh retail copies of Windows. He claims it performs much better without the bundled crap. I don't have the patience for that myself, and can't divine why anyone would WANT to run Windows, anyway.
I do think you miss the point when you claim that it is a waste of "resources" for linux to go to a lot of work to support a myriad of hardware. The resources you speak of are open source software engineers who are basically in it for the love of the challenge. Most of them are not interested in working on boring apps, anyway, and the non-hardware-related kernel proper has plenty of manpower working on it. The part of the kernel that is not hardware related doesn't even need a lot of manpower. Those are guys with vary special knowledge. The development resources available to linux are basically unlimited. Yes, the software engineers paid by corporations to work on linux make important contributions, including hardware support, but a lot of guys, particularly in hardware support, are independent geniuses on their own time. A lot of pieces of hardware owe their linux support to these individuals donating their time as a sideline because they relish the work, and individually are interested enough in some particular piece of hardware for their own use to figure it out.