Cervical cancer is rare -- and getting rarer without the vaccine. Me do the math? I would suggest you do the math. Of the small percentage of women who get treated for full blown cervical cancer, it would not justify that nearly 1 billion a year after a 40 billion inital expense.
This isn't a cervical cancer vaccine, its an HPV vaccine. Many women who are infected with HPV will have to at least get additional medical exams and diagnostic procedures done to insure its not aggressive and will subside on its own. Those that do have aggressive HPV that cause dysplasia will have need additional treatment. Not cancer treatments, but treatments to prevent the HPV induced dysplasia from becoming cancer. There is a cost to this. Signifigantly more than the $400 cost for the HPV vaccine. One woman with aggressive HPV and dysplasia could incur medical costs/bills of over $10,000 for diagnosis and treatment. So there, I just did some math for you. Multiply that by the 250,000 to 1,000,000 women per year that are diagnosed with dysplasia. If you take the low number, thats $2,500,000,000 per year. I know those aren't hard numbers, but it's still a lot of money.
BTW, "postive pap smear" does not exist. It's WNL (within normal limits), UNSAT, or EPITHELIAL CELL ABNORMALITY (there are a few others, but that covers most of the board). Only a small portion fall in the abnormal range. And only a TINY portion of those are actually cancer. Most are HPV/ASCUS.
Thanks for correcting me. I'm not a doctor (perhaps you are), and I figure most of the pap smear abbreviations and acronyms wouldn't be needed for discussion on this topic. For most women, either the outcome of a pap smear is negative (WNL), and she doesn't need to follow up, or positive (the other classifications you speak), and will need additional follow up (at least a second pap smear, either immediately, or several months down the road). I'm sure most readers took "positive" to mean exactly the same as what you described. You know much more about classifying cervical pathology than I do. This is slashdot, and I have the feeling that most readers are not pathologists, doctors, and technicians who spend their days looking at pap smears.
We're talking about spending this money on something JUST out of phase I testing. How about we wait until the results of phase II at least (preferably phase III) are in?
This is a completely valid argument, that I have no problem with. However, you didn't mention it in your original response, so I didn't factor it into mine. 8 years of testing has already gone into the vaccine with favorable results. I'm not saying that Texas didn't jump the gun here a little, but, its not a ludicrous idea either.
We're talking about a HUGE expense ($400 a pop) x 100 million woman initially (that fit in to the age group in the US) -- then about $400 a pop x 2 million a year for all 11 year old girls. Compare that to the cost of making a $10-$20 pap available to the underserved and high-risk woman who would benefit from it.
You're only considering the cost of the pap smear. So, what do you do when you confirm the woman has cancer with the pap smear? Send her on way, and tell her, "good luck"? There are additional costs involved after a woman is diagnosed with HPV, cervical dysplasia, or cervical cancer. A large chunk of these costs is more than $400 (I would bet the follow up visit alone is that much). Do the math on all those woman who are being told after a positive pap smear that they need additional treatment
Pap smears don't prevent cancer. They detect a change that has already occurred. This vaccine helps prevent the infection of HPV, along with the effects of it. Making pap smears cheaper won't make cancer go away, they'll only help it be diagnosed at an earlier stage. Both will help save lives and make women's lives better.
People grossly overestimate the link between HPV and Cervical Cancer.
You're not looking at the whole picture here. Cervical cancer statistics are slightly misleading. Cervical dysplasia, a pre-cancerous condition of the cervix, is not counted in the statistics you have provided, but IS caused by the same strains of HPV that cause invasive cervical cancer.
According to this source, http://www.womenshealthchannel.com/cervicaldysplas ia/index.shtml250,000 to 1,000,000 cases of cervical dysplasia are diagnosed yearly in the United States alone. Thankfully, not all of these will progress to invasive cancer. However, many women still need to go additional gynecological tests, such as additional pap smears and colposcopy to check the extent of the dysplasia. Some of those women will also need treatments http://www.womenshealthchannel.com/cervicaldysplas ia/treatment.shtml for the dysplasia such as electrocauterization, cryocauterization, laser vaporization, and cone biopsy to prevent the dysplasia from becoming invasive cervical cancer.
Cervical dysplasia may not be as life threatening as invasive cervical cancer, however, its still a major health issue that affects many women. For the uninsured and under-insured, the additional doctors visits, diagnostics, and treatments can result in staggering medical bills. Some treatments may affect the ability to carry a pregnancy to full term later in life, or prevent a woman from becoming pregnant entirely.
Much of this can be avoided with the $400 inoculation. Although a lot of questionable lobbying is going on, this vaccine does have the potential to improve the health of millions of women, while saving several millions of dollars in health care costs. Over 90% of men and women in the US will be sexually active at some point in their lives, and approximately 50% - 75% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_papillomavirus of those that are sexually active have been infected at some point.
As much as I hate to have things mandated by the government, I see a definite advantage in having all young girls inoculated before they reach adolescence at some point in the future, as long as the vaccine is proven to be safe, and that the costs of the vaccine are covered by insurers, as well as subsidized by the government for the uninsured/under-insured.
Not even Office 2003 or Office XP are on the list. It seems Microsoft has not even tested older versions of its own software. So much for that backwards compatibility on Windows that everyone talks about.
*I am aware that this article is in regards to certification and not compatibility. I'm just going along with the masses, since not many people commenting on this article care to recognize the difference!
You have to wonder what Viacom is thinking here. Joost's market share is much smaller than the other video services (Google, YouTube, Yahoo, etc). Is copyright protection such an issue that they would shun the market leaders?
I'm still not sure why there is such a big deal about copyrighted video on YouTube. The advertising you get for your show being uploaded to the site is probably worth much more than the marginal lost you may have incurred from it being uploaded. I don't anyone is interested in archiving the lower quality flash video files from their site. Pirates will always get the shows from bittorent or other P2P services. The only thing I can think of is they are worried about loosing web traffic from each shows website. Why not cross link to the videos on YouTube from their websites?
The entertainment industry really needs to start getting creative. They need to learn to work with these new technologies and trends, rather than against them.
I do have to say I get asked questions much more in Vista than I do in Mac OS X 10.4. In Vista, I've found its asking you about things before you even get to where you want to be, like for example with control panels. On the Mac, you are not queried for a username or password unless you need to make a change, in a protected system preference, for example. The fundamental difference is that Vista is warning you that you are in an area in Windows where you could make a change, where as in Mac OS X 10.4 you are queried right before you execute a change. I think it's a good idea where Vista is going, but, not quite refined yet. It would be nice to have different levels of UAC for a user to pick that determines how secure (and how many warnings are received) the user account is.
Perhaps, but there is a real phenomenon of corporate momentum. It's more than possible that 48% of record executives believe that non-DRM is the way forward, but who actually decides the policies of the company? Partially, it's decided by "this is what we've always done" and partially by the conservative 10% who live at the top. They're the ones that a survey of would be interesting.
Good point, but how much tradition is involved with DRM? Only within the last few years has the music industry began to sell music in protected formats. How difficult would it be to change these emerging policies?
Then again, many of the music labels are part of large conglomerates of media companies that sell video as well, and they've been using copy protection and DRM since VHS (and then DVD) came on the market.
Part of the problem is that the Airport software in 10.2.8 is not very up to date. Compare it to trying to connect to a wireless with the built-in software of Windows 2000 (there isn't any of course, it's all third party).
Keep in mind that Mac OS X 10.2.8 is end of life, just as Windows 2000 is (or will be very soon). Mac OS X 10.3.x is still actively supported by Apple with Security updates and patches, until, Mac OS X 10.5 comes out, and then, it too will be retired. Also keep in mind that your Powerbook will support Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5 when it comes out. So if you don't feel like spending the whole $149 it usually is to upgrade, you can spend the $79 for 10.4 or $59 for 10.3http://www.applerescue.com/?gclid=CN2CiYLeoIoC FQsEVAodyWbJuw
I can't blame you or stop you from being upset, but to judge a vendor on software that's EOL is silly. And in most cases, 10.2.8 is still a really good system to run, and does most things well. You just happen to be complaining about support for a technology thats been evolving rapidly (wireless).
Steps to create plain text files in Mac OS X.
1. Go to the applications folder. Open TextEdit.
2. Go to "Format" in the Menu Bar. "Choose Make Plain Text".
If you want TextEdit to default to making plain text documents everytime you use TextEdit:
1. Go to TextEdit in the file menu, open "preferences".
2. In the new document field, click the "plain text" button. Close the window to save your new preference.
In addition, you can use text editor for the terminal.
1. Go to Applications folder. Go to Utilities. Open Terminal.
2. Type "nano" or "pico".
Some of these same instructions can be found by going to http://www.apple.com/support and in the search window typing in the words "plain text". I found several articles are listed there on how to save plain text documents, most dated over a year old, the time you were allegedly "searching" for how to do this, including
Please let me know what software application you ported to the Mac, so that I may avoid it. Come on man, you're programming and you can't figure this stuff out? Besides, if you copied the plain text file to the Mac, and double clicked on it to open it, it would open in TextEdit by default! Wow...
Can I drop in the latest and greatest SLI card?? What about the latest and greatest RAM or Sound Cards or etc... Sure you can upgrade, but hardly the latest and greatest available. Oh and what about the latest and greatest chipsets? Heck Ive got a set of hardware sitting there looking for an OS, but there is Zero way for me to get OSX running on it even though it should technically be just fine running the OS.
Not to sound harsh, but, you are the.01% of the computer purchasing market that Apple, and other PC vendors really don't care about. Apple targets the largest amount of consumers they feel they can make a profit from. Most consumers aren't caring about having the latest and greatest chipset, video card, or sound card. This isn't a Mac/Wintel thing. Look at how many computers are sold with integrated graphics from Intel? A good majority. Which makes that computer useless for playing many 3D accelerated games.
Apple's looking to cater to the consumer who wants a computer to browse the web, do office work on, and wants to dabble with multimedia (photo/music/video/dvds, etc). So they market a computer that does that stuff, and does it well. They're not worried about running their OS on another platform, because they already are reaching the specific markets they want to grab, and hence you'll never see Mac OS X for generic x86 hardware.
Shows you how highly he thought of Windows XP, which was the current desktop OS until about a week ago. I'm not sure that anything Microsoft has done in the last three years would change his mind, other than the threat of being fired.
300 dollars for a centrino pc?? I think you mean Celeron. Ive been in the PC selling business for years. I purchase the pc, set it up, walk it into the door, plug it in then let the users use it. I have never seen a pc die in 2 years, especially since they have 3 year warranty.
If it's a $300 pc you're referencing, well, that comes with the 90 day warranty, not the 3 year that you speak of. I've noticed this when quoting out Dell's for customers who see the low price. With that low price you get a lack of support. What I think they're saying is "If you want to buy a PC for $300, don't expect us to guarantee it will work for more than 90 days". Most of my clients aren't amused with Dell's tactics when you up the warranty to 1,2,3, or even 4 years and watch the price soar.
Remember, the iPod was originally a music player for use with a Macintosh, and, when it came out, there was no such thing as Fairplay. DRM based online music stores began to pop up, and of course, there was not any support for any Macintosh hardware, so, ITMS was born, with DRM that runs on both Mac and Windows in the form of iTunes. If I'd like to use a play4sure or a Zune and use it on a Mac (or Linux) and play purchased, and encrypted content, where is the software from Microsoft to do this? Nowhere. Remember, everyone is playing dirty in this game, and it just happens to be that Apple is playing the game their way. I'd like to see the European regulators enforce this on the other end, and make proprietary Microsoft DRM compatible on the Mac, and on Linux. Of course, this won't happen.
People just don't get it. It's either Microsoft, Apple, or nothing. Get rid of the DRM altogether, and you aren't looking at comparing DRM compatibility anymore. Of course then the record companies loose, and Microsoft looses, and Apple gets an even playing field to show off the merits of their hardware without any limiting factors.
I wish I could mod you up on this. Kind of hard to fix a problem quickly when the software breaks at the end of the beta test cycle, not the beginning. I have been running the Vista releases since they were named Longhorn, and I have to agree that iTunes was working fine until the end.
To add to this, why would Apple want to license DRM from Microsoft, one of their biggest competitors. Apple's positioning as a company that sells hardware, software, and (now), entertainment/media, puts them in competition with everyone. So, they keep the DRM in house.
If you were driving buy an object as small as those signs at 30mph, you would barely be able to make out what it was. At a typical distance, at that speed, the stick of D-sized batteries would not appear to be "bulging" and wires would not even be visible.
When you driving in Boston, your lucky to be driving at 30MPH. Its more likely it was spotted by someone stuck in traffic.
It strikes me as odd that Google hasn't done something like this already. Personalized Google is OK, but not nearly as user friendly as My Yahoo or Netvibes. It's surprising they lag behind on this.
Having tried a handful of Linux distributions, I personally recommend Ubuntu. The biggest reason why is the Ubuntu Forums.
Mod this comment up!!!! No other operating system has a more useful, user friendly, free support system as Ubuntu with the Ubuntu Forums site. Several weeks ago I was configuring a fresh install of Ubuntu 6.10 with tips from http://www.ubuntuguide.org/, and one of the recommended optional repositories (Penguin Liberation Front) was not responding. Within six hours of posting my settings and configurations had been validated, deemed correct, and as the day went on, others were reporting similar issues. Turns out that was the day the PLF repository I had been using had just officially been turned off. By the end of the day, another developer began hosting the repository, the fix was posted in the forums, and the information updated in the wiki on ubuntuguide.org.
As an avid Mac user, even I can't report support issues resolved in a similar manner. It can take weeks for a knowledge base article to be posted on Apple.com, and the support forums rarely provide "official" support, though many great power users there make it happen. As for Windows, it sometimes can take several days to a week for a TechNet article to be posted, and as far as I know, there isn't an "official" forum to post for support like Ubuntu.org (though there are official newsgroups).
Based on this alone I would always recommend Ubuntu first for a newbie switching over from Windows. There will be a lot of questions as you "un-learn" bad habits from Windows, and the support is there at the Ubuntu Forums.
Many of the SE phones had problems with reception due to their internal antennas, but thankfully, their engineers have finally gotten the message. After having a T68i and a T610 which had god awful reception, I have now had the z520 and z525, which has a larger internal antenna inside of a clippy-like-thing, and the reception is much much better.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a cervical cancer vaccine, its an HPV vaccine. Many women who are infected with HPV will have to at least get additional medical exams and diagnostic procedures done to insure its not aggressive and will subside on its own. Those that do have aggressive HPV that cause dysplasia will have need additional treatment. Not cancer treatments, but treatments to prevent the HPV induced dysplasia from becoming cancer. There is a cost to this. Signifigantly more than the $400 cost for the HPV vaccine. One woman with aggressive HPV and dysplasia could incur medical costs/bills of over $10,000 for diagnosis and treatment. So there, I just did some math for you. Multiply that by the 250,000 to 1,000,000 women per year that are diagnosed with dysplasia. If you take the low number, thats $2,500,000,000 per year. I know those aren't hard numbers, but it's still a lot of money.
Thanks for correcting me. I'm not a doctor (perhaps you are), and I figure most of the pap smear abbreviations and acronyms wouldn't be needed for discussion on this topic. For most women, either the outcome of a pap smear is negative (WNL), and she doesn't need to follow up, or positive (the other classifications you speak), and will need additional follow up (at least a second pap smear, either immediately, or several months down the road). I'm sure most readers took "positive" to mean exactly the same as what you described. You know much more about classifying cervical pathology than I do. This is slashdot, and I have the feeling that most readers are not pathologists, doctors, and technicians who spend their days looking at pap smears.
This is a completely valid argument, that I have no problem with. However, you didn't mention it in your original response, so I didn't factor it into mine. 8 years of testing has already gone into the vaccine with favorable results. I'm not saying that Texas didn't jump the gun here a little, but, its not a ludicrous idea either.
You're only considering the cost of the pap smear. So, what do you do when you confirm the woman has cancer with the pap smear? Send her on way, and tell her, "good luck"? There are additional costs involved after a woman is diagnosed with HPV, cervical dysplasia, or cervical cancer. A large chunk of these costs is more than $400 (I would bet the follow up visit alone is that much). Do the math on all those woman who are being told after a positive pap smear that they need additional treatment
Pap smears don't prevent cancer. They detect a change that has already occurred. This vaccine helps prevent the infection of HPV, along with the effects of it. Making pap smears cheaper won't make cancer go away, they'll only help it be diagnosed at an earlier stage. Both will help save lives and make women's lives better.
You're not looking at the whole picture here. Cervical cancer statistics are slightly misleading. Cervical dysplasia, a pre-cancerous condition of the cervix, is not counted in the statistics you have provided, but IS caused by the same strains of HPV that cause invasive cervical cancer.
According to this source, http://www.womenshealthchannel.com/cervicaldyspla
Cervical dysplasia may not be as life threatening as invasive cervical cancer, however, its still a major health issue that affects many women. For the uninsured and under-insured, the additional doctors visits, diagnostics, and treatments can result in staggering medical bills. Some treatments may affect the ability to carry a pregnancy to full term later in life, or prevent a woman from becoming pregnant entirely.
Much of this can be avoided with the $400 inoculation. Although a lot of questionable lobbying is going on, this vaccine does have the potential to improve the health of millions of women, while saving several millions of dollars in health care costs. Over 90% of men and women in the US will be sexually active at some point in their lives, and approximately 50% - 75% http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_papillomavirus of those that are sexually active have been infected at some point.
As much as I hate to have things mandated by the government, I see a definite advantage in having all young girls inoculated before they reach adolescence at some point in the future, as long as the vaccine is proven to be safe, and that the costs of the vaccine are covered by insurers, as well as subsidized by the government for the uninsured/under-insured.
Not even Office 2003 or Office XP are on the list. It seems Microsoft has not even tested older versions of its own software. So much for that backwards compatibility on Windows that everyone talks about.
*I am aware that this article is in regards to certification and not compatibility. I'm just going along with the masses, since not many people commenting on this article care to recognize the difference!
You have to wonder what Viacom is thinking here. Joost's market share is much smaller than the other video services (Google, YouTube, Yahoo, etc). Is copyright protection such an issue that they would shun the market leaders?
I'm still not sure why there is such a big deal about copyrighted video on YouTube. The advertising you get for your show being uploaded to the site is probably worth much more than the marginal lost you may have incurred from it being uploaded. I don't anyone is interested in archiving the lower quality flash video files from their site. Pirates will always get the shows from bittorent or other P2P services. The only thing I can think of is they are worried about loosing web traffic from each shows website. Why not cross link to the videos on YouTube from their websites?
The entertainment industry really needs to start getting creative. They need to learn to work with these new technologies and trends, rather than against them.
I do have to say I get asked questions much more in Vista than I do in Mac OS X 10.4. In Vista, I've found its asking you about things before you even get to where you want to be, like for example with control panels. On the Mac, you are not queried for a username or password unless you need to make a change, in a protected system preference, for example. The fundamental difference is that Vista is warning you that you are in an area in Windows where you could make a change, where as in Mac OS X 10.4 you are queried right before you execute a change. I think it's a good idea where Vista is going, but, not quite refined yet. It would be nice to have different levels of UAC for a user to pick that determines how secure (and how many warnings are received) the user account is.
Good point, but how much tradition is involved with DRM? Only within the last few years has the music industry began to sell music in protected formats. How difficult would it be to change these emerging policies?
Then again, many of the music labels are part of large conglomerates of media companies that sell video as well, and they've been using copy protection and DRM since VHS (and then DVD) came on the market.
Or the plot for Fallout 4....
Ha. They don't even need adium. They can go out and get Microsoft Messenger for Mac http://www.microsoft.com/mac/default.aspx?pid=msn
Part of the problem is that the Airport software in 10.2.8 is not very up to date. Compare it to trying to connect to a wireless with the built-in software of Windows 2000 (there isn't any of course, it's all third party).
C FQsEVAodyWbJuw
Keep in mind that Mac OS X 10.2.8 is end of life, just as Windows 2000 is (or will be very soon). Mac OS X 10.3.x is still actively supported by Apple with Security updates and patches, until, Mac OS X 10.5 comes out, and then, it too will be retired. Also keep in mind that your Powerbook will support Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5 when it comes out. So if you don't feel like spending the whole $149 it usually is to upgrade, you can spend the $79 for 10.4 or $59 for 10.3http://www.applerescue.com/?gclid=CN2CiYLeoIo
I can't blame you or stop you from being upset, but to judge a vendor on software that's EOL is silly. And in most cases, 10.2.8 is still a really good system to run, and does most things well. You just happen to be complaining about support for a technology thats been evolving rapidly (wireless).
Steps to create plain text files in Mac OS X.
1 181About Document Formats
6 212Mac OS X: How to Set Up TextEdit as an HTML or Plain Text Editor
1. Go to the applications folder. Open TextEdit.
2. Go to "Format" in the Menu Bar. "Choose Make Plain Text".
If you want TextEdit to default to making plain text documents everytime you use TextEdit:
1. Go to TextEdit in the file menu, open "preferences".
2. In the new document field, click the "plain text" button. Close the window to save your new preference.
In addition, you can use text editor for the terminal.
1. Go to Applications folder. Go to Utilities. Open Terminal.
2. Type "nano" or "pico".
Some of these same instructions can be found by going to http://www.apple.com/support and in the search window typing in the words "plain text". I found several articles are listed there on how to save plain text documents, most dated over a year old, the time you were allegedly "searching" for how to do this, including
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=15
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=10
Please let me know what software application you ported to the Mac, so that I may avoid it. Come on man, you're programming and you can't figure this stuff out? Besides, if you copied the plain text file to the Mac, and double clicked on it to open it, it would open in TextEdit by default! Wow...
Then why are you reading this article and all the discussion :-). If you don't want to be told to switch don't read a slashdot Mac vs PC article!!! :-)
Not to sound harsh, but, you are the
Apple's looking to cater to the consumer who wants a computer to browse the web, do office work on, and wants to dabble with multimedia (photo/music/video/dvds, etc). So they market a computer that does that stuff, and does it well. They're not worried about running their OS on another platform, because they already are reaching the specific markets they want to grab, and hence you'll never see Mac OS X for generic x86 hardware.
Shows you how highly he thought of Windows XP, which was the current desktop OS until about a week ago. I'm not sure that anything Microsoft has done in the last three years would change his mind, other than the threat of being fired.
Perhaps they should switch to Mac OS X. They have "The Print Shop" available...
http://www.mackiev.com/print_shop.html/
If it's a $300 pc you're referencing, well, that comes with the 90 day warranty, not the 3 year that you speak of. I've noticed this when quoting out Dell's for customers who see the low price. With that low price you get a lack of support. What I think they're saying is "If you want to buy a PC for $300, don't expect us to guarantee it will work for more than 90 days". Most of my clients aren't amused with Dell's tactics when you up the warranty to 1,2,3, or even 4 years and watch the price soar.
Remember, the iPod was originally a music player for use with a Macintosh, and, when it came out, there was no such thing as Fairplay. DRM based online music stores began to pop up, and of course, there was not any support for any Macintosh hardware, so, ITMS was born, with DRM that runs on both Mac and Windows in the form of iTunes. If I'd like to use a play4sure or a Zune and use it on a Mac (or Linux) and play purchased, and encrypted content, where is the software from Microsoft to do this? Nowhere. Remember, everyone is playing dirty in this game, and it just happens to be that Apple is playing the game their way. I'd like to see the European regulators enforce this on the other end, and make proprietary Microsoft DRM compatible on the Mac, and on Linux. Of course, this won't happen.
People just don't get it. It's either Microsoft, Apple, or nothing. Get rid of the DRM altogether, and you aren't looking at comparing DRM compatibility anymore. Of course then the record companies loose, and Microsoft looses, and Apple gets an even playing field to show off the merits of their hardware without any limiting factors.
I wish I could mod you up on this. Kind of hard to fix a problem quickly when the software breaks at the end of the beta test cycle, not the beginning. I have been running the Vista releases since they were named Longhorn, and I have to agree that iTunes was working fine until the end.
To add to this, why would Apple want to license DRM from Microsoft, one of their biggest competitors. Apple's positioning as a company that sells hardware, software, and (now), entertainment/media, puts them in competition with everyone. So, they keep the DRM in house.
Hey come on. We left for a reason!
It strikes me as odd that Google hasn't done something like this already. Personalized Google is OK, but not nearly as user friendly as My Yahoo or Netvibes. It's surprising they lag behind on this.
Mod this comment up!!!! No other operating system has a more useful, user friendly, free support system as Ubuntu with the Ubuntu Forums site. Several weeks ago I was configuring a fresh install of Ubuntu 6.10 with tips from http://www.ubuntuguide.org/, and one of the recommended optional repositories (Penguin Liberation Front) was not responding. Within six hours of posting my settings and configurations had been validated, deemed correct, and as the day went on, others were reporting similar issues. Turns out that was the day the PLF repository I had been using had just officially been turned off. By the end of the day, another developer began hosting the repository, the fix was posted in the forums, and the information updated in the wiki on ubuntuguide.org.
As an avid Mac user, even I can't report support issues resolved in a similar manner. It can take weeks for a knowledge base article to be posted on Apple.com, and the support forums rarely provide "official" support, though many great power users there make it happen. As for Windows, it sometimes can take several days to a week for a TechNet article to be posted, and as far as I know, there isn't an "official" forum to post for support like Ubuntu.org (though there are official newsgroups).
Based on this alone I would always recommend Ubuntu first for a newbie switching over from Windows. There will be a lot of questions as you "un-learn" bad habits from Windows, and the support is there at the Ubuntu Forums.
Many of the SE phones had problems with reception due to their internal antennas, but thankfully, their engineers have finally gotten the message. After having a T68i and a T610 which had god awful reception, I have now had the z520 and z525, which has a larger internal antenna inside of a clippy-like-thing, and the reception is much much better.
e r=4000&template=pip1&pid=10439&zone=pp
http://www.sonyericsson.com/spg.jsp?cc=us&lc=en&v
Who would have thought that Microsoft and hackers had so much in common!