I have been a Comcast customer for many years. I added broadband to my cable as soon as it was available. But, when I called last year to look into the triple play deal ($99/month) they said it was only available to "new" customers, and I would have to pay the regular rate of $129/month. So instead I signed up with Vonage at $20 a month, leaving my total monthly outlay at $115 for cable, broadband and landline.
your describing a wealthy suburbia. You're describing you, not the average american.
Dude, according to this report (from 2006), http://www.ncta.com/DocumentBinary.aspx?id=320, 61% of Americans subscribe to basic cable at home. Add to that the 13 million subscribers to the DISH network (per Wikipedia), which is another 4%, and you have a fairly large majority of 65% of Americans paying some sort of TV bill. Now admittedly that leaves 35% who don't have cable or DISH TV, but to say I am not describing the average American is incorrect. Further, the US cell phone subscriber base is forecast to be almost 300 million Americans (that's about 85%) by 2010. Yes, many of those are pre-paid (one statistic I found said about 30% of US cell phone users have pay-as-you-go phones), but again, we are still talking a clear majority of Americans with cell phones. So I think I am indeed describing the "average American". You, on the other hand, are describing the working poor, which, while a larger population than it should be in such a rich country, is far from "the average American".
And as regards your other wisecracks and assumptions, let me make one of my own. Perhaps you should tune your radio to some station other than NPR once in awhile so you could learn that the US might not actually be "the Great Satan", and that, in fact, most (average) Americans are living pretty well.
BTW, I too spend alot of time fixing up computers and giving them to people who cannot afford them, so please get off your high horse.
On one thing we can agree: Windows ME still sucks.
here's a clue: many American families aren't going to be able to pay that kind of price.
I beg to differ. Many of those same families routinely pay $100+ cable/dish bills. And they will pay $60/month for broadband when a) they decide they need it or b) it becomes a better entertainment value to them than cable/dish TV.
And FWIW, I pay more (twice as much) each month for electric and for cell phone than I do for broadband. And don't get me started about heating costs, transportation costs, and food costs, all of which dwarf my broadband bill. In fact, having broadband allowed us to cut our cable bill (we do a lot less TV watching so we don't need lots of channels), and it allowed us to cut our landline bill (using VOIP) as well, so in the end it almost pays for itself.
I agree with your sentiment. One thing I always say as regards technological "competition", is that the guy who starts late is usually able to capture the lead fairly quickly. This is because, over time, dramatically better technology will be accessible for significantly lower costs. The trick is to not fall so far behind in the interim that you become irrelevant or lack the resources to take advantage of the newer technology when it becomes feasible and affordable. But if you can stay sufficiently competitive while waiting for the technology to mature (or the next technology to appear), you can easily leapfrog all the others. And then the next cycle begins...
Also, given that over half of the households in the US now have broadband access (), I don't think this quite constitutes an emergency. I find it hard to believe that having broadband in every home, in today's world, makes a significant difference in terms of global competitiveness. Now in 20 years that will undoubtedly change, but then the broadband picture will be markedly different then as well.
You can slam Microsoft for a lot of things, but breaking backwards compatibility (B.C.) would be far, far down on that list. They bend over backwards (no pun intended) to maintain B.C. In fact, that compatibility oftentimes is the source of their security woes. And it is most certainly one of the major causes of code bloat, and buggy code. Personally, I think Microsoft should consider *reducing* their emphasis on B.C. in order to improve those other attributes I mentioned.
Except that AT&T also knows that without customers there can be no profit. So in that case, customers are all that matters. Hmmm, what we have here is a genuine conundrum. Maybe it's not quite as simplistic as you suggest. Maybe they really are considering their customers - even if it's for all the "wrong" reasons like making a profit and staying in business, rather than just "doing the right thing".
... but now IT has loaded so much crap on it ("desktop agents" [ie apps that spy on me], antivirus, patches, etc) that it is fully 15-20 minutes after turning it on before it is usable. So now I never turn it off. I did the hibernation thing for awhile, but then it stopped working for some reason and I haven't been able to fix it. And if I ask IT to fix it, their solution is always the same for every problem - wipe the machine - a tad inconvenient for me, but pretty efficient for them I suppose. Sigh.
Ummm, Amazon "makes" the Kindle. At least they are who you buy it from, and it's their name that's on it. So, given that it is currently a closed platform (though it runs Linux and folks are beginning to hack in), any application software would have to come from Amazon.
One thing interesting about the Kindle eBook model that separates them from all the eBooks that came before is the wireless access. You really don't need a computer, nor do you need an ISP. The Kindle can be the only electronic device you own. It has (currently free) wireless access via Sprint's cell network to Amazon's Kindle Store (and presumably their music store) anytime, anywhere Sprint's network reaches. And there is at least one other interesting aspect of their model that *could* distinguish them. When you buy a book from them, it is downloaded instantly to your device, but more intriguing, if you delete it, you can download it again *for free*, as often as you want. In other words, they are the proverbial "server in the sky". Imagine having that same option with your music. You could instantly access any song you owned. Heck, with the right software, you could do "shuffle mode" on your entire music collection - not just the songs you happened to have stored locally in your device.
They have all the pieces in place. They *could* even allow me to rip and upload my entire CD collection and then provide me access on my Kindle. They could also examine my uploaded music collection and offer me songs using the recommendation engine that they use for books. And I can do all of this without ever owning a computer or subscribing to a (broadband) ISP. That is simply not an option with any other music player I have seen. WiFi devices only work near an approved or open access point and they don't allow shopping over WiFi. And as long as the music is in open mp3 format, there is no "lock in" to worry about.
Well, the Kindle has a very limited "experimental" web browser. I don't know if it would allow you to download anything, let alone save it in the music folder on the SD card (which is where mp3 files must be placed). Further, the Kindle's mp3 player is extremely minimal. It plays in shuffle mode only and the only controls that are accessible while reading are volume up and down (no skip track, pause/play, no playlists, no bass/treble controls). The point of my comment was that Kindle needs application software to make buying and playing music reasonable. It would seem that the hard parts are done - Amazon has an open-mp3 web store and the Kindle has fast wireless download capability and built in mp3 support (stereo audio output jack). All that's left is "just software".
Hmmm, with Amazon's move into the digital music download market, I wonder if they are considering making music purchases available to Kindle owners. It has a built in mp3 player and a pretty fast wireless download capability. Wouldn't that surprise everyone if an e-Book became the oft-discussed "convergence" device before the cell phone did.
Whenever I hear conspiracy theories I always ask the obvious question: "if so-and-so was so clever as to pull off this off, wouldn't they have thought of the (usually obvious, first-order) circumstance that led to them being caught?" In this case, if I were rigging the election I would certainly not report a 0 vote tally for a candidate, since then any 1 person who knew they voted for the candidate would immediately know something was wrong. You can't have it both ways. If you posit that there are people clever enough to game the system, you must also admit that they are sufficiently bright as to not get caught with so obvious a screw up.
Because of the above, I believe their explanation of "human error". And as an aside, I have yet to see the results of any vote recount that doesn't yield significantly different totals *every time* they recount. People screw up all the time. That is one reason why I am not so down on electronic voting machines. Yes, I understand the transparency argument, but I believe that can be accounted for through some combination of ideas tossed about this forum (ad nauseum) regarding how to fix voting machines. But thinking that human-counted paper ballots will make all the problems go away is laughable. Look at history. Boxes full of uncounted ballots turn up all the time. Ballots get dropped on the floor, or into waste baskets, or mis-read (accidentally or on purpose) more than we probably know.
It sounds like we have violent agreement then. And much as you have apparently spoken positively about Windows, I have never uttered any of those "age old statements" about Linux. I think Linux is a fine option, as you assert, for someone willing to put in the time to learn it, provided they can live with its limitations.
FWIW, my initial post pointing out that slow Vista adoption is still lightyears ahead of Linux adoption was meant more to counter the widespread glee one encounters on this forum regarding anything even remotely negative about Microsoft or Windows. In that vein, my comment was completely germaine to the discussion by putting the slow adoption rate of Vista into perspective for the many folks around here who are blinded by ideology.
Please do not assume everyone who uses Linux to be a zealot.
Agreed. And in return, will you please not assume that everyone who ever says anything positive about Windows is a fanboy? For me a computer is a tool. For the vast majority of what I do, Windows fits the bill (no pun intended) very nicely. That said, I have on occasion recommended Linux to people depending on their needs. I have also recommended Macs (more often recently, actually, since they switched to Intel and more commodity-based hardware).
You have to normalize expenditures or the comparison is meaningless. Obviously, if you spent $100,000 on the military in 1776, that would buy you a far larger army than $100,000 does today.
I am continually amazed at how many people on \. are unable to understand the notion of a trend. It really isn't difficult - 8th grade algebra really. But alas, there is also a trend that shows a dramatic decline in the quality of public schools, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at the inability of many folks to appreciate such advanced concepts. Here's a short primer. You take some data samples over a period of time (say, for example, percent of GDP spent on the military). You plot those points on a graph and connect them with lines. Really advanced people then apply some sort of smoothing function called a moving average to eliminate local peaks and valleys. Then you do this really tricky operation where you fit a function to the points. The slope of the function allows you to predict future data points even before they happen! The graph on this page (url:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States) shows a nice example of how US military spending as a percent of GDP has fallen over 100% since the 1950s. You see, it slopes downward - that means a decrease. It is not too hard to imagine what that line will look like 50 years from now -- you kind of just trace it in a similar fashion, continuing it on its established trajectory -- gosh, look, since it's going down that means that military spending is going down. Imagine that! Now for a user exercise, go find some data points indicating the number of Spanish speaking people in the US. Plot those points on a graph and see what it tells you. Hint: it's going up, pretty dramatically actually. You can repeat this process for the percent of children in 1-parent homes, or the number of Americans who are married. Amazingly, I think you will discover, much to your dismay, similar graphs exhibiting similar trends. Could it be that I didn't pull these projections out of my ass? Could it be that the statistics really do verify that these trends are real? If you want me to check your answers once you've finished your homework I will be glad to.
If not, let me interpret it for you. It shows that military spending as a percent of GDP has dropped over 100% in the last 50 years. There is a brief uptick in 2005-2006 due to the Iraq war, but the longterm trend is steadily and undeniably down. Any fool half paying attention would easily notice that our military even in the last 20 years has shrunk dramatically. If you don't believe me, do some googling. You will find a dramatically smaller army, navy, and air force. Were you sleeping while all those bases were closed during the last decade? Do you remember "the peace dividend"?
I'm glad you are so encouraged by these predictions. Perhaps you mistook my projections as judgemental. I don't think you will find a single word in my post that indicates whether I approve or disapprove of those trends. I was merely presenting a plausible picture of America in 100 years based on long-standing trends in today's America. This was meant to refute the silly projections of the AC/OP, which were not based on any demonstrable long term trends, but rather were merely lame political posturing.
You are correct that trends change. However, the trends I cited all have persisted for decades. The military is in a 60 year decline (both in cost as a percent of GDP and enlistment as a percent of population). As regards the possibility that a recession will reduce Latino immigration, the source I cited shows a dramatically higher birthrate among Latinos in the US which, even without immigration, will quickly expand the Spanish-speaking portion of the population. I do not know if one projects the birthrates out 100 years what the mix will be, but I would not be surprised if, still, Spanish-speaking people were the majority a century from now.
Actually, Wikipedia has a nice graph regarding the military - it depicts a steady drop both in enlistment and percent of GDP; both have dropped by 50% since 1950 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States)Note, there is a small uptick in expenditures in 2006 due to the Iraq war, though the enlistments are not higher.
As regards a majority Spanish-speaking population, this is the best reference I could track down. It doesn't explicitly validate my claim since it only looks ahead 50 years, but I strongly suspect if you do the math based on the growth numbers provided it will prove my projection accurate. http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/natproj.html
has itself grown in size to unprecidented levels, I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that data THEFT has also grown to unprecidented levels. The real question is, when normalized for how much data is "out there", is data theft getting more or less rampant?
Actually, if you want to extrapolate trends, I have a few for you to consider. Unlike your sensationalistic and inflamatory extrapolations, mine are based on actual, statitisically verifiable trends:
- Children raised by one parent will be the norm. Two parent households will be rare.
- America will be a mainly Spanish speaking country
- Marriage will be almost non-existent
- Government will be "responsible" for all the care-and-feeding of the large majority of the population, and will meet these responsibilities through ever-increasing taxation of the ever-shrinking productive members of society
- The military will be a small shadow of its former self
All of these trends are very evident today, have been gaining momentum in the past 20 years, and show no sign of abating. No serious person can say with any validity that the America of today (2008) is more religious than the America of 1908, and to imply that religion is ascendent in American society today is pure BS. In fact, the opposite is demonstrably true. The military is undeniably in decline, as is the "nuclear family". And demographics clearly point towards a majority Spanish speaking population mid-next century. None of these points is really arguable.
According to this web site (http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62034821,00.htm), Vista, in less than one year, has many times the desktop penetration as does Linux (all flavors still constitute less than 1%) after 15 years. The article also mentions that many (most?) businesses are waiting for SP1 before even considering adoption. Given that SP1 is due in a month or so, I strongly suspect there will be a dramatic change in Vista's numbers in its second year of existence.
Also along these lines, I know quite a few people who are getting Vista on their new home machines, and have been, for the most part, favorably impressed. This, over time, will also translate into increased adoption in the business world. Like it or not, Vista will become the pervasive desktop in the next 2 years.
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I have been a Comcast customer for many years. I added broadband to my cable as soon as it was available. But, when I called last year to look into the triple play deal ($99/month) they said it was only available to "new" customers, and I would have to pay the regular rate of $129/month. So instead I signed up with Vonage at $20 a month, leaving my total monthly outlay at $115 for cable, broadband and landline.
And as regards your other wisecracks and assumptions, let me make one of my own. Perhaps you should tune your radio to some station other than NPR once in awhile so you could learn that the US might not actually be "the Great Satan", and that, in fact, most (average) Americans are living pretty well.
BTW, I too spend alot of time fixing up computers and giving them to people who cannot afford them, so please get off your high horse.
On one thing we can agree: Windows ME still sucks.
And FWIW, I pay more (twice as much) each month for electric and for cell phone than I do for broadband. And don't get me started about heating costs, transportation costs, and food costs, all of which dwarf my broadband bill. In fact, having broadband allowed us to cut our cable bill (we do a lot less TV watching so we don't need lots of channels), and it allowed us to cut our landline bill (using VOIP) as well, so in the end it almost pays for itself.
I agree with your sentiment. One thing I always say as regards technological "competition", is that the guy who starts late is usually able to capture the lead fairly quickly. This is because, over time, dramatically better technology will be accessible for significantly lower costs. The trick is to not fall so far behind in the interim that you become irrelevant or lack the resources to take advantage of the newer technology when it becomes feasible and affordable. But if you can stay sufficiently competitive while waiting for the technology to mature (or the next technology to appear), you can easily leapfrog all the others. And then the next cycle begins ...
Also, given that over half of the households in the US now have broadband access (), I don't think this quite constitutes an emergency. I find it hard to believe that having broadband in every home, in today's world, makes a significant difference in terms of global competitiveness. Now in 20 years that will undoubtedly change, but then the broadband picture will be markedly different then as well.
You can slam Microsoft for a lot of things, but breaking backwards compatibility (B.C.) would be far, far down on that list. They bend over backwards (no pun intended) to maintain B.C. In fact, that compatibility oftentimes is the source of their security woes. And it is most certainly one of the major causes of code bloat, and buggy code. Personally, I think Microsoft should consider *reducing* their emphasis on B.C. in order to improve those other attributes I mentioned.
... but now IT has loaded so much crap on it ("desktop agents" [ie apps that spy on me], antivirus, patches, etc) that it is fully 15-20 minutes after turning it on before it is usable. So now I never turn it off. I did the hibernation thing for awhile, but then it stopped working for some reason and I haven't been able to fix it. And if I ask IT to fix it, their solution is always the same for every problem - wipe the machine - a tad inconvenient for me, but pretty efficient for them I suppose. Sigh.
Ummm, Amazon "makes" the Kindle. At least they are who you buy it from, and it's their name that's on it. So, given that it is currently a closed platform (though it runs Linux and folks are beginning to hack in), any application software would have to come from Amazon.
One thing interesting about the Kindle eBook model that separates them from all the eBooks that came before is the wireless access. You really don't need a computer, nor do you need an ISP. The Kindle can be the only electronic device you own. It has (currently free) wireless access via Sprint's cell network to Amazon's Kindle Store (and presumably their music store) anytime, anywhere Sprint's network reaches. And there is at least one other interesting aspect of their model that *could* distinguish them. When you buy a book from them, it is downloaded instantly to your device, but more intriguing, if you delete it, you can download it again *for free*, as often as you want. In other words, they are the proverbial "server in the sky". Imagine having that same option with your music. You could instantly access any song you owned. Heck, with the right software, you could do "shuffle mode" on your entire music collection - not just the songs you happened to have stored locally in your device.
They have all the pieces in place. They *could* even allow me to rip and upload my entire CD collection and then provide me access on my Kindle. They could also examine my uploaded music collection and offer me songs using the recommendation engine that they use for books. And I can do all of this without ever owning a computer or subscribing to a (broadband) ISP. That is simply not an option with any other music player I have seen. WiFi devices only work near an approved or open access point and they don't allow shopping over WiFi. And as long as the music is in open mp3 format, there is no "lock in" to worry about.
Well, the Kindle has a very limited "experimental" web browser. I don't know if it would allow you to download anything, let alone save it in the music folder on the SD card (which is where mp3 files must be placed). Further, the Kindle's mp3 player is extremely minimal. It plays in shuffle mode only and the only controls that are accessible while reading are volume up and down (no skip track, pause/play, no playlists, no bass/treble controls). The point of my comment was that Kindle needs application software to make buying and playing music reasonable. It would seem that the hard parts are done - Amazon has an open-mp3 web store and the Kindle has fast wireless download capability and built in mp3 support (stereo audio output jack). All that's left is "just software".
Hmmm, with Amazon's move into the digital music download market, I wonder if they are considering making music purchases available to Kindle owners. It has a built in mp3 player and a pretty fast wireless download capability. Wouldn't that surprise everyone if an e-Book became the oft-discussed "convergence" device before the cell phone did.
Whenever I hear conspiracy theories I always ask the obvious question: "if so-and-so was so clever as to pull off this off, wouldn't they have thought of the (usually obvious, first-order) circumstance that led to them being caught?" In this case, if I were rigging the election I would certainly not report a 0 vote tally for a candidate, since then any 1 person who knew they voted for the candidate would immediately know something was wrong. You can't have it both ways. If you posit that there are people clever enough to game the system, you must also admit that they are sufficiently bright as to not get caught with so obvious a screw up.
Because of the above, I believe their explanation of "human error". And as an aside, I have yet to see the results of any vote recount that doesn't yield significantly different totals *every time* they recount. People screw up all the time. That is one reason why I am not so down on electronic voting machines. Yes, I understand the transparency argument, but I believe that can be accounted for through some combination of ideas tossed about this forum (ad nauseum) regarding how to fix voting machines. But thinking that human-counted paper ballots will make all the problems go away is laughable. Look at history. Boxes full of uncounted ballots turn up all the time. Ballots get dropped on the floor, or into waste baskets, or mis-read (accidentally or on purpose) more than we probably know.
No, in this case, Hanlon's razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor applies.
Now people will be watching movies with their cell phones while driving.
It sounds like we have violent agreement then. And much as you have apparently spoken positively about Windows, I have never uttered any of those "age old statements" about Linux. I think Linux is a fine option, as you assert, for someone willing to put in the time to learn it, provided they can live with its limitations.
FWIW, my initial post pointing out that slow Vista adoption is still lightyears ahead of Linux adoption was meant more to counter the widespread glee one encounters on this forum regarding anything even remotely negative about Microsoft or Windows. In that vein, my comment was completely germaine to the discussion by putting the slow adoption rate of Vista into perspective for the many folks around here who are blinded by ideology.
You have to normalize expenditures or the comparison is meaningless. Obviously, if you spent $100,000 on the military in 1776, that would buy you a far larger army than $100,000 does today.
I am continually amazed at how many people on \. are unable to understand the notion of a trend. It really isn't difficult - 8th grade algebra really. But alas, there is also a trend that shows a dramatic decline in the quality of public schools, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at the inability of many folks to appreciate such advanced concepts. Here's a short primer. You take some data samples over a period of time (say, for example, percent of GDP spent on the military). You plot those points on a graph and connect them with lines. Really advanced people then apply some sort of smoothing function called a moving average to eliminate local peaks and valleys. Then you do this really tricky operation where you fit a function to the points. The slope of the function allows you to predict future data points even before they happen! The graph on this page (url:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States) shows a nice example of how US military spending as a percent of GDP has fallen over 100% since the 1950s. You see, it slopes downward - that means a decrease. It is not too hard to imagine what that line will look like 50 years from now -- you kind of just trace it in a similar fashion, continuing it on its established trajectory -- gosh, look, since it's going down that means that military spending is going down. Imagine that! Now for a user exercise, go find some data points indicating the number of Spanish speaking people in the US. Plot those points on a graph and see what it tells you. Hint: it's going up, pretty dramatically actually. You can repeat this process for the percent of children in 1-parent homes, or the number of Americans who are married. Amazingly, I think you will discover, much to your dismay, similar graphs exhibiting similar trends. Could it be that I didn't pull these projections out of my ass? Could it be that the statistics really do verify that these trends are real? If you want me to check your answers once you've finished your homework I will be glad to.
Hopefully you are able to read and understand a simple graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States
If not, let me interpret it for you. It shows that military spending as a percent of GDP has dropped over 100% in the last 50 years. There is a brief uptick in 2005-2006 due to the Iraq war, but the longterm trend is steadily and undeniably down. Any fool half paying attention would easily notice that our military even in the last 20 years has shrunk dramatically. If you don't believe me, do some googling. You will find a dramatically smaller army, navy, and air force. Were you sleeping while all those bases were closed during the last decade? Do you remember "the peace dividend"?
I'm glad you are so encouraged by these predictions. Perhaps you mistook my projections as judgemental. I don't think you will find a single word in my post that indicates whether I approve or disapprove of those trends. I was merely presenting a plausible picture of America in 100 years based on long-standing trends in today's America. This was meant to refute the silly projections of the AC/OP, which were not based on any demonstrable long term trends, but rather were merely lame political posturing.
You are correct that trends change. However, the trends I cited all have persisted for decades. The military is in a 60 year decline (both in cost as a percent of GDP and enlistment as a percent of population). As regards the possibility that a recession will reduce Latino immigration, the source I cited shows a dramatically higher birthrate among Latinos in the US which, even without immigration, will quickly expand the Spanish-speaking portion of the population. I do not know if one projects the birthrates out 100 years what the mix will be, but I would not be surprised if, still, Spanish-speaking people were the majority a century from now.
See my comment and a source elsewhere in this thread. It shows that recruiting rates have been steadily dropping for the past 60 years.
Actually, Wikipedia has a nice graph regarding the military - it depicts a steady drop both in enlistment and percent of GDP; both have dropped by 50% since 1950 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United_States)Note, there is a small uptick in expenditures in 2006 due to the Iraq war, though the enlistments are not higher.
As regards a majority Spanish-speaking population, this is the best reference I could track down. It doesn't explicitly validate my claim since it only looks ahead 50 years, but I strongly suspect if you do the math based on the growth numbers provided it will prove my projection accurate. http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/natproj.html
has itself grown in size to unprecidented levels, I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that data THEFT has also grown to unprecidented levels. The real question is, when normalized for how much data is "out there", is data theft getting more or less rampant?
Actually, if you want to extrapolate trends, I have a few for you to consider. Unlike your sensationalistic and inflamatory extrapolations, mine are based on actual, statitisically verifiable trends: - Children raised by one parent will be the norm. Two parent households will be rare.
- America will be a mainly Spanish speaking country
- Marriage will be almost non-existent
- Government will be "responsible" for all the care-and-feeding of the large majority of the population,
and will meet these responsibilities through ever-increasing taxation of the ever-shrinking productive members of society
- The military will be a small shadow of its former self
All of these trends are very evident today, have been gaining momentum in the past 20 years, and show no sign of abating. No serious person can say with any validity that the America of today (2008) is more religious than the America of 1908, and to imply that religion is ascendent in American society today is pure BS. In fact, the opposite is demonstrably true. The military is undeniably in decline, as is the "nuclear family". And demographics clearly point towards a majority Spanish speaking population mid-next century. None of these points is really arguable.
Welcome to the future of America.
According to this web site (http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62034821,00.htm), Vista, in less than one year, has many times the desktop penetration as does Linux (all flavors still constitute less than 1%) after 15 years. The article also mentions that many (most?) businesses are waiting for SP1 before even considering adoption. Given that SP1 is due in a month or so, I strongly suspect there will be a dramatic change in Vista's numbers in its second year of existence.
Also along these lines, I know quite a few people who are getting Vista on their new home machines, and have been, for the most part, favorably impressed. This, over time, will also translate into increased adoption in the business world. Like it or not, Vista will become the pervasive desktop in the next 2 years.
Ooops ... whoosh!