Here in MD the law making handheld cell phone use a first-level offense (meaning the police can pull you over for it without any other cause) just went into effect 1 October. I think it's cut down on the abuse, but only by about 50%. In other words, on Tuesday mornings when I drive to a weekly meeting that is 2.2…

It's the same idea as imposing speed limits. Most people speed and don't get caught. However speeding is dangerous and if you're pulled over you can be ticketed.

The laws are on the books, but I wish my state could enforce it better. I constantly see drivers looking down at their laps with a bright glow on their face as they drift out of their lane...

And yet I can't go anywhere without seeing some women in a SUV talking and texting while driving.

I have a six year old Dell Inspiron 1720. Still works great. Bought a new battery and now on my third keyboard (water twice).

Also, something more timely, when you get pulled over by a cop, please don't give him lip, put your hands on the steering wheel, make no sudden movement, if you need to get something from the glove compartment let him know before hand, give him license and registration when requested, and accept the ticket if he…

I for one, welcome our alcohol serving-robot overlords.

And that is not your prototypical user either. Yes, Linux offers a variety of distros for people to play with. With that comes your issues of compatibility and drivers not working. Most people don't use those kind of distros for their daily driver either. They will stick to your Linux Mints and Ubuntus. The ones that…

What you wear matters. It affects the image of where you are, and that in turn affects other peoples' attitude towards it (kind of like how they won't let you inside certain - admittedly posh - places if you're not dressed the part). If everyone's dressed like they just looted the Salvation Army, I feel like I'm…

Linux is about choices. You can choose this distro and that desktop. I've installed linux on about 2 dozen computers by this point, and there has been little configuring. I did once have problems with a video card and with a wifi connection. I solved it by replacing the video card with something more friendly. The…

I use Chrome primarily because of the excellent cross-device sync. If I bookmark something on my Linux-based work desktop, I can find it on my Android-devices or Windows and OSX-based personal machines too. Same goes for extensions, apart from on the Android-devices.

People like you scare me. You seem almost happy to see Firefox fall under when its existence has singlehandedly caused the big reversal and IE's fall from dominance. Even now, despite a few hurdles here and there, Mozilla are still working for us web users and developers and I hope they continue to have support and a…

The Chrome extension issue is null and void as we approach 2014. I may have agreed with this in 2012, but almost every major extension for Firefox is available for Chrome or there is a good-quality Chrome alternative. Also, while I haven't used Firefox in almost over a year, does Firefox even sync extensions between…

And *that* right there shows why people will always overpay for garbage like Windows.

Just the fact you have a list of supposed "best distros" for anyone, especially a new linux user, goes to show why Linux is not a good choice for a user system.

The funny thing is you could install a web SERVER on there, but not a browser. :)

As someone who is relatively new to Linux, it has been a lot of trial and error for me. Out of my five machines in the house, three run Linux now. Two are laptops and one is a server. I corrupted the OS several times with my tinkering to make things work as I was hoping. Which, that wasn't too much of an issue. Just a…

An associated problem is that many people don't know the difference between a failed hard drive and a fixable problem. Friends bring me their machines all the time with no real hope that it can be saved. "Sucker's dead," they'll say, and then run out to by some thousand dollar laptop at Best Buy. More often than not,…

Here's an ancient Gateway that was running Win95. Wiped the HDD and installed Puppy Linux, but with only 256MB of RAM no modern browsers will run.

I... win? Wait...