The distros where fooled into thinking KDE4.0 was ready for production... pleeese. I guess they don't do much test then, because it was obvious to anyone that had actually tried to use it that it wasn't ready. To think this gets modded insightful makes my head hurts... it is literally unbelievable. For those unable to grasp how ridicule that sounds, I'll suggest them to simply refer to the sources instead of constantly trying to reinvent history. I've followed PlanetKDE (http://planetkde.org) and The Dot (http://dot.kde.org/) since I discovered them years ago. It was never suggested that KDE4.0 was meant to be massively dropped on users. Unfortunate the Planet's concept of "old" articles extends no further than last week, otherwise I'd just point you to the time where that DIDN'T happen. You'll have to digg the individual blogs yourself to verify it with your own eyes (here's one blog to get you started though: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/, you can see all posts down to 2004). That's plainly a lie, probably based on a greatly exaggerated 4.0 release note that didn't warned all those coming to www.kde.org hell was about to break loose... But hey, I'm sure that omission caused those 5 people compiling KDE4.0 from sources (everybody else got it from their distro) to be caught off guard... It's easy to say in retrospective that labeling a developers and EARLY ENTHUSIASTS release '4.0' was a mistake. I used to agree with that, then read about the why it was needed (like the need to provide a stable (and believable, as in "the project is committed to it") platform to signal third parties to start porting applications). Bottom line, if your not going to make an effort to grasp the situation and provide us with an informed opinion, maybe you should simple refrain from providing one altogether. BTW, simply pointing out bugs in KMail does not add any weight to your argument either (no matter how severe they are) unless you provide some proof of this deceit scheme you speak of. It does not follow from the mere existence of bugs a conscious decision to lie about the state of the software. Have you actually read about the state of KMail or the any of the other PIM apps anywhere? I guess not, otherwise you'd known they are in the process of being ported to Akonadi and hence not deemed stable by their developers.

I take it you haven't given a chance to the latest KDevelop4 releases. It used to be that, while it showed some promise, it was too unstable (and unfeatured, if that's a word) to work with. The situation has changed in the last weeks though. I gave it another try and was completely surprised to see how well it worked. Stable and a way smarter than the KDE3 version ever hoped to be. It has definitely regained it place as my default IDE for developing C++ code (which it had temporarily lost to QtCreator).

So Chavez is now a military dictator... not to defend the GP nor Chavez, but guess who DOESN'T know what he's talking about now...

The problem is not only the vague language, but also that said promise only applies to what's covered by the ECMA-standard.

English uses a simple form of Latin. Other languages using the Latin alphabet, such as Spanish, French or Portuguese, German, etc. contain symbols not available in the English version. It is generally not a problem though, as most used symbols are available and missing ones can generally be replaced by similar ones.

Believe it or not, it is possible to register multiple domain names and make them point to the same site. I mean, who would have thought of that, right? I've even heard it's possible to have more than one site to your name. Maybe this other little know fact could be used to have 2 sites, perhaps a local one and an international one (but who am I to tell what people will come up with when they found out all this?). But, yeah, other than that, I totally agree with you. Non-latin ccTLDs can't possibly be used for anything else than fulfilling people's "misplaced patriotism". It's not like everybody in the world can't understand the latin alphabet already. That's only to be expected, after all, we would too fell right at home if asked to type giberish in other alphabets as well. I for one would certainly have no trouble typing anything you throw at me, irregardless of alphabet. Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, Japanese, you name it, I've mastered them all. What's more, thanks to my great observation skills, I can guess the general meaning of it simply by staring at said giberish for a minute or so. Anyways, I hope to have contributed to your in-deep analysis of the situation.

and it just bugs me the total disconnect of people totally unable to fill in the pretty obvious gaps. nonetheless, here's a "hint": lobbies, powerful corporate lobbies.
yes, to many (including me) the solution to many problems involves government action or regulation. you conveniently ignore that people taking that stance are generally (implicitly or explicitly) talking about legislating in favor of the interests of the general population, not of private interests (the only ones this law is trying to protect).

And if you (re)read the article you'll (hopefully) see systems with SP2 or SP3 are vulnerable too...

"By default, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 do not have a listening service configured in the client firewall and are therefore not affected by this vulnerability"

Don't let PR spin on things fool you either.

At what point in history was Java legal situation worst than the current status quo with Mono? Java has been cross-platform from day one (by Sun's choice) so developing Java applications for Linux was never more of a risk than developing Java applications for Windows. Also, there were never copyright concerns with Java so, please, stop spreading lies. The problem was inclusion of Sun's JRE in stock distros and the free implementations, though incomplete, could be distributed just fine (like Mono). Yet, there was never the threat of the platform (or parts of it) suddenly disappearing because of a patents violation. Had Sun sued the free implementations you could have still used Sun's JRE/JDK. This isn't the case with Mono, where at best you have a promise from Microsoft saying they are OK with people implementing C# and the CLI, which is only a very small part of the platform Mono intends to implement. The truth is that despite some people's wishes, the recent events change very little as the promise only covers the parts of .NET already believed to be safe (because of the ECMA stamp); they do bring and extra layer of security (which is a good thing) but that's all. BTW, software patents are definitely and issue outside of US and Japan. Firstly, as long as they remain valid in the US there will be big groups lobbying for them on Europe and elsewhere (the world is bigger than the US, Europe and Japan). Secondly, even if software patents are not valid in Europe, treaties between nations and the fact that the US is the most influencing country in the world makes them hard to ignore in practice.

I'd say correcting GGP. Qt didn't go LGPL because of GTK, Trolltech was doing fine with their dual license model. It was Nokia who decided to make Qt LGPL as, being a much larger company, they are not dependant on that (relatively) low income and thought this would boost adoption of Qt (which they seem to be pushing hard now).

1) x264 is an encoder, so it would not be of any use to Firefox anyway... ffdshow on the other hand (most complete decoder available in any platform) is LGPL and could be used both by firefox and WebKit (though it doubt a decoder it's going to be embedded into any web engine).
2) Yes, neither MS of Apple are likely to support Theora out of the kindness of their hearts, but they don't control the web like they do the desktop/office. They might be forced to change their tune if sites the size of Wikipedia start making extended use of it.

Sorry, I've made a few mistakes in 5). To get an old style desktop you have to select "Folder View" activity type not "Desktop" (which is the default). To change it you have to right click on the desktop and select "Appearance Settings" (there's no "Desktop Settings" entry)

I can answer most of those...
2) You can configure the task manager to show task from current or all desktops (right click on it and select "Task Manager Settings"). I'm not sure about the Compiz issue but it works fine with KWin.
3/4) The default shorcuts for those actions are Alt-Shift-Tab and Meta-Shift-Tab. You can also change them in System Setting -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Global Keyboard Shorcuts -> KWin
5) Right click on the desktop and choose "Desktop Settings". Change the Desktop Activity type to "Desktop" and you'll have your old style desktop back. BTW, the settings bar will stop popping out on hover if you lock the widgets. Click the little icon on the top right corner and select "Lock Widgets".
KDE4 might still be missing a few things from KDE3 but you're greatly exaggerating things. Most things are not only present, but are where normal users would expect them. Maybe you're not really trying?
On an unrelated topic, I have an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT and up until KDE4.2.1 had experienced pretty appalling performance but, with the latest upgrade this week, thing have improved noticeably. I'm not sure if this is due to the KDE update (4.2.1 to 4.2.2), the NVIDIA driver update (180.41 to 180.44) or something else entirely but, finally, the last KDE4 issue really annoying me has vanished as well, so it looks like there's only happy times ahead.