I am flabbergasted that you would get bent out of shape--on principle--about being "forced" to install IE (which typically is commonly packaged with a lot of software, along with Adobe Acrobat, for reading help files) and feel that you were being unfairly dealt with by a huge and suspicious-acting corporation with greedy ulterior motives that can't be trusted to work your computer reliably.

Yet aren't you the same guy who lectures me on how I should happily pay my $30,000 in taxes every year to IRS gunmen because the government is a swell bunch of guys who can certainly be trusted to do good things with it? And then you follow by listing all the great benefits I supposedly get out of it? Like maybe restraining Bill Gates from raping your farm animals which he no doubt would immediately do if the chains of government on him were broken?

This amazing mental disconnect is common in most modern Americans, which is why someone who pays a third of their life's income in taxes to support the government's power base, and never gives it a second thought, can blow a gasket and complain to the newspapers when asked to pay a buck by a bank to get cash out of an ATM. I would give a lot to know how such a thought process was trained into people.

...I tried to go to Linux a few years ago, couldn't figure out how to partion and format my hard drive.

You and everybody else. You think people bought Microsoft all these years because the boxes were pretty?

For the record, deep inside the Macintosh operating System 10 lies a nice, shiny Unix core. So it seems that I, who had been forced to use Unix systems at Stanford, and had once sworn a mighty oath never again to allow one of those horrible Unix monstrosities within ten miles of me, have been co-opted by a pretty interface. God, we're so easy sometimes.