Tell you what, I agree not to give in to media stereotyping if you agree not to be condescendingly dismissive based on - as far as I can see - nothing more than a few casual acquaintances -- in a different country.

In the meantime a little statistically meaningful reading for you: Harris: The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans, 2007

Choice findings:
If you are interested in a more in-depth analysis both qualitative and quantitative I suggest you buy the following article online from the Journal of Foreign Affairs

That depends on whether you are referring to many of the godly American educational institutions and home schoolers, who are additionally likely to be vehemently opposed to students downloading large swathes of the sciences.

Tis blasphemy!

If you mean in the sense of pandering to what is seen as a veritable goldmine of market opportunity, namely America’s intolerant religious right you are spot on.

Here is a little teaser from a recent article in the Telegraph: Religious iPhone apps provide answer to worshippers’ prayers

However, that stuff is chump change in comparison to the real prize; turning America’s fine & highly lucrative but strategically speaking fragmented religious broadcasting industry into a tithing franchise for the iApp store (rates may vary).

The Lord moves in mysterious ways -- Amen.

Your laptop may well be ancient but what is almost certainly causing sluggishness and unreliability is the age of your operating system installation rather than that of the hardware itself.

This is because all versions of Windows have a tendency to severely degrade efficiency with age due to a common design flaw/feature.

One thing you can try is to download and run a free utility program CCleaner, which will repair some of the debris that has built up in Windows over the years. Just be aware in the process it will remove lists of recently accessed files, favourites, and so on, although nothing that is permanently stored on your computer is affected.

CCleaner can produce spectacular results but it may also be that your Windows installation is beyond the pale, in which case more radical surgery is required.

That being so a complete operating system reinstallation is likely to get you a good as new laptop, either using the original version of Windows installed or an alternative proposed above.

The extent to which this process is manageable depends on whether you have data on the laptop you want to keep and if so whether it is backed up adequately. However, if this is a limiting factor and your back-up arrangements are inadequate, it is really something you ought to look at anyway if your laptop’s performance is erratic.

Visual Milestones:

I have Windows 7 installed on my main desktop and am delighted with it.

In particular I consider it to be a superior operating system for juggling many open applications as part of my daily workflow, with the Aero effects and the redesigned taskbar the key bits that make a difference for me.

But I would never consider installing it on a netbook because they tend not only to be underpowered for multitasking in general and Aero in particular, but with the typically small screen the new outsized taskbar in my view becomes a hindrance rather than an aid.

Instead for something in the netbook class I now strongly favour Ubnutu Linux with the fervour of a neophyte, either in the standard flavour or the netbook remix edition.

It is just excellent and free and easy to try out if you so desire; there are plenty of howtos on setting up a dual booting system knocking around on the internet.

At first glance this is very sloppy reporting.

Blame what you like for the sales decline but the reality is that it is impossible to quantify the performance of Pentax cameras in general let alone dslrs because Hoya do not report the segment breakdown, instead lumping everything together with Pentax’s medical equipment products.

The only thing they say specifically about camera operations is:

They made a loss in the same period last year which is now greater, but the good news is that they have expanded volume, and possibly done so in a down market. Since their longer term problem has been lousy market share that is undeniably good news.

Must say I am surprised Bloomberg have not picked up on this story during last week.

The rule of thumb is you need 1 core or 1/2 Hyperthreaded core per VM + 1 for the system.

You are underpowered in terms of CPU, completely ignoring the disk side.

I like Ubuntu 9.10 a lot.

I wish my personal memory extended to manipulating the command line a bit better but in any case I plan on rolling out various flavours as virtual machines for the family to remote desktop into, once I get the networking side properly configured.

However, for heavy multi-tasking nothing beats Windows 7, in my view.