Linux-Mobile vs. Microsoft WinCar
   
   This is a reply I typed up to a friend who had sent me that old tired
   joke about "If Microsoft made a car..."
   
   There'd be a weird car called a Linux-mobile, that was easy to get,
   but wouldn't be sold by big dealers. You could find it for $50 at Fry's
   supermarket, get one free from a friend, or have it delivered very
   slowly through the bathtub faucet, extruded out long and skinny.
   Hell, you could go out and buy a book on how to drive the Linux-mobile
   and find the car tucked into the back cover!
   
   If it broke down or needed some work, the best mechanics would be
   other Linux drivers who just happened to be driving by. Each
   Linux-mobile would come with a metric ton of tools in the trunk,
   from the simplest greple-wrench to a big box of network sockets.
   If you didn't have the tools you needed, you could always get
   different ones, since they were all free.
   
   If there was something that didn't work quite right in your car,
   instead of waiting for a car company to offer the next model year
   three years from now, you could just bum some new and improved
   parts from your friends.
   
   Linux-mobiles would be a little ugly, a little rough around the
   edges, and not too popular. The people driving them would look
   like mechanics. Pretty soon, you'd look like one too. But you
   wouldn't care so much as you drove past those stranded in the
   center median. Maybe you'd stop to offer help, but would scratch
   your head when you notice that their WinCar didn't seem to have
   a hood to open and look under. Then you'd notice that this car
   didn't seem to have doors either, and the driver was trapped inside.
   
   Linux-mobiles would require a different key for
   each person that drove them. Even weirder, they would grow a new
   steering wheel each time someone new got into the car! What's more,
   the Linux mobile would happily run for weeks, *continuously*, even
   making trips on its own with *no* driver. You could relax with your
   paper while your car went to get groceries.
   
   You wouldn't even have to sit in them to drive them; you could
   steer them from another car's steering wheel if you wanted to!
   
   While you couldn't drive the Linux-mobile on a few popular tollroads,
   such as the MSOffice Turnpike, you could drive it a lot more other
   places: on roads, on dirt trails, over grassy fields, along train
   tracks, through the sky, and across the sea floor.