If you were to have copyrighted, controlled and monetized Linux to acquire incredible wealth and therefore had the philanthropic power of an Andrew Carnegie (or Bill Gates) what cause or causes would you personally want to champion with your wealth?

American English now considers "funner" a proper word. Do I need to say more?

Would you like to purchase an extended warrantee on your shopping in peace experience?

We live somewhere with winter. Freezing water cracks roads. I am amazed by how nice the roads are in California, Arizona and Florida. The mid-west, however, is a shit road central.

Snow sucks. Unless you are a child and then it is the best free toy ever.

That's me. What do you need?

I think calling people "Slashdot's dick community" is rude and in doing so, you have undermined your own argument about rude behavior.

I find the "fixed that for you" to be a humorous and desirable part of /. discussion and feel it would be a loss if no one ever used that format to respond to posts. It can be poignant and funny when done well. It can be rude, however I rarely sense intended malice or insult when it is used.

I do not find calling people "dick" to be a humorous or desirable part of /. discussion. I most often sense malice and insult when "dick" is used.

Is it 1234?

Are you for or against "fixed that for you"? At first blush, I want to guess that you don't like that phrase but, if that were so your response would be so hypocritical I wasn't sure.

Would you please clarify?

I think you are trolling at this point.

Asking your motivation for a decision that you made and then complained about is not me placing blame. I was trying to get you to take ownership of your own actions. You installed Gnome and then complained about the size of Gnome. Who else could possibly be responsible for your decision to use it?

The issue being debated was large data sizes when updating the OS. Are you saying that Windows users don't have huge updates to keep their systems current? Are you serious?

Most people that buy computers do want all the complexity hidden. They should use Windows and/or Mac OS. Casual users SHOULD NOT USE LINUX!

Linux is not for casual users just as custom muscle cars are not for casual drivers. I haven't used a Linux distro in the last 8 years that installed Gnome or KDE by default. If you don't use it either why did you complain about it? Were you consciously creating a strawman argument? Were you trolling?

There are many free Linux distros which install neither KDE or Gnome by default. It might sound incredible but it's true.

You can tweet via SMS. I know this and I hate twitter.

You do realize that suits and ties are dress-up costumes. They are in no way functional or necessary. Just like judge's robes are costumes.

Business and law both rely on a great deal of theatrics to present the image of legitimacy. And these theatrics are enough for people like grandma and you that would prefer to make snap judgments based on illogical assumptions in place of actually thinking.

Your apathy and love of tradition is holding the world back. Please begin to question the basic tenants of Western civilization so we can fix it before it is too late.

The Microsoft anti-trust trial?

Worked in cable once upon a time. People shooting the cables is relatively common and it is typically an intentional act. There is a large percentage of the population that hates the cable company.

If you didn't want to deal with the bandwidth to upgrade Gnome, then why did you install/use it?

One of the top reasons (not the first but close) I don't use KDE or Gnome is that I don't want those largish data transfers when updating the system. Openbox is my desktop environment of choice. The file size for upgrading it -> 323KB (2.2 MB installed)

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 323K 2012-05-12 03:31 /var/cache/pacman/pkg/openbox-3.5.0-7-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

Don't blame the GNU/Linux for your decision to use a bloated DE.

Mac and iOS just hide all the details from you. DLL and dependency hell are still there, they just are Apple's problem, not yours. I simply prefer control over simplicity but for most consumers they prefer simplicity. Thank the magic sky wizard there are more than two closed-source choices for those of use than want to DIY.

It is important to remember that for almost 2,000 years the Bible was treated as allegory. No one treated it as the literal word of a sky wizard and it was interpreted with regard to the world view of the people that wrote it. It was analyzed with regard to who wrote it and what their world was like when it was written.

It was 20th-century American lay-ministers that created this rejection of centuries of logic and rationality (all things being relative, of course) and began insisting that, even though it was written by imperfect humans, the magic sky wizard's perfect meaning was conveyed literally in the writings.

tl;dr -> The literal interpretation of the Bible is an American corruption of Biblical tradition by uneducated fanatics.