Yes, let's kill everyone who disagrees with us. History has shown that that approach ALWAYS works ...

Sony fought *hard* to make Blue-Ray the dominant standard. It was basically "everyone and their brother behind HDTV" vs. "Sony and a couple of their bestest buddies behind Blue-Ray" until Sony spent a ton to get exclusives and woo studios away, all so that they could monopolize the next generation of movies (and not repeat the Betamax experience).

As somone who hates to see companies monopolize technology, the fact that all their efforts were largely wasted makes me very happy :-)

Of all the many stupid ideas that have been suggested in this discussion, that has to be the stupidest. Until we can engineer a massive virus that alters the DNA of everyone on the planet (or at least in the USA) good luck changing human nature.

You can't just pick one example and claim it proves a point. If you look across a large sample size of elections, I HIGHLY suspect you will find that the candidate with the most money wins a disproportionate amount of the time.

... so bascially you're saying that you want to live in a system where our politcians can be legally bribed. I don't think most people agree.

But if a 3rd party is doing that digitization, the only way it "could have [been] made ... in photoshop" is if there was a conspiracy between the sender and the mail scanner. You'd have to be pretty paranoid to be concerned about that.

And? If there's no middle man then ultimately someone (in this case it sounds like the buyer) has total control over the transaction. It doesn't matter what UPS says, if they don't want to release the funds they don't have to.

In a dark market like this the ONLY protection you have against fraud is the other party's reputation.

And who gets to decide what "the facts" are? You're very language betrays the conceit that you are somehow omniscient, because how else can you know that someone else's knowledge is "ignorance" and your's are "facts".

I too believe the anti-vaccine BS is ... well is exactly that, BS. But the moment anyone presents me with real evidence to the contrary I'll happily change my posisition, because I realize that any given human being only has a limited amount of knowledge available to them, and therefore that I must always be open to new knowledge.

Ummm ... that's disturbing.

So basically they're just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks? I suppose that's one way to avoid choosing the wrong platform ...

Ubuntu *did* (past tense) an amazing amount for the community, and for a long time Ubutunu was justifiably the dominant distribution because they gave people what they wanted (as you more or less said, it was the first distro that was super user-friendly). I do give them props for that.

Then it all went to Shuttleworth's head, and he started thinking he could dictate to the Linux world what we would all use. That's when many Linux users started abandoning Shutttleworth/Canonincal and going to distributions that actually cared: there's a reason why (on many distribution watchlists at least) Mint has surpassed Ubuntu.

Mint listens to their constintuents, and builds their distro around their concerns. Ubuntu does whatever the heck they want and says "take it or leave it".

See Mint's choice of MATE (Gnome2) or Gnome3 vs. Ubuntu's "We're making this new Unity thing that no one wants and we'll force it on our users before its ready".

Did the person you heard that from also tell you that vacinations cause autism? Or that JFK was assasinated by Bigfoot (as part of the global lizard-people/Illuminati coalition)?

Also, why would you think Windows *doesn't* have Microsoft spyware installed?