My favorite simpleton is the one who uses MS Word as their file manager.

I actually have infinite patience for anyone willing to learn the correct way to do something. When someone just wants me to make their horribly inefficient, kludgy, jerry-rigged, workflow continue to work across OS/software versions, I become very annoyed.

It was around at the right time to capture a large percentage of normies just getting online for the first time. These people don't like change. They don't really "like" computers in general. To them they're just tools; very frustrating and obtuse tools. Changing e-mail addresses is far more trouble than it is worth--we can barely get these people to give up Windows XP.

No, not really. There isn't a viable left-wing party in the USA. The Democrats are moderately pro-business center-right and the Republicans are extremely anti-regulation, anti-tax, pro-business far right. There's more divergence on a few (mostly irrelevant) social issues, which is why people think there's a bigger difference than there really is.

Look up the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars - battles for control of the drugs via ice cream van trade

ideally that touchscreen & those knobs in the dash should accept inputs from external devices and be able to communicate back with them, then the inbuilt software in the vehicle can be worked-round if obsolete

A standard interface would be nice too

I have 2 windscreen mounts in my car - one for satnav as and when needed, the other for my android phone. The car's a 2001 Volvo V40 XS (cheapest version) without a car computer but with a full OBD-2 compliant interface - a bluetooth adapter lets me use my phone to give a constant readout of speed, RPM, engine temperature and spot fuel efficiency

If OBD could be extended so as to allow media/entertainment and car climate control over OBD we could forget standardised interfaces and just mount a portable Android tablet in a clip over the dashboard console and handle all-in-one. This would however require future Android versions to be able to split-screen and display several apps, else it risks jack-of-all-trades apps that end up the optimal tool for none. It would allow all the UI customisations you make to your personal car to be migrated to any other vehicle while you use it.

In 'Cryptonomicon' (Published 1999) Neal Stephenson introduces a character (Avi Halaby) and a few locations (a town and a pub called the Bomb & Grapnel) who are set up, created, founded in the Baroque Trilogy of novels (Published 2003,2004,2004)
- Halaby's family background is included as an irrelevant throwaway comment which jars with the storytelling trend, until 5 years later when one of his characters in a storyline centuries earlier, founds the dynasty

I'll have the bravery--which Americans used to pride themselves on--to state that I'd rather there be another attack than live with the current NSA abuses. I'd rather die with my liberty than live without it. And it's a false choice anyway, like you said. This won't make us safer, it won't prevent another attack. We're not trading away liberty for safety. We are giving away liberty, getting no extra safety, and becoming a police state. It's lose-lose-lose. There's no trade off. There's no balance. It's the ever tightening ratchet of fascism.

Mainly because melting-down failed nuclear reactors reactors arent actually as dangerous as common perception would have you believe. Comparatively safe zones can start within hundreds of metres of the breach and in many cases the radiological effects on long term health are on a sufficiently long timescale that normal human mortality steps in first. The experience of Chernobyl taught us this. Total long term deaths resulting from that meltdown were initially expected to be in the hundreds of thousands. In practice so far the death toll is less than 100 (yes, one hundred) - plus a much larger number of people living-with-health-issues

Private sector doing something about homelessness in the long term. I bet Michele Bachmann is positively moist at the prospects for this sort of entrepreneurship in America

should be noted that at the current time the touchpad is not supported in Linux distros, so it must be used either entirely from keyboard shortcuts, or with a usb mouse/trackpad/rollerball. Still a great deal but thats quite a failing in a laptop that doesnt have a touchscreen (unless you buy the C720P touchscreen version which is 50% more expensive)

There are trivial workarounds for both platforms.

Please explain how a legitimate business, which has to answer to the court of public opinion, not to mention the real courts, would be able to monetize blackmail (an illegal activity).

It's even more laughable than that. You can simply take a screenshot and it'll be saved permanently. In iOS, press the home button and the lock button at the same time. I'm sure it's easy with Android, too.

There's precedent for the FLOSS community not giving a fuck about software patents. They're not enforceable globally and the internet is still mostly borderless, at least in the "free" world. How many open source media players are out there that technically violate the patents on MP3, Windows and Apple codecs, et al? There's no trouble distributing those.