Actually, it isn't America. It's the EU.

I don't remember Metacity being buggy. What I do remember was that with Sawfish, the seams between it and the rest of GNOME still showed. It had its own control center, for example. On the other hand, with Metacity as the default window manager, a user wouldn't even need to know that there was this application called Metacity that provided window titlebars, etc. Configuring Metacity--what little there was--was done through dialogs that just looked like another piece of GNOME. In short, Metacity's integration with GNOME was far more seamless, and for users who didn't want to dick around with configuration and didn't even know that a focus model other than "Click to Focus" even existed, Metacity was perfectly adequate.

"Right-wing Christians seem to be more into Old Testament severity."

But the Old Testament, while often barbaric, had at least as much of an emphasis on helping the poor as the New Testament.

"And for those whom it is a problem, that's the way their life is. They can't watch Netflix, they can't buy TV shows from iTunes or watch Hulu, or buy games on Steam. Even YouTube is a pain."

That's not true. My connection is fast enough that I can handle Netflix streaming, YouTube, and Hulu just fine, but a 4 GB download still takes a few hours.

"I use emacs to write code, and vi to edit config files."

Same here. There's are some obvious reasons why a Unix admin would prefer Vi to Emacs: it's nearly always standard equipment on a Unix box, even if Emacs is not, and it's faster when used in a remote login session. Indeed, for administration, the issue of Vi versus Vim is irrelevant, since one's going to use whatever stock Vi is on the machine, and one doesn't necessarily have control over whether that Vi is really Nvi, Vim, or whatnot.

The code snippet shown in the ZDNET article, the code that Google supposedly ripped off, is GPL.

Ok, the phone can receive text messages, and I think it can send them out as well, but my phone is basically as smart as it needs to be. It handles phone calls, and that's all I really need it to do. It doesn't have a camera, which turns out to be an advantage since I can take it to places where cameras are not allowed. My phone is fairly, simple, straightforward, and gets the job done.

I remember when I was looking into matrix classes for Java and finding that addition, multiplication, etc. were done by things like "A.plus(B.times(C))" rather than the more readable "A + B*C", because Java lacks operator overloading. In an attempt to simplify Java, its designers made a decision that ended up making certain code needlessly harder to maintain.

I thought the next couple questions were also badly thought out:

2. Sometimes I don't feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems.

Well, yes, sometimes I don't feel sorry. If someone who has hurt others goes to jail or gets hoisted by his/her own petard, then, no, I'm not going to feel too sorry.

This question is even worse:

3. When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective towards them.

Protective? I'll probably feel frustrated, instead. I'm hardly likely to be in a position to even protect such a person.

"Then you come out with the stable version, and win."

If you can. If the program is unstable because of lots of little niggling bugs that are hard to find because the code is a bunch of spaghetti, then coming out with a stable version may be a tall order.

I haven't seen that much manga, but what I've happened to read (a little Guyver and Blade of the Immortal, and the Planetes series) has had little to do with cute princesses. Where do people get this idea that manga is about a few particular things when it's a medium used to tell stories in a wide range of genres?

From what I can tell from Googling, the whole point of libg2c was to be a sort of compatibility library for use with g77-compiled binaries, and it isn't needed otherwise.

Looks like you are confusing compilers and libraries. What Fortran 77 libraries are unavailable in Jaunty? LAPACK is still there. If there's some Fortran 77 library code that you need to compile, GFortran should be able to handle it. It can compile Fortran 77 code, you know, and it's gotten pretty solid in the past couple years.

g77 is unsupported by GNU and is being phased out in favor of Gfortran. Why are you bothering with a legacy compiler whose functionality can be replaced?

Offhand, I'd say that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Now, I've found problems with GFortran on Hardy Heron (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gcc-4.2/+bug/193299), and depending on what compilers you need for class, that *might* be an issue, but otherwise, I'd let it be for now.