You could try minitube, a native Youtube client. You don't even need to have the stupid Flash Player installed to use it, so it doesn't eat more CPU than any other video player.

The difference is that they didn't license the GPL'd code.

You make it sound like the evilness (read: utter lack of ethics) were a funny meme, not a plain, cold fact.

> Kind of ironic, given, umm, World War II and stuff, which country seems more free now.

World War II has been discussed to death, and it gets boring. It's just 12 damn years out of 1200 of German history. Besides of the fact that we will (because of these 12 years) never allow Austrians to make politics here again, I find the Weimar Republic, the imperial period and the troublesome centuries that led to them much more interesting in regards to how we attained our freedom oriented mindset. These were the times when we tried to find our identity as a nation state while everyone else was up and running and busy building colonies in Africa. Before 1871, travel was hard because a patchwork of microstates existed where our nation is today. Yes, that has probably resulted in our upholding of individual freedom.

Ugh, you forgot the verb, the period and captitalization of two words.

Heil ihn doch selbst!

(German joke)

According to the article in the German Wikipedia, first-time receivers *never* receive a higher rank than the second-lowest one, except of heads of states. So it's still quite an achievement.

Arschloch.

Ok, which kind of English would you pick? Canadian? Australian? Caribbean? Ghanaese? Indian? Scots? Or one of the countless creole dialects and pidgins? It is one of the few languages that has never been officially reformed or standardized, so it is essentially... multiple languages. Exactly what you criticised.

Languages evolve to reflect the mindset of their speakers. Even if one had the means to eradicate all languages except some form of Standard English, it would instantly break up into ca. 6000 branches again.

I'd like to add to your thoughts that nowadays nearly all "devices" are computers too. They have general purpose CPUs (nearly always ARM- or MIPS-based) and more or less powerful I/O. In most cases it's only the software that confines them to specific gadget-typical tasks.

Becoming childishly hysteric when realizing that there are multiple powers on this planet - yes, that smells American.

cmd is a pathetic toy compared to any Unix shell. Tweaking screen buffers won't help with that.

Your biggest hassle seems to be hardware support, and Ubuntu is not the greatest distro regarding that. Try Mandriva or PcLinuxOS.

And my advice is to switch to a distro with decent GUI configuration and less breakage, like Mandriva.

Stay away from the hard drugs. You will feel better soon.