There is a solution for that: use Ubuntu Linux.

It also works for me under 10.10, so you might want to consider just upgrading to the latest version.

On an Ubuntu 10.4 system, I plug in my iPod Touch and it just shows up in Rhythmbox, allowing music to be transferred both ways. It works both on my laptop and my desktop; I didn't do anything special.

Have you tried starting up Rhythmbox?

Well, obviously, you should first convince them to switch to OpenOffice, Pidgin, and Gimp and then convince them to switch to Linux; the other way around is silly.

And given how crappy MS Office, Photoshop and iTunes are, it shouldn't be difficult to get them to switch.

Linux is very much alive on the desktop; it is very widely used inside corporations and universities. These "1% market share" figures are meaningless; they are usually based on device sales or web site statistics of popular web sites, neither of which tell you much about "desktop" Linux.

Linux hasn't grabbed much of the general purpose consumer desktop market, but that market is pretty much stagnant in itself. The new consumer market is tablets, netbooks, and smartphones, and Linux is grabbing a large chunk of that with Android and (in the near future) MeeGo and Chrome.

No need for Tux to look sad.

In that case I am going to figure you are a Wiccan, a faith that was invented in the 1950s.

No. Wake up, man, and learn something about the faiths of the world, many of them older than Christianity.

I can think of no faith that believing that homosexuality is not morally wrong and that Christianity is morally wrong are defining beliefs.

Where did I say they were "defining beliefs"? It's the idea that faith is an arbitrary set of rules handed down in holy books and revelations itself that is "wrong", in the same sense of "wrong" in which the flat earth theory is "physically wrong". If you like, that is a defining belief. Beyond that, we don't concern ourselves with Christianity any more than with flat earthers.

They explicitly state that "man lying with man as with a woman is an abomination".

The original language is more ambiguous; furthermore, the sentence has a context that you're ignoring.

You are doing verbal backflips, particularly given the clear plan of "man and woman cleaving together to form one flesh" in Genesis.

Well, perhaps I'm doing "verbal backflips" because it actually matters, given that your interpretation has been used to justify everything from discrimination to mass murder.

I always find it astonishing that anyone defending christianity is expected to have a scholarly attention to detail and sourcing, but anyone attacking it is allowed to simply make unsourced statements, and assume them to be true (what is known as begging the question).

I didn't think it necessary to provide a source for something that centuries of scholarship have established. You can find some of the discussion here. There is still disagreement about how exactly the document came to be, but that large parts of it cannot be of Mosaic origin and that it is composed of different source documents is beyond question.

To sum it up, because of His character as demonstrated in the Bible (as opposed to the popular strawmen that are constructed).

The Old Testament describes a paranoid, mass murdering, irrational tribal God. If you choose to worship such an entity, that's your business and says a lot about your character. Of course, the Old Testament is such a corrupted document that even if monotheism were true, it would have little to say about his character or intentions anyway.

What faith is that?

If you can't figure that out for yourself, there is no point in telling you, because you won't know what I'm talking about anyway. Go learn something about other religions and then you will probably recognize it.

Saying that your basis to call something morally wrong is your "moral reasoning" is circular logic.

Moral reasoning is part of moral philosophy and moral psychology; they have standard college courses on it. If you want to discuss questions of morality and ethics, at least learn a little bit about them!

These verses are anything but clear. They certainly do not forbid all homosexuality. They may forbid anal sex between men, ritualistic sex in non-Jewish temples, or simply tell guys not to have sex with another guy in their wife's bed (which is something probably even Oscar Wilde would agree with).

Furthermore, while Judaism claims that these verses are Mosaic, they clearly are a later invention. So, you have some vaguely specified act that is declared immoral by a piece of text that was fabricated by priests long after the divine revelation from which it originally was supposed to come. What kind of authority do you think such a passage has?

And then, of course, there's the even more basic question why you think that humans even have any moral obligation to submit to God's authority, if a God as described in the Bible actually existed.

Upon what do you base your claim that anything is morally wrong?

On two sources. One is my faith. The other is moral reasoning.

You are aware that improved public health, hygiene, quarantine, isolation, city planning, etc. are direct consecuence of suggestions supported by medical research, aren't you?

You're playing word games. The scientific results that successful public health policies have been based on have very little to do with, and cost almost nothing compared to, what is funded today as "medical research" today.

The "cuba libre" drink is said to be the result of US intervention in Cuban independence from Spain.

So? Cuba is communist today, no? I said "associated", not "historically linked to", didn't I?

It also makes you think of Coca Cola, that's a capitalist icon if there is one.

Yes, and probably also not a good association for an office suite.

Yes, Americans should think of something else. How do we fix that?

Easy: just fix the political systems in the Spanish speaking world. Some progress has been made, but there's a lot further to go.

There wouldn't be any "conflict of interest" if Oracle just gave up their own effort and joined LibreOffice on LibreOffice's terms. So, indeed, there is a "conflict of interest"--between Oracle's unstated proprietary interests and plans for an ostensibly open source office suite and the interests of the open source community. And the fact that they don't want the FOSS developers on their board anymore tells you that in no uncertain terms.

When Americans hear "Libre", they probably think of Cuba, rum, and communist revolutionaries. For some software, that may be good, but for a business office suite, I don't think those are good associations. They should think of something else.