I would think that the transition from Articles of Confederation to the U.S. Constitution was a rather major political change that happened through democratic means without widespread protests.

And we do, which is why we quarantine dangerous infectious disease carriers, to limit their rights and freedoms, in order that they don't harm others.

Where, pray tell, are our HIV colonies located? What about the hepatitis colonies? Where is the influenza ward in the hospital? (yes, the flu is deadly dangerous)

Oh, right. What you said is pretty much make-believe except for possibly some rare esoteric infections that few people acquire.

Bad coders can write bad code in any language.

There is nothing that requires that Perl code be write-only.

I can. Several members of my family are sole proprietors of small businesses. They buy television ads.

Really, local ads are not that expensive.

"It's a limitation on corporate speech."

Yeah! Because, you know, individuals can't buy television ads.

Why bother with that when MythTV is already quite capable of skipping the commercials entirely?

If you never see the commercials, there's quite literally nothing to see (or hear) here and it's very easy to move along.

"Yes, people huff gasoline, they huff the propellant from Cheeze Whiz."

Cheeze Whiz doesn't use propellant, it comes in a jar.

You might have been thinking about Easy Cheese, which does use a propellant, but it's a bit hard to get to it the way the can is designed, as the propellant is in a separate sealed chamber from the product.

Actually, it was the VERIFY command in the ProDOS BASIC.SYS that output the copyright message when no filename was given. In ProDOS, if a filename was given, it checked that the file existed, but did nothing else.

Apple DOS 3.3 and earlier read every sector in the file and would return an I/O error if it could not be read. Not specifying a file name resulted in an error.

There's a difference here. In your scenario there was violence and the subject was not given a choice.

In pregnancy, unless there was rape involved, the act of getting pregnant was the result of an action that was fully optional and therefore the consequence of pregnancy was 100% avoidable.

Obviously, nobody could possibly want one for the purposes of demonstrating their skills at poking holes in sheets of paper from a distance.

with the exception of hunting rifles, they exist for one purpose, to facilitate the most abhorrent crime there is.

Yeah, because there is nobody on this entire planet who might want to use one to test their skill at punching little holes in paper sheets from a distance.

Beyond that, ban everything but slow-shooting hunting rifles.

Most certainly you wouldn't want to try that with different kinds of firearms, in different positions, and at any sort of speed.

While we're at it, we should ban all forms of foot races except for marathons, because nobody should have any reason to participate any other kind of race.

Put your body where your mouth is and go to Iran.

Let me know how that works out.

A 10% reduction on taxes on profits

Nice try. There is a difference of 12 percentage points (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage_point).

The reduction in taxes is nearly 50%.

Basically, my scenario as well.

I just rebuilt my MythTV box a few weeks ago after it developed a mainboard issue. So, I decided to upgrade it with an SSD for the boot disk, new OS install, and newer mainboard, proc, and memory.

Honestly, it doesn't take that long to set up. It took about a day to get running the way I wanted, including the hardware work and futzing with the EFI BIOS on the new board.

Here are the installation steps I took:

0. Get the hardware work done.

1. Install Scientific Linux 6.2. 2. Install EPEL and ATrpms repositories and yum-priorities. Set up yum priorities to put Base before ATrpms, and ATrpms before EPEL. Make sure the storage is all there (NFS and local RAID1). Install Base package set only.

2. yum -y install xfce4 mythtv

3. Manual work: download the "firmware" for my Hauppauge tuners and stick in /lib/firmware (5 mins). Download, compile, and install latest lcdproc package (10 mins). Copy the MCE remote definition to lirc config. Make sure that udev doesn't steal my remote and make it a linux-input device (Linux has built-in support for MCE-type USB remote receivers, but it's not easily customized as far as I can tell).

4. mythtv-setup - anyone should be able to work through this.

5. Make sure lircd, lcdd, lcdproc, and mythbackend start up on boot.

6. Log into box and run mythfrontend.

7. Set prefs the way I want them, maybe 30 minutes to go through.

8. Watch TV.

9. Since this is a dedicated box, set up gdm for auto-login and mythwelcome to auto-start, and make sure APCI wakeup is working.