"And really, if you're going to start blaming the automobile for every bad thing that's happened in the 20th" Fuck off with your straw man arguments.

"Did we have wars before the automobile? Yes? Then you have no case. Utterly silly."

I didn't say ALL wars were about oil, FFS.
What did I actually say?

"Hundreds of billions in wars to secure access to automobile fuel."

Mass transit subsidies are more obvious, but private transport is massively subsidised by the government and community. Roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, etc, etc. Hundreds of billions is spent on road infrastructure. (Some overlap here, but the great proportion is used by private cars.)
Hundreds of billions on health costs -- car accidents, air pollution.
Hundreds of billions in wars to secure access to automobile fuel.

If all the costs of private urban road transport were added up, maybe we could see which forms of transport really cost more.

If anyone wants to download a bootleg Kindle edition, you can easily find them online very shortly after publication
(And many books with no official ebook edition have homemade versions of varying quality as well.)

Most Kindle books are 500kB or so, less than a hi res scan of a page.

So this scan/print/sign/register/download method is much more work than what you can already do now.

You are the one who declares everything different from the US system is shit. That everyone must accept your definitions of socialism, communism, capitalism, constitution.

Political philosophy evolves. It isn't frozen with whatever the first famous person to write a book about it said.

Studying exhaustively doesn't mean you are impartial. I see far many people here with a wealth of detailed knowledge they use to support their prejudices.

I know socialists and they don't believe what you insist they do. I know communists and they are mostly good, altruistic people. But I know what would happen should they get real power.

Marx isn't Mohammed. He doesn't define "socialism" for everyone now, if he ever did, and certainly few if any socialists I know would defer to his definition. Any Marxists still around hate socialists more than anyone else for not being pure enough.

Maybe I should have used "democratic socialism" which is what most current socialists profess.

Anyway, you haven't actually cited any sources, just invoked some names.

Fine. Enabling you to just completely ignore any country, like most of Europe, that didn't follow your exact historical progression and evolved their constitutions rather than creating them in a dramatic event.

That was the final stage, which of course was never attained. Many though did have quite idyllic "all for one and one for all" periods of altruistic government for a short time after the revolution, until the assholes started manoeuvring for power.

Anyway, I wouldn't care about your silly word games except you are using them to say every form of government except your own is shit. A sadly common insular American attitude.

Socialism, for example, has proven to be the world's ripest breeding ground for corruption, because it is designed to be led by a relatively few people in the first place.

Presumably this is some weird American definition, not used by anyone who actually is a socialist.

And I know that there are plenty of corrupt oligarchies that name themselves "socialist". Same as the many countries, like North Korea, that label themselves as "Democratic" don't make the idea invalid.

The U.S. has the longest-standing Constitutional government in the last milennium or two. That says an awful lot for this system, as opposed to others that have been tried in the same period.

Parliamentary democracy has lasted well over a millennium (e.g. Iceland continuously since the 10th C) and is doing fine, thanks.

there has never been a real Communist government in written history

Well, there have, but within a decade of attaining power they all become juntas or oligarchies or even monarchies (North Korea again). Sadly communism is too idealistic about human nature and doesn't have the checks and balances to stop power crazy psychopaths from taking control. Your constitution was written to prevent excessive concentration of power, and is fairly effective at that, frustrating as it is for zealots on either side. But it's not the only workable way to do it.

DHCP lets you log into the printer and configure a static IP, then reboot it. Better than having it locked on an IP outside the range you use in your LAN, or that duplicates an existing device.

That would be replacing thousands of elephant genes with identical, possibly damaged, mammoth genes, instead of just the few that are different.

You can get all your Yahoo email by POP. You can pay about $20 a year; or do it free if you change your location to a non-US location, like e.g. Singapore. Then you can turn on POP. You can't send via their SMTP though, which wasn't a problem till this week. Now I put my ISP address as "From" and Yahoo in my "Reply-To". But it's pushing me to give up Yahoo entirely. I've been uneasy about them since MS bought them anyway.

The question was in relation to someone trying to get Ubuntu working on his PC. That the person even contemplates that (or upgrading Windows even) implies a level of PC sophistication. If they don't have an old PC or laptop in the closet, they know someone they can borrow one from. Anyway, I think those who really cant would be pretty rare.

Why not? I do.

You can get a much better PC, say 4 years old, for $50. Or less. Less than getting phone support from a Fortune 500 company probably.....

My old PC is better than that and I literally can't give it away.

I ran Win2k until earlier this year. Everyone kept tutting about how vulnerable I was to viruses, etc. In more than 10 years, not one. But they smiled and said I was just too dumb to know. Anyway, I believe that a 3rd party firewall, antivirus and any net-interacting software, kept up top date, and it doesn't matter how soggy the OS is under it. When the PC died I put XP on the new one; as more software was becoming incompatible with 2k. The real problem will come when Firefox is not updated for XP -- I think it is on its last legs for 2k compatibility. And Flash is already incompatible, so lots of websites didn't work properly.

On your phone. Laptop. Smart TV. I have the same problem when my PC is in pieces for any reason; I use a laptop to look up stuff to get it working. Do many households have one and only one way to access the net? And how ancient a PC is it that doesn't have ethernet on board? If worst comes to worst, spend $5 on a supported card.

The only time we had a problem with Ubuntu and hardware was when we were waiting for broadband to be connected for a few days and had to use dialup. Ubuntu didn't recognise the modem port on the Dell laptop. Never needed to before or since though; I believe there are proprietary drivers but didn't bother to chase them up.

Not many now; a few weeks after its rolled out, a lot. They will learn. Also, Android is Linux, and there is already a lot of knowledge about that that transfers both ways.

I got a used laptop for my daughter with a locked down version of Vista on it that wouldn't let me install anything. So I nuked it and put Ubuntu on it. She's been using it for two years. Complained of course, but it works and I can basically let her install whatever she likes, for free, with no fear. She had an XP laptop before that was lousy with viruses. Libre Office handles all her schoolwork.Now she also has a Galaxy Android phone and rooted it so she run stuff she used on Ubuntu.