Yes, there are two candidates with a realistic chance to win, but there are more than two candidates in the election. I was actually a bit surprised when I went to the site and only saw Obama and Romney on there, with no mention at all of Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. So, I guess I need to reevaluate my understanding of where Twitter falls in relation to mainstream media outlets. It's apparently a lot closer than I thought.

My aging Dell laptop is due for replacement. I'm familiar with their hardware, BIOS, support site, etc, so I was not eager to have to shop elsewhere.

Lamar Smith's Democratic opponent in the 21st Congressional District of Texas is Candace Duval (http://www.candaceduval.com/). I'm sure donations are welcome.

Regulating commerce is not the same as regulating the entire commercial entity. Of course, that's not the road we've been going down for a very long time. It's much easier to consolidate power in Washington where the lobbyists have a one-stop shop. On the other hand, actually respecting the 10th Amendment would require an informed and intelligent electorate, so I guess my point is moot.

How is this the domain of the United States Congress?

I dropped my cable TV subscription over a year ago, and went with OTA only. This happened wen the cable company forced us to use one of their receivers for each of our four wall-mounted TV's. No thanks. Kept my cable modem, of course.

I've been very happy with it, except for one exception - NBC Sports Network (was Versus) exercised an option in their contract with IndyCar (practically the same day I dropped Comcast, I might add), which took away just about all online streaming. Since I don't get cable, I don't get NBCSN. So I'll be watching yesterday's race tonight via a torrent.

I'm also a very heavy user of Netflix. I love it. My wife and I are watching Battlestar Galactica now - we never saw it while it aired. We're making our way through the series at our pace. I also tend to turn on Top Gear or old Twilight Zone episodes when I want background noise.

My point is that I've adjusted very nicely to not having cable or a dish. I like it a lot. They're only going to manage to frustrate people like me with this move. I'm not going back, so they're really not helping themselves any.

One, can I make it look like 10.04? Specifically, I don't like big icons I can't remember that chew up screen real estate. I like one little-bitty bar across the top with words that I can read.

Two, if I make it look like 10.04, is there any point in upgrading? Or is it only UX "improvements"? If I stand a better chance of getting halfway decent performance out of my ATI card (and my first question goes favorably) then I'm all over it.

Hah, ok, yeah, it did sound pretty pretentious. It's all true, though. I remember looking at some Apple system that had 128k or so in a glossy magazine thinking of all the stuff I could do with it. I have no idea what that was, but apparently it was some killer stuff. And then I went to work for a guy who gave me a used 286, and I was in the IBM PC world for good, trading up for better parts whenever I could.

And, seriously, I've never owned any iAnything. The walled garden thing is spot-on. I'd rather do without than opt-in. I just found it curious that I never managed to own any other Apple item, even back in the "good old days".

Started with a used ][+. Strangely, to this day, I've never owned another Apple product. In the early years, it was a matter of cost and availability to me. These days, I just prefer to stroll around outside the walled garden. But, man, I loved that computer.

To take this down another tangent, why aren't sports available online? I'm missing a race today that I would love to be watching, but I don't get the channel it's on (NBC Sports Network). Of course, they won't provide a streaming option, even a delayed one. So, I'll be avoiding much of my online news sources for about a week, until I find some torrent I can grab and finally watch the race. Why is it so difficult?

I helped a friend transition from an old XP laptop to two new Win7 laptops. He bought Office 20-whatever. I didn't open the shrink-wrap. I put LibreOffice on and told him to try it for a few days. I also pulled up his old version of Excel on his old computer, showed him a screenshot of Excel 20-whatever, and then opened the LibreOffice counterpart on his new one.

After a week, I've heard nothing about LibreOffice, but he doesn't like Win7 at all. I would've put Ubuntu on, except for two reasons: 1. He runs QuickBooks, and I was not in the mood to try to get that to play nicely under wine or some other hacky route. 2. Even though I run 10.04 LTS, I've seen Unity and absolutely don't like the direction they're going. Had they stuck with the interface in 10.04, I probably would've at least given QuickBooks under wine some thought.

This friend is not particularly computer-savvy. He runs an HVAC business. He doesn't want latest and greatest. He wants something familiar, and he wants it to just work. I think the open source community in general, and Ubuntu in particular, missed a golden opportunity when Win7 hit. If your product matches what the user was already using more closely than the next version of what they were using, you should be pushing that. Hard.

I have contact with lots of small business owners. If I suggested to them an OS that was free, looked and acted like their existing 2000/XP OS, and still ran their office suite (or a free 90% look-alike), and still ran their accounting/bookkeeping software of choice, they'd be all over it.