Maybe the real issue is that your goverment isn't actually providing education for your own children. Your dependency on being able to leave capital to you descendants is merely a symptom of that actual problem.

I know this. This does not invalidate my former statement.

They do in my experience. And I've yet to come across somebody that's ever used MMS. I know I haven't.

Well a great truth is, we used to have issues with qt due to it's former license. IIRC, it used to be dual commercial/GPL. It isn't anymore.

vlc isn't backed by any company.

And most large software IS backed by companies. Care to mention some big GUI proyect not-backed by some company OTHER than firefox? Because I can't even think of one. KDE uses qt.

Perhaps not "industry standard", but it IS used by several proyects that dominate in their area, and several quite large (lage as in "with a large userbase") projects:

Skype, Vlc, Teamspeak, Origin, and lots more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I agree on this point, but, what about Qt? Qt is superior to gtk in almost every way, cross platform, and not "bound" to anything. Plus, the license is pretty liberal.

If google pulled out of india, people would just use something else, and google would permanently loose that market, it's as simple as that.

Out of curiosity, how has upgrading worked for you? It seems that Mint's dev prefer a clean-reinstall upgrade. Have you done that or in-place upgrades?

The only thing that makes me hessitate about Mint is upgrades. It seems that it's oriented towards full-reinstall upgrades, and I wouldn't want my parents having to do that (and they wouldn't do it either). Having used XP for about 6years without reinstalling, I really want to offer something that can offer a similar experience.
Then again, Ubuntu has been know to break everything between releases. So I'm not sure what to use!

Personally, I don't bother giving any support to windows users - even family members. First of all, I don't want to waste time learning windows-related stuff, secondly, they know my stance on the matter, and know I won't support non-free software. Finally, they have more motivation to migrate to *nix if they know you'll support them once they do.

Actually, the fact that it runs firefox is interesting: it'll help keep the browser market heteregenous, which is what's best for both devs and users in the long run. We don't need another browser dominating the market just like IE did: it gives them too much power.

Plenty of XP software that fails on win7/8 works fine on wine.

Let me remind you that the Silk Road mantainer was tracked by an inpected postal package, not through tor.

People gave lots of money to a total stranger for that stranger to take care of it, and got robbed.
Does that prove that Bitcoin is a bad idea, or that people are too stupid?