Indeed: the very face of evil. We must incinerate it (with fire), lest the accursed audio codec rise up and slit our throats in the dead of night! Damn Apple and their fashionable products. Damn them!

I feel your tidbit about Thomas Jefferson founding the Democratic party is rather misleading. He founded the Democratic-Republican party, which later disassembled itself into Democrats and Republicans, but his views cannot be easily categorized one way or the other. On the other hand, despite his idealist notions of strict constructionism, he ultimately succumbs to pragmatism.

Look at the Louisiana Purchase, for example. He had no authority to authorize the purchase, but it was too good to pass up, so he went through with it anyway. Besides which, he contributed directly to the cause one of the main influences on the issue of States' Rights: the Civil War. His Virginia Resolution introduced the concepts of nullification and succession in protest of the Alien and Sedition Acts. With the conclusion of the Civil War, states' rights were debased somewhat and the issue died to the point that it was forgotten for decades, leading to the further erosion of states' rights.

This isn't to say I'm a person who disagrees with the concept of having a centralized, federal government. Personally, I see that type of oversight as necessary and more efficient in a lot of ways, but the fact remains that your claims about Jefferson are a bit preposterous.

Interestingly enough, gbrainy is dependent on the mono runtime and all its libraries which seem to take up ~40MB in the alpha. It's not quite 350MB, but it isn't exactly slim either. Granted, fspot and tomboy depend on mono as well. Just something to consider.

Actually, there's a minimal iso image for a net install and you can install a command-line-only system from the alternate install disk. Both use a modified version of the Debian ncurses installer. I've used it both options a few times and found them to be very useful for building a lightweight system from the ground up.

The idea that a decrease in piracy will lead to a decrease in price is incredibly naïve. Even if pirates decided they were going to actually buy games all of the sudden, prices wouldn't change in the slightest. Like it or not, in our economic system, the overwhelming goal is to make money and lots of it. Prices will never go down. The genie is out of the bottle. Publishers have found that they can routinely charge $50 for a brand new game, and they're working their up to $60. Look at Modern Warfare 2. Personally, I find your sentiment manipulative, but you are entitled to your opinion.

Serves 'em right.

A government is as sensible as the people participating in it. Perhaps living in a democratic republic is an advantageous circumstance?

...But not before setting it on fire.