You forgot unnecessary default bloatware (mono) and a propensity to cover up useful text screens with useless graphical screens. But still, I'd take Ubuntu over Fedora anyday, at least there's some kind of real attitude about support compared to Fedora's ambivalence.

Don't know why I'm getting modded down on this, it's straight from a gimp's mouth. There are lots of user friendlier image editing programs that have sprung up due to the warts of gimp.

I have it from a gimp developer that they intentionally cultivate user unfriendliness because they don't want to deal with 'clueless newbies.' It would benefit ubuntu and open source mainstream if they forgot about gimp. It has a stupid name and is not designed to be a user friendly program. It's not particularly powerful either, so holding it up as the Photoshop alternative isn't very useful.

You're talking about a very particular kind of representative democracy framed by particular conditions. Among other problems, the conversations don't scale very well. If it all comes down to one day once every X years of voting between 5 candidates and 4 issues, I don't think that's a very good system. Granted, participation could shift from those adept in 'traditional' campaigning to on-line forms, but I think the participation would be higher. I am for a very radical change of democracy using modern computer networks, where delving into issues involves organizing information available to everyone, clicking on links and consulting individuals. I do agree some checks and balances are required, and some processes should be extended with multiple levels. But systems can evolve past their historical basis to something based more on positive beliefs of the benefits of networked individuals, that their capacity (for example, those involved on networking sites) should be expanded so we rely less on the charisma of elected officials and more on competent individuals in open connected networks creating accessible permanent records. I am very pro government but think it should be very efficient, very open, and very inclusive of the public it's meant to serve on a constant basis.

I often wonder why this doesn't happen.. Get most people to share their wifi (in exchange for free internet), supergeeks will set up wired caching hubs. Layer on some social networking so it's more difficult to exploit. Voila, free citizen-net!

Why does doing it with paper get people involved in their civics? If you want more direct democracy (voting on finer issues) allowing internet based involvement would seem to be the more practical route, unless you think people need to be hypnotized in person.

So.... what's better than My Documents (or some other similarly named directory)? I'm glad Gnome backed away from the conceptual spatial version of directories. Traditional folders are easy enough to understand, complemented with cross system search. Unfortunately the open source world is not very good at front end innovation, but with the quality of the underpinnings (any OS is doomed to reinvent) is very good at understanding and accommodating approaches of the day. I'd like to see the free software world charge ahead with an amazing resolution free and shared timeline branching desktop.

I think you're totally wrong. The basics of the WIMP - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) - experience date way before Windows, and Microsoft only got file structure sensible - not storing data with programs - post Windows 95. Firefox across all operating systems can be configured to ask where to save documents so it's not an Ubuntu thing. And what's especially wrong with My Documents? The main thing Ubuntu tries to do is make it easy for people to understand how to use the OS. On that level, they succeed admirably. The same strategy is used for OpenOffice - make it like Office so people can adjust to it easily. That's the main goal - make it functional and easy to use, free and easy to install for as many people as possible. Those who need to can "escape" to the more advanced options. Being different for the sake of being different would be a terrible mistake.

There's a way to get a Thinkpad without Vista on it from the Lenovo site, haven't tried it recently but it worked a month ago. Change the CPU in any system to a Celeron, then select the enabled Vista Starter option (you know, for developing countries that would be confused by having a first world operating system). Then change the CPU to something real, and the OS changes to no charge DOS. You can then place the order. I ordered a T400S using this technique. Good luck!

Thanks... I'll try Ubuntu 9.10 and see if it fixes my problems. I note that multichannel (ac3) encoded media is considered a "political" problem, while for the vast majority of users that would be more important than being able to switch from headphones to the neighbor's stereo.

Pulse Audio's flexibility sounds cool. But I just want my 5.1 audio setup to work. It doesn't. Right now it's completely broken, audio skips and I have to use low level programs to get surround sound. The audio system should just pass the raw stream through to my very capable receiver. When I try to use PA to do this, the receiver shuts down. I've spent hours trying to configure this through random "guides." I'm technical but I've grown very tired of tweaking, I want a distro that just works for a very common case - multimedia.

Um, no... every time there is a government change, ministries get renamed, rearranged, budgets get slashed and rearranged. Haven't you heard the phrase "Canada's New Government?" Sounds a bit Orwellian.

It was suggested by Kurzweil and Mirsky over a decade ago, though they mixed in kinetic energy.

Their plan is to make money off the residue of what TPB was. Their projection is that bots and spiders alone will generate enough advertising dollars to pay for the sale. Also they are working on a co venture with The Onion to expand on http://thepiratebay.org/legal

PS why is comment posting so horrible (Using Firefox on Linux). its laggy and loses focus (not me, the comment box). Just give me plain text, please.

Thanks for that info. Fujitsu makes great computers, aside from their keyboards (I had my eye on a Fujitsu Tablet). Hopefully the drive will relate to what you posted.