And how is that different from the Washington Post or the New York Times, or most of the mainstream newspapers?

I've just finished reading your post and I wasn't the slightest bit surprised to see that it consisted of nothing more than a series of excuses. Not excuses for having failed in one or more endeavors but excuses for why you never even tried. Judging only by what you've written here and in other posts, you've never once asked what you could do for your country, but have spent your time on Earth asking what your country could do for you.

I don't know if Fedora gives you the .rpm files when you install from a live image, but it's trivially obvious how to find out. If not, you can use dnf --downloadonly to download the packages you need, including dependencies as you need them.

Not always. If you were to go to a neighborhood theater that specialized in old movies and watched the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, you wouldn't be watching the original version, or the remake. You'd be watching the third version of that movie made by Warner Brothers because it took them three tries over a decade to get everything right.

Personally, I'd love to see The Ten Commandments again on a big screen, the way it was intended to be seen. Add in The Longest Day, How the West was Won, Around the World in 80 Days and The Great Race and you've got the beginnings of a great set of films to watch at the theater. Kids today can't appreciate movies like that, not because of the stories or the color but because none of them look right on a home screen. Either they're trimmed to fit a standard screen, so that you don't see everything, or they're letter-boxed so that while you see everything, it's too small and cramped.

Then again the UK has so many accents I'm not sure there is anything you could really definitively call British English.

This was a major problem during WWI, with soldiers who couldn't understand their officer's orders because of accent clashes. They solved it by picking one rather neutral accent and teaching all of the officers to use it. This is where "received pronunciation" came from.

I've never needed to try this, but I'd like to think that you could be able to tell your bank that no charge to your account for any reason by a specific bank is to be accepted. And, if they try using a different bank, simply lather, rinse, repeat while reporting all the banks used to the proper authorities for bank fraud. And, because what they'd be doing is Wire Fraud, a federal offense, they've now got the feds on their asses even if they don't cross state lines.

Actually, I wasn't joking. I run a Windows-free household with Linux running my desktop and laptop. One of the effects of this is that I don't have to block Windows update because it doesn't apply to me. I can only guess that my post was marked as funny because people didn't realize that I meant what I wrote literally.

I find it trivially easy to block Windows Update without blocking the Internet. All I have to do is run Linux.

I may not use Apple, but I have added that to my collection of random wallpapers for my Linux desktop. Does that count?

If and when you do, you can count me in! I have hearing damage caused by exposure to too much "outbound" back in '72, and tinnitus caused by the same exposure. This can take years to manifest itself; in my case, almost 30 years. Between the two I'm 10% disabled, and my LADA diabetes brings it up to 30%, all Service connected. Back when I was doing telephone tech support it wasn't a problem yet, but it would make it very hard for me to do that job today if I weren't retired. Now, I'd probably need The Cone of Silence to get rid of the ambient noise caused by everybody talking to their computers, but I don't think there's anything that can really help with the tinnitus. I wonder what the ADA would have to say about this.

I can well understand that. I regularly have to ask women to pitch their voice lower (demonstrating, so that they know I mean a lower pitch, not volume) because of hearing damage caused by too much "outbound" back in '72.

Why not? Les Nessman does. Of course, in his case it's a virtual door, but there's nothing stopping you from following his example.

Where is the B Ark when we need it?

Linux will be fine with or without Linus, Linux succeeds because crap is good enough.

No, in the long run, crap is never good enough, and sooner or later Microsoft will either abandon that attitude or go under. Linux is prospering and becoming more and more popular because there are enough people helping developing it who won't settle for crap to keep it from going down that road and failing.