Senate of Canada: an incremental improvement

The Senate of Canada needs to be abolished. Of this I have no doubt.
Furthermore, that is the long-held position of the NDP, one of the principal reasons I support that party.
But the NDP has an Achilles' heel on this subject: no senators plus, to paraphrase Otto von Bismark's tested observation, “politics is the art of the possible.”
Those two facts should make party spokesmen and commentators pause before ripping the Liberals and Justin Trudeau for removing 32 Liberal-appointed  senators from the Liberal caucus.
Here's why:
NDPers spouting the party line that the Liberal initiative doesn't address the real issue are not incorrect, but do overlook the fact that, given the requirements of Canada's Constitution, we're unlikely to see the end of the Senate in our lifetime. Getting the agreement of seven provinces representing at least 50% of the population is simply too steep a mountain to climb, and short of revolution, there are no other options.
So abolition simply isn't going to happen, at least, not in any foreseeable future, not even with a majority NDP government. (I love Thomas Mulcair's assertion that, as prime Minister, he wouldn't appoint a single senator. But does anyone believe the NDP would be in power long enough to empty the Senate?)
This implies that, if we are to be relevant on this issue, we need to put some water in our wine and think reformation instead.
Of course Conservatives are also talking reformation, but their favourite reform involves an elected Senate, which would not only perpetuate an already dysfunctional institution, but also give it added legitimacy. It might even prove to be effective, thus giving the Reformers who morphed into the Conservatives two of their three “E”s.
But why would anyone support a Senate with real power and legitimacy in which the Atlantic provinces would have more seats than the entire western half of the country?
I trust the NDP to oppose an elected Senate even more vigorously than it opposes what we have.
(Odds are they won't have to: the Supreme Court is likely to point out that such a change would require a change in the Constitution, which makes an elected Senate just as unlikely as an abolished Senate.)
Which leaves what the Liberals have just done.
Their shot at reform is unlikely to make much immediate difference and is not without its problems. Removing Liberal senators from caucus doesn't stop them from being Liberals or voting as their Liberal brethern in the House do. Nor does it stop them from being unelected. It doesn't even stop them from forming their own Liberal caucus in the Senate. But it does cut the ties between the Liberal Party leader's office and the Senate, and I don't see how any New Democrat could argue that's a bad thing, especially given the relationship between our Prime Minister's office and the Senate.
Besides, if Trudeau really does get to institute his proposal of changing how Senators are chosen, over time the Senate's partisanship really will be diminished.
Again, I don't see why that's not an improvement over what we have presently.
Even if it's far from the ideal.
Frankly, I'd be more impressed with my party if its spokesmen weren't so blinded by Justin Trudeau's rise in the polls that they can't acknowledge an impressive, if incremental, first step.

Warning: potentially boring...

 ...at least, unless you're one of those fortunate people who have the time to spend hours (and sometimes days!) messing with computers.
As I am.
Anyway, on to the latest computer saga, revealed through (a somewhat modifed) email correspondence with a friend who is also my Linux guru:

I have a DVD that I wish to duplicate for several complex reasons involving the fact that we have too many computers featuring too many operating systems at our house. 
So I go looking for K9copy, which I've always used before, and find it unavailable in any of the Linux repositories. I subsequently find it online, but then discover I will have to "compile" the file, which is well beyond what I think I'm able to do. 
On reading the on-line forums, I discover that K3b will also serve, but there's a problem: the resulting .iso file is 7.7 gig, and my blank disks are 4.7, which is of course why K9copy (which shrinks as it extracts and then writes files)  has been so useful in the past.
I suppose I could shrink the file using DVD95, but that has created problems in the past and I'd still have to write the resulting file to a blank DVD.
Clearly, I'm meant to not copy DVDs.
On the other hand, today one can purchase two 16-gig flash drives for a mere $20, tax included.

I send, and carry on, expecting to just drop the .iso files onto the virtual flash drive now mounted on my desktop. And the saga continues in the next email, an hour or so later..:

I'd forgotten that FAT32 files (which is how most usb flash drives are initially formatted) max out at 4 gig. So I reformatted one drive to NTFS, which Linux will format and Mac will read. However, according to Dr. Google, Mac won't write to it.
So I thought I'd format the other on the Mac. Disk Utility offered several versions of "Mac OS extended (journalled)". I know from past experience that doesn't work in Linux. It also offered something called ex-FAT, which, again according to Dr. Google, does. Except that this requires installing a new repository in Linux, and when I tried to do that, my terminal assured me that such a repository could not be found.
Apparently it is possible to shut off journalling in Mac OS, but I don't know what the consequences would be so I'm not going there.
In any case, I do have the two .iso files installed on Sandy's iMac, and I do have them on a 16 Gig NTFS-formatted drive.
And I learned a bunch of stuff, some of it even useful.

That email had just been sent when I received:

Interesting. Back on 2013-04-27, in reply to my question about whether you could play (with VLC) .iso files made with K9Copy, you wrote:

K9copy seems to have disappeared from the repositories. So I used K3b
to create the iso, then DVD95 converter to create a burnable file,
then DiskCreator to burn the disk, which the VLC Media Player played
without issue. I'd prefer K9copy, but there you are.

To which I replied:

Damn. So I've been here before, and had forgotten the particulars.
Oh well, as I mentioned, USB flash drives have come down in price phenomenally, so I really no longer need to make DVDs for this purpose.