The Note 2 and Note 3 are, based on my observation, good for a couple days without charging. Like the iphone 6+, this probably has more to do with the form factor than anything else.

I can get about a day and a half out of my S4, but I'm an atypical user since I don't use any messaging aside from E-mail (SMS is stupid and I hope it dies soon).

It's somewhat silly to try to define "using a smartphone as a smartphone" since that's really the ultimate movable goalpost. I use mine primarily to read things on the web while I'm away from a bigger computer and I listen to locally-stored music. I don't really launch other apps, maintain social connections, play games, make calls or look at pornography while on the toilet, all of which might be part of someone else's definition of justifiable smartphone-ing.

So, I see this as rationalization.

The fact is, you took a leadership position, and later turned your coat for reasons that perhaps made sense to you. But they don't really make sense to anyone else. So, yes, everyone who supported you then is going to feel burned.

You also made yourself a paid voice that was often hostile to Free Software, all the way back to the SCO issue. Anyone could have told you that was bound to be a losing side and you would be forever tarred with their brush.

So nobody is going to believe you had any reason but cash, whatever rationalization you cook up after the fact. So, the bottom line is that you joined a list of people who we're never going to be able to trust or put the slightest amount of credibility in.

And ultimately it was for nothing. I've consistently tried to take the high road and it's led to a pretty good income, I would hazard a guess better than yours, not just being able to feel good about myself.

Meh, it's easy to find people with skill. With values, OTOH...

You have a point.

It's sort of a chicken-and-egg issue. Debian doesn't get the help because Debian doesn't make itself worthy of getting the help. There have previously been paid developers working on Debian, they simply weren't paid by Debian.

Clearly, we need to start a eugenics program that would create humans that have the following traits:
- Petite in stature
- Ultra efficient metabolism. Just increasing our intestines efficiency by 1 or 2 percent would save huge amounts of food.
- Highly intelligent.
- More efficient gas exchange (Humans in the Himalayans already have this trait) so they could function in lower pressure, lower O2 levels.

A human with those traits would be perfect.

The problem is that some factions in the non-systemd camp are pursuing systemd "emulation" by using shims and forks. That way you just get a second rate systemd, and it will remove any motivation from upstream projects to support anything else than system. Using Ubuntu's "logind" is a short term gain, but a strategic failure for the non-systemd camp. They need their own implementation of needed infrastructure, not just copying or emulating systemd.

It sounds a lot like the non-systemd camp have no idea what they are actually for, they only know what they are against. So this kind of thing is not surprising to hear.

The "UNIX philosophy" is an empty slogan that switches people's brains off. It sounds great, until you try and build a real system with the features modern users demand, and then it turns in to an exploding nightmare of combinatorial complexity as every program tries to abstract itself from every other program in the name of political correctness. As already noted elsewhere, the programs people use serverside Linux to actually run barely resemble the UNIX command line tools and that's for good reasons ...

I am beginning to be wary of systemd, but no. I am talking about anal-retentive policy wonks who believe they only make the distribution for themselves and have (perhaps without intending to) systematically marginalized Debiian and made the project a whore to Ubuntu.

There is a certain contingent in Debian that is not good for the project, IMO. I would like to see which side of a fork they are on, and pick tthe other.

Is there really someone so stupid that they cannot tell the difference between a cartoon drawing and a real child?

There appears to be an entire united kingdom whose legal system is populated with such people.

Just FYI, the rule against illegal cartoons exists in the USA too. The Supreme Court struck down attempts to use CP laws in this way as being obvious nonsense, so Congress just went ahead and amended the law to make it explicitly illegal as opposed to implicitly illegal.

Unfortunately a lot of crap like this ends up being brought into otherwise sane legal systems thanks to pressure from the USA to "upgrade" national laws to meet the "latest standards". Japan has been pressured for years to tighten its CP laws, being publicly named and shamed etc - the primary justification for not doing so was fear of false positives. Like this one. And like the notorious cases where two teenagers can legally have sex but not photograph themselves doing it.

Fact is, politicians love being able to say they made the law tougher on paedophiles. It's a sure popularity winner. So it's inevitable you end up with idiocy like this.

Great, so we're still having a competition to see who's shittier... Hopefully Lockheed will get on with it and we can replace all these nasty polluting ICE engines in these ships with fusion reactors...

Last I knew these mega ships emit staggering amounts of CO2 because their giant engines burn the cheapest dirtiest fuel possible.
I think it's time to rethink civilian nuclear power for mega ships.

South Korea is hardly the third world. If Danish shipyards can't beat them on price, why not?

The JVM is very language specific. For example it has op codes for allocating java objects. A truly cross language virtual machine doesn't have anything anywhere near that high level or specific to a particular language.

Whuuu? The JVM does not have opcodes for allocating "java" objects unless you use a very strange definition of the term - if it worked that way then how could other languages target it? The JVM has opcodes for allocating objects and calling methods on them, including opcodes like invokedynamic that exist purely to support non-Java languages like Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc.

The JVM has a really large variety of languages that target it. It's impressive. There are static languages like Java, Scala, Kotlin, Ceylon etc, there are dynamic scripting languages like JS (using the new Nashorn engine it's only about 2-3x slower than V8), there are Lisp like languages, there are implementations of Erlang and so on. And thanks to the fairly well specified "least common denominator" type system Java provides, code written in these languages can all interop pretty nicely.

If you think the JVM is language specific then I'd suggest looking at Ruby and Kotlin, two very different languages that are not much like Java, yet nonetheless both can run on top of the JVM.

This is actually two bets, isn't it? One is that I live to be 93. Not terribly likely.

OK, you're on. Not that $10,000 is likely to be worth as much in 2050.