I used to do this: running everything in blackbox window manager with different panels and other launcher applications. I actually stuck with blackbox for a long time because I liked being able to edit the desktop window in a text file and open applications just by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing from a menu. I gave up on using other launchers and panel applications. I really liked the minimalism of black box.

Now, I'm using Unity with the Launcher on Ubuntu. I find it usable for the most part, and once you alter habits to work with its paradigm, it doesn't really hinder productivity.

"No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president," Sanders said.

Since when is the Federal Reserve an agency of the United States government? Last time that I checked it was and still is a privately owned corporation.

This is exactly the type of abuse of power that the Second Amendment is meant to prevent. When any and all citizens could be armed, the government agents have to deal with them as equals or risk being killed. When all of the risk is on the unarmed populace, the thugs are free to act with impunity.

Tyrants prefer unarmed peasants.

I hate to state the bleeding obvious, but it seems that I must.

Why would you want more nuclear power? There is only so much uranium to be mined. It really doesn't matter how long estimates say the uranium reserves will last, there is still only so much to be had, and then what? Eventually, we'll run out of uranium, just as we'll eventually run out of oil and coal. Sure, we'll have more some day, if you care to wait millions or billions of years. Frankly, I don't have the time.

The best source of power beats us on the head every day, the Sun. We should be seriously investing in solar, wind, and tidal for power generation. These sources are not likely to run out for the lifetime of the planet, and that's a damned site better than relying on finite resources that take millions of years to replenish.

NOTE: There are more ways to use solar power than just photovoltaic cells.

Bingo! We have a winner!

My experience is that the spambots are currently more compliant with RFCs than most legitimate servers.

No. G-S are not "trying to be good guys." They are trying to make money in a scam investment in a way that is illegal in the U.S. They are obeying U.S. law to avoid being sued or whatever. This is purely a cover-your-ass move.

Have you had a look at the ocean lately? We've eaten or poisoned the fish to near extinction.

It is also my suspicion, supported by research that I'm too lazy to look up, that farm-raised fish are fatter and less full of the lovely acids that makes their wild counterparts so healthy to eat.

In my day, we just called it "software."

I'm going to do the same thing about it that we do about the 40,000 odd traffic fatalities every year: Nearly nothing.

We don't invade privacy and remove freedoms because so many people die in traffic accidents. Why should we because of some vague "terrorist" threat? Honestly, airport security never has and never will stop a determined terrorist. We need to simply have an adult conversation with the American people and perhaps increase the educational investment in mathematics education. Perhaps, if they understood statistics a bit better, then they wouldn't run around like idiots demanding that something be DONE about what amounts to a non-threat.

Yeah, I know....

You know, everyone keeps quoting "information wants to be free" out of context. Stewart Brand also said in the same breath that information wants to be expensive. He was talking about two sides of the equation, the consumer side that wants to be free, and the producer side, that wants to be expensive.

I personally get very tired of the producer/consumer economic model that keeps getting shoved down our throats by the old economic models and the industries that cling to them.

The Internet and affordable technology enable us all to be producers and consumers of each others' digital works. The whole tired argument of information wants to be free/information wants to be expensive should really be a moot point by now.

I should probably make some kind of joke here, but words fail me.

Quoth Bruce Schneier:

There's nothing we can do to educate users, and anyone who has met an actual user knows that.....Rather than focus on what can we do to educate users, we need to focus on building security that doesn't require educated users.

Reference: http://www.schneier.com/news-055.html

You my good sir, or madame, are a poet!

I worked on KDE 2.0, did some coding for KMail, and then because of time constraints from job and family had to give up on it. I quit using KDE soon after because I realized that other than one or two applications, I spent 90% of my day doing command line stuff. I used the BlackBox window manager for many years. Then, last year, I tried KDE 4.something again. Man, was I disappointed. The environment may have been nice and the look much improved, but very basic stuff was missing from a lot of the applications. Konqueror was hardly useable as a browser. There was no way to manage certificate and key stores, even using the dedicated application for that. Basic stuff that was there in 2.0 was simply missing. I don't know what discussions were had or what decisions were made since I left the community but someone seriously screwed the pooch on version numbering. To my mind, 4.4 or whatever I was using should have been a 4.0 pre-release. I got the impression that KDE's focus now is on the gee-whiz bells and whistles and they are less concerned with shipping something that works.

These days, I really don't give a crap about "desktop environment." I use the applications that I use, and again, I still spend a lot of my day writing command line applications to get real work done, mostly shuffling data from place to another or fixing problems created by user or programmer error. Frankly, KDE 4 felt like it was getting in the way, and its native applications (and I know some are written by the KDE team and some not) were lacking in features. I was forced to use applications that didn't integrate with the environment just to do something useful.

BTW, I feel pretty much the same way about Gnome, but I suppose that I am using Gnome since I switched from Kubuntu to Ubuntu. I really don't care, since the applications that I use don't integrate with any desktop environment.