No, they were not. Neanderthals died out about 25ka ago.

... or is that just me and the people I know?

I try the same every spring whenever we switch to DST (which for me is UTC+2), but I give up after a week or so because it gets confusing with different web services (calendars, bug trackers etc) and my own devices being in different time zones

... after Mr Guttenberg had to quit as Defence Minister because of plagiarism, it seems to have become a sport to topple politicians this way. It's a fun thing to watch.

So... all those pre-historic women loving the mysterious stranger with the blue eyes? Interesting.

"This gene does something good for people

So it seems.

It makes them have more kids.

Might be. Alternatively, it may also let more kids survive or make the kids more aggressive towards others, or... whatever, we dont seem to know really.

... also, I use different distros for different purposes.
Ignoring that, this is what my timeline looks, sorted by first use of each distro:

fli4l suse gentoo ubuntu debian arch

... or so I misread the headline at first glance.

... the answer depends on "what do want it to you use for".

I hate those polls when there's no nonsense option you can choose to say "I hate this poll".

What do you want to imply?

That, somehow, he who does not know how to debug the kernel should not play with bit operations?

Something like that?

  Or, that we should stop researching the structure of the universe, and instead focus on what we usually do, which is making war, screwing other people and post photos of our dicks on teh internet?

Schellenberg, E. G., von Scheve, C.:
Emotional Cues in American Popular Music: Five Decades of the Top 40

(paywalled)

Don't know.
There are upright and honourable people in politics. There's black sheep, like everywhere, and maybe politics has more than its fair share of them.

But seeing how the media turn and twist every word you utter, and publish them again completely out of context, I imagine it's difficult to be upright and straightforward.

By the way, in Germany the Pirate Party is very big, at least in the news, these days. Most of them, even those that are in the spotlight, are political amateurs. As such, they dont all always talk ... cautiously with media (also, a lot of the political discussion happens in public fora etc). Recently, news show "Die Tagesschau" made my day when they quoted a party member saying something like "all parties contain 10% idiots". Never before had I heard the rather profane word "idiot" in that show. And I fear I wont hear it again soon ;)

And that's a pity. Because current trends are just that. Current.