I have been using XFCE for several years.It comes with Studio Ubuntu, which also uses a kernel optimized for audio editing and CG rendering. My passion is CG, and if using XFCE helps to shave a half hour off a 10 hour rendering task, then you bet I'm going to use it.

Another benefit I have noticed is that I spend a lot less time messing about in the GUI time sinks. I look for an OS to provide a fast and economical way to get to the applications where I do my work. Code that supports fifty different ways to color the file manager screen is deadweight and frought with potential bugs, and I'm happy to be free of it.

A third benefit of XFCE: I am as susceptible to shiny distractions as the next guy, so I appreciate that XFCE has far fewer ways to wander off into the woods than KDE. There were a number of features in Gnome 2 that I miss, and if the Gnome 3 train wreck had not happened, I might never have moved to Studio Ubuntu and XFCE. Yet considering today's alternatives to XFCE, I have no regrets.

You said that very succinctly. Unfortunately it is also very wrong.

Read TFA again. The dark side (of Iapetus-- not the Force) is the side that is facing forward in its orbit.

May the Farce be with you.

That's no moon; that's half a binary planet.

"North" is a geocentric concept that can be projected outward upon the solar system.

That one is simple and easy since there is a clear consensus among Earth dwellers as to which way is north.

In other situations it can get more complicated, such as when projecting the egocentric concept of "Left" and "Right" outward from an individual point of view. The simplest case is when looking at a photo of Mutt and Jeff, and being told that Mutt is on the left. Even though when the photo was taken both Jeff would have said that Mutt was on his right side.

There are even greater problems when there is no consensus within the group. For instance, for a libtard "going to the Left" is definitely right, but "going to the Right" is clearly wrong, which is as succinct a summary of the state of USA politics as you can get. Well, except for the die hard Tea Partiers, where "Right" is always right, and "Left" is always wrong. But then after rejecting everything that is not right, all the Tea Partiers have left is right. Which is at best terribly confusing.

It was all so much simpler during the last American civil war, when everything was either North or South.

There is only the small problem of getting to court when NSA and FBI regulations come into play before the courts are involved. When those regulations stipulate that property can be confiscated, bank accounts can be frozen, and you could be turned out into the street with nothing more than the cash in your pocket, that is a powerful incentive to STFU and do whatever the Man says to do.

You may not have any effective allies, either, since there is nothing preventing your lawyer from being gifted with an NSL gives him a bad bit of conflict of interest wrt your case.

You seem to be unaware that Federal agency regulations are enforceable long before a situation can be brought before any court. The agencies have their own "courts" as defined by agency law, with their own means of encouraging cooperation. Such as confiscation of property, like all your computers and hard drives. And your cars. And your house. And your passport. Oh, and freezing your bank accounts.

It is all done according to their regulations, generally. The agencies are the ones who take the general guidelines given to them by directives of the Executive branch and/or laws of the Legislative branch and work them up into whatever regulations the agencies think would be most effective. That always means self-serving, to some extent. If you will notice, there is no mention in any of this about being innocent until proven guilty-- this is not court law, this is agency regulation.

It is a crappy system. It can be badly abused: J. Edgar Hoover. There needs to be reform. But this is so integral to the standing government-- all those agencies and bureaucrats who are unaffected by elections-- that reform is not going to happen anytime soon, and possibly not without bloodshed. And by the way, I'm a hippy leftest libtard, not a gun rights freak or anything like that.

Agency regulations come into play before courts are involved. When an agency regulation has a gag order preventing the victim from speaking to a court, then you have the kind of situation we now have in America with FISA, NSA, etc.

"But what good is a phone call if you have no mouth?" Agent Smith asked very quietly.

Is this the Dumb and Dumber show? Is slashdot in a mad race toward the lowest IQ that can still author a comment? Come on, guys, you are giving nerds and geeks a bad name.

You do realize it would take a thick book to document all the chemical changes that happen in a candle flame? (Everyone here has seen a candle flame at least once, right?) And that candle flame is a highly controlled burn.

So do you really think anyone can add a known fluorinated chemistry to a wild fire that is creating all kinds of products of incomplete combustion and have any idea how one of the most reactive elements in the periodic table is going to combine with who the hell knows what?

Of course no one knows what the chemical compositions of the stuff that is getting into the firefighters might be. All they can recover is the products after a second very complex set of chemical reactions; after whatever further reactions occur in the lungs or the blood or maybe the liver. At this point, even the portal of entry can only be guessed at. The environmental chemists have their work cut out for them on this one.

Well, yes, I live very well with on an income of $10,000/yr, barring a catastrophic health issue. I do so by being very careful about avoiding frivilous expenses. A one-time expense of $300 on top of a continued monthly expense that is only a few bucks less than what I am now paying doesn't work for me. But spending $300 now to avoid years of monthly payments would be a good deal.

I don't really need any faster access or greater bandwidth than what I now have. Yeah, I'd like those, but I'd also like a trip to Hawaii, a larger appartment, room for an infinite number of bookcases... Not going to happen.

Thank you for posting that. I think I had stopped reading when I hit the "$300 construction fee". That was a show-stopper, so why spend any more time on the thing?

Yeah, I would be interested in the $25/mo for 12 mo, then $0 for the next 6 years.

I'm disappointed that Portland did not make the cut this time. But I don't expect to directly benefit from Google's fiber anyway. I'm on a fixed income and the last I looked, Google would be more than I could afford.

That said, I expect that when Google does come to Portland that will force its competitors to sweeten their offerings. But maybe that will happen soon anyway, in an economic equivalent of 'spooky action at a distance.' If Google succeeds big time in these other cities, the providers already in the Portland market might realize that it would be advantageous to drop their rates and offer better packages now, and thus make Portland look like a less inviting market to Google.

Well, a couple of providers would also have to improve their customer and technical support (here's looking at you Comcast). But I'm sure they would sacrifice some of their excess profit margin if they felt the Google dragon breathing fire on their butts.

So I for one welcome our new google overlord. Even if he never comes completes the courtship ritual, he might put the fear of loss of market share in the boardrooms where it will do the most good.

You have lost me with the way you introduce the term "instinct" into the discussion without defining it. What do you mean by instinct? How do you distinguish between "instinct" and whatever the other thing is that you feel that humans and other primates may have, but that other mamals do not have?

Also there seems to be some confusion on your part as to how extensive "mirror neurons" are across species. They have been identified in man and in some primates, but they have not as yet been identified in any other mammals. You seem to be making an incredible leap between the state of "not yet found" and the state of "not there". Has it occurred to you that human and laboratory primate species are very easy to find and study with MRI, but it is not yet possible to do MRI studies on lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!)

Are you simply a troll? Or someone who is momentarily stumbling over their own words? As a working hypothesis, I think you are exhibiting the behavior of a troll who has not yet become skilled in the language arts.

It seems an equally valid conclusion is that a number of bad health outcomes are associated with pre-existing conditions that encourage or enforce prolonged sitting. I don't think this meta study has adequate controls for pre-existing bias; I don't think that can be done in this kind of research.

Nevertheless, the human body is designed for strolling around the savannas gathering stuff to eat, gathering things to burn. Brandishing torches to drive the large predators away from their prey, cooking their stolen meat on fires of dried dung. Nearly constant movement, but very little extreme exertion. A sort of idyllic life, if you don't mind the smells and the bugs.

It makes sense that a modern life style that mimics the one the human body was adapted to would be the healthier way to live.

Or that more people who are going to die sooner than the average in any case sit around a lot more than the others. Is the study doing an adequate job of controlling for this variable? As an episodic asthmatic there are several weeks each year when I have to time my medications and inhaler use so I can get an hour of walking in each day, but other than that hour I am quite sedentary, trying to avoid wheezing, during those weeks. I live a generally sedentary life because I have little choice: I could not keep a job as a mailman or Fedex delivery driver, etc. I am likely to die earlier than most from complications of airway disease, yet that has little to do with how much I sit on my butt during the hours when I am not doing my daily 3 to 6 mile walk.

There are a lot of men in similar predicaments. I know of two young men with cystic fibrosis who religiously Zoomba an hour each day and otherwise are student bookworms dependent on elevators and those OLGCs (old lady go-carts) to get around. These guys are doing everything they can to live to their 40th birthday and the odds are not in their favor. How much do these kinds of edge cases distort the general statistics? Is the study adequately accounting for those who are going to die young no matter what, and must live a sedentary life style?

True enough. For death itself.

The thing to really fear is if sitting on your butt all the time increases the risk that you won't be able to enjoy sex for the last 10 years of your life because you'll be too sick to complete the sex act. Even when making love all by yourself. You won't have the heart for it any more. In a very literal way.

That's the true message here. Not that death will take the indolent sooner, but that if you develop one of the sedentary diseases, you will not be able to have much fun in the last, lingering, decades of your life.

Get off your keister and move around a bit. We've got the technology... take your coffee and lunch breaks with a walk with an audio book. Replace your computer desk with a treadmill equiped with a keyboard. Move your butt!

That might be a good rallying cry for all geeks: Move your butt.