Also important is: which version are you looking at? The 1.4 series (still updated) is intended for smaller/embedded installs, while the 2.x series is intended for mainstream (especially desktop) usage

It's a wordplay on "Mao", the guy famous for kickstarting communism in China.

Because there's no way that's going to be a government sting operation. No way at all.

He said "Creationist" not "Christian". There's not a complete overlap between "Creationists" and "believers in social Darwinism", but the general impression one gets of the attitudes towards the poor and attitudes towards religion in the right wing of (especially American) politics is that it's a large set (partly by virtue of "believers in social Darwinism" being a terrifyingly large set in general).

It's not the science education where you need to fix people who believe crazy things like literal $HOLY_BOOK interpretations, it's the language skills. Teach these people what similes, metaphors, and allegory are.

They should just ditch the browser plugin by default. Support it as 'legacy' for a version or two, but don't ship or install by default (hell, they could even only offer it to corporate customers for all I care). It's the biggest problem with Java -- otherwise you pretty well get what you expect if you download and run unknown code, no worse than any other language. It's not like C's ability to completely tear your operating system apart if you run code you don't know is a bug, after all.

Pretty sure that only applies in cases where the accusers are the ones pressing charges. Considering this is the exact reverse...

It's possible on almost any Linux distribution if you're using a KMS-based (modern open-source) driver. Actually has been like that for a couple years now. There are some lingering permissions problems (need write access to the tty it's running on, a few other device nodes, and the log files -- most of these are solved by using SGID to a dedicated group rather than SUID to root, the rest require minor patches or config changes) but the big hurdles are gone.

It's not the default anywhere because it's mildly fiddly to setup and requires that you're using the open source Intel, ATI, or Nouveau drivers. Probably has some problems with using a display manager (KDM, GDM, XDM, etc.) too, as those login to the already-running X server rather than starting a new one for the user.

You forgot that it has to be a non-free (speech and beer) iPhone app!

You may wish to double-check your figures on the profits of the culture industry. It may be shocking, after the bullshit spewed by the RIAA, MPAA, etc., but they are making a hell of a lot of money despite piracy. There is also a substantial amount of research that suggests those who pirate more also legally purchase more when it comes to media.

KDBUS sounds okay to me. Apparently it, in a lot of people's views, boils down to "DBUS done right" -- the protocol is completely different under-the-hood, and will be (or is intended to be, if the userspace side people don't fuck it up like they constantly do to udev) supported in userspace by a translation layer for old-DBUS programs.

Further, the kernel devs have a habit (substantially creditable to Linus Torvalds) of doing a lot of things right, and making sure they don't break anything in the process, so I expect KDBUS will end up being stable and usable. Unlike, for example, udev which has made about a half-dozen hard backwards-compatibility breaking changes in the past year or so.

Unfortunately Apple has a tendency to do weird, non-standard, undocumented things with their hardware configuration, or else I'd be using an Apple laptop myself (without OSX).

See the stuff surrounding the Thunderbolt connector under Linux for an example -- despite, ostensibly, being a standard Thunderbolt port, the Linux implementation doesn't quite work properly with Apple's hardware (hotplug doesn't work, and the OS doesn't even see the Thunderbolt port unless something was plugged in at boot), but works perfectly with the reference Intel hardware. Not to mention their exclusive use of Broadcom wireless cards, the most difficult cards to work with in general (no supported open source drivers unlike the other big two, Atheros and Intel).

How do you 'win' against a concept?

Terrorism isn't a person, it isn't a nation, it isn't even a religion. There is nothing to win a war against, so you cannot ever have a traditional end to a war against terrorism. If those in power wish, it's a 'war' that can go on forever, quite easily.

git does include support for gpg signing of commits and tags, which I think is what the GP was talking about (though wrapping one's head around the cryptographic security of how git does it is a bit difficult).

SHA1 in git isn't really used as a cryptographic security measure, but git's structure does allow for some innate security because, if a colliding SHA1 hash is to show up... git looks at the new object, says "Huh, I already have that one." and just uses a reference to the original object instead. I'm not sure just how much git protects against an attack targeted against a single copy of the repo as, like I mentioned earlier, it's pretty difficult to wrap one's head around git's security due to how everything interacts.

Or at least that's the case for me. Maybe someone else has a quick explanation for how it all fits together.

Linus is a bit more restrained in his flaming. Typically he only does it when the person on the receiving end has done something dumb-to-monumentally-dumb and is someone Linus trusted to not do such things.