That's stretching the GP's comment a little far, I don't think s/he is saying that nobody should ever get angry or sad (or joyful).

What I was saying is basically that if someone wants to believe in a bearded ghost that I don't believe in, I respect it. It's none of my business. If they believe that said bearded ghost says that those who have sex out of wedlock or are gay or whatever else are sinners who will burn in Hell if they don't accept Jesus before they die, and choose to abstain from sex or suppress their sexuality it's all absolutely fine and none of my business either. So long as they don't make MY beliefs and decisions THEIR business (which is where I'm proud of the religious friend that I do have and the mutual respect we share of each others beliefs), why should it matter to me what they believe in?

I don't think anyone is saying you can never get angry about anything. I get pissed about work all the time :)

Agreed, with KDE. It's ugly as sin and won't win any hipstery screenshot awards, but it actually lets you have some buttons for things instead of the more recent GNOME approach of "treat you like an idiot and hide the controls". I wouldn't mind if there was even an advanced "show me more controls" button but there isn't.

With the ugliness, by my personal taste I found that it helped to use one of the alternative themes for the controls - clearlooks I think? and go into the window border settings and disable the blue glow. It looks fairly decent now, though IMO the bottom panel and menu are still ugly.

I'm not angry at Apple with regards to their desktop OS (I am a bit annoyed at how locked down their iOS devices are, but I switched to Android).

However I am *wary* of the future of OS X, specifically the fact that the late Steve Jobs was always talking about the "post desktop era" and that much like Microsoft they seem to be trying hard to move everyone over to tablets. So I've been catching up with Linux as a contingency for if/when Apple turn around and say "the Mac only accounts for 2% of our sales, so we're withdrawing them from sale". It could be 5, 10 years from now but the whole industry seems to be predicting the death of the desktop in favour of tablets and I'm pretty certain I'm going to end up one of those stubborn old fools who likes his 30" monitor, physical keyboard and mouse and the freedom to customise my own hardware. By then Linux may be the only desktop OS left, and us old-farts-to-be have to be prepared.

The problem it has at the moment is that developers and users alike have kind of invested quite heavily into the GNOME/GTK environment, only for GNOME3 and Unity to get "Tabletification Disease" and end up dumbed down and buggy. I feel that they were right to update the ageing GNOME2 and I don't personally believe that MATE is the answer in the long term, but that they jumped the shark in the process.
It's actually gone kind of backwards from when I was properly into Linux about 5 years before, when GNOME2 wasn't so old and.. 2D. Everything was solid, stable, mature. Now it's like the Linux Desktop, at least on the G side, has gone back to square 1. Basic features are missing and it's just not right in 2013 that the desktop should show graphical glitches and/or lock up on popular AMD cards for example, nor that I should have to do command line incantations to repair my wireless driver after an update, both of which are examples of my recent experiences with it. I'm capable of fixing things but do that for a living and have better things to do with my time at home.

On the positive side, I tried KDE and gosh.... relative sanity! They actually dare to give us controls and buttons and not treat us all like retards who will flip out if there's more than one button on the screen. But most of the decent software (IMHO) is GTK/GNOME based because we all had faith in Ubuntu (and look where that's led us - nowadays with Canonical doing their own thing with everything it's one step away from closed source). *sigh*

It's just..... a mess.

Getting a new camera (Panasonic LX7) and finding that Corel haven't added RAW support for it to Aftershot Pro and "goodness knows if/when they will", then going to my Macbook and having it work instantly on Aperture, was the turning point for me when I thought "why am I back to wasting my time messing with Linux again?". (Plus Aperture is so much nicer to use, but I was willing to make a sacrifice if Aftershot would actually work). I'm now severely tempted to about-turn and flow my way right back to OS X on the desktop and consign Linux back to a secondary drive for playing with occasionally and seeing if it ever matures. Life's too short, you know?

Half true. One such person is a close friend and doesn't shove it down anyone's throats (he will "teach" people if they ask, but never without asking) nor would he go around telling me or anyone else how to live their lives. He doesn't let differences in beliefs stand in the way of friendship (neither do I), which is wonderful. It's how all religious (and non-religious) people should be.

It doesn't stop him listening to and believing what the pastors say though, and at least being quietly concerned about the future wellbeing of friends who do things they consider sinful.

But yeah, I don't really mind. I'm all for the Trek-like vision of religion where we just respect each others' beliefs, love them for who they are and get on with life. The only reason I think the Pope is an asshole is because (as is his job) he's trying to shove his views onto everyone else all the time.

It's "stuff that matters" because he's the leader of a religious group that comprises 1.2 billion people. And I guess it's no huge surprise but it's worth knowing that he's another of those bigoted assholes who will be telling those billions about how all homosexuals are evil and that no-one should be using contraception, and we won't miraculously be getting a nice pope who would modernise religion just yet.

Please remember however that the Mint most people are recommending is actually based on Ubuntu.

I'm not saying that everyone who switches to Mint is doing so to spite or boycott Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth, however it's worth knowing that by using the Ubuntu-based version of Mint you are still indirectly supporting and relying on Canonical and their Evil Ways :)

LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is another story, although I'm not too sure where it stands in terms of maturity at the moment.

It worked for the old Star Trek movies :P They were looking positively ancient by the time VI came around.

Can I play that on the Symantec Cloud?

YMMV - I use my Nexus 7 very heavily (especially at the pub, being antisocial as I am) and find its book-like format perfect. While my full size iPad sits gathering dust.

Same here.

It's grown over the years (ooer missus)
At first I thought the original iPhone was huge, and got used to that. Then I thought the HTC One X and Samsung S3 were huge, and got used to my One X. I think that's a wonderful size. I think the GNII is huge, but could get used to that.
Anything bigger than the GNII wouldn't fit in my pocket, so I think that's the limit. In fact the HTC is about the sweet spot for me as I can fit it in the same pocket as my wallet leaving the other pocket free for a camera.

But recently I've toyed with the idea of carrying a 7 inch 3G tablet (which gets into the realms of "fairly comfortable to make internet posts on") and reverting to a dumbphone so I can get more than 5 minutes of battery life. 7in tablets fit into a standard jacket inner/map pocket. This idea would fall over on warm summer days when you wouldn't wear a jacket, but I'm posting from the UK and our last warm summer day was in 2006 so I'm not too worried.

We do snack on the employees. Mwahahaha

.... oh.

In that case I don't understand what the fuss is. I guess nowadays we just assume that people are incapable of turning off things that they don't like (same goes for things like all the fuss about Ubuntu's Amazon search, which you can just uh... turn off.)

Any company relying on some random job applicants for free consultation and taking them seriously is stone cold retarded and deserves the damage they'll inevitably suffer.

If they already know they're interviewing decent people then presumably they're only between jobs for a very brief time and wouldn't be daft enough to act as a doormat :P

Story is silly.

As a user, I like the convenience but the last thing I want is for all kinds of legal disputes and possible regulations as chances are they'll overreach in banning what Google and other search engines are allowed to do, and we'll end up with less than we had before Google pushed it like this. "Don't be evil", and at least allow sites to opt out.

Given the obesity problem, skipping to the grocery store or doing a goose step to the bus stop is probably a good idea as no doubt it expends more energy and uses more muscles than just slowly plodding along.

Doesn't seem like a good idea though. I'm all for doing your own thing and not worrying TOO much about what society considers "normal" (like I'm sure goes for most of Slashdot's readership) but I think you'd pretty soon be known as "that idiot who goose steps to the bus stop"