I think this is goddamn just awesome. The only question I have is: why didn't someone think about this before?

I often find myself switching between CLI and GUI, either of which has usability advantages depending on the problem at hand. This one has a good chance of combining the some of advantages of both and come out as a solution outperforming either of the two traditional options. Nice job! So inspiring. Very creative! Way to go, E!

What would you like to do an cannot?

...they also seemed to have a rough spot in the past months. For months, there was no stable version available for ubuntu Precise, which is an LTS. Last month, they finally released 3.5.13.1, with support for Precise. I also had trouble accessing their web page and repos for many days in a row. Not exactly the kind of stability I would expect for my main DE.

By the way, KDE 3.5 was my first Linux experience. It was my DE of choice; it worked well and I liked the configurability. But I always found it butt ugly. Looked way old-fashioned and outdated compared to OSs/DEs. Tried a few different themes, but that only made it worse. I still stayed with it for its functionality. But I always found it totally unsexy.

Why do you think the Linux community would pay more attention to a particular kind of hardware once Apple uses it?

I think he/she says "sub-$1000 laptop" because GP suggested to try getting all that stuff in a "cheap non-apple laptop" (and not because he/she thinks the MBP is less than $1000).

It's because of what someone else explained further above: Higgs field is a quantum field, which fluctuates constantly. Particles spontaneously emerge and disappear all the time. Same thing is true for photons: even in a perfectly dark room, you have spontaneously photons appearing and disappearing. This leads to the so-called zero-point-field. Even when there are no "real" photons in a dark room, the electromagnetic field is not zero. It fluctuates around zero due to these so-called "virtual photons". Same is true for every quantum field. To generate a "real" Higgs particle you need 125 GeV. Virtual bosons come and go all the time (for free). Interaction with "massive" particles gives them their mass.

Yes ggp has binding energy right. Except this has nothing to with the Higgs Boson. Higgs Boson is about why particles have a rest mass, i. e. the mass that elementary particles still have after taking everything apart (so that binding energy/mass does not play a role).

A photon bounces off mirrors because the electromagnetic field which describes the photon probability density is governed by Maxwell's equations. And according to those, and electromagnetic wave is reflected off a mirror (a perfect metal, for instance). Another way of looking at it is that photons interact with charges. When a photon approaches a metal, it stirs up the charges (electrons) inside the metal, which, in turn, interact with the photon (electromagnetic field) to change the photon's direction.

The way gravity affects the trajectory of photons is because (according to the theory of general relativity) mass distorts space-time itself. In this picture, you could think that the photon flies "straight" in a "bent" space-time.

... or maybe they belong to the previous owner's "missing" spouse?

So how does the Wayland solution do in terms of bandwidth? I am not sure I fully understand your explanation, but it sounds like entire images are transferred, rather than just the drawing commands. Sounds like it would be using as much bandwidth as the "offscreen image" workaround.

Totally agree. I gave up on Amarok, too. It's crazy how it's bloated with all these UI features I never use. I am using bare VLC now. It's not pretty and quite barebones. The backend is a dream, plays everything. Of course, it's totally lacking DE integration, and for my taste it's a bit too barebones, but what can I do. Surprisingly, there are not too many decent linux audio players around :(

... why hasn't anyone figured this out before? Is it too easy and too obvious to be true?

This is what I have been waiting for. After my initial excitement about (k)ubuntu release updates to get all the hardware running and supported, I am now at a state where everything is fine. The ongoing new 6-month releases are more of an annoyance than a great feature. Having to upgrade completely every 6 months just to get access to the latest software releases does not seem like a worth while effort. Sure, you can say that's what the LTS releases are for. But while the LTS releases do enjoy long-term support for security-relevant updates, they do not get a lot of software updates. So if you favorite application gets a major update after the LTS release you are out of luck. (Of course, you can fiddle something together on your own, but that's not really a low-maintenance solution.) Also, from my experience the LTS do not have less bugs than regular releases.

So if they can make rolling releases working with a high level of quality and testing, this would be really awesome from my point of view.

Summary: Republicans won. Democrats lost.