Linux is like an ecosystem , with some companies at the top of thew food chain and others who are forced to live underneath them.

What you THINK is Linus is at the top of that foodchain. In reality, Redhat is at the top of that foodchain, and Linus, Mark and everyone else - all other distros -get a lot of code RedHat writes forced onto them whether they like it or not. They are by far the biggest, most well funded, most prolific and most influential Linux distro Plenty of core functionality issues out of them, and because so many other device makers and 3rd party software makers write code which depends on their code, all other Linux distros are forced to follow suit.

Fo course, once code is depended-upon by a large number of 3rd parties, that dependency spreads like a cancer and all Linux distros are forced to include that depended upon code.

And what makes RedHat so sucessful, what lets them maintain their position as top dog / ecosystem dictator? One thing- the contracts it has with the US government.

And what code might I be talking about? I might be talking about Systemd.

http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

You can read about it at this link and especially the ones below but tldr; It Came From Redhat and provoked nonthing less than a civil war in Linux over whether it will be included.

Shuttleworth proclaimed it would never be included in Ubuntu and Linus railed against it, but to no avail. In the end they both submitted to the power wielded by Redhat.

True, there's only a 99% chance this inscrutable mess of code, which has staged violent coup after violent coup against the territory previously held by nicely isolated and well understood parts of Linux *at the lowest levels* isn't a government sponsered backdoor-via-oopsie-a'lookie-at-that-bug-we-wrote ! but that's small comfort to the rest of us who need somewhere to run from the privacy-raping, eavesdropping, keystroke-logging, backdoored piece of shit Torjan known as Windows 10 when Windows 7 stops being habitable.

So yeah, the guy who has root on every Ubuntu installation in the world and was publicly submitted into bowing before and pledging his eternal allegience and fealty to His Majesty the King wants everyone to know that King's clothes are marvelous and all this talk of a naked King is just bunk.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/8/1...

http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/fea...

The basic tension here is the use of technology by Bad Guys gives them preternatural power to do bad things in big ways. OTOH , the state sponsored panopticon which is deployed, in all earnestness- let us not pretend otherwise, seriously, I don't question their motives even a little - is a known recipe for the destruction of democracy, dissent and a death sentence for a healthy society. But only a free and healthy society has any hope to counter terrorism. Absent freedom of thought and freedom from intimidation, short-term, parochial local incentives borns of personal fiefdoms take over policy making completely and that society is doomed to fall, just like Rome.

We cannot allow ourselves to become Rome. The only way to do that is to prevent the government from deploying a system which could be used by future governments to crush dissent and independent thought. That is, to crush anonymous speech and the freedom to explore ideas and voicing opinions which run counter to powerful interests.

It not that terrorism doesn't have the potential to bring a doomsday to us all, they most certainly do, it's that through an indirect process which is nevertheless guaranteed to be realized, that potential turns into an absolute certainty if the government is able to get root on all our keystrokes.

cocaine.....

Seriously, what's to stop this fruitcake nation-state autocrat from becoming hopelessly addicted to substances which

1) make him feel poweful in the face of overwhleming odds, i.e. going up against the U.S.

2) seriously and permanently shift his reasoning and perception facilities deep into the megalomaniac-omnipotent spectrum ?

Answer- nothing and no one.

Hopefully the people around him have an Easy button under their desks they can push before he waddles them into nuclear oblivion.

Oh the irony of unjustly reaming out someone because you didn't read their post by acusingthem of unjustly reaming someone out because they didn't read someone else's post.

Double decker wow.

Read my post again.I took Fuckbook and Zuckerfuck to the shed , for exactly the points you're citing. I took timothy tot he shed for mis-representing zuckerfuck's "free services" as something other than exploitation, which is exactly what they are and what the article, and timothy, tried to hide.

Learn.To. Read.

"Indian government's disdain for free services..."

Wow. Just wow. Who is timothy and why does he have seemingly untrammelled access to posting slanted stories on Slashdot? Is he the new owner's nome de plume? Got a Facebook connection, or what?

The facts of matter are internet.org would provide India witha free walled garden Facebook-limited, Facebook-defined, Facebook-mined, Facebook-exploited subset of the real internet. It was nothing but digital colonialism, a new different of reservation for a different kind of indian (and that is most likely how it was joked about within Facebook itself).

Well, as many have observed lately Slashdot is going down hill. I think *timothy* and his posts pretty well sum up what's wrong with slashdot. It's turned into a tool, aimed at nerds and nerd-influencers, blantantly serving corporate interests, pushing corporate agendas.

So that's it for me. I can't in good conscience continue to contribute my energy, attention and effort making Slashdot profitable if it's just a tool for Facebook and its ilk to push their propoganda. The internet's a big place (no thanks toFacebook) and I'll find another home.

As a parting shot and look back to what Slashdot used to be, Stalman gave a great speech less than a month ago about the red hot, immediate danger the so called "unitary patent" being pushed by the corporate coke snorters is posing to software developers all over the globe; basically itspassage means American-style software patents for all nations in the EU. Thought you won that fight? Think again.

http://techrights.org/2016/01/...

The action you need to take is to call your representative and tell them this issue is important to you and you are watching it.

Bye Slashdot.

Thank god the government is doing this. Because it will end or at least greatly reduce the incidence of minors getting access to p0rn, that's for sure. Of course there will always be the troubling borderline cases of people linking to the metric tons of p0rn in all kinds of chat rooms and in all types of contexts, including political ones like, famously, Goatse:

http://gawker.com/finding-goat...

but we can spend more time and money going after those sites and individuals later.

This is a great way for the government to appear to be doing something about something without incurring the statistical risks associated with taking political risks. It's awesomely futile but tailor-made for people for whom the world's real problems just seem overwhelming and intractable. You know things like global warming which may, even now, be on an unstoppable trajectory to wipe human civilization from the Earth, and then they're the refugee crisis and that damn thing *making* all those refugees, what's that place called? Syrianna.. no wait that was a George Clooney movie about something or other... camels and shit like that right? Oh wiat...Syria, ...right?

Then there's the grotesque economic disparities which pose a real threat to the perceived legitimacy of the lawmaking process itself and then there's that whole thing with EU...

Fuck it. Gentlemen, man up. We're going after adult p0rn.

We may have grown up with *exactly* the same access to *exactly* the same images (there's a very limited number of positions the human body can assume and and only so many props which can be meaningfully included) and, truthfully our parents did too and, well, yes, our grandparents and so on in an unbroken chain going back at least to antiquity, in all cultures too, but dammit, we're going to stomp it out.... on the internet.

I know I am acting as a one-note musician of late, so feel free to skip this if you've heard it (from me) before but this is not just the shape things to come, it is one example of a force which will dictate every aspect of your life, every aspect of how governments are (re)structured, every one of our childrens' lives will be grounded in and determined in large part by this force. The force is simply the fact that technology is rapidly bestowing the power to cause very great destruction to very large number of people into the hands of smaller and smaller groups of people, tending towards one. In fact the level of destruction is tending towards "death" and the number of victims is tending towards "everyone". That is a world changing event sneaking up on us and no one is taking it all that seriously, at least, no one I have granola and lattes with.

It's not just genetics, it's all forms of DIYBio and eventually nanotechnology; it makes viruses ransomware and even city-closing SCADA attacks look like the good old days. If what happened in cyber happens in the real world it will look like this: hackers will toy with genetics and bio-based "stuff" under the hacker ethos of free exploration for everyone. Most of it will just come to nothing, but someone will find a way to turn all the algae in public fountains neon blue and everyone will think it's cool. Then the blackhats will start to get involved and create malicious wetware. Then the DIYBio hackers will try to step in and write wetware to protect us against wetware. We know where this goes. We know who has the upper hand and who is always playing catch-up in this cat and mouse game.

The problem, the real problem is we're a failed species. Because of the way we evolved, owing to evolutionary pressures where winning is strictly defined as making babies (DNA passing itself on through the device of making brains and bodies that want to pass it on.. any other type of DNA eventually gets shut out of existence), very many people are completely governed by genetically mediated impulses which serve fish, lions and apes well enough but spell doom for humans. Those impulses just keep driving people to *more* of certain behaviors, without limit. More money, more power, more land, more resources, more control over other people and what they do and think and of course who they fuck (religious zealots) . It's all about gathering to yourself and monopolizing as much as possible all money and power and therefore, women and thereby offspring. You have countless examples of exactly this behavior in medieval times where the local Lord would avail himself of any peasant bride the night before she was married or in with polygamous cultures like modern day Saudi Arabia or just being a NBA star or a corporate executive or a rock star.. it's the drive to control resources and be the alpha male in order to maximize your genetic fitness, and of course, it has to be pointed out that women overwhelming prefer such males.

Those are extreme examples all, but they go to the heart to of the issue with our species- it's why there's social inequities at all. It's why there's war and totalitarian dictatorships and income inequities and why a small group of people will band together to fuck over millions and billions of other people just to preserve their privileged status. It's about status which is about controlling resources which is about copulation and genetic success whether the bearers of those impulses are aware of it or not.

We *could* be a species whose members, as soon as they are assured they will always have enough immediately and determinedly set about to provide and lift up their fellow humans. We *could* be a species whose strongest desire is to make sure everyone in our community has the basics necessary for a decent living. Are we that species? Have you ever wondered why not? Why do billionaires offshore their wealth to tax havens and give less of their net income to charity than "average" people? Why do dictators dictate anything other than fairness and economic equity shall be the law of their land? Why are the strongest human drives to acquire control dominate exclude and generally fuck over people far less fortunate than themselves ?

From a sociobiological perspective, all those drives serve one purpose- to advance the "cause" of your genes, to increase your personal reproductive fitness at the expense of your alleged competitors who are vying for the same reproductive-enhancing resources and opportunities.

And in fact, control over and access to all that stuff DID, over the course of evolutionary time, prove to be the deciding factors in who lived long enough to spread their genes and who was genetically shut out. As a consequence, we are all to a greater or lesser extent possessors of those impulses. And for some people, or for all people in some environments, those drives just never experience any type of satiety or attenuation by other life events. They brutally and callously determine their bearers' behaviors and dominate their world view, forever without limit and without end.

So bin Laden, who had many wives, and many children and tons of money STILL felt insulted, dismissed and humiliated when his offer to defend Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein was rebuffed by the Saudi royal family and the rest is history. So Saddam Hussein who had effective control over the land wealth and political power of an entire sovereign state only used it to aggrandize himself and seek yet more power. So John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Bill Gates - who are known now by many for their charitable trusts- had lives and careers that can only be described as pure-play sociopathic; their productive lives were spent dominating, and deceiving industries and customers, in that order, all in (blind, unconscious) service to increasing their "genetic fitness" which , darn it can never be fit enough.

Look at what ISIS is promising its recruits- harems, women and power over other men. Look at what they told the 9-11 hijackers.. 19 virgins in heaven. Sure the promises of enhancing their reproductive fitness are sublimated with some Allah-talk and jihadi-righteousness and Caliphate-goodness, but that's all it is, sublimation. Is that really any different than libertarians and conservatives talking about lowering taxes and getting government off their backs so they can just have more, er I mean benefit society in their capacity as job creators ? They're all just justifying their acquisitive impulses and those impulses exist as they do as a mere tool for their DNA, so that is can succeed, so it can be more competitive in a competitive environment.

We are the things our genes make us and at a very fundamental level, we do their bidding . It's why you're sexual at all and what part of your daily activity and waking hours are spent thinking about, looking for, preparing in some way for sex. Attracting a mate. Planning a successful career. It's so basic, we don't want to own it, we don't want to admit the extent to which our DNA uses us and our thoughts and impulses and ambitions and perceptions and opinions to serve as a vehicle to recreate itself. And all that comes out at the dysfunctional end as terrorism, as a desire to destroy the competing males and the society they built and the leverage that society gives them.

We have to set about the work of making ourselves a different version of ourselves. We hail Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and virtually just anyone who succeeds materially, but in reality these are the worst sorts of people. We have this vague or sometimes explicit idea that we can contain and channel otherwise destructive "ambition" (to use a disarming phrase for domination and destruction of others) to society's benefit. That belief has to be measured by its results and what are those results exactly? Well, where are we right now? What is the original article talking about, because that's where we are, really, at a juncture where another 50 years will finish us as a species. We need to turn our technology on ourselves and make a better version of ourselves and by better I don't mean smarter, taller, better looking, more cunning, more "successful", I mean better, morally and socially better.

Either we can use our technology to fix the actual problem we have, or we can use our technology to make better band-aids for the increasingly vicious wounds that same technology will be inflicting on us. Only one of those paths has a future for us.

Looked at from a certain perspective, the overwhelmingly bad threats we face going forward are all variations on a single theme- huge power over life and death is devolving into the hands of smaller and smaller groups of individuals. The size of the group needed to pull off an attack is shrinking, while the number of people harmed and the severity of that harm are both simultaneously going through the roof.

This characterizes the nature of the threat of terrorism - small arms fire is bad, automatic rifles are much worse and small groups of people flying planes (a high technology) into skyscrapers (another high technology) is worse yet. So this is yet another example of that phenomena, albeit a more obvious example.

We're going to bestow obscene weapons of ultimate destruction upon ourselves then, we're going to use them, just as the critics are saying. At some point it's got to happen that we wake up and realize that only path to survival for us is to attack the root cause of the problem- human thought and behavior- specifically terrorism comes from just two sources.

One is the obvious, the infliction of real economic and power injustices by a tiny ruling minority upon the majority. The minority essentially treat the lives and fortunes of the majority as an asset to be strip mined for their personal benefit. Call it what you want, dehumanization, oppression, exploitation, enslavement, rape it's all the same thing, the same strain of thought and impulse: over there is that other person- let me find a way to separate him from anything I may want and then turn the very act of his living, his existence, into an event which benefits only me.

This breeds huge criminal and extremist political movements all over the globe- in the Middle East, in Russia which is effectively a kleptocracy, and even in the US which is effectively a plutocracy.

The reason for a lot of the "crime" is because "crime" and the "black market" is the only rational way for people to put bread on their table. So also with extremist political movements. People know when they're treated unfairly, when their lives have been stripped of meaning and hope. Not everyone thinks the best choice is to set himself on fire, and if that widespread general malaise gets harnessed by a unifying narrative which promises to solve all those problems, then you have something like ISIS or al Queda.

Besides economic and social injustice, the other source of terrorism is sociobiologically driven impulses which for some reason are immune to satiety or attenuation of any form. They just keep driving people to *more* of the behavior without limit. More money, more power, more land, more resources, more control over other people and what their lives will be like. From a sociobiological perspective, all those drives serve one purpose- to advance the "cause" of your genes, to increase your personal reproductive fitness at the expense of your alleged competitors for the same reproductive-enhancing resources and opportunities.

And in fact, control over and access to all that stuff DID, over the course of evolutionary time, prove to be the deciding factors in who lived long enough to spread their genes and who was genetically shut out. As a consequence, we are all to a greater or lesser extent possessors of those impulses. But for some people, or for all people in some environments, those drives just never experience satiety or attenuation by other life events. They brutally and callously determine their bearers' behaviors and dominate their world view.

So bin Laden, who had many wives, and many children and tons of money STILL felt insulted, dismissed and humiliated when his offer to defend Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein was rebuffed by the Saudi royal family. So Saddam Hussein who had effective control over the land wealth and political power of a sovereign state only used it to aggrandize himself and seek yet more power. So John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Bill Gates - who are known now by many for their charitable trusts- had lives and careers that can only be described as pure-play sociopathic; their productive lives were dedicated to use controlling, dominating, and deceiving societies, industries, and customers, in that order, all in (blind, unconscious) service to increasing their "genetic fitness".

The more power be confer on ourselves without ever making a move to bring some of that technology to bear on people as people, as the purposeful and ultimate cause of our problems, the more certain it is that we will finally vacate this world and yield it to another roll of the evolutionary dice.

https://deepclimate.org/

You know you're lying. Just admit it. Just admit that you'd rather billions of people die than you have to admit that you're a bitch boy for billionaires, a fool and the sort of low information braying self and other destructive jackass you like to proclaim others to be Admit you'd rather destroy the entire world than be shown to be wrong, because you're , you know ego-dysfunctional, weak and basically a sociopathic predator with onlya loosely-defined grip on reality, basically, you're a subhuman piece of shit.

Just , you know, admit it. You'll feel better.

Know what the real difference betwen people like me and people like you is? In my worst imaginings, I give you a trial. In your best actions, you mass-murder hundreds of millions of innocent people and , thanks to the amount of Koch Libertarian crack you've shoved up your fucking nose over the years, in your life long role as a fool for billionaires' greed and indifference to human life, you aid and abet the worst crime any group of humans has ever inflicted on humanity and call it "Fweedom".

http://davidappell.blogspot.no...

So, defendant Anonymous, are you familiar with the term "cherry picking?". Why don't you tell the court what you understand the the phrase "cherry picking" to mean?

Defendant Anonymous, do you turn to the internet for information about climate change? You do? Since you know what cherry picking is and you have already described yourself as highly engaged with the topic of climate change, did you ever consider the possiblity that this statistic was itself cherry picking? Did you actively seek out disconfrirmatory evidence for this statistic?

Defendant Anonymous, I refer you to your posting on Slashdot Mar 2012 where you directly accused a poster of cherry picking his statistic. So you were well aware not only of the concept fo cherry picking but that cherry picking was used in the climate change debate....

Defandant Anonymous, I present to you a graph posted by a fellow poster WoofyGoofy in rebuttal to a comment you made describing "no climate change in nearly 19 years", do you recognize that graph? Would you say that that graph describes an instance of cherry picking? Speka up Defandant Anonymous.

Defendant Anonymous, were you aware of what people said the consequences of global warming would be upon hundreds of millions of people, if it were true? Speak up so the court can hear you Defendant Anonymous. Yes you were? And yet, you continued to post statements as facts , statements which a reasonably prudent person who did not possess a wanton disregard for the truth, would have rejected as likely falsehods. Isn't that right Defendant Anonymous? By your own measure, the statements you made were most likely false, weren't they Defendant Anonymous?

Ladies nad Gentlemen of the jury, we have here nothing more than the very description of the law under which Defendant Anonymous has been charged- Gross Negligence and a Depraved Indifference For Human Welfare With Special Circumstances.

Ladies and Gentlement of the jury, Defendant Anonymous and millions more just like him are precisely and individually culpable for the destrcutive falsehoods they either knew or should have known they were spreading through the years 1990-2020. These were years in which the Great Climate Crisis still could have been averted save for the actions of Defendant Anonymous and his ilk, actions which displayed a Depraved Indifference to Human Welfare. Actions which they knew or shoudl have known would contribute to the millions of deaths and political upheavals we see nightly on the news. ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, the Supreme Court in 2025 had already found that each citizen, individually has and always has had an implicit, unshirkable obligation to be honest and to act in good conscience in their utterances and writings when the fate of other human beings rests in the balance of those utternaces, no matter how small a part their individual utterances and writings may have played in the ultimate fate of those fellow humans. That same ruling found that each individual can be charged with the totality of the crime to which they contributed, and that theories of so called "proportional guilt" serve only to thwart a justice which must not be thwarted.

  What we have before us here in the public postings of Defendant Anonymous is nothing less than a criminal act of the highest order, Because of Defendant Anonymous, and others soon to be tried, the Earth is where it is and there is no going back.

Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, I submit that there is one verdict which wil serve justice, a verdict of guilty on the charge before you. Defendant Anonymous knowingly and with malice aforethought made utterances and wrote statements which he himself knew or should have known were likely false. Bring back a verdict fo guilty, and may God have mercy on his soul.

The fact is that the world and the US DID have a consensus regarding human-induced climate change prior to the Koch brothers injection of denialism into the public discussion. You have only to read some of the eexhaustive and authoritative books available to you : Dark Money, Merchant of Doubt Doubt Is Their Product and The Hockey Stick And The Climate Wars to understand therehas been a deliberate coordinated attack on climate science and climate scientists for the express purpose of deferring and delaying action on climate change. The Koch brothers own study told them the mainstream science was correct, and they buried that study.

http://thinkprogress.org/clima...

Alright then. What are we really looking at? We are looking at a group of terrorists who have built and set off a bomb called global climate warming with the specific intent of handing the world's governments- which governments they have openly called for the desmantling and destruction of- a problem so large they will not be able to cope with the fallout. They have set off a bomb which they believe will cause the collapse of the United States Government. In this they have been aided by anti-government conservatives, conservative moevements, conservative think tanks, other conservative billionaires, all stripes of conservative publications, editors writers and bloggers. Each and everyone of is a terrorist or a supporter of terorism and the result of those terrrorist activities is hundreds of millions dead and condemend to death the permanent destrcution of the habitiblity of large portions of the Earth , mass envrionmentally caused political upheaval, population dislocation wars and diseases taking the lives of yet hundrends of millions more.

Those are crimes. Those are crimes so vast, the criminals believe they can never be charged with them. The criminals believe they will not be held accountable. The criminals believe there are too many of them to be prosecuted and their actions resemble too closely mere opinion offering to ever be labled as crimes.

I'll give them this- their plan to radically deconstrcut then reconstrcut the American government is going to suceeded beyone their wildest dreams. Because under our pre-Global Warming system of government, they would have gotten away with everything. But as we the afflicted, the destroyed, the people forced to live under the New Koch-Inflicted Reality, we the victims of Scalia and Thomas and Americans for Prosperity and the Wall Street Journal and Scaife and Murdoch and Norquist and all the tens of thousands of other organizations and individuals who together joined to systematically destroy our species common heritage, our ability to sustain life human civiliation on this planet, take power they will meet a very different United States Government. They won't be facing corporate water-carrying bitch boys and and fucking house niggers like Holder and Obama. No, it'll be more like the full Black Lives Matter treatment, joined by Yellow Lives Matter and Red Lives Matter and While Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. They'll be facing real justice courtesy of the United States Government and in accordance with the United States Government's laws, served up hot and they'll be no limit to scope of their assets we'll seize, or the nooses the United States Government's courts of law will sentence them to swing from.

In the pre-Global Warming American government, no mere opinion maker would have been put on trial for his life for "opinions" he offered. Under the post Global Warming American Government, they're very lkely find that the tolerance for mass-murder via mass-lies has been exhausted and, just as the world will witness unthinkable climatic and ecological and social events, so too the world will witness the trial of "average" citizens for Crimes Against Humanity. Let them tell the court and the world why they thought the scientists were wrong. Let them be subject to cross examination and then let the jurors decide for themselves if what is on display in the courtrooms is anything other than Gross Depravity and Indifference to Human Life with Special Circumstances -i.e. the effected number more than one million- a capital offense.

Here we come. Here we come. The horrifying reality you unleashed on billions of your vicitms is not going to overwhelm us, or overwhelm our sytem of government, or overwhelm our justice system or save you from *what you have done*. Nothing is going to save you from what you have done.

You're terrorists and if people today can't put that together then people tomorrow - and I mean tomorrow- certainly will have no problem with it. People wonder why the US government didn't just kill Hitler early. The asnwer si because the US government was shot through with anti-semites and fascists, especially FDR's cabinet and the office of the Secretary of State was filled with anti-Semites who actively hid first hand acconunts of what Hitler was doing in Poland and Hungary from FDR. Don't think we're any different. The judiciary and Congress is shot through with people who are in effect anti-government terrorists, determined to destroy the government from within. Thus Citizen's United. Thus continuation of deomcracy-gassing Dark Money politics. Thus the contiguous anti-science, anti-action-against-climate-change decisions flowing out of the conservative wing of the Supreme Court. The Nazis too thought they were above the law because they WERE the law. History proved how wrong they were. History proved there there exists a certain, unchanging, God given moral truths and obligations which no one has the power to controvert and whosoever does so, at all times and in all places without exception for particulars is guilty of Crimes Against Humanity.

Here we come. Here we come. This is not your father's diffident government, happy to compromise with mass murders and people who would destroy all life on earth.

There's never, ever, without exception, been a crime the that comes near the depravity and scope of destructiveness such as you've committed or a class of criminal as purely evil as you manifestly are. So get ready. Get ready for the Big Change in Government which you so feverntly sought to instantiate. I don't think you're going to like it the way you thought you would, but maybe when they break your body, then they'll change your mind.

OK this is Linux's Big Chance. The nost savvy most technically literate most intelligent people are going to, for the first time, really really be looking for alternatives to Windows because of this shit. I know I am (not to say I qualify as any of the above). Those people, that 5-10% decide for their familes, their inlaws their friends their co-workers what's cool, what's great and what you shoudl avoid.

So is Linux ready or does it still expect its everyday users to be keen to memorize lots and lots of magical incantations - "sudo apt etc etc etc etc" - in order to really GetShitDone?

Every time I wanted to do something on previous version of Ubuntu- purpotedly the most user-friendly version of Linux out there- I quickly found myself instructed by the cognesceti to solemnly intone this and that long incantation into the darkness of a dos prompt. That's a deal breaker.

Does anyone in Linux-land really understand that very basic fact? People know how to use my computers by memorizing trails through GUIs. That mimics how primitve people (people like me and and you) learned to navigate and find their way around the real world; they used signposts and landmarks to remind them where to do next. Folks, accept it- this is how are brains are wired to find things in a complex environment.

Text is NOT how we are wired to find things. We have no good memory for text- it's always an explicit labor of memorization. And those memories are remarkably frail and subject to confusion with similar text-based memories. That's why indexes and filing cabinets and encyclopedias are alphabetical- because otherwise we'd never find that thing we were looking at before just by remembering where it was last time.

But I can remember how to get to the store, how to get home, where that vacation camp is that I last visited 20 years ago. Because it's a trail, just the kind of thing my brain is specialized to remember, with landmarks thattrigger further memories, landmarks which effectively let me offload the work of explicit memorization.

So.. do we have a real GUI in Linux yet or am I going to have to sudo apt my way around still? Because this is most definitely the magical moment Linux has been waiting for - the Gigantic, Customer-Alienating, Self-Inflcited, Grand Windows Fuck Up.

Very intersting obviously I've been schooled, so thank you fellow Slashdotters.

Monopoly is what you get when there is no regulation. Does anyone really want to argue that? Throughout history, what we've had is large corporations and banks getting larger without limit as they consume smaller efforts with anti-competitive practices, practices which are "natural" and dont' involve forcible coercion.

Sorry but Libertarianism is completely confused, at best and a refuge for scoundrels at worst. The whole Milton Friedman-Ayn Rand-Alan Greespan wing of libertariansim is just thinly disguised sociopathy. Rand herself was a true blue sociopath as evidenced not just from her policy recommendations but her personal utterances and interperonsal relations and Friedman, lest we forget, helped, approved and supported Pinochet , a torturer, terrorist, and mass murderer. and Greenspan's fantasy that the market is self correcting under all crcumstances, that it's impossible, as in physics-style impossible, for something like the 2008 crash to every happen in a market such as ours.

As far as indentured servitude goes, since when are libertarians concerned with one party's ability to inflict "duress" n another party? That is the whole point of not limiting financial power inequalities. If I own all the land through deals i made, I can shut off food production to everyone else and no one can do anything about it. If me and my buddies get together and decide not to hire Black people, then that's our business. If we decide to make a list of people to whom we dont' want food sold to or jobs offered to then that's out business.

People have power in this world to the extent that they control resources. For all practical purposes there is no upper limit on the resources a person can control under Libertarian schemes- a fact Libertarians are well aware of. IT follows immediately that there is no upper limit on the power Libertariansim gives someone over other people's lives and fates and their ability to pursue happiness . Libertarianism could give a shit about creating a fair and equitable world. It's monomanically obsessed with process and keeping the number of rules which govern that process as small as possible and what comes out the other end of this for real flesh and blood members of society who have to live and suffer under this "purity" , well , who really gives a fuck? It's a kind of poitical and social autism.

  It's not a coincidence that Rand Paul would roll back the civil rights legislation of the 60s. That's a prinicpled decision on his part that comes straight out of the Libertairan playbook.

Sorry, it's nto just that the Koch brothers have given it a bad name. It goes all the way back to Greespan and Friedman and Ayn Rand . This is a political movement built upon the predatory and incredibly short-sighted ideas of sociopaths and autistics. It just is.

One more thing. Libertariansim shares a LOT in common with Marxism in a very specific way- it suffers from 19th century-physics-envy. Like Marxism, it posits that a set of "laws" which should govern a "system" and if those "laws" are followed then the sytem's behavior will be predictable.

Well folks, that is just pure physics-envy bullshit when it's applied to hyper complex "systems" like "the economy" and "people's economic behavior", which are "systems" only in the sense that you have applied that word "system" to them and in no other meaningful sense.

This whole 19th century "call it a system and devine the sytem's behavior from a few underlying princples" is absolute wishful thinking. If you want to reduce it to a few underlying principles then reduce it to the physical forces - gravity the strong force, the weak force etc. and come show it to everyone when you're done. And good luck with that, too.

What are we supposed to think when the group explicitly replaces "the pursuit of happiness" with "property"?

From their site:

Statement of Intent: "I hereby state my solemn intent to move to the State of New Hampshire. Once there, I will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of individualsâ(TM) rights to life, liberty, and property."

Pretty much sums up this group of people up. I think we all know a monpolistic, anti-social, predatory-capitalism-loving, big-bank-hugging, Koch-worshipping, Grover Norquist-loving, environment-trashing, indentured-servitude (hey, it's a contract btween consenting adults) pushing libertarian sociopath when we see one ...or 20,000