Attempting to turn yourself into an internet meme won't cozy you up to us, not when your administration's policy is that all private communications online should be subject to government snooping.

I keep hybrid tablet-laptop around as an art PC. It used to be an old Toshiba Satellite; now it's a Sony VAIO Duo 11. I run Slackware on it, like I do nearly all my machines. Slackware will run fine if the digitizer part is supported by the kernel (since new Wacom and N-Trig parts come out from time to time, sometimes kernel support may be missing or naff if the laptop is too new). Otherwise you will see reduced functionality, but that is true of any distro.

Using a stylus you can drive most aspects of a WM or DE. It gets tricky using your finger.

When NASA is as accountable as a mind control cult, you know shit's really hit the fan.

One of my favorites is "Hands to Heaven" by Breathe -- which is mostly a mawkish 1980s power ballad, until the chorus swells and...

"Tonight I may just tweak your ass..."

Whoa! Getting a little raunchy there aren't we?

The Amiga: the Lamborghini Countach of computer hardware. Sexy, innovative, considered pure awesomeness in its day... but stuck forever in the 1980s in terms of design and engineering.

I don't think you'd find any proponents of EBCDIC who didn't wear a blue suit and have a six-figure salary riding on the continued use of IBM mainframes.

Systemd is open source software, which Lennart has made available more or less out of the goodness of his heart. You may hate it -- God knows I fucking hate it -- but the world really is a better place for it having been written. Why? Diversity. Systemd is yet another set of ideas in the ongoing discussion that is open source development. Software gets written, then it gets patched or replaced by someone who thinks they can make it better, and alternatives for every use case flourish. It's a conversation, a debate. So while there may be vehement disagreement with the ideas that systemd represents, we are all better off for at least having heard and considered those ideas.

Just don't make the entire user-space stack depend on systemd. Please.

Didn't IBM intimidate a would-be litigant out of suing by threatening to sue them on the same claims once before? IBM is like the big brother asterisk from the Pink Panther cartoon "Pink Punch"...

In the novel Jurassic Park, Dennis Nedry disabled the park's security by disguising a backdoor function call as an object constructor in what was pretty clearly a C++-like language, in an attempt to pull a fast one on anyone who might audit his code. (The novel had screenshots of his IDE and everything; wonderfully geeky.) That C++ enables this sort of behavior makes it complicated and risky to use in certain scenarios. I can imagine kerbnel developers blanching at its use, or keeping it to a restricted subset.

Ah, but think how much bigger Windows *could* have been, if it had followed its historical growth curve!

An OS needn't, and shouldn't, be more complex than is necessary to get the job done. By keeping Windows at a constant level of resource-intensiveness, Microsoft has made more room on modern hardware for even more advanced high-end applications -- and has made it feasible to refresh old PCs with the latest Windows. (Really important; the typical corporate drone's PC is profoundly rinky-dink.) This is stuff we used to cheer Linux for doing while Microsoft operating systems inflated with each generation. Now we bemoan Microsoft for keeping the size of Windows down while Linux bloats up the way we made fun of Windows for doing. (Have you seen GNOME 3?)

Microsoft deserves full credit for keeping their system size and complexity down over the past few revs.

Technology is essential to gaming, because without great code to back up your design (no matter how modest that design may be) your game will be glitchy, slow, or unplayable. In fact, Notch is a programmer first, designer second. The design of Minecraft (and many of his other games) seems to have evolved organically out of his programming experiments as well as the community.

So technology is still a big deal in gaming. Stop trying to convince us you're still relevant, Romero, and go sling some code. No game, no weiner.

Would you rather spend your time designing and building a spaceship or sitting in endless meetings at some Center for Excellence negotiating over a spaceship that might be designed and built decades later, if at all? If you're a good engineer, chances are you want to get to the bit where you're designing cool things that blast off into outer space, with as few bureaucratic obstacles as is practical.

systemd dependency is optional in Xorg 1.16.

It's likely that the major desktops will have switched to Wayland and deprecated X support before systemd is made a hard dependency for Xorg.