That's certainly something a lot of people are finding out. In times of economic troubles, fields like astronomy are the first to suffer.

As for the original question, I think you have more than enough time to learn physics and astronomy if you pick up some books and watch videos, to the point where you might be a pretty good amateur enthusiast. But contributing to the field? Maybe by doing some amateur astromy, you can help us spot objects. Lots of people are happy with that. I guess if you have good programming skills, you might spend some time learning physics to the point where you can run your own simulations, assuming you don't need a supercomputer to do so. 10 hours a week is definitely on the low side though, it's going to take a while to learn everything you need to know. Also, it's very unlikely you will get published unless you manage to be associated with a university. Maybe inquire into doing a part-time degree or something? The reality is that if you're not in the academic world, it's hard to contribute meaningfully.

I read your post in the same voice as the South Park "they tuk our jerbs!" guys. It was pretty funny. :)

I find that shooters which make use of vehicles a lot are actually better controlled on consoles. Twin sticks are superior to WASD + mouse for controlling tanks and such. That's why Halo made sense on consoles.

First, it's all the same commission. It has a large mandate. Also, while it is popular (especially since that Globe and Mail article fulll of mistruths) to bash Québec for its corruption, I'd argue that we merely are more distrustful of our government, and so we tend to speak out more about these things. Anglophones seem like they want to sweep that stuff under the rug. I mean, you think your politicians are squeaky clean? The conservative party broke election laws with their robocalls, yet it's just one dude who's responsible for it, no one else knew about this in the party? And you really think the oil industry hasn't been "contributing" here and there to encourage Harper to not give a shit about the environment and sabotage climate change international conferences? What about that gun lobby shirt MacKay was wearing the other day? Makes the conservatives' insistence on getting rid of the gun registry quite interesting...

Let's not be naive here. All governments are corrupt. You need to be wary of these things and root out this corruption. That's what our commission is doing. I'd also remind you that the article was about policemen illegally taking tourists' money. That has nothing to do at all with what you typed. You just saw an opportunity to bash your favourite target.

Also, you might have guessed that I am actually a Québécois and that I live there.

I find it funny how Canadians always jump to the "Québécois aren't a race!" defense whenever they get called out on their Québec-bashing (an all too common practice). As if defining us as not a race somehow makes your discrimination less problematic. Call it whatever you want: racism, xenophobia, whatever. Some people in Québec have started calling it francophoby, which I guess is a pretty accurate term. The name doesn't matter. The concept of hating an entire people because their culture is distinct and different fom yours, and because they refuse to give it up and adopt your culture, that's certainly an attitude we need to get rid of.

A particularly interesting fact about Canadians' denial that this is racism is that they made it about racism first. "Speak white!" is something many francophones has been told by anglophones. There has been an association in the past for a long time in the minds of some anglophones between the white francophones of Québec and the black population of america. I wouldn't claim that we have had it as bad as they did, but it's not hard to see why this association was crated in the first place, if you know anything about our history.

Anyway, I take solace in the fact that it's mostly older generations of Canadians who are francophobic. When I lived outside Québec, most people my age were cool. Hopefully this trend keeps going, because there is no doubt that we will never feel home in Canada if we're always hated in this fashion.

This comment was modded as troll by someone and I admit that I probably shouldn't have made it. While it is unfortunate that some english Canadians feel every discussion of Canada should be a platform for their hatred of Québecois, I accomplish nothing by replying to them.

That's not terribly surprising considering how xenophobic a majority of you guys are.

Hey look, an article about Canada! I wonder if some ignorant racist english dude decided to randomly bash Quebec for no reason... Oh, who am I kidding, of course! This is Canada after all, the land of multiculturalism.*

That's because they're really good at it.

I don't see how this is different from DNA tests, which require you to provide your DNA. If the thing is inside you, then it can be considered part of you, and then the same logic that forces you to give your DNA information would require you to give the information on the chip, no?

I don't see how that changes anything. As far as i'm concerned, if you go to one of these patent trolls instead of trying to develop a product, you are indeed slowing down innovation. If a company independently has the same idea and actually tries to do something with it, I don't think they should owe you anything. How exactly did the original "inventor" contribute to society and technology? There is no valuable function being served here. Just someone who came up with an idea, and rather than doing something with it, figures he's just gonna leech money from people who have the same idea later on.

Damn. That's actually a really good idea. You'd have mod points if I had them.

Oh I can see why these might cause frustration. I was also bothered by the first implementation of it. But it seems like people don't like the concept, which is what I don't understand. They claim unity is good for touchscreens, but I'm not so sure about that honestly. Last time I was using unity, I was relying exclusively on the launcher and the dash search functions to start programs. With the launcher on auto-hide and the taskbar merging with the titlebars, it gives you the most screen space for your programs of any environment I've tried, and accessing programs and files from the dash is extremely fast. It allows you to control your computer almost entirely with the keyboard, which I like very much, while still being very accessible if you're just slouched in your chair, browsing with only the mouse. It strikes a nice balance. I'm used to awesomeWM now and it is better for coding, but unity is the most usable out of the environments I've tried.

I don't understand the folks who say you can't get work done on ubuntu. So many people were doing research on ubuntu with unity at my last university. You just need to use the keyboard more than you're used to in other environments, which is a good thing for me. Menus are a pain in the ass.

I don't agree with you that this diminushes ressources for projects. As I wrote above, many people contribute to open source projects because they just feel like it, not as a job. The different environments you quote above are all trying to do different things, as are the distros you mention. Would the arch maintainers even consider working on debian if arch didn't exist? That's not obvious to me. There is also the fact that while these projects may be going for different things, they can still at times come back together and integrate features from the other ones. Systemd is actually a very good example of this: it had competing init systems, but it has now been adopted by all the major distros. This competition was useful, and we arguably wouldn't have an init system to standardize on if people hadn't been allowed to go off on their own to try their solution.

For the user, again, this is terribly overblown. Just pick ubuntu. Or mint if you really want something a little bit more traditional. There is no reason to recommend a newcomer go for anything else. These are tried and tested distributions that are clearly designed to be easy to use. If the user wants to go further from there, they will have had enough experience with these beginner distros to make an informed choice. If they're more pragmatic and only use linux to get work done, they'll probably be satisfied and won't even need to look at the other distros. Again, the average user will never even hear about 95% of the distros on that timeline. They can't be paralyzed by options they don't know about.

It's true that some software works better in certain environments, and may require some work to appear native in other ones. I don't think that's a big deal since there is almost always an alternative that is native to your environment. It usually follows your environment's design principles, which would make it a superior choice anyway.

I think doing things more than once is good as long as you're doing it differently everytime. Those distros can sometimes be solving similar problems, but they usally have different solutions. Just look at all the people who complained about unity. Aren't they glad that XFCE exists? And now there's MATE if they really want the old school experience. Those products are clearly serving different custormers, and this parallel work can be useful for linux as a whole, as developpers can learn from the successes and failures of other projects.

Meh, reports of ubuntu's death are premature. Lots of people quote distrowatch numbers but they don't really matter. I'd say the average non-nerd who runs linux is probably still using ubuntu. It's still a good distro. If I weren't using a tiling window manager, I'd probably be running unity. Never understood why people don't like it.

The fragmentation argument is a terrible one, and always was. User's who aren't too technically literate don't know about any linux distro but the one they're using. Hell, how many people out there know what ubuntu is but have no idea what linux is? How would these people even know that a new distro came out which doesn't use systemd, if they're not already a huge nerd? As for newcomers who are more technically literate, just pick ubuntu. It works. Or one of the other big ones if you really want to try things out. This is really not a big deal. Fragmentation is also not an issue for developpers. They claimed it was the reason they wouldn't port games to linux for a while, but then they realised they can just say they're targeting ubuntu and the communities for different distros will figure out what libraries are required. That's what they're doing and it works perfectly. I'm gaming on archlinux. It is officialy supported by exactly 0 developpers out there. Ask me if fragmentation is an issue.

Fragmentation doesn't hurt anyone. The many distros just give power users more choice. It's also in the spirit of open source software. The maitainers for all those distros don't owe anything to anyone. They don't have to tattoo the penguin on their forehead and march in line with the rest of the linux crowd to "advance the cause of linux". They do this because they like it. And they're not hurting anyone.