As a Debian Developer, I'm very pleased to read comments like yours.

However, I think you are exaggerating. It's true that Debian is much more stable than Ubuntu, yes, and I'm very proud of that. Unfortunately it is not true that it _never_ breaks. Creating that sort of expectation is going to end up in a lot of frustration when something does break.

My worst cases of breakage are old notebooks, that used to work just fine with Lenny but now don't work just as well in Squeeze (hibernate doesn't work, fan control doesn't work, etc), due mainly to the kernel people not supporting those peripherals any more. There's only so much that we Debian folks can do, when upstream breaks, it's very very difficult to prevent the breakage in the distro.

This happened more than once during DebConf6 (Debian Developer's Conference 2006).

The cleaning staff kept unplugging the router that provided PoE to the whole wireless, TO WATCH TV WHILE CLEANING!

Using a standard keyboard is ONLY important if the people involved are from different keyboard-layout regions. And what is important is that you agree on a standard, not that the standard be English.

About what you mention of the brackets, you should take a look at the Latin-American Spanish keyboard that has {} without modifiers. I find this pretty convenient to code in {} using languages. Another possibility is to switch to Python, so that you only need to know where the : is.

The difference is the timeframe where this has happened.

It is now generally agreed that what went on in the American continent was not right. The massacre of the indigenous inhabitants is not something that many people are proud of today, and each country has their own processes of restoration of SOME of the land to the original peoples.

That such an usurpation would be started in the 20th century by the same people that apologise for their actions in the Americas, with conditions similar to the ones that were so hated about Apartheid in South Africa is something that does not cease to shock me.

So, yes, it's not the first and probably won't be the last unfair usurpation of land, however, the conditions under which it has happened make it specially nasty.

That is not what the article says. What it says is that the patent was filed 20 years ago, and that the freetype library included the code that infringed on that patent "for some time".

What would "find a way around these patents" be? With software patents, that patent a "method" of doing something, it's quite hard to be able to find a way around them. Say Microsoft decided to enforce their double-click patent, how would you find a way around it? Basically, no other software would be able to use the double click input method without paying Microsoft for a patent license.

The EFF fights against many of the enforced software patents, trying to prove that there was prior art and that the patent was actually invalid when it was granted. If the patent was actually valid, there's not much you could do.

That's how it is, that's why we hate software patents.

And since it's a suggestion mailbox and not bug tracked there's no proof of it?

I still find it very hard to believe.

Do you have pointers to where your dad submitted these suggestions? Links to bugs, mailing list mails, etc?

It's common for suggestions to rot in the bug tracking system when nobody is interested in implementing them. It's NOT common however, to tell someone that makes a good suggestion to fuck off, so I'm rather not inclined to believe it without proof.

Also, Free Software developers tend to react badly when stuff is demanded from them, instead of just suggested. It could be as subtle a difference as the difference between "I think it would be great if this could be changed" and "This must be changed".