So I've got one person replying to me saying FSF is too "fundamentalist", and I've got you saying they're too lax and are letting too much slip through.

Finding such behavior on /. is about as surprising as discovering that the Duck Dynasty guy is an ignorant bigot.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad X60 that I've used for several years as a drawing tablet. (I assume the models being sold for this are without the very-proprietary patented Wacom digitizer). The swivel hinges don't hold up too well to abuse (I've had to do a "hip replacement" on mine), but it's otherwise a good piece of hardware for its day.

Well, with the value of Bitcoin already rapidly declining, they may not have to worry about it for much longer.

Doom came out around the time that I lost interest in gaming. I think the fact that the medium was overtaken by first-person shooters was part of the reason.

Congratulations on your statistics-defying eyesight, but "tablet equivalent to those phones with the big numbers" sounds like an acknowledgement that his father is experiencing the changes in eyesight that are typical of people in their 70s.

Did you read the question? How are the cameras and higher resolution worth anything to a man in his 70s who just wants to read e-mail and watch movies? The high pixel density on the latest displays is wasted on someone with declining eyesight and presbyopia (and encourages app developers who don't understand this to use tiny fonts, just because they can). And I can't recall the last time I used a camera while reading e-mail or watching a movie. He was asking about a tablet for his father, not for you.

One advantage of getting him an iPad that can run iOS7 is the fact that it has a setting to scale the default font size up and down. It only works for apps that support it, but the built-in Mail app is one of them, so you can scale the text size up for him.

"I do love the headphone jack. Simple, easy, and universal." And as doomed as POTS and broadcast NTSC. The headphone jack is currently the constraining design factor that prevents phones and tablets from getting any thinner. I guarantee you that Apple is working on a flat (reversible) replacement for the iPhone 6 or 7 or 8; the only question (other than when) is whether it'll be an open standard that will (over a few years) be embraced by the rest of the industry, proprietary to Apple, or something halfway in between that gets adopted by some manufacturers but not others and splits the media-playing industry into VHS and Beta again.

The Sentinel is going to be pissed that we'd already contaminated Europa.

I was curious to look at this article until I saw that it was based on only 4 years of data, and concluded that it was of no real value.

Once upon a time, when a superhero movie with a budget and talent behind it came along once every few years, they were pretty exciting and entertaining. But with Marvel squeezing out films as quickly as they can turn the crank, plus Warner getting one out now and then, and fantasy/sci-fi films (e.g. Middle Earth, Transformers) being made from the same big-budget CGI-heavy dimly-lit mold, there's getting to be very little special about any of them.

I've experienced the same kind of shut-up-the-developer-hath-spoken treatment from the Paint.net forum on other matters. It's one of the reasons I don't recommend it anymore (that and the issues with the software that I'd asked about).

I know plenty of "ordinary folk" who might want to download GIMP: people who use computers as a means to do stuff they want to do, and that doesn't mean dicking around with strange download sites on the internet. I recommend it frequently to artists I know who want to do basic photoshoppy stuff, and the fact that they don't already have something for that demonstrates that they're not particularly experienced with where and how to get software online.

"it was even visible from space"

My house is "visible from space": it's right there on Google Maps. This phrase is meaningless, because it's almost entirely a function of weather, the camera being used, and whether something is covered.

(On the other hand, it's often parroted that the Great Wall of China is "the only man-made object visible from space" ... but even one of China's own astronauts admitted that he couldn't pick it out from Low Earth Orbit.)

"lying to ourselves about what the time really is"?

You seem to be operating under the misunderstanding that the arbitrary numbers we've assigned to certain times of day have some kind of objective Platonic referent. "Eight o'clock" is just a social construct. If you want "12:00 noon" to be the instant when the sun is directly overhead (allowing for latitude adjustments), then you'll have to give up time zones altogether.

P.S. Does anyone actually work "9 'til 5"? Every office I've ever worked in has had a standard starting time of 8:00, an hour off for lunch, and a quitting time of 5:00.