Will they fork, or will they stick with the dippy new interface? Because I have to say I tried the new interface. And I find it doesn't help me much. First thing I do on a new system is to "sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback" and login under the old system.

Oh, and don't think I'm in curmudgeon mode and simply don't like new things. I really tried to like the new system, I really did. But having to right click on Terminal and select "open new session" to get a second shell up is ANNOYING AS FUCK. Come on guys! You know that's not how we work. If you don't have half a dozen command prompts up you're not busy. Why make it harder to do that?

So for me, this is the end of Gnome. I need something that helps me work, not gets in the way of work. I like the system but if you ditch the "classic" aka "useful" mode, well sorry. Gotta go find something else.

Yeah, pretty much. But remember that in a modern OS it's not just your task that is running. The drivers are all running, the virus checker, firewall...there is a lot of code running in the background. It would be nice if all of that was running on some core that your program isn't running on. You can get benefits of parallelism from the os as well as application design.

And Moore's law is a measure of potential. If the programmers are not up to the job, the law still holds. The machine is in fact faster. Whether you and I can fully take advantage of that isn't part of the law. It just says the machines are more capable, and they are. It's up to the programmers to take advantage of that, but the law still holds.

It is just expressing itself differently as we begin to hit the wall with process size decreases and speed increases. If wattage of the cpu goes down, you can pack more cores into the same area. Computing power is still going up.

Two points.

1) Do you think that makes us any less responsible? If you were to bomb Kansas halfway to hell and remove their infrastructure, destroy their food and water distribution the same thing would happen. It wouldn't be the fault of the people living there. It would be the fault of the people dropping the bombs.

2) Let's say you are right though, and let's say the number is hugely inflated. Let's say we are only directly responsible for one tenth the number. That still means we've done 37/10=3.7 times worse to them than 9/11.

No. We don't get out of it that easily by saying crime went up and therefore we aren't responsible. We are.

I don't think anything that has been done has actually added any significant safety.

How about ending our presence in Iraq? Do you think that has anything to do with your safety? It does. Allow me to explain.

Check out this wiki page. Give it a good once-over, then let's talk about the contents.

You'll find that a good base number for civilian deaths in Iraq is a little over 100,000. That seems to be the average agreed upon number. We'll go with the AP number, 110,600 deaths. AP is reliable, and it's a decent average for the most conservative estimates for loss of life. Now note the time period. "March 2003 to April 2009." That's 6 years and one month. Are you with me so far?

On 9/11, the terrorist attacks accounted for the loss of 2,977 lives. Now let's look at those numbers and see what they mean.

110600 / 2977 is 37.15. So what that means is that we have killed 37 times more civilians than the 9/11 attackers did. The 9/11 victims and the civilians in Iraq are alike - all innocent people that did not deserve to die.

March 2003 to April 2009 is a period spanning 6 years and 1 month. That's 73 months. And 73 / 37.15 is 1.96. That's almost exactly two months. That means that what we've done to Iraq is like a 9/11 style attack every two months for over six years. Remember how pissed off we were after 9/11? Imagine that every two months for six years running.

110,000 families missing a loved one. A child they raised, a mother they loved, a father that will never come home. 110,000 families that have a good solid reason to absolutely poisonously passionately hate our guts.

Still feel safe? It took only 19 guys to carry out the 9/11 attacks.

My point is that it absolutely matters who is President. Decisions will be made that will affect your safety directly. You need someone at the helm that makes good decisions.

It matters. A lot.

Thank you Sweden. It's nice to know that when my generation hands off the torch, there will be some people available that will know what to do with it.

In America the situation is different, or at least it appears to be. I've been a part of the interview process on the hiring side. A lot of kids we get are fantastic on big iron Java and website back ends and SQL, but really couldn't program an 8 bit processor to do anything. It worries me. You ask them how a keyboard works and they panic. They don't know.

Ok age jokes aside, honestly I worry just as much about younger programmers. They have less of an idea where it all comes from. Not many graduates these days are coding in assembly. Or even C anymore which is pretty much the mother language to all other languages.

Drivers and other down-to-the-metal stuff aren't written in Java. Yes, I know that with Google you can find me an experimental counterexample. I know that. But the system you are using right now? It'll all be assembly, C and maybe a little C++. And you're most likely not using a browser written in Java or Python or C#.

You know, some years ago I considered going back to college and getting a CompSci degree. When they said that Java was their main language I decided not to. I like Java, write in it, and I plan to get whatever Oracle is calling the SCJP this week someday soon. I'm not dismissive of any of the new technologies. I like them. They are great at the problems they are designed to solve.

But there is something to be said for writing assembly and manually turning on an MMU unit, just once. You can know about computers, or you can know computers. We're missing something by shifting the educational focus to the higher level languages.

I don't think Obama knew how polarizing of a figure he would be. Republicans never like a Democrat, but they positively hate Obama. He didn't anticipate the lengths they would go to make his presidency look weak. Like blocking the Veterans Jobs Bill.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to say that military spending is ok and shouldn't be defunded, start two wars under the last Republican president, and then block a bill to take the survivors of those very same wars and deny them aid. And then claim Obama isn't keeping his promises!

It honestly boggles me how anyone can vote for these people.

For one thing Canada won't have to put up with Americans abusing their socialized healthcare system.

This deep, my friend. This deep.

I'd call it a good start. Let them catch their breath, think their ordeal is over... then give them 10 hours of They're Taking The Hobbits To Isengard.

There is already a universal virus killer in development. And it doesn't target the virus. Instead it targets the cell hosting the virus. When a cell is virus infected it makes a specific protein, a "help I'm infected" RNA flag.

DRACO is two proteins bound together. When it sees the "help I'm infected" RNA, it breaks in two. Half of DRACO binds to it. The other half is a protein messenger that triggers apoptosis - cell death.

The end result is that any cell that has a virus in it commits suicide before the virus can use the cell to reproduce.

Here is a quick story on DRACO.

Check out James Gleik's Chaos.

It's nonfiction but still might scratch the same itch. It's told from a storyteller's point of view discussing the personalities and early discoveries in the field, the stubborn resistance encountered, all that. It's a good story as well as being a good book about math.

No points today and this is the best post in this thread I've read so far. Mods! Attack!

Well if I'm a lousy engineer you must be a lousy manager. You hate my idea, but don't have one of your own to offer.