It's not so much a big assumption as it is a starting point. There is probably a biosphere somewhere in the Universe that uses a red or yellow pigment for photosynthesis. The problem is that detecting it at a distance is much harder, because while we might see the spectral signature we couldn't be sure that it's life.

Looking for a biosphere that is very similar to that of Earth makes it much more likely that we'll be able to detect that it is in fact "life" and not something else. While we may miss 99% of the life in the Universe with this approach, if/when we do detect it, our confidence will be much higher.

I use Ubuntu as my desktop, because while I like Arch and Slackware, I'm too old to spend time futzing with getting backups to work or writing custom trayer configurations or whatever. (And when I finally got everything I wanted on Arch, half of GNOME or KDE was installed anyway, so I didn't really see the point.)

Anyway, you know what I wish Canonical would work on? Ubuntu for Computers. I don't need yet another mobile operating system; Android is there, iOS is there, Windows Phone is there, FirefoxOS is there. There's nothing that Ubuntu Touch is going to offer that isn't done better somewhere else. All it's doing is cannibalizing resources from Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Working on Mir just creates divisions within the open source community; there's nothing wrong with Wayland.

So yeah, Canonical, don't just jump on the mobile bandwagon. You have a core product, focus on it.

There's a USB installation image for i386 and amd64! Finally! Dear lord, it's been years. That's as big a deal as the time_t thing for me.

Once upon a time there was going to be a Rising Stars miniseries/movie. Any word on that? What about more comics in that franchise?

Also, Midnight Nation...any word on a miniseries or movie of that?

(Also, for any Slashdotters who haven't read Rising Stars and Midnight Nation, both are very much worth reading.)

I've worked in tech for 15-20 years now. Since about 2005, I've sat on interview panels.

In all that time, I've interviewed maybe three black people (two of whom ended up getting hired). Same with women. It wasn't that we were intentionally ignoring resumes we thought were from black people or women, we just simply did not ever get them.

I went to college at a school that had a large black student body (although it wouldn't be classified under the "Historically Black College" scheme). Looking at their website, the college is 52% white, 27% black, 10% hispanic white, 3% Asian. However, in my CS101 class (~50 students), it was all white and Asian guys and one white girl (who ended up changing majors).

The high school I went to was roughly 50/50 black/white, but my AP Computer Science class in high school was 100% white. There was actually a pretty good split of girls and boys, though (it was the only "computer" class that offered honors credit, so there was an attraction to people who wanted high class-placement even if they weren't interested in CS).

So yeah. While I don't doubt some corporations are biased in their hiring practices, there also just aren't a lot of black of female applicants, and not a lot of black and/or female CS graduates. I don't know how to address that end of the problem.

If he filled up his thermos with water from the bathroom sink, would that be theft as well?

I wouldn't mind so much except that the federal government also provides between $20 and $50 billion in subsidies to oil and gas companies.

What game, just out of curiosity? I remember reading about how Ant Attack was developed that way.

Looks like it's the end of the line for OpenVMS as well.

I would pay good, American money, to have OpenVMS open-sourced instead of just languishing like other DEC OS's. Why can't RSTS/E or RSX-11 be free? What could that possibly cost HP? Same with OpenVMS at this point. It's a great system, and I would love to see it available to average joes.

Someone who isn't as lazy as I am should start an "Open Source OpenVMS!" petition.

Someone really needs to explain the appeal of Kubuntu and KDE to me. I just don't get it. It's so *busy*: everything is huge with glowing drop shadows and spinning cursors and animations everywhere. It's also the only desktop environment I've ever sat down at that I couldn't just use immediately - I tried "creating an activity" and was left with a completely blank desktop, not even any panels or anything. There may have been keyboard shortcuts to get out of that situation, but I didn't know them and shouldn't have had to. I tried creating another activity later and the session segfaulted. This was a release version, not a beta or something.

I really want to like KDE, truly. I used KDE on FreeBSD for years, but eventually moved over to CDE on Solaris and then GNOME on Linux. I tried going back to KDE with Kubuntu 13.04 and had the above experience. So someone, please explain what KDE offers that I don't get through GNOME, Unity, XFCE, or Razor...

Most state laws (I'm assuming you're in the United States) allow for a DUI conviction if you are in "actual control" of a vehicle. That means if you're asleep drunk in the car and the keys are also in the car, you can be found guilty. If you're parked on private land and drunk, you can be found guilty. If you're in the driver's seat in an automated car and the car could be switched to manual control, you could be convicted of DUI if you're drunk.

That's what worries me. The transition to fully automatic cars needs to be essentially 100%, or at least 99% with a "pull over and stop moving" for the remaining 1%. Otherwise I would've be surprised if fatalities went *up* due to drivers taking a nap/getting drunk/reading a book and failing to notice when they need to take back over.

HDTV was the best thing to ever happen to laptop manufacturers. My CRT monitor in 1997 had a roughly equivalent resolution than my laptop today (1366/768). With the advent of HDTV, computer display manufacturers went out and rebranded everything as "True HD", implying to consumers that these are really high resolution displays because, well, HDTV is so much better than SDTV, a True HD monitor must be really great too! Hiding behind those letters made it easy to mislead customers about the actual resolution of their displays.

I would love to have a QHD laptop. Hell, I wish there were more than just a few 1080p laptops out there. The QHD laptops are finally starting to arrive, but they're slow coming. I wish I could get a Chromebook Pixel without the, you know, Chromebook part.

Now that Clang/LLVM has got this finished, I'm wondering what a system would look like with:

    * Linux as the kernel
    * Clang/LLVM as the system C/C++ compiler
    * Heirloom Toolchest as the basic userland toolchain
    * Wayland as the underlying display system
    * musl as the system C library

That would be Linux, but would contain almost no GNU code. Not that I have anything against GNU, but the Heirloom Toolchest, Clang, and musl are all more standards compliant, smaller, and often faster than their GNU counterparts. I wonder what a Linux distribution like that would look like. I'd use it.

(I hate how "GNU's Not Unix!" is really becoming more and more true. Unix was about minimalism, and sometimes GNU seems like it's about stuffing everything possible into every tool.)