Change is not bad. X11 needs change. Perhaps they should have worked with X11, but from what I hear the X11 authors themselves didn't want to keep it.

X11 is broken in one serious way. X11 window forwarding over network is slow. Pathetically slow. Maybe some people who only ever forward terminals from X11 and whose entire computer use case involves manipulating ASCII characters might be fine with this, but those of us who work with graphics of any kinds that third-party hacks are required to make X work over a network. Witness the abomination that is NoMachine NX, where they had to basically rewrite X11 so that it would work fast over a slow network connection.

X11 may have many plusses, but this inability to do fast networking is just stupid and needs to change---whether via updating X11, Wayland, Mir, or what have you.

You sound like someone who's gotten burnt by installing non-long-term-support Ubuntu in a production environment. That was your error, really; the non-LTS releases get minimal support, so installing them in an infrastructure-critical environment is pure silliness.

I've never had an issue with LTS releases... I have a machine that's been continuously updated since Ubuntu 8.10 (non-LTS), and the thing has miraculously upgraded with zero hitches via 8.10->9.10->10.04->12.04 and soon to be 14.04. This was a 2008 Mac Pro, to boot, so I've enjoyed incredible support in terms of mac-specific drivers and even the Broadcom wifi working out of the box.

Shuttleworth has inspired many people, and while he's made mistakes he's not afraid to push the boundaries and make disruptive changes because that's what keeps things going. The formula of disrputive changes in non-LTS with stability in LTS works great. Just stick to 0.1 releases of LTS Ubuntu and you'll have a stable system.

If Stallman thinks that it is a "reasonable" proposition to force companies to put their source code in escrow, he is further removed from reality than I thought. It is more reasonable to leave things the way they are.

I meant "closed source," not "sells a source"

Mod this one up everyone... the ONLY question out of all of these that we can't guess Stallman's answer to.

If the source code is never published, then the source never needs to go into the public domain at all. Once the GPL becomes unenforceable, then there is nothing there to force you to publish your source code. So:

1) Emacs vXX is released in 2014.
2) Copyright expires in 2019 and it goes into public domain.
3) Company downloads vXX as public domain code and makes a sells a source program based on it.
4) In 2024, the Company's binaries become public domain, but since it never released source, its improvements never do.

So, in summary, while the binaries will eventually be public domain, this does not replace the GPL's current function of forcing the sharing of source.... the Company's source code improvements to emacs can be kept private forever.

Come on, you need to add a couple of digits to your UID if you're making this type of argument.

It's been said over and over again for a decade on slashdot: no one's saying you can't profit from free software, especially RMS. He would love it if everyone could profit from free software.

"Stallman's community" (I presume you mean the FSF) is about one thing and one thing only: the idea that when you create something that is free for everyone, you have a tool to ensure that as it evolves, it remains free for everyone for ever. Pure and simple, that is all.

It's about saying one thing and one thing only: "this thing that I have created is a seed., free for everyone to use. Whatever fruit it gives, and whatever other ideas it gives rise to, should also remain free for everyone to use."

The fact that profit is associated with restricting the freedom to copy or modify is entirely tangential to the above basic point.

There's a flip side. I brought in an iPhone 5, almost out of warranty, with a broken sleep button, to the Genius Bar on my way to work. The guy said "yep," 5 minutes later I walked away with a fully functioning replacement, no questions asked; got to my office, and it was like having a brand new phone.

Then I was at an AT&T store. I saw a I guy with a Windows Phone; same thing---button issues, still under warranty. He got told to ship his phone somewhere. He needed his phone so he couldn't ship it off. So he got told to haul is ass somewhere thirty minutes away to a depot, and maybe after they looked at it there would get a replacement. The look of confused frustration on his face made me feel like I was taping an apple commercial.

Bottom line is: everyone says Apple is more expensive. Well, first of all, it's not. Same price for the top-tier Apple and Android phones. OK, so the cables are more expensive and proprietary. True that stinks, but maybe that pays for stuff like the Genius bar where they go out of their way to make life easier for you.

No issues on an iPhone 5. It's been a joy to use and a breath of fresh air---the UI was 5 years old and getting really stale.

I'd been really getting bored of my iPhone and *gasp* using it only in a very utilitarian manner for quite some years. Now I actually turn it on again because all the fades and swimming bubbles and blurs are actually quite damned cool to look at. It's fun using it again.

You don't even need a Fourier transform to get an intuition for the principle. Both the Fourier transform and the uncertainty principle are consequences of the Cauchy-Schwarz integral inequality:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy%E2%80%93Schwarz_inequality#Physics

So like everything else in physics, it's a consequence of math, not incomprehensible magic.

Is there a tweak that brings back Aero?

Is joke, right? The whole idea of dethorning MS is passe now. MS is dethroning itself.

The ones I found aren't OSS and cost $3-$5. Are we really crossing over to the OS X realm of finding paid tweaks to provide much needed system functionality?

Do these tweaks really restore the FULL start menu? Including the part of it that searches inside your documents and launches the appropriate software to read the documents when clicked on or hit return?

Oh wait, do I really want to trust some third party to search inside my documents? In Win7, it was Microsoft that searched inside the documents and despite all their faults I semi-trusted Microsoft to respect my privacy... but now whoever runs some random tweak is searching inside my files?

You fail to understand many things.

Most importantly, you fail to understand the idea of "increased variance." The predictions of global warming period is not that it will get hotter all the time; or that it will get cooler all the time; but that there will be an increased frequency of oscillations between cooling and warming at rates not previously observed. It is this oscillation, this switching back and forth between heating and cooling too rapidly, that is the evidence for the global warming hypothesis (same goes for tornado strength). This is called "scatter."

Second, you fail to understand that "testable predictions" means reproducing past events. Global climate models cannot reproduce the temperature record for the past without including man-made heating during the industrial revolution. These same models, when run into the future, predict increased scatter and increasing mean temperature, with a scatter level that's high and a mean increase that's slow.

These two points continually have been mis-explained to the public, and the advocates for policy change to reverse climate change have failed miserably at getting these points through to the public---hence your post.

I think his comments on FTL and all the hype about interstellar space exploration are totally spot-on. All the Alcubierre drive news that had NASA's name attached to it was traceable to one guy there who doesn't even really understand general relativity. What you have to understand about NASA is that they tend to write blank checks as far as exaggerations in press releases go; so while the work actually being done (building an interferometer) is valid, the hype attached to it about this and that could be extremely overblown (interferometer will be used to test FTL travel). The end result is "NASA working on warp drive" headlines where the real headline should be something much more humble and limited.