"The Desktop" is and has always been nothing but a very poor metaphor anyway. Get your damn desktop off my root window! ;)

Damn right. The purpose of the root window is to provide something to click on to display the main menu, and somewhere to place iconified windows. Kids these days with their "shortcut icons" and "widgets" ...

I can accept complains about "/opt" and "/usr/local" - they might not make much sense nowadays

Really? Where would you suggest I install software that doesn't come from my distro's repositories, then? Because I'm sure as hell not going to put it in plain /usr where it could conflict with the package manager and cause all kinds of horrible problems.

Something Fedora is missing here is that it's not the separate directories that confuse people, it's the abbreviations.

Something you're missing here is that this proposal has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with new users or anyone being "confused" by anything. This is entirely about the technical benefits Fedora believes would be provided by having all distro-controlled binaries and libraries stored within /usr.

GPS is a question?

And THIS is why I switched away from Ubuntu long ago.

Please, Ubuntu guys, learn the concept of a "showstopper". You should not release software with major known bugs. Is your release schedule really more important than your users' computers working properly?

ACT-UP and Stallman may have been needed at one point, but ultimately do more harm to their own cause then they realize.

Thank you for your concern.

Funny thing: there are huge numbers of people like you, who are always ready to tell anyone who stands up for a cause that they are doing it wrong and would be far better off just sitting back down again and not rocking the boat. There are far fewer people like Stallman who are actually ready to do the standing up. Which do you think has a more beneficial effect on society?

To put it another way: without Stallman, I would be typing this on a computer that was bound by restrictive EULAs that would prevent me from knowing how it worked or modifying it to suit my needs. He clearly knows a thing or two about software freedom. What have you accomplished that gives you the authority to claim you know better than him how to achieve his goals?

(Also, I find it bizarre that you equate issuing a press release you don't like with throwing blood at people. Really, you're going with that? Wow.)

This is British Airways we're talking about, not Southwest or Ryanair. BA does not charge hidden fees for everything. In-flight food and drink, a reasonable number of checked bags, etc. are all provided at no extra cost.

(The downside is that BA tickets are more expensive up-front. You pays your money and you takes your choice: put up with sleazy nickel-and-diming scumbags, or pay a premium to receive premium service?)

Target size. More people are looking for Windows exploits, and given the choice between exploiting Windows or exploiting OpenBSD, the average cybercriminal is going to go after Windows every time.

(Had this been asking about e.g. web servers rather than main personal computers, things would be different -- Linux is a very attractive target in that area and often exploited, and I bet OpenBSD is not immune or ignored either -- but that wasn't the question.)

HP, for one, if HP are still selling laptops by then.

If you order your HP laptop with Windows you get a Windows logo. Order it with FreeDOS or Linux? No Windows logo. (And no Microsoft tax.)

Partly this is the fault of our culture labelling all mental health issues under the broad brush of "s/he's crazy".

This. A thousand times this. This is totally correct.

Just look at language. Love it or hate it, political correctness is a fairly good way to track society's attitudes. And we can see that many people, nice people who would never dream of calling someone "nigger" or "fag" or "bitch" or "lame" or "fatty", have no problem with using words like "crazy" in polite company.

It's inconceivable that a politician who described his/her opponent as "insane" or "deluded" would face criticism from anyone apart from the most radical bloggers. Compare that to what happens if a politician uses a word that even sounds like a racial or sexual slur!

I'm not making any big judgement here. I call things "crazy" all the time myself. My point is simply this: the language we use proves that society as a whole does not think of mental illness as a thing that affects "people like us". It affects other people. Those crazy people who are insane and therefore not like us and our friends. Crackheads and people who were abused as kids and so on. People we can comfortably assume aren't present in the room when we're talking.

Is it any wonder that people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid considering the possibility that they themselves might have mental health problems?

I know the white knights here who already despise the TSA will crucify me for saying it, but millions of people fly every fucking day. Yet this shit mostly seems to happen to self-important bloggers

Alternative possibility: thousands of people are being sexually assaulted every day, and most of them react in the way we already know most victims of sexual assault react -- by convincing themselves it was their own fault, or that it didn't really happen, or that they consented -- because they know that nobody will believe them if they speak out. And people like you would just accuse them of being self-important drama queens. And the last thing they need is people like you adding literal insult to the literal injury of the sexual assault someone just perpetrated on them.

Which of us is right? I don't know. Maybe these incidents are isolated. Maybe the victims are partly to blame. But what I do know is that there are altogether too many nasty stories about the TSA for me to be certain that there is no truth to any of them, and if TSA agents have left even one person feeling that they have been sexually violated, that is one person too many.

I spend a lot more time considering exactly what I am going to write than I do pushing buttons, so my neanderthal technique is irrelevant.

It's not quite that simple.

It's true that if your technique is accurate and does not require you to look at the keyboard, then the fact that it is not as fast as "proper" touch typing is largely irrelevant. On the other hand, if you were making lots of mistakes, or having to look for keys on the keyboard, then you would be distracting yourself and interrupting your train of thought, which would seriously harm your productivity.

The number of fingers you use to type is not very important, but the amount of your conscious brainpower you are wasting on the process certainly is.

A bug in a library function shows how a language is poorly designed?

No, but releasing an update without even running the existing unit tests shows how amateurish the whole PHP project is. The terrible design of the language is also a reflection of its amateurish nature.

It's true that some websites manage to do wonderful things with PHP, but then it's also true that some artists manage to make wonderful sculptures out of manure. That doesn't mean it's a good choice for most people.

So ... what you're saying is that you want 80% of your games to be reruns or shoestring-budget shovelware, and the handful of original AAA titles to be subsidized by 20 minutes of advertising in every hour? Because that's why cable TV costs what it does.

Me, I'll gladly pay $60 for even just 20 hours of original, advertising-free, high-budget content. Movies are the closest comparable thing, and they are almost invariably more expensive than games.

Especially type inference. Now we can write

var area = 0;

Instead of

double area = 0;

I think you mean

auto area = 0;

in that first example.

And you're being ridiculous. Anyone who types that is an idiot and deserves everything they get. The actual nice thing about "auto" is that you can type

auto it = container.begin();

instead of

std::unordered_map<std::string, std::vector<std::string>>::const_iterator it = container.begin()

without having to faff about with typedefs all over the place.