I've had a friend here (the Netherlands) who married an Eastern European girl (before the EU expansion). They actually had to 'prove' that their relation was legit before she got her residence permit, showing things like pictures of holidays together, emails and chats (ICQ! ;-) ) exchanged, etc. It feels wrong that the government gets that close and personal, but I guess sham marriages are too easy otherwise...

Social scientist here. I wouldn't know what to do if it weren't for linux. My desktops run linux, my servers run linux, the cloud services I use without a doubt run linux (not even talking about the architecture between my computer and those cloud computers), and even my frigging phone runs linux.

The complete "scientific toolchain" or scipy/R/sweave/latex (+github/travis) is now free and open source. This is great because it saves a bit of money, but what it really does is enable you to inspect, modify, copy, and share every step from raw data to the pdf of the article.

(The last non-open part of science is the journals, which should be dealt with even more brutally than the recording industry.)

I'll bite :-)

I used csv and subversion back in the day, switched to hg, and now switched to git. I manage a smallish project with 5 or so contributors and contribute to some other projects.

Git/hg vs csv/svn is all about distributed vs centralized. With git/hg, you learn to love branching and merging, and commit as often as needed.

Git vs hg is more subtle, but I am strongly in the git camp now.

In my perception, hg et al are about lines of code. You contribute code and the code is checked in. git is all about commits. Your work is in commits, and commits can be rebased, squashed, amended, etc until they are just right to express your contribution. Git is not so much about communicating with yourself about how you got to your code; git is about communicating to the rest of the team what you are contributing. In a sense, you are not (just) writing code, you are writing a commit history.

That said, what I miss in git is the "version history" of commits. I would like to see some sort of "is-based-on" link between the 'final' commit and the commits it is amended, rebased, and/or squashed from. I would love to be able to 'expand' a final commit to see the history that went into it, because now you are sometimes choosing between commit elegance and keeping track of development history (aka in the choice to amend a silly type you choose elegance; in the choice to -no-ff merge a branch you choose history).

I would guess that there is a big difference between "guaranteed to survive a 1.2m drop onto concrete" or even "99% chance of surviving the drop" (which is probably what they offer) and the anecdotal "I dropped shit from longer distances and they were fine".

My S3 was seriously damaged by a much smaller drop. You can be lucky or unlucky with such devices. Military doesn't like that :)

I'm a scientist, but not in astrophysics or a (remotely) related discipline.

At some deep level, I "doubt" the big bang theory because it seems to me that it is not something that can really ever be tested, simulated, experimented with, so we have n=1 observational data at best, and building causal theories on n=1 observational data is tricky; and on another level I "doubt" the theory because I don't know the literature or even really understand the phenomenon and I have no clue what the scientific evidence for and against it are. "They" say that it is the currently accepted theory, but what does that even mean? Why would I not doubt it?

All that said, I don't believe that the theory is false, I just accept that "other scientists" know what they are doing so as a body they are probably right if they accept a model. But I don't like accepting things on authority, I like understanding why something would be the case, and I don't have that understanding for big bang theory.

[at least with other "grand theories" like tectonics or evolution I have some understanding of the process involved and the evidence that lead the scientific community to accept it (e.g. the magnetism 'bar code' for tectonics) and it can be observed somewhat in real life (the functioning of current species, the shape of continents. And let's not even talk about flat earth, young earth, intelligent design and other complete hogwash]

FTFY. I'm afraid you underestimate the conservative force of the well conntected :-(

Why does a decoder need execheap? Is there some sort of optimization that causes the processing and data to be not separated? It sounds like an invitation for all kind of exploits (which is presumably why it is banned by execheap).

Also, is there a reason to use a specific MP3 decoder? Is it because of licensing, or are there technical reasons?

sudo apt-get install postfix dovecot roundcube nginx :-)

Maybe it's a stupid question, but can't you "launder" code by routing it through a third nation and recommitting the code from there?

What is the export restriction on anyway? The bits? The IP? And does it extend to any derived work of an export restricted IP burdened work? Because if any piece of code on which any citizen of a restricted country has copyright, I'm pretty sure the linux kernel would contain at least one line, meaning all android phones and most routers, servers etc would be illegal?

Also, DADT sounds really stupid as company policy. I don't know a lot about US law, but in the Netherlands corporate liability extends if the management knew or was in a position to know that law was breached, and having policy to conceal such breach is good evidence that management was in a position to know. Any US lawyers care to comment?

Sumimasen! O-kyaku-sama no bitokoinu-wa kietta arimasu! Moushiwake arimasen!

Vendetta Online has a system of license levels which unlocks content, but combat success is 90% skill and 10% equipment (after the first couple of levels which probably take an experienced player less than an hour). Smart use of low level ships/weapons in the hands of a skilled player will kill a relative noob with top-notch gear every time.

What I'm trying to say: levels aren't really the problem, making "level" the most important determiner of success is the problem.

I use xmonad as window manager, which AFAIK is not installed out of the box on any distro but on ubuntu takes me around 2 minutes to set up (using existing .files). I use it mainly for programming but also some gaming, but I never have bleeding edge hardware.

I figure I could just as well use debian or mint, I don't really think I would notice any difference as long as the package repository is reasonably stocked. I use ubuntu because it is my first linux experience that I used for more than a week, and because of the enormous amount of support, stupid forum questions with non-stupid answers, etc. It helps if an answer to a problem is directly applicable.

Genuine question: Besides the desktop environment, are there any real differences between all the Debian derivatives?

If you have enough prisoners to take a seat in parliament, then maybe those people deserve representation?

Even ignoring the problem of getting him from power, ICC has no jurisdiction as Korea isn't a signatory and the UN security council is needed either to refer the case to the ICC or to create an ad hoc tribunal. Even if China might as some point decide to stop propping up its neighbour, it is not very likely that they will allow them to be tried in court.

FTFY!