Hasn't backfired in the 3 or 4 years it's been around yet...

And for goodness sakes people, there's no free t-shirt for being a member!

If Dante's Inferno is anything to go by, "virtuous non-believers" go to the first circle of Hell. It's good-ish believers who go to Purgatory.

There's no t-shirt. I mean, if you become a developer and then attend an Ubuntu Developer Summit...then there's a t-shirt. But for members? Well..if you grab one out of a conference pack so you can look all Ubuntu-y while running an Ubuntu booth at a conference...sure, but anyone working with a Local Community Team can do that. Membership gets you fairly intangible things. A Freenode @ubuntu/member/foo cloak, @ubuntu.com email alias, permission to use the Ubuntu logo on a business card (which you print yourself), an LWN subscription...

Where is this t-shirt thing coming from? You get an LWN subscription, an @ubuntu.com email alias, permission to use the Ubuntu logo on a business card, and a cloak on Freenode.

Announcement? Where? This is an interview regarding something that's existed for years. Regarding becoming a LoCo team, perhaps the loco-contacts mailing list or #ubuntu-locoteams on FreeNode could give some pointers?

Thanks :) That's a much more thorough explanation than the little bit of "and then there's these Protestants, and they had this Reformation..." thing we had as part of the history part of Religion class in Catholic school.

Code has nothing to do with it. I became an Ubuntu Member a few weeks before I submitted my first patch--which wasn't to Ubuntu. My contributions were things like:

• helping people on ubuntuforums.org
• helping people in #ubuntu on IRC
• organizing an installfest
• volunteering with the local community team

Technical contributions are not the only sort of contributions. For that matter, someone wanting membership whose only contributions are code-based will be told to simply apply for developer status as developers are automatically granted member status. Direct membership application is for community-based contributions. Advocacy work, tech support, writing documentation, working on translations, etc. are what are looked at.

Catholicism is works-based. Catholics believe that Jesus opened the Gates to Heaven but you still had to either do enough good stuff (or pay in place of that) to get in. No idea what Protestants back then thought, but nowadays they tend to say that your actions have nothing to do with it because faith alone gets one into Heaven. Though uh, actually the Calvinists of that time period believed in Predestination: God knew before you were born where you'd end up, and your life was simply an outward reflection of that (ie, if someone is destined to go to Heaven, you'll know it because they're the ones helping the poor, while being a murderer doesn't *cause* you to go to Hell but instead is a *sign* that you're headed there).

Nah, I saw an article last year saying the Catholic Church was still cool with Indulgences.

With Mark in charge the decision was made back in May to ship all the experimental stuff in 9.10 so it'd get an extra 6mo of testing before 10.04 LTS and to base 10.04 off of Testing instead of Unstable.

You can definitely use wireless from the CLI in Ubuntu if you know what you're doing. Which, well, that's how anything on the command line is: "if you know what you're doing." See also: "man 5 interfaces"

Nope, none of the feminists I hang out with say those things.

Myth. Circumcision's only effect on hygiene is that lazy people find it easier to clean if they're circumcised. On the other hand, scar tissue is *more* susceptible to infection...

The patriarchy does harm men, yes. Without the patriarchy, more men would be willing to admit that they'd been beaten, and other men wouldn't ridicule them "for being beat up by a girl." Until it's ok for men to admit that they'd been beaten by a woman and not suffer for it, this won't change. Think about that next time you say or hear someone say "dude, I can't believe that bitch owned you!"

Early adopters mean people who upgraded at release time? Huh...interesting...

I've been running Karmic since the first week of June, alpha 1. Sure I hit bugs back during the early alphas, but meh. Since release? Or rather...since a month before release? No problems.