...is entirely possible. For the last several years, the U.S. Patent Office has been moving to a distributed model where comparatively few patent examiners live in the D.C. area except during their initial training period. I know two patent examiners, and both live in Ohio. In any case, this text-hissy-fit likely did no favors for the lawyer or their client.

2GB for a full Slackware install? Try nearly 8.

And yeah, I'd like to put it on a diet, but once something is already included it becomes quite entrenched. It's extremely difficult to remove anything large enough to make a difference without causing rioting in the streets with torches and pitchforks. I suspect it's the same for any Linux distribution.

"so there may be some hope of making UEFI more Linux-friendly"

The only hope is to make Linux distributions more UEFI friendly. UEFI and Secure Boot is certainly here to stay.

What were the terrible effects of that agreement? I'm having trouble remembering any. Everyone ran around screaming that the sky was falling, but it didn't fall. Just sayin'.*

* it is necessary to end with "just sayin" when replying to any statement that begins with "not to be a dick"

The NYT review has now been seen by at least an order of magnitude more people than would have had any awareness of it had Tesla's CEO made no comment about it at all. The vast majority of Telsa's previous reviews have been of glowing, fanboy type. Now they've completely countered those reviews by causing this article to become the most prominent one on the Internet.

In the digital age, when the press gets something wrong (especially in an opinion piece) it's just usually better to walk away.

This introduced a lot of people to 3-D rendering, and the free-enough license led to widespread adoption.

There should be a law, and if this becomes a problem there will be one. However, the existing laws almost certainly concern sending faxes and are unlikely to apply.

You didn't like JJ?

Maybe, just maybe, you're confusing cause and effect there? Government workers aren't mistreated quite as much as, say, people working in an Amazon warehouse because they are unionised. Among other things, obviously: the government has a harder time mistreating people because there is some sort of political and democratic oversight. For the same reason, the government can't appear to be suppressing worker organisation. And of course government workers are usually more highly trained and less replaceable than warehouse workers.

For the record I have no idea if parent's assertion that government workers in the US are strongly unionised and my assertion that they're less mistreated bears any resemblance to reality.

Facilitating communication is, at best, a secondary (if necessary) function of unions. Unions serve as collective bargaining platforms to somewhat level an otherwise inherently unbalanced power relationship. I don't know about the specific unions you're talking about, and I don't care. There are many kinds of unions, and they don't share many attributes regarding their internal structure. I do know that fundamentally nothing has changed regarding the imbalance of power.

Unions may be archaic, but so is human society.

So, this is the poll you're referring to: http://www.people-press.org/2011/08/30/muslim-americans-no-signs-of-growth-in-alienation-or-support-for-extremism/

The actual wording in the poll is (in English, who knows what the poll said in Arabic, etc): "Suicide bombing/other violence against civilians is justified to defend Islam from its enemies..." (and then select one of Often, Sometimes, Rarely, Never, Don't know)

It's fairly bizarre to conflate suicide bombing specifically with an abstract range of things, violence against civilians. Violence against civilians could mean all kinds of things to different people, it's quite vague. The wording implies that only suicide attacks against civilians are relevant, not (military) suicide attacks against non-civilian targets, another thing to misunderstand.

Civilians itself is the key word, I guess, our assumption would be that violence against civilians is not permitted almost per definition, civilians being exactly those people who are not to be targeted. But clearly, Western armed forces have had a pretty tough time figuring out who is a civilian and who isn't in recent conflicts -- usually erring on the side of calling somebody an armed insurgent. We just define our problem away.

Next, the question whether an attack is justified. Under Protocol I of the Geneva Convention (caveat IANAL!), killing civilians can be legal in certain circumstances, you just have to try to avoid it, or not know about it (despite due diligence), etc etc. Calling that a justification of an attack on civilians is a bit twisted, but it's a legal framework. And of course it happens all the time, legally, and without any serious repercussions. The US hasn't ratified Protocol I, BTW. To be fair, the wording of "against" civilians sort of implies an attack where the civilian casualties are the objective, and not just involved. But that's a fairly fine point to make, people are being asked to answer a poll, not write a paper.

Defend is another fun word to toss in there, as I assume many subjects wouldn't consider your average terror attack an example of "defense". Or maybe they do, whatever, we don't know, it's pointless to argue about it.

Defending Islam strikes us as odd, because that ain't a country, but first of all the question/sentence was written by Pew, subjects were not given a choice of slightly rephrasing it (I guess their best option to deal with a false premise is DK or possibly no answer); second of all defending Islam isn't any stranger than defending freedom or the free trade and if anything it's less strange than fighting a war on terror or on drugs.

The final "its enemies" ties the whole thing up neatly, going back both to the point about who's a civilian and who's not and to the point about defense.

There'd be more to say, but I am all out of words.

I'm using eclipse running on another host in the LAN via X11 every day. It works fine. There's no appreciable difference to running it locally. Granted, this is on a fast LAN that's somewhat tailored to do this well.

Posts like these are why I mostly stopped reading Slashdot after a decade or so. I can take the trolls. I don't care about dupes or bad summaries or even off-topic stuff, I come here for the discussion. But when even the people who seem to have something worthwhile to say continue to make an ass out of themselves on formal grounds, there is just not much signal left in the noise.

Yes, but how do we establish whether a certain observation was made or whether certain logic is sound? Or, from another perspective, given a situation where different people communicate different truths, how do we deal with this situation? These things matter when you make decisions as a group. But I guess that's politics, not science -- point taken.

But still... I guess you could take the position that the hive mind is better than any individual at making the kinds of factual determinations we're talking about, so even if you come to a different conclusion, it's safer to bet on society than on yourself. Not that I'm saying this is the right decision for every person in every situation (since there wouldn't be any progress in this case).

How would you honestly come by such a figure, when there are myriad sources that can cause health issues (including people who smoke!)?

Well, we're not talking about any pollutant here, just greenhouse gases, and mostly CO2 when we're talking about energy.

I agree that it's not straightforward to establish a cost figure. So I guess one way to do it is set a goal of total emissions, run a few models to establish a tax amount that'd get you close according to those models and then run it in the real world and adjust in both directions appropriately. I guess you'd ease society into it by lowballing the tax and gradually increasing it until it you get to your intended goal.

I wouldn't want immediately toxic emissions to be handled in the same way because I don't want an individual plant to emit those at will and only subject to financial limits. But CO2 seems more like a finite resource than a toxic emissions.