They already make money from Linux! By collecting dubious licensing fees from Android phone manufacturers, including Samsung.

This amounts to over $2bn, as of over a year ago.

Granted, they are not writing apps for it (yet), but they are making money from a Linux platform.

Other manufacturers are doing away with physical buttons as well.

For example, my first Sony, an Xperia X10, had 3 physical buttons at the bottom. So did my next Sony, Xperia Arc.

Then my current Xperia ZL has no buttons on the front, just capacitive ones.

You get used to it though, and never miss them after a few weeks of adjusting.

How ironic that the paper titled No Silver Bullet" was written by no other than Fred Brooks. Yes, the same guy who wrote the famed The Mythical Man Month, which was about his experience as a manager for software development at IBM.

I would argue that fossil fuel is not the only determinant ...

The hard part is that we have become almost dependent on integrated circuits. This goes for any computer device, all control devices in manufacturing, and much more ...

If civilization collapses, how can we get back the IC fabs going with specialized material?

I wrote about it in a previous comment: 19th century technology vs. mid 20th century.

And expanded a bit on it in information readability and longevity in the digital age.

Look at how much JK Rawlings borrowed themes and story lines from JRR Tolkien.

Another LG TV owner here ...

I want to echo what the parent said. LG TVs are decent in general. The voice feature is just a gimmick added to make the company/product look cool. Perhaps it gains some WOWs when demoed in store. But in real life, its voice recognition is subpar, and the feature does not get used much. And yes, you have to press a button on the remote for the TV to listen (via a mic in the remote in my case).

That the earth was round, was known from the time of the Ancient Greeks.

In fact, the circumference of the earth was measured by Eratosthenes in the 3rd century BC, with considerable accuracy, using very simple means.

Here is Carl Sagan in Cosmos, on Eratosthenes measurement of the earth's circumference.

I can't talk about Ukraine because I am not fully informed about it as I am about the other countries I listed. But from a cursory look, Russia accepted an independent vote from the Crimean penninsula, and annexed it based on that. If it is good for Crimea, then it is good for the rest of Ukraine.

But as I said, Ukraine is not what I can/want to discuss. I am specifically astonished to you characterizing these three Arab countries as having 'legitimately elected government" while the facts completely contradict this. These are dictatorships, and not legitimate at all. They were a brutal police states.

Moreover, the role of the USA in removing or trying to remove the dictators was minimal to non-existent.

Mubarak was legitimately elected?
Gaddafi was legitimately elected?
Assad was legitimately elected?

If you are not joking, you have to be in an alternate universe, or out of your mind.

[I am Egyptian by the way, and know what I am talking about]

Legitimately elected Governments in ..., Syria, Libya, Egypt?

What? Legitimately elected? Syria, Egypt, Libya? Really?

Is this Vodka or pot overdose?

At some point in the future, genetic analysis will be messed up because the lineage fo the mtDNA is not from the same mother that gave the nuclear DNA.

Will be a serious puzzle when this is done without any accompanying documentation that person X had this done, or a marker is present to indicate it was.

No kidding ...

For many years, I have been returning HTTP return code 418 (I'm a teapot) to obnoxious crawlers.

For example: Dealing with resource wasting crawlers in Drupal. Also here and here.

The last time I commented about the continued posting of Bennet's rants, some idiot moderators marked it as flamebait.

I am posting it again below. This is serious, not a troll, nor funny:

Slashdot's editor team knows that the "audience" here hate Bennet Hasleton's continued long winded drivel, yet they keep posting his stuff regularly.

This is yet another clear sign that Dice and Slashdot do not care about their "audience", just like the way they handled the Slashdot Beta debacle.

Dice: keep ignoring your "audience" while expecting viewership to increase. Yeah, that will happen alright ...

As an Egyptian, I have to take issue with India claiming they were flying first. The Egyptians indeed had helicopters, submarines and spaceships thousands of years ago. And not in oral myth. We have real carvings on the temple of Abydos showing them clearly.

Don't believe me? See for yourself.

For the sarcastically challenged, they indeed look today live those vehicles, but the cause is recarving the new pharoah's name on top of the old one, hence this artifact.

Mod this informative, not funny!

You are not alone in your dislike for Unity.

I did install Ubuntu 14.04 Server edition on newer (2014) PCs that require UEFI, and it works fine.

But you have options: kubuntu (KDE desktop, which I am using now), xubuntu (XFCE desktop) or lubuntu (LXDE desktop). If you use the 14.04 from any of those, then you probably wouldn't have any issues compared to older versions.