... why hasn't anyone figured this out before? Is it too easy and too obvious to be true?

This is what I have been waiting for. After my initial excitement about (k)ubuntu release updates to get all the hardware running and supported, I am now at a state where everything is fine. The ongoing new 6-month releases are more of an annoyance than a great feature. Having to upgrade completely every 6 months just to get access to the latest software releases does not seem like a worth while effort. Sure, you can say that's what the LTS releases are for. But while the LTS releases do enjoy long-term support for security-relevant updates, they do not get a lot of software updates. So if you favorite application gets a major update after the LTS release you are out of luck. (Of course, you can fiddle something together on your own, but that's not really a low-maintenance solution.) Also, from my experience the LTS do not have less bugs than regular releases.

So if they can make rolling releases working with a high level of quality and testing, this would be really awesome from my point of view.

Summary: Republicans won. Democrats lost.

OK. So you are not afraid of Google spying on you, but you would be afraid of government agencies spying on you? Have you thought about that the government agencies may ask Google to hand them over your data set once they get interested in you? I just checked the dashboard. I agree that's not what you are afraid of. What you are afraid of is the data that can be generated by doing a sophisticated search on the complete data base. For instance the one that is a time profile of you telling what you did every minute you were using a computer or you had your android phone switched on. This one will tell which web site you surfed (=google-searched) from which IP address at what time and where you were (GPS in your phone) every minute. I am sure the search could be carried out using many different interesting parameters.

I admit I am guessing a bit here. Correct me if you know more details. But I think this kind of fantasizing will be important to assess how dangerous or not dangerous this data eating of companies like Google is.

I am also tired of all the inconsistencies between the 6-month releases of Ubuntu. I think now that ubuntu is running on a lot of hardware, focusing on consistency and reliability would be much more important. Many changes are only done for the sake of changing! And unfortunately, this usually means that a lot of stuff breaks and that I have to figure out things again. Yes, you could say, then you should be going with the LTS releases. The idea is good, but in reality, my impression is that the LTS releases are not better-cooked than any of the standard 6-month releases; they have about the same amount of bugs. Moreover, with LTS releases, you are stuck with old software in many cases. I think it would make more sense to move to 1-year, or even 2-year release cycles for the core OS, with apps updated and maintained in between.

Of course, when you know science as we do today, it's easy to say that this was an obvious dead end. However, imagine how much was known about anything such a long time ago. How could he have known that these experiments would not lead to success? Many other experiments were done at the same time (and much later) that seem much more esoteric, and which ultimately lead to scientific breakthroughs. What comes to my mind right now are Faraday's electrical experiments with frog legs...
So from that point of view, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Newton trying to "cook" some chemical elements seeking for new insights.

Awesome. You just made my day. That was a good laugh. Thanks!

I respectfully disagree on which of these items would be called science or technology. The Physics Nobel Prize was just awarded for graphene with all its electronic applications. So you do not deem it science. Well, you have your right to your point of view.
And, btw, it was the first time in 24 years in Madagaskar that they found a new carnivore (at least according to the summary). So it may not be as rare an event considering how many countries and islands there are around the globe...

* Quantum Computing
* Bandwidth of Optical Fibers
* Transistors based on Graphene
* New Display Technology
* New Input Devices
* Image Recognitions Techniques
* Encryption Algorithms
* Computer-powered Mathematics
* Computer-powered Physics
* New Processor Designs
* Laser technology (data transmission)
* Integrated Optics
* Magnetic (and optical) storage
* Solar Cells and other alternative energies

... and if I spend ten more minutes, I can probably come up with 50 more items which I believe are more interesting and relevant to geeks and the technology they like use and like to have in the future. Sounds a lot more "sexy" to me than a rodent-like looking little creature.
Sure, I will admit that my point of view is subjective. Everyone is free to disagree; different readers will prefer different topics. But how is my contribution "off-topic"? There are lots of comments every day discussing whether a submission is "worthy". I thought that this would be a valuable kind of feedback.

Stuff that matters? Are you kidding? What's next? Filing weather forecasts?

I happen to work on graphene (since 2005). The surface area of graphene is about 2600 m^/g. And that's counting both sides. So one side would be about 1300m^2. that's 13m times 100m. Definitely less than a football field -- American Football or soccer.

I totally agree. I tried "rotated" for a while and performance and overall experience was bad. The colors looked slightly different and unbalanced. My guess is that viewing angles are optimized for using the monitor in "normal" (un-rotated) mode, and the average viewing angle may not be normal to the screen surface. So when you rotate the thing it all gets messed up. There are also more subtle issues: how to handle sub-pixel anti-aliasing (like in Windows ClearType) when one monitor is rotated and the other one is not?

That's why they say "temporary". They realize it's important, so they want to get it right and take their time (and possibly even involve some savvy people from the community). So what are you complaining about? OK, this is slashdot, so it's not cool to RTFA. However, not even reading the summary? That's taking it too far, dude (or duderette)...

My first reaction is: Thank God. I didn't have a very good feeling where things were going after the Oracle takeover and some of their later business decisions (OpenSolaris). Of course, it all depends on how the new foundation will steer things, and I don't know anyone who is part of this, so it's hard to make a judgment. So my hope is that they will at least not make things worse, and maybe this is a even chance to re-energize the project and take it to the next level.

Dear Document Foundation:
Please live up to it, and make OOo (or LO) kick some ass. We need you!

May the force be with them!

Why is everyone behaving so totally conservative? Like we already have invented the desktop in its "final" and "best" version and all that's left is cleaning up some driver bugs? Yes, I suffer from the bugs, too (every day), and I hate clippy as much as everyone here. However, there also needs to be some playing with new, innovative stuff. And the video linked to the article actually looks like quite a bit of fun. I especially like the effect where the relative window positions are slightly moving when the head is moved. It's a bit like a 3D effect where you can look behind the windows by turning your head. Looks pretty cool to me.

Everyone here seems to be about as open to new UI ideas as the Catholic Church to Galileo's ideas. (Yet we are still dreaming about "Minority Report" type interfaces?) Or is it just that the average age on ./ is now above 60?