Wow. I was scrolling down to find a positive comment for the new GNOME release. Well done and hats off to you sir.

For me I'll be keep using GNOME 2 until something usable replaces it, checking GNOME release thread for signs that the devs might go back to producing a high quality and functional DE.

I bet you had to travel both ways uphill in the snow barefoot as well.

Today it is much harder for someone "indigenous" and fresh to get a start and to hold it steady to make it into a good stable career.

This is not so. By default each human cell is a male cell. Female cells have to be constantly refreshed into being female through hormone release.

The way it works is that when you are born male you have something called SRY and it increases SOX9 and decreases FOXL2 which is the "opposite" part of a cell that determines which gender it is. For females it is the otherway around. However, if a female does not suppress SOX9 they will develop male characteristics (this is why you can get an XX male). The cells default option is to move back toward "maleness" and this is why after menopause women and men aren't really that different (because at a cellular level they are tending towards the same gender expressions).

I think they mean unpayed jobs, of which there are some for inexperienced graduates. Some years ago when I graduated, I would have done jobs in either physics or engineering or computer science for free for months to get experience. After dealing with "employers" back and forth for long periods of time and them stipulating the terms, I couldn't get anything because of competition! Now I am fine, because once you have experience you can simply waltz from job to job, but getting the initial job with an advanced degree is hard (I think the degree puts many people off and I don't mention it much in my successful job interviews now).

According to you problems could be solved in the 70s and 80s but not now as "there is a pervasive pessimism among younger IT, a terrible can't do attitude". Then you say that coding is for the young man and older people should go into management where "experience and wisdom play a greater role". Can't have it both ways. If the coders are there for coding and management that sets directions is comprised of people from this older generation, then something is amiss. I think you look through rose-tinted glasses at the past. If you attack a whole generation, you should first acknowledge the problems with your own one (which is sometimes very greedy and currently numerous).

Not me specifically. I am actually in the management ranks. However, I was doing a rant in reverse on you, since you generalized to saying all young people are pessimistic and useless.

Of course in reality you need an experienced person that has seen things before to point out when things might be headed the wrong way. But to blame GNOME3/KDE4/Windows 8 and all the ills of poor interface design on younger generations of programmers is flat out wrong and you only get those extra points because there are a large number of older generation people like yourself that think that way.

Contribute to open source if you have any talent and help fix the mess! Open source cares not about age.

That is silly. Some old codgers are terrible at programming and only got there because they got in early, then decry that the world is going to hell in a hand basket because of "new generations". From what I've seen, young people are often the most sane (except those from overseas that come because they are cheaper) and have been robbed blind by older generations that pass the buck onto them. Young coders have to deal with all the problems that old people foisted on them because they couldn't solve, as well as management now making all the decisions and lower pay. </end rant>

You are thinking small scale. It's not about the cost to a small company or department. H1Bs threaten to lower wages across the board due to plentiful competition, less ability to move to another company, and allowing company HR to threaten someone else taking your job. Some of the savings then go to board members of large corporations, to political lobbying, and to shareholder profits.

I'm pretty sure they use helicopters and private jets to get around. You ain't going to see them on congested roads if they don't have to be on them.

"The firewall went down, the massive server exploded, and now your information is lost in a black hole. Sorry about that. We might however be able to get a small portion of it back, as it still appears to be transmitting information in high frequency streams on either side. The receiver we placed to get that information fluctuates a bit and might catch on fire, however, so no guarantees."

I followed it up with one of the senior engineers who's worked on this server for years and they told me there was no black hole, just someone forgot to plug in the backup system.

The guys who donate sperm are not all law students or graduates. I would say chances are they will still find plenty of people willing to donate sperm for a "good cause" and to make a couple of hundred quick dollars.

Seriously? A "war on women!"? I know this is /. but have you even skimmed the article summary?

Aiming for a future where we use less energy than we do now is backwards. I'm not advocating that making existing systems more efficient is a bad thing at all, but to power things that will progress society will require more energy per person consumed than we do now regardless.

Wireless power requires 60% more base power. The often dismissed as impossible flying cars require at least 1.5MW per person. One day it is not far fetched to think we will replace the microwave with a device that can assemble atoms and completely replace farming, which will take serious power. This is what I think even the solar/wind/geothermal people who don't want to move back into caves intuitively understand is the kind of changes that will occur sometime in the future.

Solar panels belong in space. They are much less efficient than hydro-electric, which is about as efficient as coal, which is 6 million times less energy dense than nuclear fission, which is less energy dense than nuclear fusion, which is only 2 orders of magnitude less efficient than antimatter-matter reactions. Spread out to consumers, solar panels also produces a lot of waste that future generations will have to deal with.

The parent post is correct, but Greenpeace does not dictate government policy in Australia.

Australia has 31% of the world's uranium reservers (the world's largest) and has in recent years declined production slightly (probably due to Germany's and Japan's 'efforts' that increase greenhouse gas emissions across Europe and Japan). Australia does not use nuclear power for energy generation or for military use or for icebreakers or any use other than ANSTO (small research lab that produces radioisotopes for medical use).

Australia could have gone nuclear ages ago, but didn't. Similarly to how it cut space research and plans to build rocket launch platforms, it is a country of little physics achievements that haven't been done by overseas people. The problem is that is also a county full of coal, and with other countries running out of coal, it might well be the place for coal globally over the next 50 years if policy doesn't change domestically.

Already the highest greehouse gas emitting OECD country in the world in the future if the coal extractions can be seen large from space (like tar pits in Canada) then it might become the biggest contributing country to global warming on a global scale indirectly (due to use of its coal and nonuse of uranium, not to mention thorium).