Not to dispute your point, but your conclusion is wrong. When the largest backer is Wal Mart, you don't assume a high I.Q. in the customer base.

I agree that it should be easy. My point wasn't to rely on distributors for building. It was that the work has already been done for major projects like the ones listed, so you can get a sense of their build complexity by looking at what they had to do.

For example, here are some ebuild sizes:
gcc-4.9.1 1556 bytes
mythtv-0.27.4 9796 bytes
firefox-33.0 11698 bytes
libreoffice-4.3.1.2 18473 bytes
chromium-40.0.2194.2 18610 bytes
netbeans-ide-8.0 29367 bytes

That's a rough approximation of complexity. Sure, you can have a long but simple ebuild with comments and trivial stuff. You can hide lots of complexity in an eclass file. But it's a starting point.

As you can see, a project that uses a typical autoconf setup like gcc, while a very large project, has a very simple ebuild script. Meanwhile, Chromium and LibreOffice are quite complex. I don't know much about netbeans, but it's the largest ebuild in Portage right now. Other large ebuilds include openldap, ghc, php, and ati-drivers.

Of course, if you use a source-based distribution, it's easy, but that's not the point. If you download the source and build it yourself, you'll have to learn a bit about how they manage the build environment. You'll have to handle being sure all the dependencies are installed. You'll have to figure out any configuration options.

That's exactly what people who make distributions do. If you want to see how complicated the build is for any piece of software, just look at how complicated the build scripts are for various distributions. I expect you can find these for the binary distributions. With Gentoo, just look at the ebuild file.

The difficulty in determining the effectiveness of the vaccine when you give it to everyone is dependant on how effective it is. If it reduces the chances of exposure resulting in infection by 10%, then yes, it will be tough to show that it's not useless. However, if it reduces the chances by 90%, it will be quite obvious.

You are correct. I was repeating something that I had heard many times, but turns out not to be true.

Here, I Googled it for me:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

It doesn't have a GPS. Doesn't that mean it's not legal in the USA? I thought that was required for all phones so that if you call 911, the dispatcher will know where you are. I also thought that the GPS was integrated into the chipsets that they have to use for other basic features anyway.

There are good things and bad things about hiring workers directly for things like security. At the tech company I work for, we hire outside services for security, landscaping, stocking the coffee stations, and running the cafeteria. Obviously these workers aren't getting the same benefits package that direct employees get. On the other hand, it lets the company focus on doing what the company does and letting other companies specialize in other services.

It's rather like using an outside cloud vendor for IT services instead of implementing them in-house. The only difference is that the people doing the work are doing it on-site.

It also means that the outside contractors are treated differently when there are layoffs. The company decides to reduce headcount, but the service contracts are managed under different budgets, so those workers aren't cut.

FIRE TRUCKS: They rarely have to travel more than a few miles at a time, with plenty of time to recharge. And they're all ridiculously expensive already, so the added cost of batteries is insignificant.

I use the PLAY store to get apps, and it has a bunch of other stuff integrated like music and movies that I ignore. That's fine. Buy why are there now all these separate PLAY apps? What's the point?

app-shells/bash-4.2_p47-r1 is not vulnerable. I just updated.

The "His Dark Materials" trilogy was good, but the first book was by far the best. It went seriously downhill after that. There was a lot of potential, but it just didn't deliver.

I have MythTV running with a 3TB drive, but it's down to the last 100GB. It also holds all our photos and Time Machine backup for one iMac. I'm now planning a FreeNAS box with 8TB usable and drive slots for three more drives when that fills up (probably 6TB or larger drives by then). I plan on ripping all our DVDs and putting them in storage.

I did a comparison of the cost between the server and a nice entertainment center that was mostly for storing DVDs, and the server won by a landslide.

I think for most people this sort of thing doesn't make sense, but there are a few places where it does:

*) Security. If you're paranoid about break-ins, being able to monitor your home remotely can bring some peace of mind.

*) Stalking your family. The same security features will sell to anyone that wants to know what their family is doing when they're away. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; think of baby monitors and such.

*) Remote management. If you have a property like a vacation home or are just away from home a lot, being able to remotely manage the heat and air conditioning is a huge benefit. This also brings in the potential to do things like automatically disable the air conditioning if a door or window is open. I would love to have a thermostat that would display "close the sliding door to activate the air conditioning."

But yes, for most people, there is no need for any of this.

Then again, I would love to have automatic blinds that open and close based on such criteria as sunrise/sunset and weather. In the winter, I want the skylight blinds open during the day and closed at night. In the summer, I want the reverse. All the window blinds should close a half-hour after sunset by default (or maybe I would find something else makes sense).

Possibly, but more likely they're dropping their subchannels that were ignored by everyone anyway.

Most broadcasters use their physical channel for one HD logical channel and several SD streams. For example, 4.1 might be HD CBS, 4.2 might be the same thing in SD, and 4.3 might be continuous weather. If they drop the SD channels, they can probably fit in both HD channels with little degradation.

It loads fine for me.

Many news sites give you a limited number of free articles. This may be one of those. Typically after you hit the limit, your options are:

*) Pay money
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*) Clear your cookies
*) Use private browsing mode