This is what Desktop Linux is. It's companies trying to make a version of Linux which Just Works for people who don't care that it's Linux. That means sacrificing choice in the name of making the product more tailored for the users they're targeting. That's good design.

Your fundamental complaint is that Ubuntu isn't tailoring its product for you. It's a completely free and open product, planned from the start to make Linux more usable by non-technical people. And you're complaining. Despite the fact that there are literally dozens of other Linux distributions which do exactly what you want. Nice.

"They who can give up essential safety to obtain a little temporary liberty, deserve neither safety nor liberty."

-- Me

Having dispensed with the pointless question-begging, can we start talking about which is essential and which is temporary in this case?

I hate to defend geocentrism, but it certainly was science. Given the evidence of the sun, moon, planets, and starts pretty clearly moving across the sky in a revolving fashion, what scientific explanation would you come up with? Was every astronomer prior to Copernicus not actually a scientist?

When people proposed the heliocentric explanation, the church intervened and said that the Earth is the center of the universe for theological reasons, and that was certainly not scientific.

I actually support a lot of copyright restrictions and enforcement. But I have to laugh whenever a company gets its panties in a wad about what people do with the unencrypted signals that are deliberately broadcast at very high power from extremely large antennas in the middle of large cities.

Character data would be stored in a database (in Blizzard's case, Oracle). The local drives on the blades would have game data and server executables, which would be even more valuable than character data to the right people (gray-sharders, botters, and other nefarious types).

One of the interesting things about the Heartland documents is that they make it pretty clear that they're not being funded by oil companies.

One fleet moves to threaten civilians (city, planet, moon, asteroid, space station). Another fleet moves in to defend. Neither fleet needs to be manned. The winning fleet has control over the civilian area.

The idea isn't that civilians won't be threatened, it's that military personnel won't be doing the fighting directly.

The idea that the South lost the Civil War "in large part" because slaves were not "enthusiastic workers" is horseshit. From General Lee's horse.

Making health care not be tied to your job is a good idea. But other than that, without the government engaging in "naked and clumsy dictation to employers" (which, in fact, is exactly how I'd describe any efforts to make health care not be tied to your job) how would you propose making businesses compete for workers and treat them fairly? Prior to the modern era of unions and workers'-rights laws, we had much less pleasant working conditions. Child labor, indentured servitude. Certainly no vacations.

I'm sure you're right, but that only proves his point... the code was moved from userspace into the kernel, which certainly contributed to its complexity and insecurity.

I support modern interpretation of the Constitution (what the GP hates). But 3/5 of a person was changed in an amendment, which I'm sure he fully supports, not an interpretation.

"T-h-e", like most pronounceable words, has a vowel.

Dude that was the New York Daily News, not the New York Times. Big difference.

It's the cinematography in general, not just the lighting. For example, there were no optical effects, which dramatically reduce the visual quality because they effectively are re-filming the original film (with extra stuff). But yeah, in terms of cinematography, nothing in SF has ever beaten 2001.

My favorite trick they used was the floating pen that the stewardess picks up. It was attached to a piece of transparent acrylic, and she just detached it when she took it.

It was in The Deep Range by Arthur Clarke. Not sure if it predated that though.

If a new version of Ubuntu could save my datacenter massive amounts of money via reduced power consumption, then I'd be an idiot if I didn't at least weigh the cost/benefit.