You know, at the end of the day, Canonical needs to concern itself with *its* bottom line too, you know.

Sorry, but I hate it how people think they can tell companies how they should allocate their resources to fix their own personal problems. FWIW, I haven't had any problems with wifi on the computers I've installed Ubuntu on, so obviously they're doing something right.

And I *really* want an ARM based GNU/Linux laptop,tablet, netbook.

It's interesting that you brought that up, given the history of the climate change "debate." Because until about 10 years ago, saying global warming doesn't exist was the position of the deniers. The position was that global temperatures were not increasing. Then the position was changed to admitting that that temperatures were increasing, but no faster than historical rates, even though it's clearly exponential growth.

Sir, while what you have discovered appears to be a conspiracy, after further digging we have determined that what you allude to is the result of (1) people changing their mind in response to new data, and (2) new people entering the debate with different points of view. I'm afraid the plot is more sinister than we had thought! As we know, only the noble and true follow their convictions until death.

Thanks for posting this (though why as AC? are you a competing scholar?).

One possibility though, would it make a difference if you excluded/included the names in the dialogue? You know how the dialogue says "Socrates:" and then what Socrates says. Your numbers seem so close...

I don't think that will actually work, because by supporting minority parties you're not actually making any changes to the government. Okay, you hope that it would, that if you make enough slashdot comments you'll be able to elect a green or a libertarian, but honestly I just don't see that happening. There are a lot more voters than people reading slashdot.

One thing I think might work is voting against incumbents. What will that accomplish? I don't really know. But it's a stark way of expressing your disapproval of the people who *have* been running things.

I have an Asus EEEPC 2G Surf--you really can't get lower end on a netbook than this one. I use it regularly for IRC, Web, and programming projects and while, yes, it is sluggish, the key is to go for a minimal Debian install and work your way up from there. Forget about GNOME or KDE, if you're looking for a desktop experience, then you're looking at the wrong place.

As old and outdated as this computer is, is more than beats the user experience of an iPad since I can comfortably rest it on my lap in the lazyboy and tilt the screen up while using it :)

Hear hear!

Like Medicaid. That's "welfare" according to most people, because if you can't afford to see a doctor then you're the scum of the earth and [i]deserve[/i] to be sick. Other forms of welfare I'm less leniant with, but come on! This discussion makes me sick. The grandparent poster sounds to me like someone who disguises "I deserve more" into "They deserve less." People are pissed off about their own financial problems love to take it out on poor people. Poor people know something about financial problems too, you know.

"In our world, here and now, there are any number of people who have more rights than I have, and my service to my country means just about squat."

Are you going to actually substantiate your outrage or are you going to give us the outrage? This is sounding like an OReilly rant more than anything else.

So, first, who has more rights than you do? And are you suggesting that your service to your country gives you more rights? What service? Military? I respect military men, but they don't get more rights than I do. Sorry. I have a thing.

I saw that too. The way to look at it, I guess, is that Gnash is the GNU replacement for Adobe's Flash program and a counter to their proprietary technology. On the other hand, Ganash is the open source version of Adobe's Flash technology that justifies putting Adobe Flash in all Apple products and, indeed, in all products period.

Mathematically, if every release the javascript is 10% faster, that is 10% faster than the last fastest release, so maybe we're talking about smaller and smaller values of fasterness.

IOW, if it takes 10 seconds to complete a javascript script, then it takes 9 seconds because 1 second is 10% of 10 seconds; then it takes 8.1 seconds because .9 seconds is 10% of 9 seconds; then 7.29 seconds; then 6.561; and so on.

Wow, at that rate everyone will be using it, even people who don't exist!

Hell yeah.

And if technology progress at the speed it has been (and it always does), we won't even *need* bodies, so what the hell are we even worried about?