... stay away from kids. no need to spoil them so soon. they'll spoil themselves when looking for their first "qualified" job.

fucking outlook has already accomplished that majority of users can't even send/read email the way it's supposed to, just because they have no notion whatsoever of what email is. and i'm sick already of receiving docs from even academics with no notion whatsoever of elementary document layout and information exchange.

methinks it was jobs who said once: give users powerful tools and they will do marvellous things. may well be. give'm office and unleash the real moron they have inside, in full color.

the thing is nobody is trying to sell you anything, here. debian is a gift for you from a dedicated community, but i couldn't care less if you use it or not or prefer another distro or even some propietary product of your liking (talking about scam ads!). the simple idea that someone is trying to "sell" you "debian" is absurd. of course there will be always fanboyism but this is rare for debian in my humble experience.

"just works" is subjective. it describes well my experience with debian (as compared with other distros/oses), but then it's also very vague. for someone else it can mean an easy peasy install out of the box and voilà, there you have your mediacenter running, regardless of the fact that you have to reinstall everything months later because the system "just chokes" or "crawls" or got compromised. for me it means you have a consistent system where you (the user) are in control and that behaves as expected over time. this you only get from systems where reliability is a priority and thus enforce rigurous release methods and policies. this is naturally incompatible with release rush pressure, feature races or marketing fluff of any sort. well, debian is such a system, built for reliability, to "just work". of course not the only one but one of the most prominent examples today indeed.

the equivalent of "other's" release is debian's "testing" release. it only becomes the official "stable" release when enough testing has been done and it's deemed stable and mature. that's why debian avoids lots of integration problems other distros suffer and why you might say it "just plain works" in comparision: because it's way more tested.

this was implicit in the answer if you had made use of a couple of neurons. and of course if you'd really wanted to know, you could as well have read it off the debian homepage where it is clearly explained, instead of displaying you utter ignorance and calling others BS just because of your own mental laziness (or because you enjoy being a dick, be my guest).

They do. For example: The Force: Volkswagen Commercial

they test.

i too started with woody and never had a problem apart from having to install nvidia driver and a bit of x configuring. it wasn't really that hard and there was more than enough help available on the net, just the frequent kernel recompiling was a bit annoying. maybe it's that my requirements were just that modest, but i'm very grateful that there are still solid and reliable linux distros around like debian. cutting edge fancy distros are nice too but they tend to rot (see ubuntu) and fortunately when that happens you can always return to debian. long life! love it.

links on slashdot articles are clickbait by default. use your favorite search engine.

however the article is correct. the title itself makes it pretty obvious that squeeze is a release of debian (why else should it get long term support?) AND the article explicitly relates it to the release number (debian 6). and anyway, if you don't already know what "squeeze" means in the context of debian, why should you bother to read articles about debian at all, let alone coment on them?

please improve your trolling or refrain. this is pathetic. you are smudging the illustrous name of anonymous coward!

What about focusing the greatest minds and resources on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections ?

i guess because all dependencies are inherently a trade off, it's up to anyone to find adecuate balance depending on the situation, and publicly stating that one is systematically way unblanced on either side isn't interesting info at all. particularly, if this anonymous poster had to be coherent, he would have to be coding on cpus built with his own hands, not to mention having written his own compiler and os from scratch. that would be quite a rave party in house!

i don't hink the comment is justifying anything, it just draws a comparison. (n.b.: only saw the quote, smart folks at beta seem convinced that i can't mentally handle posts below -1)

so gitmo is still run by that former, entirely different administration.
and this other entirely different current administration has absolutely nothing to do with the power shift in ukraine.
high five!

... a qualitatively signifficant (although maybe not quantitatively) part of protesters were indeed self declared fascist extremists, most of them openly nazi-sympathetic, so that's not a comparison at all, and it has nothing to do with godwin's rule. however unfortunate, it just reflects facts. check your sources.

Aren't chicken nuggets artificial enough already ?

free or not free, that's not a "licensing issue". it's all or nothing.

YOU miss the point.

while the idea of such an "easily usable knowledge repository" is interesting, the issue of who governs this repository is determinant. if open and transparent such a system would be revolutionary. since it is not, it is just another product to avoid like pest. inspirational? sure! anyone?

sadly, i'm afraid (near) future humans will indeed be very dependent on asking such AIs for much of their lives, and that those will not be accountable. but no hurry at all to get to that, seriously.

Exactly, that's why the answer to the question is mu.