I must say that I somewhat followed Debian's lengthy discussions on this subject, which were quite interesting and informing, and I don't recall this argument coming up even once. I replied to this because the use case is undertandable to long-time Unix users, but not because I feel it's usual or important.

And yes, I also expect a new piece of software (specially if it's far-reaching compared to its antecesor) to have more CVEs than one that's been used for over 30 years, and works mostly unmodified since basically forever.

I don't have an answer for you, but can direct you to the latest thread on the topic — On August 8, a message was posted to debian-devel@lists.debian.org titled Reverting to GNOME for jessie's default desktop; the thread had 174 messages. Josselin Mouette made a specific question that goes along your question, but I'm sure you will find more.

The reason why XFCE was mentioned as a possible default desktop in Debian is the install media size — In order to ship a self-contained distribution that can give you a functional desktop in one CD, GNOME is no longer an option.

But yes, there are several active discussions on how to better achieve this. It's not that Debian has decided XFCE suits us better than GNOME.

(said with a Debian Developer hat on — No, I'm not a desktop guy, nor work in the debian-installer, but do follow the discussions)

I do not use kill -1, although its function is easy to understand — But sending a signal to a group of processes instead is quite useful. That's what kill -$PID achieves (instead of kill $PID — I agree the interface is not the most intuitive, but is well known and understood).

I think I feel as uncomfortable using GNOME 3 as much as you, but for that matter, I cannot use any kind of desktop environment. So I'm neither a GNOME fan or detractor, I'm just a weird user.

However, GNOME-like environments did provide more than one concepts that were later incorporated in other environments — Including the industry mainstream.Take as an example transparency handling and live window miniaturization (adopted in Windows Vista and 7). The "wobbly windows" and "cube desktop" ideas were loved by some, but it does not matter too much that they fell out of favor: They displayed ideas (and implementations) that would later be copied elsewhere.

Yes, I know the wobbly windows are based on technology which is not so distant from NeXT's Display Postscript (and of course became part of MacOS X). But the transparency was added in Linux-land and later appeared in Windows. Going back to a tiling interface (which, yes, was Windows 1.x but largely disappeared from the mainstream for >20 years) is also a Linux contribution; I started using a tiling WM in 2006, and saw that concept start being adopted in more mainstream Linux environments some years later; it seems nowadays tiling WMs are allthe rage (as they are part of the "tablet mindset" we all love to hate).

So, yes, there have been concepts introduced (or re-introduced after a too long hiatus) both in GNOME-land and in the wider Linux-land. I won't go into more details as I'm GNOME-illiterate, but some bits are easy to find :)

I find seriously offensive the hero treatment "war veterans" receive in your country.

I have lived in places (and visited many more) that have been seriously damaged due to being "incorrectly aligned" politically. As insulting as my comment can be to you, I find it insulting to have a front-page article in Slashdot devoting resources to war veterans. Of course, in your society, you are free (and expected) to take care of those you think that are patriots — But you have to understand that many of us cannot relate to those patriots in any different way than we would relate to mass-murderers.

When was the last time the USA army acted to protect the USA citizens' skanky ass (instead of imposing the USA's convenience over people from any other nationality)? 60 years ago, perhaps? How many of those veterans are still alive?

The citizens of the Rest of the World who have no say on who's the looney in charge of your army?

I'm not a social media person, so no, it's neither somebody I follow or somebody followed by me.

I know more than a few people working on security.

And... Yes, I am outing somebody. Somebody who's well known for his activities already, as well as for his skills. And who has never hid them.

I happen to know a highly skilled person working as a security analist. He says his main customer for 0days is the NSA – But this friend has an independent mind and concience (he is not a NSA person, just an outside contractor). I know for a fact he also has worked voluntarily to make the world a better place (i.e. with the "good guys").
I guess my friend is not the only such analyst. If people like him can sell their work and (in full or in part) leak part of his findings to the underground, privacy-minded networks... Well, I'm sure he will do so.
And after all, people with such skillset do know how to remain under cover.

Mexico.

Oh, boy, we can get ethymological about this and get nowhere.

I have heard the lines that "education" stems from the latin "ex ducere", "leading out" — which basically means developing, unrolling. But it needs to have a leader (a Duce) whom to follow.

I have also heard people argue that "education" likely stems from "ductilis", from "making a person more ductile", more likely to follow their assigned roles in society.

I have heard people insisting we should strongly favor "instruction" over "education", because it has much less an ideological bend. Instruction is the communication of knowledge, of facts and skills.

Mind you, in Spanish we don't use "schooling", and I don't know exactly how it should be translated. But anyway — Education includes human, social, behavioral aspects over instruction. And I feel that schooling strongly emphasizes on said aspects. Schooling also goes about the importance of the society going all together and coordinated — There are standardized school subjects to be taught. A person cannot say he has enough education to enter productive life if they never learnt the rudiments of algebra (for abstract thought), physics and chemistry (for a basic understanding of how the world around us works), language and literature (to be able to express oneself and to understand others), and a very large etcetera that will eventually include all of the subjects me or you used to hate in school.

Yes, the hole was dug 25 years ago, the grave stone ordered 23 years ago, the undertaker paid 20 years ago. But the hole has got filled with leaves, which had a lot of time to be composted into new ground. The undertaker died two years ago. The grave stone shows signes of decay. And COBOL is happily breathing.

I still continue to see Java applets being widely used in tasks that require trusted signatures — Say, filling in the tax declarations in my country, or submitting the grades for my students. For both actions, we must use a x.509 client certificate, and for both actions, quite different entities do not trust client-side Javascript validation, Flash code, or anything like that — Only Java applets.

Which quite sucks, right, but anyway there'sa point to them.

Just following up - I downloaded a new .deb from the Skype site, and it now worked correctly. Debian 7, AMD64 (multiarch, as the package is i386).