For those of us who prefer to roll our own distros or compile stuff ourselves, XFCE is far easier to build from scratch than any GNOME or KDE4 environment. The dependencies on libraries not shipped in XFCE directly are minimal and there aren't many snags to worry about.

Don't forget about the more recent and glaring example: Big Bang Theory. I've seen it referred to as "nerdsploitation" and "blackface for nerds" in various places. Let's face it: actual nerds are still picked on and outcast even by our "modern and enlightened" society (cough, cough). Being a nerd or geek is now something to loosely emulate in an exaggerated fashion to seek attention, but being an actual nerd or geek is still unacceptable.

Even worse is the fact that radical feminism is now directly attempting to destroy the "safe spaces" created by the outcast nerds and demonize their existence. Look at Linus Torvalds: actual nerds who understand Linus and Linux, how the ecosystem works, and that see how well Linus' methods have worked for over 20 years straight are happy with his behavior. "Polite society" feminist trolls focus in a myopic way on extremely specific actions he has taken to black-label him and try to get him ousted from the open source community in the name of "being nice." These are the same people that loudly clapped when Sarah Sharp made a politeness stink on the LKML but stopped tuning in immediately before Linus engaged in a courteous two-way conversation with her and they resolved their differences cleanly. Sarah Sharp still contributes heavily to the Linux kernel. Sarah Sharp isn't hiding under a rock playing the victim card while doing nothing of actual value. What do today's nerd-hating oppression olympics P.C. hordes contribute to the world of real nerds and geeks once you exclude their vitriol? Funny how rabid social justice douchebags rarely submit patches to open source projects.

Nerd outcasting is still very much alive and well. It's just that now they're trying to cast out the outcasts from the island that they founded because they were cast out in the first place. At some point even the most timid victim will lash out against the bullies and re-align their jaws.

Girls do not play the same games as boys, and also tend to pick game categories that have no "main character." It's not that social media changed gaming; it's that social media put the game categories that appeal more to females right in their faces.

7-Zip is by far the easiest way to do this. Select files, right-click, 7-Zip, Add to archive... and if you supply a password and check "encrypt file names" the whole archive is AES-256 encrypted with the password you used. Upload that bad boy and feel more secure. On the other end, download it, right-click, "extract here" and then delete the 7z file. It's just one extra step prior to upload and after download and the shell integration makes it dead simple. If you're on Linux using p7zip at a command prompt, "7za a -mhe archive_name.7z file_and_dir_names_go_here -p" and it'll prompt for a password.

freedesktop.org is under Red Hat control. All of the biggest douche moves in Linux have come from Red Hat, including all the Poettering-based junk and the lovely musings of Ulrich Drepper. At least Drepper wrote some interesting papers and made some valuable contributions despite his acerbic handling of bug reports; I don't really find anything Poettering does to be of real-world value. Red Hat has beaten Microsoft in the EEE philosophy; I think Microsoft is far less evil than Red Hat at this point in history. It's too bad because Red Hat historically helped to bring Linux into the corporate mainstream and has otherwise done some great things for the community. Why did they start going downhill so hard?

Red Hat and Ubuntu are the enemies of clean, functional, and elegant open-source solutions. The irony is so thick that you could cut it with a knife.

http://www.floodgap.com/softwa... and you're welcome. ;)

Firefox doesn't get slow as molasses after a few hours either. Perhaps you are thinking of a very old version or have a pretty low-spec computer.

I browse by typing raw HTTP into Telnet sessions on port 80. Text looks fine.

Good, JavaScript is faster. Now where is my in-browser ad blocking engine written in C? Since lots of articles have run that whine about Adblock Plus slowing down browsing due to injecting a massive CSS file into every page, let's see the ad blocking capability put where it really belongs. THAT is a feature that almost every user of Firefox wants: ad blocking in the browser.

I've noticed that a very high number of movies made since Save the Cat! came out follow the three-part formula outlined therein. It was especially apparent having seen Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), then watching the (annoyingly titled) Riddick (2013).

On top of most films following the same general plot format, the buildup of any kind of suspense is practically nonexistent. Everything has to move so damned fast that you don't even have time to come up with something to anticipate based on what has already happened before the next action-packed mostly-CGI-and-obviously-so thing smacks you in the face. A classic film like Halloween where the first 90% of the film is nothing but suspense build-up could never be made today, even if it was set in the same time period so that modern technology couldn't get in the way of the plot. Suspense is largely a thing of the past.

While I'm here on my soapbox, does anyone remember when "special effects" were actually special? (Get off my lawn!)

Women make safer choices. That's better if safety and stability are higher priorities. Men make riskier choices that come with greater potential rewards; some obtain the rewards and some fall flat on their faces. Neither choice is "better" without looking at what matters to the person making that choice.

Freedom of speech exists to protect the most disgusting, offensive, disturbing, and unpopular speech. It does not exist to protect speech that is not objectionable, as such speech does not need protection in the first place. Production of video constitutes a form of speech; content is irrelevant. The concept of "obscenity" does not exist in the First Amendment and its existence anywhere in the body of statutory and case law as an excuse to penalize people for unpopular speech runs strongly against the entire purpose of the First Amendment.

A system administrator can't administrate the system without "that much access." Who controls the access above that sysadmin? Why, it'd have to be another sysadmin...see the problem?

Why couldn't Sony just yank all the Internet connectivity until the machines were fixed?

Oh, I checked. The website made it sound like it was some sort of antivirus program that no one had ever heard of. When asked about it, some customers didn't even know what it was or how it had gotten on their computers. It installed a filter driver for all network adapters and at least two machines weren't getting online at all because of it malfunctioning. All of the customers already had an antivirus solution installed. Rapport started popping up on computers in the era of fake security software.

You should probably get some detail before jumping to conclusions.