In the mathematical models I've seen, ice in Antartica growing is in fact a sign of global warming. Thinking that warming is going to be uniform is hopelessly naive on a world with the complex ocean and atmospheric phenomena we have.

I've been a Linux user continuously through out that whole period, and I get what you're saying. For the last couple of years I've found Linux a lot less stable. Sometimes the culprit looks like the graphical environment/drivers, sometimes maybe not. But it's been really frustrating and I've not know where to begin hunting it down. Bug reports sure, but when your bug stays open for 18 months.....

That's because it's not a chip and pin. They gave me the same card and it's a chip and sign. Lame facade of security.

Yes. This.

This is true. I just visited the Netherlands and as an American I had this impression exactly. We want to think we're all so hot, "invented the Internet" and all. But the Dutch do technology way better than us. I was very envious of their chip and pin technology.

.org isn't a TLD?

This is right. I'm far sighted, and it is completely different than being near sighted. You can see mountains, you can drive. You can see everything not close in crystal clear fidelity.

For close up work, like reading or sewing or electronics you wear glasses. Most of those activities are fairly static, and glasses are generally no problem (though I find my glasses want to fall off while sewing). I don't have much experience with VR, but I suspect the experience could be completely different.

I think it should count as a surplus in this case when revenue exceeds expenses. After all, the government really has nowhere to put the extra $100 if it takes in $1000 in taxes and only pays out $900 in benefits. They buy treasury bills perhaps, but that's just another way of spending the extra $100, since money you loan the government is spent.

I think, by the way that both democrats and republicans miscount these issues in their own ways. Democrats always want to point to the Social Security trust fund, for example, but that is silly. That money was loaned to the government, and it will require a reduction in spending elsewhere or a raise in taxes elsewhere to pay the money back.

So, while I would count it as surplus when revenue exceed expense (for one year) I would also count it as deficit when expense exceeds income. According to the SSA, that started happening in 2010, "Social Security’s total expenditures have exceeded non-interest income of its combined trust funds since 2010, and the Trustees estimate that Social Security cost will exceed non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period."

On Social Security statements, they tell you what your benefit will be at your retirement age. They also predict what percentage of benefits will be covered by receipts on that date, based on population dynamics. For my retirement age, that's about 70%. Social Security taxes will only be able to pay a bit more than 2/3 of the benefits promised when I retire.

That's the amount I use for retirement planning, by the way. I don't think Social Security will "go away" but it's inevitable that the amount awarded can't indefinitely exceed the receipts, and I don't think it is sensible to plan for the full amount.

I'm a die hard Linux user, but seriously, it sucks.

X breaks my shit every time I upgrade. I just spent 90 minutes tonight getting my Synaptics touchpad working again. I spent hours 2 years ago making it work. All the focus on compositing is leaving good 2D stuff in the lurch I feel. I do a lot of work remotely, and it is the devil trying to find a display manager that will work over VNC and let you choose your window manager without crashing. And then what do you use, Gnome, Unity, KDE? It's getting to where nothing works without a compositor and 3D.

Sound is a disaster. How many Linux sound systems are there? OSS, ALSA, Jack, ESound, PulseAudio, some I don't even remember. Alsa has been a disaster since it came out, from the perspective of documentation. I don't know how anyone ever wrote the first ALSA applications. They're supposed to be compatible, but they're not. If you play ALSA applications on my PulseAudio system, you get static and distortion. I went through all the fixes, and none of them work on my system. Fortunately the author of my application added PulseAudio as a natively supported output method (in addition to the OSS and ALSA that they already supported). I need to send them a thank you.

Notifications? Behavior I depended on two versions ago has been removed from the current version.

My system tray in XFCE4 is quirky. Some application icons won't appear unless I run the application as root (Hamster and redshift). Maybe that's a quirk of upgrading, but Google tells me I'm not the only one with these problems. And XFCE4 sucks less than other window managers, so it's a behavior I just live with.

That's just what I can think of off the top of my head.

And it sucks.

What I hate most are the meta-discussions; discussing what we're going to discuss. And the meta-meetings; meetings to decide when we're going to meet.

Ding ding ding! This is exactly why people who remember still hate Microsoft. Using their monopoly muscle to make vendors pay for their Windows product whether they use it on a machine or not was a despicable practice.

You mean "obvious to you and me." "I" is a subject and "me" is an object. It doesn't make you sound more educated to you "I" everywhere. Well, it does to some people, but it shouldn't. Just as you don't say, "Give that to I," you don't say, "That is obvious to I."

This reflects my anecdotal experience of late as well. My Dell server just turned 3 years old (and I had a 3 year service agreement on it). It came with three 1-terabyte drives. All failed before my service period ended and were replaced; the last of the three was replaced this past summer. 100% failure of the original drives in less than 3 years.

Yes, remote graphical desktop work of all kinds has been wrecked in the recent versions.

When I finally got the computer to boot with wdm (by editing the startup scripts) I quit looking for other solutions. But I admit I didn't try mdm. I went through the 8 or so display managers that are packaged with Ubuntu, and did not go outside to build something external like Mint.