What has that got to do with the price of eggs in China?
(A quote from a person in a country that is not where Slashdot operates, about a subject as equally relevant to the location of Slashdot as a court decision about an unrelated service).

Absolutely nothing. I'm sure it would be considered illegal once it is tested in the jurisdiction covered by the court. In the mean time the decision in the UK has about as much affect on me and the software I use, where I live, outside of their jurisdiction as the above mentioned price of eggs in China.

Actually that's not true, my country exports to China so the price of eggs in China are actually more relevant to me than the court decision.

You're knowingly ingesting carcinogenic chemicals with every cup of coffee. You're also knowingly ingesting a chemical that is fatal in a certain dose with every glass of water you drink, specifically H2O.

I have no time for people who don't consider dose whenever they talk about a chemical, and think that chemical = bad because.. um... chemicals!!!!!

Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to excrete in your watersupply.

Hmmm H2O is a refinery waste stream too. I guess since I found that in my water it MUST be refinery waste. There's absolutely no way on earth that one chemical can be used for more than one purpose.

Oh my god you've gone full retard. Treating refining waste water is something that is trivially easy to do and far FAR cheaper than moving it off-site to dump in some hole.

Look I get it, you're an incredible skeptic who (quite rightfully) thinks corporations will do anything to help their bottom line. Even through that lens your conspiracy theory is right up there with the faked moon landings.

Neither are they. They are simply injecting it. Someone else is claiming that it's safe.

No the idea is that one courts decision only applies in that jurisdiction. Napster was shutdown by a court in the country in which it operated. If the Supreme court of the Cayman Islands ruled that it was an illegal operation, no one would give a shit.

Likewise just because one judge in the UK made one decision doesn't make the software illegal in any other parts of the world.

it was 90% after the first $2 million, and that was in 1960. Adjusted for inflation that's something like $14 million today.

It was never really a tax per se. It was a check on out of control wealth concentration and the scary, scary power that comes with it. Plus it had the added bonus of encouraging real investment because hey, it was use it or lose it when it came to money. Now the rich can sit on a Scrooge McDuck style cash horde. But unlike the cartoon there are real consequences to that. Our economy grinds to a halt because all our capital is tied up in excesses like private jets & Mergers and acquisitions. No real value is added.

I saw the best quote ever in a news story a few weeks ago (I'm paraphrasing here): Finance is no longer a tool for getting money into productive businesses but for getting it out.

Features don't disappear entirely, they get moved. I understand people are used to things, but there is no reason why a function which enables or disables radios on the phone should be tied to power button instead of the pull-down settings where every other function that enables or disables radios (bluetooth, wifi etc) is located.

Simply double swipe down and the airplane mode button is in the very middle of the screen.

I for the life of me don't understand why you think the BlackBerry hate is limited to only slashdot. BlackBerry is an equal opportunity bucket of crap and doesn't discriminate against non-geeks in the hate department.

I just nuked Samsung's firmware from my phone in favour of a Google Play Edition firmware. Oh man could I not disagree with you more. The material UI is insanely difficult to use compared to many of the other interfaces out there. If every other person makes a "mess" then the latest stock Android release is a damn garbage dump.

Disagree. This may drive popularity in a small number of people (geeks especially), and people who belong to groups where there's a feature expectation (Apple advertises it's new features so people expect to use them), but the vast VAST majority of Android users simply don't give a shit.

I personally know about 6 people who simply haven't updated their phone because they don't want to, don't see a need to, and have been burnt in the past (my girlfriend complaining that the WiFi icon no longer changed colour to indicate internet access state with KitKat). You go talk to iOS users and they know why they are updating, they know there's a benefit.

Me? I run the latest and greatest on my phone but I can't even answer the question of why. What did 4.4 bring over 4.3? I don't know. May have been a bit smoother, but that may have been due to a factory reset. What did 5.0 bring over 4.4? A completely redesigned user interface which does the same thing in a different and arguably more complicated way. When your biggest selling feature is that you need to re-learn how to use the damn phone then there should be little wonder why people aren't upgrading.

There are reasons why iOS is popular, but upgrade cycles is definitely not one of them.

That's mostly because we've cut taxes on corps so much that they've got more cash than they know what to do with. I miss the 90% tax bracket. It kept corporate power in check and made them think about where they were investing their money. Now they can just casually toss $50 billion here and there and it's no skin off anyone's back.

Are there any examples of other skills where the distribution is bi-modal? It would be extremely atypical. I think the default assumption has to be that the curve is the classic bell shape, like most skills, unless there is evidence to the contrary.

More over, I think the point that programming skills can be learned is an important one. In the west we tend to think people have certain innate abilities and weaknesses, like some people are just bad at maths and can't be helped. In some places the assumption is that almost anyone can master almost any skill with enough studying and practice. If someone wants to do programming, or any engineering, to achieve some other goal they can learn to do it well, even if they don't love programming for the sake of programming like some nerds do.

As a noob I highly recommend you search for quick answers before completely blowing off an entire distro in the future. I mean go your hardest and do whatever you want, but in some cases there are not only people out there with the same use case as you, but people who have made it trivially easy.

In Ubuntu just typing the following:
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

will download and completely change the desktop environment to XFCE for you. Likewise "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" will download and switch the environment to KDE.

Maybe MS has decided to crack down on computer repair stores. I used to work at one many years ago, and an MS rep told us that we mustn't activate Windows ourselves. We had to let the end user do it so that they would be forced to agree to the EULA.

We pointed out that our customers expected a fully working computer that was ready to use when they got it back, but they were not interested. Maybe they want to enforce that rule suddenly.