"But generational starships"- nope, sorry. We can't build a Buick where the fucking bumper doesn't fall off in 3 years... we are sure as SHIT not building a spaceship that will last the literally tens of thousands of years required to travel to our nearest neighbors with orbiting planets while supporting huge amounts of life on board. Let alone the fact that there's no guarantee the planets you find on the other end of that 30,000 year flight will be habitable in any appreciable way.

Except it may not take nearly that long for the ship itself. If you can scale up one of the low impulse drives they're developing now, say the ion drive, and accelerate the ship to say 90% the speed of light, time dialation kicks in. For crew and ship, a 27,000 light year journey will only take 13,000 years subjective. At 99% a 29,700 light year trip would only take 4000 years subjective. High speeds, but if you can keep accelerating during the whole journey, they're not unfeasible.

Relativity makes FTL possible, in the subjective sense that 29700 light years / 4000 years is a speed faster than light.

Regarding the many different Linux configurations, then I agree with you in principle. But I don't think the fragmentation of Linux has been really helpful either. It is clear that there now is a major push to reduce Linux fragmentation.

I think the "every distro is a separate island" doing everything their own particular way, is something that will disappear. But perhaps that isn't so bad, maybe the interesting thing about different distros, aren't that they all place their shared libs in different subdirs, but rather, what software platform they deliver above the system level. Less Linux fragmentation will definitely make it easier for distro maintainers and upstream developers in many respects, so perhaps this will release energy to do more cool things, instead of patching up differences. I mean, a pure systemd version of Gentoo will still be Gentoo, it will just share some basic OS characteristics with other Linux distros that will make it easier for upstream projects to support it.

I still think there will be many, many different Linux distros in the future, catering for either the mass market, or specialist use, I just think they will be less fragmented and different at the core system level, thanks to systemd etc.

I can see the value in that. At some point I expect I'll set up a box with a mainstream distribution if only to run Steam, for instance. The current fragmentation does make it difficult to run software packages that make assumptions about how the system is laid out. I can often get something working, but it can be a pain.

If I had to choose between very fragmented or completely uniform, however, I'd choose fragmented. We can't predict where Linux will be used in the future, and so we may need the core-level diversity that fragmentation brings. It's about more than just where libraries are placed, but about ways of doing things. Being able to drop in an alternative system-level structure lets us try out new principles, such as systemd versus sysvinit for instance. We might all be using systemd in 10 years, but I would bet you nobody will be in 50, so if we're no longer able to experiment with alternatives because we're locked into one system, that new alternative will come from outside the Linux ecosystem. It's evolution: stop growing and settle into a niche, and eventually something nimbler will outcompete you.

This is a similar discussion I have with the rest of my family: they use OS X because they see a computer as a tool to run software, whereas I also see it as a testbed to experiment with the running-of-software as well. I value diversity and flexibility over ease of use, which is why I've stuck with Slackware and similar distributions, and only occasionally use a package manager. That's an issue of taste, however, and as they say: de gustibus non est disputandum. I know I'm in the minority here, but I'm hoping the majority doesn't abandon us as it feels like is happening at the moment.

I think the only way the smaller distros will have a say in the new direction Linux is taking at the moment, is to organize and counter it with their own proposals.

Yeah... There are some interesting alternatives out there for various parts of systemd - I've been using runit as init system for a few months and like it - but few of those are gaining enough traction.

Patrick Volkerding seems to have made no firm decision in any direction at the moment.

Ok, my mistake.

...it seems that the future for non-systemd distros is very bleak.

The future definitely doesn't look good, and I don't disagree with the arguments you offer to paint it so bleakly. I'm not ready to give up on alternatives, however, so I'll do what I can with my meager skills and encourage anyone else also doing so. I prefer to remain optimistic, that we can get enough people together to continue offering an alternative to systemd.

Not requiring everyone to use the same setup is one of the big strengths of Linux. That's one of the main reasons I don't like systemd as an ecosystem: it seems to be trying to force everyone to use the same setup, by depreciating everything else. No one piece of software should be so central that there is no way to replace it with an alternative, because otherwise you end up with monoculture and monopoly.

Slackware still doesn't have systemd, and Patrick Volkerding has apparently come down pretty hard against it. He still hasn't accepted Pulse Audio for similar reasons, and that's from a decade ago. Unless you think Slackware will disappear, or that it doesn't qualify as a "distribution of note", I think it'll end up proving you wrong.

Yes, probably no Gnome and similar, but there's always Enlightenment, Xmonad, and plenty of other more palatable alternatives. There's eudev to handle /dev, Slackware already hasn't shipped with Gnome for years now, and there's daemontools/runit/s6 to replace sysvinit. I'm sure we'll find a way to steer clear of systemd, even if we end up in the minority.

I expect using a larger font, or actually a larger system DPI setting, is exactly what he wants to do. There's a huge difference between a 12 pt sentence at 92 DPI and at 300 DPI, one of the reasons I still prefer to print out articles when I'll be reading them intensively. It's the high DPI in addition to the lack of backlight that makes e-paper displays so great.

I'm only 31 and I can't see details like I used to either, so anything that makes text sharper is good. I'd be interested in a 300 DPI 27", but that's roughly 7050x3960.

Or maybe he was a foreigner with a funny accent.

Like I was...

Ideal viewing times for these come rarely, and at the magnifications required he would also need a very expensive tracking mount in order to really enjoy them.

That's news to me... I regularly watched Saturn's rings a few years ago using a cheap Nature Company 4" refractor. Couldn't see any details of course, but I could very clearly make them out, an inspiring sight. Can you do that with binoculars?

I don't think they have to worry about below 40 F temps

Don't know why on earth you'd think that, considering that the average outdoor temperature in Portland in the winter is around 40...

I agree, a panacea it is not. I'd rather see nukes than coal, but I'm looking forward to the day we can rely on space-born generation. It's still a pipe dream, but a conference I was at a few years ago had a few people presenting on the topic. Seems the Japanese are very interested.

Cheers,

On which planet? They work just fine as long as you are not expecting unicorn farts. 15% of UK electricity roughly, ~50% of German.

And when the wind dies and the sun sets, guess where Germany gets its power instead: France's nuke plants.

So, 24 FPS is the vacuum tube amplifier of the film world - the distortion we're familiar with and like?

The (very Muslim) Egypt is also blockading Gaza.

Misrepresenting the facts. Egypt closed the border with Gaza among other reasons because Hamas is seen as part of the Muslim Brotherhood, who Sisi kicked out. It's because the Egyptian leaders are not Muslim that they're blockading, not despite of them being.

Both strongmen considered their victims to be their citizens and subjects. In the state of rebellion, but citizens nonetheless. Bullshit propaganda much?

Whereas Israel does not consider the Palestinians to be citizens? What are they then, an invading army?

How are they citizens?

They're native to the region, which satisfies the definition you linked.
Even the US will admit that anyone born on its soil is a citizen.

So? The "boundaries" have Israel on one of the sides - why aren't you claiming them to be citizens of Jordan and Egypt? At least, those two neighbors actually once occupied the entire West Bank and Gaza respectively - for twenty years...

Simple: Jordan and Egypt are not claiming that Gaza and the West Bank are part of their country, whereas Israel is.

Israeli government has changed many times since the country's establishment - swinging from Left to Right and anything in between. Never once have PLO or Hamas changed their official goal of destroying Israel.

Besides the point, verging on a straw-man. Whatever the Palestinians are, that doesn't make the Israelis any less far-right.

It pulls Palladium to shame since you can't install any apps except those provided by the Google overlords.

You don't know what you're talking about. I can install apps from anywhere on mine, and I haven't even put it in developer mode. That includes unpackaged apps I've developed on the device itself.

But even in countries with larger third parties, they're seldom major parts of government.

In Belgium we have the Christian Democrats, the Liberals, the Socialists, the Nationalists (two types, even), the Greens, and those are just the major parties of the north. I count 13 parties with seats in the federal government after the most recent election, and a coalition usually includes at least two northern parties and two southern parties, but often more.

The make-up of the government can change significantly, as well. For example, the big winner in the north of the country, the nationalist NVA party, didn't exist 15 years ago and now they've got the most seats of all parties (22%). Government negotiations this year are going to be a real pain because the Nationalists and the Northern Christian Democrats are at loggerheads with the Socialists and the Southern Christian Democrats, with the Liberals of both north and south are caught in between.

So far it doesn't seem to have led to a lot of radical change in outcomes other than making the election results take a couple of extra days due to the calculations involved when there's a dozen candidates.

If you want a laugh, look up the Belgian political crisis of 2010-11. It took the government 541 days of negotiations to form a coalition. I believe that's a modern world record.

We just started using ranked choice voting for elections in Minneapolis, which in theory eliminates the "lost vote" problem by allowing you to make third parties your first choice but still vote "defensively" by making some other candidate a secondary choice.

I support such voting systems, in the hope they will bring candidates to the center.