You wanna confine it to a handy though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumclaw_horse_sex_case

If you're talking about stackexchange, you are getting into a sysadmin/developer/knowledgeable user community. It's not really a representative sample.

AFAIK, no one has really got a reliable measure. It's pretty much impossible when you are talking about most FOSS. It is pretty clear that Ubuntu is by far and away the most popular for desktop usage.

I have a hard time believing that accounts for a significant percentage of Ubuntu's search volume. If both had the same popularity, for example, and even one third of people wanting info about Mint searched for "Linux Mint," if Ubuntu had a search volume of 166, then Mint would have a search volume of 33. This is a much smaller relative disparity than actually seen. And the likely case is that while some people searching for Mint information query for Ubuntu, most are still going to search for Mint.

Are you fucking kidding me? I have no idea why people ever think of Distrowatch as mattering. All that it measures is page hits to Distrowatch's info page about that distro. It only measures what people who go to Distrowatch click on at Distrowatch. Notice that the numbers are in the low thousands per month at best. Their audience is longer-time Linux users who remember it from like fifteen years ago.

Google search volumes are by far a more accurate gauge of interest, as it is both a much larger sample, and a more uniform sample, as a broader range of people use Google than visit some fucking site that was cool during Slashdot's heyday. Sampling 101.

The vast majority of linux users use Ubuntu, with Unity (they don't know what XFCE is). They just don't post on Slashdot. Take a look at this Google Trends frequency of search terms here.

Mint barely registers compared to Ubuntu. (Also, distrowatch really is useless).

The only people I know (aside from a few sysadmins with RHEL) that run another distro are my parents, because I put Mint on their computer. I just use FreeBSD now.

So you're telling me that things in other star systems are far away?

Except that it takes ages. The new pkgng on FreeBSD awesome though. Just as good as apt and not a pile of shit like pkg_tools.

n/t

Well, you will pay more (through incarceration and costs of the crime to society) if you don't prevent it in the first place.

It doesn't matter if you don't think you should pay for it. That's not how the world works.

Just having that much money means that the organization becomes bloated, and then produces worse and worse software due to design-by-committee and such.

Can Slashdot at least try to tone down the retardation?

I bet that's because there are few new perl devs, so on average they are far more experienced.

Got to be something like that. Perl is worse than C for the ability to have subtle errors, and it doesn't have C's excuse of manual memory management.

Actually running fiber costs huge amounts of money. For a normal city it's easily hundreds of millions or more. The rule of thumb is that you need 30% adoption for it to be worthwhile in an area, which is a significant risk, and is mathematically impossible for more than 3 companies.

The problem with the internet, especially cable, is that it is a natural monopoly. It's like most utitilities that require infrastructure to the home. It would be stupid to have 10 competing water companies, right? That's because there would be large amounts of redundant infrastructure. Therefore, it is better to have a highly regulated monopoly with pricing set to prevent monopolistic rents.

The current situation is that each cable company has a monopoly in most areas, with DSL providing a duopoly in some places. Obviously, monopolistic pricing occurs, with prices far above the free market rate for inferior service. But that isn't illegal! You have to show that they are acting in an anticompetitive manner, which is very difficult.

Even in the case of oligopilies, price fixing is legal as long as it is implicit: A company can signal to another by unilaterally raising prices in a way that would be irrational if non-cooperative behavior is assumed. Then the other company will raise their prices as well, to acheive a cooperative outcome with both companies making more money. Again, this isn't illegal, unless there is an explicitly communicated price-fixing agreement.

Thus, FTC antitrust stuff means fuck-all.

Hahaha, surely you're joking.