That quotation smacks of pure nihilism. Unsure then (in the sense of a thought experiment) why people who TRULY think that way don't just off themselves. How is death different that hanging around for a good meal?
For the truly dedicated to the kind of piffle you quote, the two ideas should seem indistinguishable.

You seem to have distorted the argument of Inventing Freedom.

Is that like saying that the initial conditions of a function are not the same as the inductive proof of the rest of it? I'm going to have to chew on this a while.

Can you point to where you thought a legitimate question was a denial, when I didn't espouse any alternatives?
Remember back in the day when reasoned debate was kinda vogue?

Early symptoms of Ebola are "flu-like" and it is contagious during these "flu-like" symptoms. Now ... consider the fact that flu season is upon us. But you know what's _really_ frightening about this? Not one of the goddamn idiot "authorities" has even mentioned, let alone assessed, this confounding situation's impact on public health containment measures.

Now THAT'S frightening!

Read the CDC's guidelines on monitoring and movement of persons with "exposure" and tell me their guidelines work for a country in the throes of massive incidence of "flu-like symptoms".

While reading this wisdom from on high, imagine there is, in this multi-"culture"al heaven that is the US nowadays, a "community" somewhere with strong identity, Hollywood-fired resentment of the US's white-supremacist history of slavery and colonial exploitation with corresponding suspicion of its public health measures (just look at the murders of public health workers in West Africa -- and many of those health workers weren't even "white-devils"), strong relations in West Africa and -- to top it all off -- a flu season that has a good percentage of its community exhibiting the early stage symptoms of Ebola...

That's not the issue: Since virtually all (x86) systems built later than 2010 are 64-bit, the expected case is 64 bit UEFI. Contemporary linux distributions don't even bat an eye at booting on a 64-bit system with 64-bit UEFI (well, there are a lot of ugly details under the surface, probably enough to keep several devs more or less permanently alcoholic; but the user doesn't need to see that).

However, there are a few edge cases that really haven't gotten enough attention and/or love to smooth them over: Apple has some older models with 32-bit EFI, and 64-bit CPUs, that are a bit weird, and there was a period where MS/Intel was using 32-bit Atom processors, with UEFI and no BIOS fallback, in order to hit aggressive price points for 'win-tablet' systems. These are a huge pain to boot to anything except the OS they were designed for; because distributions with good UEFI support almost always expect 64-bit CPUs, and 32-bit distros almost always expect BIOS booting.

There may be others; but the 'clover trail' based hardware that uses Z2760 or similar atom processors is what I'm talking about.

complaints from users about the name (VERY unprofessional and immature, BTW)

They aren't the ones that named it "GIMP," which is a really well-known American idiom that could have been easily avoided if the developers weren't too busy smelling their own farts.

These all scream "ME DONT WANT TO RELEARN ANYTHING"

It's this presumption that everyone who doesn't use GIMP is stupid and lazy, or that making it more attractive would necessarily lead it to becoming a "Photoshop clone" exemplifies the FOSS general ignorance of creative use cases and users, and tends to explain FOSS's utter failure at even making a dent in these markets. As long as your attitude is "I'm doing this for free, so I don't have to meet you half way, art fag," people will happily pay $10 a month for CC.

[Signed, someone who drops $1k a year keeping his Pro Tools up to date and would rather not.]

The laptops are based on the Celeron N2840, with 2GB of RAM. I can't seem to find much in the way of benchmarks; but I suspect that they are surprisingly adequate. What is a bit surprising is that the the N2840 has a quoted tray price of $107, so either Intel is cutting HP one hell of a deal, or I don't even want to know what HP cobbled the rest of the system together from...

Two different product lines: one is cheapy laptops(and since a touchscreen adds a nontrivial hit to the BOM, these don't come with them) and the other is inexpensive 7 and 8 inch tablets (which do have touchscreens, since they don't have keyboards or touchpads).

You might want to be a bit careful, some of the ultra-cheap Windows devices are UEFI only; but 32 bit, which freaks most Linux installers out; but these are not Windows RT machines, so they will not be cryptographically locked out.

Time, and experimentation, will tell how good compatibility actually is; but it should be markedly easier than any Windows RT device, and honestly quite probably easier than doing a Linux port to a lot of common Android devices(yes, bodging a headless debian userland or something onto an Android system is easy; but getting X, using a mainline kernel, or not using bionic, less so...)

3D modelers know what a vertex is, what I think he means is that, in some cases, perhaps they don't completely understand the mathematical formalism of the thing, and just have an intuitive feeling for what it is -- "the thing that's the corner of my thing."

Of course, there is the perspective that you shouldn't need to understand the "fundamentals" or nuts and bolts reifications of things, because that's what the software's for, to take all of these mathematical games and put them in a box, out of the way in a separated concern, so I can get the job done in whatever way I want. What's the point of having software if it doesn't enable people, even mathematically disinclined people, to create?

A sculptor has as much to say about 3D modeling as some voxel-counting dork from NVidia's demo team, more even, really. Saying that "vertices" or "bezier paths" form some sort of "fundamental" base for all visual art is constructivist, scientistic and naive.

TFA doesn't provide enough detail to know for sure; but the problem may also be with expectations about what the system can do.

"Training" video snippets, regurgitated by various 'learning management systems' are something to be treated very carefully. Video tends to be slow and have poor information density as reference material(for, say, the arcana of some ghastly line-of-business software mess); but are also fairly shallow, and a bit condescending, as a substitute for a little hands-on guidance for your first time through a more complex activity. Does your company really deal in tasks so simple that a few youtube snippets can get you up to speed, or such churn that your colleagues can't spare some time to get to know the new guy?

(This is not to say that documentation isn't vital, it is, no human can be reasonably expected to remember all the arcane details; but 'reference material for people familiar with the task' and 'drool-proof intro videos' are extraordinarily different things.)

A wiki is a perfectly adequate CMS, if so configured, and if this is basically a vehicle for slinging video snippets at people the details of formatting are hardly going to be your biggest problem.

The more fundamental problem is that "Content management" and "Content" are fundamentally different things, and it's not a difference of degree. There is no CMS so brilliant, even in principle, that it will produce a single line of information for you. The best you can hope for is a system that auto-magics the production of indexes, bibliographies, other organizational stuff, and doesn't munge the formatting into unreadability.

You'd be better off with 'content' that is actually worthwhile tacked together with threadbare HTML hacked out in notepad than you would be with the finest of all possible CMSes and nothing to put in it...

Yeah. You know it's almost as if the Russians didn't get a copy of the memo that says we are only permitted to use about 1/3 of the current known reserves.
You know, the memo that notes that if we don't leave the other 2/3 in the ground, we are COMPLETELY SCREWING OURSELVES and our little dogs too, on the climate front.

You know, sooner or later, our current "leaders" are going to be held liable for this criminally insane path they are steering us down with a greed-twisted grin on their faces. I can only hope it is sooner.