It is kinda sad to live in the time of prosperity when I know in times of adversity, we would be more resillient, more strong and determined. The comfy emptiness of prosperity just leads to boys being born and then growing without any inherent purpose other than being a part of the economical system. And the girls can afford to reap the fruits of prosperity while the boys wander confused trying to find a purpose in their lives. This is just an opinion to explain the current situation with lonely guys often working in tech or academia. Don't get me wrong, the desperate search for their purpose may lead to new great inventions and discoveries, but also the necessity has lead to great inventions and maybe faster. Living in prosperity is rather dull.

Says someone living in (relative) prosperity... So you want life to be harsh, unforgiving and generally hostile to survival, just so your purpose can become to merely exist and get your next meal before your peers eat it.

Wrap your head around the horrible fact that life has no other inherent meaning than to merely exist. You can live an empty (read: no inherent meaning other than to exist) life and have it be a struggle to survive or you can live an empty life and add all the frills to it that make it meaningful to you.

Either way, life is indifferent to what you choose.

www.manjaro.org

How dare you derail OP's dogmatic diatribe against the unatural evils of non-heterosexual intercourse with facts of nature? Don't you know gays are of teh DEVIL!!!1!!11

As a gay man (with the only real choice to stop hiding my sexuality or else become a mental wreck by all the closeted secrecy) I find these "YOU CHOOSE TO BE WRONG, YOU EVIL CREATURE!" fantasies to be equally funny, sad and scary. It's a limited, empathyless "If you are not like me, you are wrong and must be eliminated" kind of thing.

N/T

It's a solution in search of a problem

Which is what people have probably said about wheels, boats, bows, guns, castles, astronomy, gaslight, electricity, self driving carriages, photo cameras, computers, dishwashers, dryers, mobile phones, the Internet, etc.

Lets hear the creationist explanation for this one :-)

Satan put it in the ground to make us doubt God. (Or some other shit along those lines)

***Exactly. And with that in mind, since we left the 90's it has been really hard to find a good program launcher that isn't incredibly bloaty and that doesn't hinder my workflow.***

Exactly this. It's the same for me. I'm not necesarilly married to the "Win95" paradigm, but if I'm going to dump it, I expect the replacement to enhance my daily workflow, not drive me up the wall with distracting and context breaking view switches.

It may be the modern thing on mobile phones, but there it is not a matter of innovation, but of working around restraints of the (still) limited mobile hardware.

As long as nothing better comes along, I'll be on Cinnamon.

Well, if it does demon eyes, I want one. I've been dying for the ability to flash the proverbial eyes that can kill.

So presumambly all your houses are built for it.

Sorry to bust your bubble, but TFA mentions that The Netherlands escaped the trend and I can tell you that Air Conditioning is rare in The Netherlands. Our houses are built to keep warmth in as much as possible, as winters are pretty cold here.

If a heat wave in 2003 caused the decline in health afterwards, The Netherlands would have been affected pretty badly.

By then, that will be the weirdos and the old farts...

*** What is a decent alternative that would remove the "I disagree" button mentality and promote good well-thought-out content? ***

Well, it's so obvious that it is staring us right in the face. To get rid of the abuse of moderation options to serve as a "I disagree" button, just add that ff-ing "I disagree" button and make this a second counter next to the standard moderation. It would instantly point out the (interesting?) comments that are counter to the group-think.

Samsung's and Intel's Tizen IVI? Jolla Sailfish? Raspberry Pi's Raspbian? Still not convinced about the feasibility of mobile use?

Buy better hardware...

Cold Fjord, you are a master in reducing everything into its constituent parts and from there "failing" to take the overarching relations between these constituent parts into account. No, Snowden and Manning have nothing to do directly with politics in Australia. They both are indicative though of the rot that pervades politics in so called civilised societies. On the surface, the citizens in a civilised society are in power, but in practise it is the largely autocratic, political caste that determines the fate of the non-political castes. To become an aacepted part of the political caste, you need to accept their "etiquette". Maybe that is the way primate societies are supposed to work, but humanity can't let go of sugar coating their machinations under the pretense of having higher principles and ideals.

Don't talk authoritatively about sex if your being is completely lacking the "firmware" for performing this function. This is not to dismiss you, belittle you or label you as a freak. You are not any of those things. You are you. You don't do sex, which is ok, but you have absolutely no insight into what the "need" for sex is, because you are in a minority with a differing psychological make-up that doesn't need it.

I don't know what life without sex is, because my firmware compels me to seek it out. Sexual beings get pretty unhappy and frustrated if their want for (non-solitary) sex is not met. For sexual beings, the togetherness, the physical act and the release it gives, is something we simply don't want to do without. We sexual beings might not die if we don't get sex, but our quality of life greatly diminishes.

To give you something workable, imagine it like this: Denying sexual beings their access to sex (probably) makes us just as unhappy as you'd be if someone were to constantly badger you with proposals for physical sex.