That's, to me, a new example of the problems with systemd.

So far the only one that's sounded serious is the "won't fix" reply to a report of logfile corruption. But there have been a humongous number of complaints about different small problems.

To me systemd sounds like a bad idea. I don't really know. The problem appears that it's going to be hard to avoid, and with so many small problems, it's quite likely that there are some serious one.

A question in my mind is "What problem does it fix?" The only answer I've heard is that you can boot faster. This doesn't impress me, as I rarely boot my computer, and when I do I often want many of the steps to happen slowly enough that I can tell what is going on.

My suspicion is that systemd is a very bad direction to go. I'm remembering that mono was also sponsered by Red Hat. And even if I grant the best of intentions, big chunks of code tend to break more often and be harder to fix.

My interpretation is fully deterministic in the same sense that their was. Probabilistic is meant in the "sum over histories" sense that multiple histories yield the same present, so you can't reasonably pick just one and say "That's what came earlier", but you instead have a spread of probabilities of linkage. I interpret that probability as the strength (weight) of the link. From each past the probabilities to all the futures it links to sum to 1. Similarly from each present the probabilities of all the pasts it links to sum to 1.

The difference between out models is that EWG, at least in the presentation that I read, only considered forwards (toward the future) links. I see no reason to believe that this is a correct interpretation. (I'm not sure about chronology, but I believe the EWG model was created prior to Feynman's Sum over Histories approach being derived. This difference is probably the result of that.)

The Dems only held the House 2 of the past 6 years. Possibly longer.

Yeah the /. department the article is filed under immediately tipped me off to the bias in the article.

This is par for the course of many software projects I have been on in the private sector. SSDE, Same *&^% Different Employer.

Baloo, at least, needs to be sufficiently visible that you can turn it off. It eats up an incredible amount of CPU time to, for me, no benefit. KWallet has it's points, but it's not THAT great. In my use case sticky-notes would be quite reasonable for passwords. Just don't make them accessible over the net (i.e., to other programs running on the same machine). I'm not worried about shoulder surfers. As for Akonadi...I had no idea what it was until I just now looked at the web page, and I still don't know if it is of *ANY* value to me. But if it doesn't take up CPU time when I'm not using it, I guess it doesn't do much harm.

OTOH, I find Gnome3 unusable. Gnome2 was decent...I preferred it to KDE4, but then I preferred KDE3 to Gnome2. xfce would be a good system, but when I tried it, it got confused about which window was on top of which (more specifically, windows tended to get stuck under the menubar at the top of the screen). It's usable, but with several misfeatures, so currently I'm using KDE4. I'm also wondering about razorQT, but I don't want my window manager to be flakey, and the last I heard razorQT was in very late alpha. I've also heard about LXQT recently. Don't know what it's status is, but it isn't in the system repository, and this makes me dubious.

There were (and are) people who like MSWind. Agreed.

MSWind became dominant because the people who made the purchasing decisions trusted IBM. Not because people who used the computers liked it. Most of them didn't. Now most of them do, because they've become habituated, and the thought of putting in that much effort again terrifies them.

If you want to pick a company that became dominant because people liked it, pick Apple. I, personally, don't use or want to use Apple, but those who do use it like it. (When I used it, I liked it...but they made a change in the EULA that I found unacceptable. Now I no longer know it, though I don't actively dislike it the way I do MSWind.)

The entire deal reeks. A holding company in the Caymens associated with a company in a foreign land with profits which may or may not meet accounting standards. The only people dumb enough to take that play would those who cant lose, like banks.

IIUC, this is not a survey of the *level* of sexual assault, but of the rate. And if the sample questions quoted above are typical, then I'm surprised that it isn't higher.

OTOH, the questions that were listed above (in the discussion about poorly worded questions) don't distinguish between a bit of uncomfortable humor and forcible rape. One presumes that actual criminal activity is rare, but this isn't evidence of that.

That said, in groups that are predominantly male and relatively isolated from external contact, one might expect that undesireably agressive sexual behavior would be relatively common. The real question to me is how moderate is the degree of undesireably agressive sexual behavior. (The rate would be interested *IF* coupled with the degree.)

Really; they probably got married, had kids, and got a life. Or developed some sort of interest outside of work. Or they just got their job and technology worked out to the point they don't have to work 60 hours a week to keep up. In short, they got a life. Assuming they are burnt out may be incorrect. You should also get a life.

They could have told the EU to get out. After seeing what lack of control of your own currency did to Greece, Italy, and Spain I've come to the conclusion the tight economic binding which is the EU is a bad idea. There are also no firewalls. It creates a situation where a country as small as Greece, Italy, or Spain can threaten to take down the entire global economy.

I believe that there are theoretical designs for computers (using reversible computation) that can compute without using any energy in computation. What I'm not sure about is that there's anyway to retrieve the results of the computation. (I've also got no idea of the speed of the computation. It might depend on random motions for all I can remember.)

Whatever, that's merely a theoretical quibble about your point. But then your point itself was a theoretical quibble.

The real weakness of 256 bit keys is poor implementation (of something). And you can't know that everything is properly implemented.

Weeel....sort of. Depends on what you mean. I looked at a lot of (well, several) computers before the Apple ][ was released. They were all interesting, but not quite interesting enough. Then the Apple ][+ was released with a Pascal card, and I bought it. A lot of other people made about the same choice at about the same time. That was when the PC bacame notable. A few years later IBM released the IBM PC with no significant advantage over the current Apple product...but that was when it boomed.

This is sort of like Apple releasing the Apple ][. Not the ][+. OTOH, Dremel is a much bigger name now than Apple was then. Perhaps that will be a big enough kick...but my expectation is that there will turn out to be the need for much fine-tuning of the design. Then Dremel will release a greatly improved model. And then someone who's the darling of a business segment will release a different, probably incompatible, model with some useful differences, and many user drawbacks...but it will sell into businesses, and Dremel will be edged out of the market...though not completely, and they may continue to dominate among home users and certain niche segments.
But THAT will be the boom.

Makerbot, etc. is just like the S-100 computers that predated Apple.

N.B.: This is all reasoning from analogy, and therefore not to be trusted. But it's still a good guess.

You're assuming that the universe is deterministic, or at least that the past is. I don't believe that to be correct. I believe the past to be as probabilistic as the future. Granted, it's probably that every backwards simulation will end up at the big bang, but in between now and then it's an uncollapsed wave function.

OTOH, I also believe in the Everett-Graham-Wheeler interpretation of quantum mechanics...but not in quite the same way that they did, as I'm considering branching to be essentially symmetric between the past and the future, so that not only does the present lead to multiple futures, but there are multiple presents connected to multiple pasts in a probabilistically branching net in both directions. Each present has multiple pasts, and each past has multiple presents (futures?). In a connected lattice that (perhaps) teminates in one single instant in the past where all the lattice links join (called the big bang) and less probably terminates in on single instant in the future where all lattice links join (called the big crunch). The big crunch, however, doesn't seem to be extremely plausible at the moment, given current knowledge and theories. And neither join is required by the theory.

FWIW, as far as I can tell this model is consistent with everything known about physics, but I'm neither a cosmologist nor a quantum mechanic.

Now that's just not true. Brainfuck is worse than PHP. So, for that matter, is whitespace.