I've heard of this, but I was under the impression that it was mostly motivated by power saving -- that it was solely during the hot summer months. If this is, in fact, an effort toward making things more comfortable and more conducive to creativity (and consequently, more sane), more power to them.

I'm an embedded systems engineer for a company in the US, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of a large Japanese company. We enjoy comforts like alternate work schedules, telecommuting, etc. Our Japanese counterparts, however, arrive at work promptly at 8 am, spend much of each day in meetings, and then begin actual work well after noon. They work late into the night (~8:30P or later), have dinner at 10, go to bed and wake up the next day for more of the same. And, they work on Saturday. Additionally, they all wear uniforms -- it's like watching prisoners march to the mess hall when it's time for their collective department lunch break, given at 45 minute intervals.

Not only are they not as productive, their creativity is obviously stifled. Aside from the cultural norm of not wanting to rock the boat or "think outside the box", they are simply unable to innovate and create the same way we are. Indeed, when they need some creative problem solving, they come here to the US for brainstorming sessions. And, the frustrating thing is, I get the impression that they feel their way is superior. Not so. They live to work, while we work to live.

Wow! So, after 4 days, 17 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds, you could transfer a whopping... 1 whole MEGABYTE.

.the stuff just comes out by itself.

Well, if ((age < 2) || (age > 65))

Thank you for making my point for me. It has already happened, so it will again. It sounds like, even though you started your first reply with, "Well, as much as I don't like to defend it ...", you've talked yourself out of defending it. We are, therefore, in agreement. Now, let's go get a beer.

So, then you either get actual attacks happening nobody took seriously. Or the men in dark sunglasses hauling you off in the night for questioning because they're 100% convinced that your threat to drop the condoms, Snickers wrappers, and Depends on Capitol Hill was real.

Which scenario do you think is more likely? Furthermore, if anyone is a real threat, there will be much more intelligence (as in evidence of a threat) surrounding that individual than their tweets. Arresting people based solely on their tweets or FB posts will very rapidly devolve into an outright ban of saying anything critical of government officials or policy -- AKA fascism.

Why not just force Twitter to change TOS to require sarcasm tag?

Or, why not just allow free speech? Why do we have to identify sarcasm? Maybe part of the expression of the message is its ambiguity.

"Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers! Ballers!"

*collapses on court floor*

"Ball... *gasp* ers. Bah. ha. hhhhhaa"

Right-wing lunatics like, say, Jamie Foxx?

Furthermore, one of the nice things about autonomous vehicles will be the ability to have ZERO passengers in some circumstances. Need to pick your dad up from the airport? Send the empty car. Kids need to be dropped off at school while you do a little grocery shopping? Let the car drop you off, take the kids, and then return to the parking lot of the grocery store.

No person should be responsible, because no person should be required present.

This is asinine, and is the single largest failing of the IO Slave mechanism.

Exactly! This is especially idiotic when opening a 1.4 gig (or 4.1 gig or larger!) video file. On my laptop with an SSD, where my /tmp is a tmpfs ramdisk, this is going to fail miserably.

That's great, if you're only using KDE apps. What about apps that are neither KDE/Qt or Gnome? VLC is the first that comes to mind. xmms2 is another. Or, what if I want to use WinAmp through Wine? All of this just works in MATE/Gnome/Cinnamon with gvfs.

The media playing apps should be file system agnostic -- they shouldn't have to know about URLs or network protocols.

I've teetered between MATE and KDE for the last couple of years -- they're both great, but I like KDE's interface and look/feel a bit more. Also, Dolphin is, IMHO the best file manager for Linux.

But, the thing that still pisses me off about KDE is the handling of cifs mounting (a la smb://). In MATE (or Cinnamon or Gnome2), if I mount a share with smb:// in the file manager (Nautilus, or the newer ones), I get an actual cifs mount. Now, if I open a file on that mount with a photo viewer, or a media player (like VLC), the file manager throws a locally-mounted and accessible file path to the application.

Not so with KDE. Doing the same thing from Dolphin throws the URL of the file (smb://server/share/file.ext) to the application, and the application usually has no effing idea what to do with this. So, I end up either copying the file to my local hdd and opening it from there, or adding an entry to fstab to get a real mount (which is not practical if mounting a new share on someone else's server.) The gvfs way is better than the KIO way.

Drill a small hole on the other side of the wall -- opposite the thermostat. Get a can of Freez-it, and periodically spray some through the hole to cool the thermometer. (An upside-down can of canned air will also work, and you might even be able to get the company to pay for it.)

The best scene release 3D TV? The opposite of a "nuked" 3D TV?