I hate to break it to you, but Captain Jean-Luc Picard is not real. He is a fictional character on a TV show played by Patrick Stewart.

I'd have to disagree. I think Picard was a great captain. Kirk had this annoying... habit of... pausing... for... effectiveness repeatedly,... but his... pauses were... not... very effective... IMHO. Other than that, Kirk was ok I guess :)

MD5 hashes are all well and good to verify that what you downloaded is indeed the file that exists on the repository's server. However, does the package manager check this against other repositories? What's to stop an owner of a particular mirror from replacing a certain popular package with a malicious program of the same name and regenerating the MD5? I guess the mirror would fix itself the next time it updates from the main repository, but people may still grab the malicious version in the meantime.

Unless mirrors don't work that way.

The creation of those crime scene photographs, or war photographs, required the harming of human beings. There's nothing crazy about wanting to outlaw those photographs.

If I never had any intention of purchasing that CD - ever - how does my downloading it prevent the producer from making any money? The producer can still sell 5,000,000 copies of his latest album. He just won't sell 5,000,001 copies, but he never would have anyway because I wouldn't have made the purchase with or without my downloading of the 'pirated' version.

Besides, why should we have to pay, repeatedly, for work that someone already performed, and got paid for?

I've often seen error messages come up during upgrades of various distros. The problem is, often times those errors are on a text console and they scroll WAY off the screen faster than any human can read them. This is certainly the case with Gentoo. Ubuntu often seems to have these console messages, but sometimes hidden behind a "details" link that shows a small console window when clicked. Doesn't make for easy reading. Even if it did, the average user might not even understand the errors.

I've certainly seen some pop-up error messages occur during an Ubuntu (or Mandrake or Red Hat or... ) upgrade, but often times there is no error, or at least not one that is apparent to the user. I think it was when I was running Ubuntu 8.x, I had to put a 'pci=nomsi' into the kernel line in Grub so it would boot my SATA hard drive properly. I only did that because a forum suggested it. Several months later, a regular 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' (via the GUI, not sure what they actually call it) included an update to my grub.conf file. I didn't remember about the pci=nomsi thing. The update removed that, and the OS failed to reboot. An average or new user would be stumped with something like that.

Case in point, I am completely unfamiliar with OpenSolaris. I installed it at home a few days ago. Install went fine, except my network driver was not detected. It gave me a URL to download the driver. I downloaded it, followed the instructions to install it, and was able to ping various websites. I rebooted the system, and it dumped me to a text console (no GUI). When I tried to log in as a normal user, it told me I didn't have a home directory, and defaulted to use / as my home. There were no errors or anything before I rebooted to warn me of this. Why would a network driver installation cause this? So I reinstalled Kubuntu and everything works fine :)

There is no problem that can't be solved with Military explosives. ;)

I don't understand...

The thing with complete reinstalls is that once you do a fresh install, you have to go out and install all of the additional apps you had on the old system, reconfigure various settings, things like that. Perhaps it's not too bad though if all that involves is 'sudo apt-get install program1 program2 program3... programN' after the clean OS install.

Let me introduce you to Damn Small Linux. Damn Small Linux requires:

  * i486
  * 24MB RAM
  * 50MB of hard disk space for install with X-Window environment
  * CD or DVD drive, or USB flash stick, etc to install.

On my old system, an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ with 512MB RAM and a 200GB hard drive, I used to run XP Pro. For a while I played an MMORPG called Silkroad Online. On that system, I always had to run Silkroad's graphics settings at the bare minimum with the detailed shadows feature turned off to be able to play the game without significant lag. It was well known among the community that detailed shadows really drag Silkroad down on most people's systems.

Then I decided to install Ubuntu on that system (I believe it was Ubuntu 8.x). I loaded the OS, installed wine, installed Silkroad and started it up. Silkroad ran quite nicely with the default settings. I turned all the graphic settings to max, detailed shadows on, and it still worked quite well. I had a minor amount of lag if I went into town when a lot of other players were there, but not much of a lag. I even had Compiz-fusion enabled on that system and it wasn't really that bad to have the game up and spin the 3D cube.

I think Ubuntu (at least about a year ago) is perfectly fine running on less than a gig of RAM. Today's Ubuntu can't be that much more of a RAM hog.

Why even try to achieve equality in the culture when you can just change the culture?

If it wasn't for us nerds and geeks designing military weapon systems with their fancy software to calculate ballistic solutions, enemy tracking devices, etc., the jocks out in the fields carrying their guns and driving those tanks would have a much harder time winning those wars.

I played sports in elementary school, little league baseball, and I still got bullied. Admittedly, I wasn't very good at baseball though, but the main person that bullied me admitted several years later he did it because of jealousy of my grades, not because I sucked at sports.

When I was in elementary school, I was a smart student, always studied, got really good grades, but was shy, had very few friends, etc. etc. There was one guy named David who would always bully me, beat me up... He met up with me one time after we graduated high school and finally admitted the only reason he ever did any of that was because he was jealous of me. He was jealous that I got such good grades and apparently didn't have to try very hard while he struggled throughout our school years just to barely pass each class.

My guess is a lot of people probably had a similar experience, similar reasons for mistreating a geek or a nerd.