Of all the weird scenes in that movie, the one where the guy gets fries stuck up his nose sticks with me.

I'm sure this probably reveals something dark and scary about my personality, but damned if I know what!

Soldiers at home arn't usually put into confrontational situations on a daily basis with a high temptation / likelihood to mess up.

Take those soldiers and put them in similar-ish circumstances (that is, actually send them to war) and you sure as shit see those behavioral problems emerge.

I've been doing this for years. I started when youtube started going nuts with the takedowns.

These days I pretty much grab any video/image/audio clip/document/etc that I think I might some day want to watch again, because more and more there is a good chance it'll be gone when I want to.

Yup.

I personally don't think I'll ever trust Microsoft as a company. Microsoft may seem somewhat benign these days, but they did some pretty damn evil stuff back in their day. The spirit of Microsoft past, which left a trail of corpses behind it back in the 90s and early 00s and put things in place to bolster their business which still cause grief to this very day is still in there. To them anti competitive practices were practically a religion, and just about everything they did had an end goal of crushing someone or at least locking future competitors out.

It's pretty much impossible for me to read a Microsoft announcement and not immediately assume malicious intent. I suspect I'm not the only one either.

I don't buy it for (mainly) three reasons:

1) Animal studies have shown terrifyingly similar gender specific behavior, especially with regards to toys.

2) At an age where social queues such as "don't bite your sister" are a struggle, I find it very hard to believe that kids all across the country seem to play in a manner consistent with others of their gender. Yes society puts the the pieces there, but the kids still seem to gravitate towards the same stuff. Even in cases like the authors, where there is a serious effort to steer a kid in a "non-traditional" direction, the maternal/nurturing or hunter/gather instincts woven deep in our DNA still manage to manifest themselves.

3) In cases where for whatever reason some kid doesn't conform to the norm, no amount of parental pressure seems to change that either. You can't tell me every kid is consistently picking up on slight social queues from infancy yet you end up with say fathers burying their sons in sports only to have the kid showing an interest in say, ballet.

Bleak, but so very, very true.

This guy sounds like an insufferable asshole.

Kids are interesting because they arn't restrained by years of learned social behaviour. Sure they are influenced a bit by society, but at that age they tend to just do what their hearts tell them to do regardless, which to the great frustration of people like the author often conforms to the stereotypes they are trying to fight.

Attempts to raise children in gender neutral environments always seem to end terribly, and of course there's the whole David Reimer thing.

Indeed.

Plus by having an outside interest, they tend to have a greater domain awareness and are able to talk more intelligently to customers and maybe even contribute business ideas.

Pure idealism doesn't get people very far. Pragmatism is what you need, and bitch as we do, it's actually kinda where things are heading. Yes some things are heading in a bad direction, but for the most part, things are becoming more open and we're able to do a lot more without relying on proprietary bits.

I'll accept a system that's mostly open except for a few bits over a completely closed system. People like RMS are all or nothing, which is fine if you don't need to actually participate in business or society in general. We can fight around the edges and make gradual inroads, and more stuff will become open, or at least open alternatives will be created, which is largely what is happening right now.

You can't completely stop the progress of technology, nor eliminate the influence of those who want to control it for any number of reasons. If you compromise you can participate in the process and steer some of it in your direction, otherwise you can be RMS and just sit in the corner angerly shouting while it happens anyway.

Hopefully we gradually move away from an economy / society where most people have to work 40 hours a week.

There will be an intermediate period where we have a lot of "jobs for the sake of jobs", but eventually I hope we just let the machines we've built do the work and find some better (hopefully more direct) way of managing actual finite resources.

I don't have any interest in gnome, however it is the best illustration of the problem.

Systemd is becoming a web of inter-dependent bits for which more and more stuff will depend on. Even at this early point in its adoption, running a non-systemd system, even when it isn't the default, involves way more effort than it should and excludes you from a list of packages that it shouldn't.

As systemd takes over more and more system functions, this is going to become more pronounced, until systemd and all it's non-init related functions become wedged in so tightly that it becomes a nightmare to use anything else.

It may become a very elegant solution and may result in a better functioning system with more mass-appeal, however it'll be the only practical choice anyone has.

Yikes, I don't know what happened in your past, but I hope someday you can come to terms with it.

Personally, as a programmer I've had to deal with various system and networking issues and am reasonably comfortable diving into that stuff, but I appreciate that being a sysadmin isn't just configuring switches and installing software, and if you threw me into that role I'd probably make a lovely mess of things.

It has been a fairly long slide.

I feel like at some point mass adoption became the big goal, and a lot of the things that really drew my to Linux in the first place have eroded away.

I always loved the variety of choices for just about everything and the general "if you don't like it, change it or make your own" mindset. The new thinking seems to be centered around agreeing on standards and rallying around a subset of options in order to make a more presentable solution to present to the masses. This is probably great for humanity and all, and even if we just end up with an open source version of Windows it's probably a good thing, but it's not what made me love Linux.

Systemd is just another step down that road.

That sounds very encouraging :)

Luckily for me I'm a desktop user, so wifi is a non-issue (and seems to be something that gets brought up a lot as being a sticking point, but then, the same was true of Linux for a long time).

Definitely glad to hear there is VirtualBox.

Neat, I actually figured FTB would be no problem and OpenRA would be the problem. Then again, for as much as I love minecraft and FTB, I'm in constant awe of how terribly implemented everything is. It wouldn't surprise me at all that they'd manage to make something in java platform dependant.

And yeah, when I discovered OpenRA, it basically became my life for like a month. Huge nostalgia trip. Got a small group of people I play with on pretty much a weekly basis now. When they get Tiberian Sun working I'm probably going to regress to university levels of binge gaming.

I think a lot of people tried OpenRA back when it first came out, said meh, and then forgot about it. When I was told to go play it, my reaction was basically "yeah I tried it, it wasn't that great", but It has really matured into a very playable game (albeit with it's fair share of quirks).

Anyway thanks for the response! :)