Posting this from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and I consider pre-Unity as a "classic desktop," and it is Gnome.

Seriously, I have nothing against change, but I think there should be a cross-distro standard desktop that JUST FREAKING STAYS THE SAME. There should also be bleeding-edge environments for more adventurous people. Why shouldn't people have a choice? But it would be nice to install most any popular version of Linux and get a standard desktop.

So the free market will do what New York couldn't with taxes...drive the price of junk food up! Sweet.

[O]verall, OS/2 failed to catch on in the mass market and is little used outside certain niches where IBM traditionally had a stronghold. For example, many bank installations, especially Automated Teller Machines, run OS/2 with a customized user interface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

Yes, this. Someone had some taxpayer money to spend to come up with this crap. When the law and the NSA are playing S.H.I.E.L.D, this will look really cool on the monitors. And then they will time it for a holiday or other important day and release the DDoS.

I used to brush every day, but not always two - three times a day. Always had cavities and inflamed gums. Lost a few back teeth that couldn't be saved (but at least they were in the back). I got a Sonicare for Christmas a few years back. I haven't had a cavity since. Got a check-up yesterday and he said my gums looked great. In fact, cleanings used to be very, very painful. Not so much anymore.

True story. My second cleaning after getting the Sonicare, the person cleaning my teeth said she was going to get one. She had receding gum lines herself, and she was so impressed with my improvement that she was getting one. Her exact words were, "you may have just saved my teeth."

And suppose he tried that, he ended up in jail, and the government was somehow able to spin damage control and minimize his efforts? You make some good points, but he took the most realistic path of options to make sure he didn't go down in vain. I must admit, when this all started, I thought it would blow over fairly quickly. Most events like this have. In the end, the only thing that America responds to is money. That Snowden is costing corporations money here is the best thing to happen to America since apple pie. The Constitution is gone and our Rights are a joke, but cost corporations some money, and maybe we will see baby steps taken in the right direction.

Soldiers fight for our freedom? As if fighting in some third-world crap hole has anything to do with our freedom here in the United States. I think Snowden is a true hero. He didn't give his life for oil or empire, he gave his life for something that intimately has to do with *our* freedom.

Lots of things work for Norway, and lots of other countries, that doesn't work for us. We are abnormal when it comes to the rest of the world. Now that may not always be a bad thing...but normal we are not.

A dual boot Windows 8.1 and Steam OS machine. I'm not really feeling the need for Android on a PC. Anyone else?

I setup an older version at work to sync important files between laptops. Version wasn't that far behind. We had nothing but trouble with it. If clients didn't hit the network or Internet, sometimes the clients would just lose all their settings. And client setup was not trivial, so I had to be the one to do it. Also, it would sometimes create a huge number of dupe files, which were versioned in order to stop collisions.

All in all, we ditched it for Goodsync. Not perfect, but it doesn't just one day up and lose all its settings for no apparent reason or create hundreds and hundreds of dupe files.

From here on out, it is nipple interfaces!

I get tired of the false meme that "oh, we would have cured disease X already if the results weren't being suppressed in a big conspiracy"

This guy was on to something good. When he was farting around in the lab, he got funding. When he started to get results, the funding vanished. I love his statement in bold below:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/science_news/4273366.html

So how did you get it funded up to this point?

There is some private funding and the university put some funding into it. And also, at early stages when we studied the mechanisms of these mice, we had one Mitchell Cancer Institute grant, several small grants from Cancer Research Institute. But they all stopped funding me. It was kind of a strange situation. I thought it was our common goal to come up with a new weapon to fight cancer, but the moment I announced I had a new weapon to test in real human cancer situations, everybody shied away.

there is no one single disease, "cancer."

Scientists are in "complete surprise" that cancers closely resemble each other across widely varying organs, according to Dr. Douglas Levine of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the principal investigator on a new endometrial cancer study published Wednesday in the journal, Nature.

"The problem," leading to existing drug treatments performing at an unsatisfactory 10% death rate, was in "the traditional methods for categorizing the leukemia," said Dr. Timothy Ley of Washington University in St. Louis, who co-led a study simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

"Cancer of the uterine lining closely resembles the worst ovarian and breast cancers... telling evidence that cancer will increasingly be seen as a disease defined primarily by its genetic fingerprint rather than just by the organ where it originated," says The New York Times' interpretation of these results.

Cancer gets cured about once a decade, sometimes by real doctors, sometimes by "quacks." I could show stats from real doctors with similar results to this one, which never saw the light of day once it was discovered (or rediscovered).

People don't actually like creativity, even in medicine:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/12/creativity_is_rejected_teachers_and_bosses_don_t_value_out_of_the_box_thinking.html

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.

In medicine, innovative things happen all the time. When *you* go to the doctor, you get the same ol' thing that has been done since 1952.

I can see both sides of a controlled burn. Yes, it is probably the right thing to do. But the first time it got out of control and burned a bunch of houses down, the crap would hit the fan. Can you imagine the news footage of the people who's houses were burned down by a fire set intentionally by the government. Wow. I don't generally like politicians more than anyone else, but even I could understand the motivation to not be put in this position.