The gratuitous use of bolding grants me insight into the developer's mindset and makes me despair for the future of this fork. Still they're just getting started, and probably slapped something together that will soon be replaced.

"For such a small sample, that's not enough to definitively say whether the small difference is due to random chance, or due to small differences in opinion in the population being surveyed."

Then you haven't shown anything. Without statistically significant data, your survey is meaningless.

"What it does show, even with such a small sample, is that in the underlying population there's almost certainly no huge gap between people's opinions of black women vs. white women breastfeeding in photos."

No, it doesn't. You cannot draw conclusions from your results without significant data, because as you just said, your results could be due to random chance. I see this all the time in papers submitted for peer review. They'll say something like, "our technique showed benefit over the other techniques, even though the difference was not significant", and try to claim this as a win.

I've often wondered what fate awaits humanity. Will our technology gradually regress as the supply of rare earth minerals dwindles? There's a finite amount of economically recoverable reserves, and no recycling program is perfect. As the centuries roll by I imagine the minerals being gradually spread out in deposits that aren't economical to harvest - say as a thin film of rust at the bottom of the ocean, or in tiny pieces in long forgotten garbage heaps.

Or is it possible that we could continue having access to rare earths more-or-less forever?

My Linus just worked right out of the box. You have to get past the F--- You! if you have NVidia graphics, and the prickly user interface that periodically tells you you're a moron.

At least it's better than my Stallman. That thing ate something off the bottom of it's foot while I was giving a presentation. Yechh.

I either NEVER had a sense of smell, or at least not since I was 5 years old. So I should have died over 25 years ago.

Not if you read the article - it says the that the olfactory nerves are continually regenerated, so if your body stops being able to regenerate itself you will lose your sense of smell first. It doesn't say anything about losing your sense of smell because of other reasons.

Because there's no caffeine in there.

I don't actually prepare for coronal mass ejections, but backing up data just always makes sense.

In fact, I think I'll go back it up right now.

I've always been impressed with how rock-solid, and well, server-like the Debian desktop has been. I wouldn't want to give that up - it's simple, it's clean, it's ultra-reliable. If I want to run a website or allow remote access, there's really not that much to learn. Compare that to the complexity of Windows server.

Is this split actually a valid suggestion, or more anti-systemd rhetoric? If there was no such thing as systemd, would you even care about splitting?

I think we're on different wavelengths, since I actually agree with what you say.

What I'm trying to do is refute the Broken Window Fallacy, which says that if you go around breaking windows you'll benefit the economy, by creating jobs fixing windows. But what you've done is made owning windows more expensive, since they periodically need to be replaced. And the standard of living drops a little, because you're wasting resources fixing windows that you could be using for something else.

Making a window factory more efficient is the same as not breaking windows. You've reduced the resources needed to own a window. The window fixers will complain that you're hurting the economy, by removing window-fixing jobs. But people will have additional resources that they can spend on something useful. This might be bigger windows, but it could be better healthcare, police, etc.

The only way for jobs to actually be lost is if people started working fewer hours, because they are free of their window-fixing burden. But, I can't see that happening in response to Tesla's robotic factory?

Whither now your broken economic system that requires unlimited growth?

I didn't say it was a good or sustainable system.

This next wave of automation is going to put a real crimp on the middle class that it can't easily absorb.

I often see this argument, and always disagree. Technology has, I believe, reduced the number of farmers from 66% of the population down to 4%. And yet, 62% of the population isn't out of work. Ditto for factories that mass-produce items, making them much more quickly and efficiently than a craftsman could do by hand. What happened is we started buying more stuff. We weren't content with 1900s levels of living, we wanted more. (And probably always will.)

If one man can do the work of five men, it doesn't mean four of them will be out of work. It means we'll buy five times more stuff with the same money, and the environment or any other consequences be damned!

Crackpot mode activated!

Does that mean that the "computer" running our hologram might in fact be a black hole? A black hole whose mass is equal to the mass of the Universe. I understand that black holes spin very rapidly, causing the singularity to expand into a disk... might that be why galaxies are flying apart from each other, rather than collapsing together due to gravity?

I mean, if the black hole were not spinning, and dark energy was indeed switched off, then the Universe would eventually contract into an equally massive black hole. At which point, there would be nothing to distinguish the 'inner' black hole from the 'outer' one, they'd be the same singularity.

Sadly, this is probably a gross over-simplification.

but int computer-land

Ah, I see you're a programmer. Damn that muscle memory!

I don't know, but there's only one way to find out!

His sample size isn't necessary too small - I've seen plenty of papers with statistical significance at 12 to 20 participants. No, his problem is more likely self-selection bias. That is, people who are frustrated with the lack of slide-out phones may be much more likely to respond to the survey.

In my experience, the opposite tends to be true. You initially get the cost of deploying a new platform and training users, then the savings kick in over the long term.