The difference between the power user and the programmer is that for the latter the entire graphical system of the computer can be considered to some degree optional. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the perspective of the "gnu/linux power users"; the concerns are not aesthetic. The principle that graphics are optional is not a secondary function of Unix either, but a core tenet. To whatever degree that the goals of the graphical user interface and the textual interface conflict, the TUI will pretty much always win, in Linux.

These Unix principles are as much as anything else agreements between developers, that computer systems should be designed along certain lines. Compliance with any standard is more or less optional, and compliance with open source licenses, while not optional in the strictest legal sense, are as often 'honored in the breach as the observance'. It can be hard to detect when a license has been violated; refer also to the issue of public code lacking an explicit license. Generally though, if you agree to play nice with others, they will let you use their code without any financial consideration whatsoever. Linux is merely one example of the fruits of these agreements.

Bear with me here: because of the inability to simultaneously optimize for both TUI and GUI, making Unix palatable to the masses involves in some fundamental ways making it not Unix. Apple has been very successful with this strategy -- would you imagine that iPods and iTunes don't even have their own scripting language? -- and Canonical has been only a moderate success. The difference between the two is that no one would ever think to interact with an Apple machine exclusively by way of the command line.

On the one hand, Canonical needs Linux to serve as the basis for Ubuntu. On the other hand, they need Ubuntu to be different from Linux/Unix, because Unix isn't really built for normal people to find it usable. You can make it into something like that, but the more you do, the less Unixy it is. Also in doing so, you're going to end up violating Linux standards, and particularly where concerns the GUI. You may rely upon this generating ill will.

My opinion is that at some point, Ubuntu will be better served by describing itself as a Linux-compatible OS, rather than a Linux distribution per se. The Moblin/Meego/Sailfish fiasco seems to have resulted in precisely that animal, I'm afraid, and SteamOS never pretended to be anything different. Canonical needs to divorce Linux, but it needs to keep living in the same house for as long as possible.

P.S.
On an unfortunate persona note I must add that you seem to be under the idea that you are in the group of users for which Linux is primarily intended to be useful, or that your use case is to some large degree compatible, and I regret to say that such is unlikely to be the case.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean to imply. It's wonderful that you can quote-mine to support an arbitrary point, but be so good as to include that point with the quotation.

At a guess to your intent, I'd suggest that If you'd read further than the lede, you might have encountered quotations from judges who considered that they had no right to stop the practice, and given the legal status of women at the time, I'm afraid that the matter is rather less certain than you seem to be implying, without even delving into the distinction between legality and failure to prosecute. Certainly it was illegal at one time, and illegal at another time, and in between? A semantic argument, firmly grounded in opinion. I presume we both showed up to this party to hear ourselves and score abstruse points on trivial details of the subject at hand -- opine away, if you would.

The smallest viruses are well within the storage capacity of a QR code, and an exploit could be a mere handful of bytes; what makes you think that they are somehow inherently secure?

As an example of how this institution has varied, consider that in the mid nineteenth century in England it was considered legal for a man to try to sell his wife.

Ye gods, what a way to describe someone! So you don't like your wife, you lead her to some public place in a halter, the halter being considered particularly important to the legality of the affair, and sell her at auction to any bidder. This was considered legal by many judges; women couldn't own property, and were owned themselves -- and some Englishmen even told themselves that this arrangement was out of some sort of protective benevolence. Anyway, it was held that a man could do what he wished with his property, at least until the practice began to be seen as vulgar, at which point the legal argument became, "Uh...hey! You can't do that!"

All it would take to revive the custom in America today would be if it made a good TV show.

Quite rightly said.

As a web developer, I have no sympathy for anyone that tries for pixel perfection. Assuming that you handle all the idiosyncracies of the browsers and imperfections in the speciifcations correctly, you either get the choice of limiting yourself to whatever the oldest target browser provides, or backporting the features you want with javascript. From an artistic perspective, you can't control the viewport size or whether the client is using a browser that supports anything but raw html. The ultimate goal is therefore out of reach.

It's not entirely invalid to argue that artistic or technical perfection should be pursued without regard to whether it is attainable, but let's face it: your website may be many things, but the next La Gioconde it is not. It's probably not even Piet Mondrian, although hopefully it escapes being Jackson Pollock. It's okay that it doesn't look the same on everyone's screen.

In point of fact, you should expect it. Because, you know, it's entirely guaranteed to happen to some degree. Thus, responsive web design is usually a pretty good idea.

Also good: having a well-documented API. You know, for kids.

On the other hand, someone who can do complex, unit tested, well-structured application code, in PHP, Javascript, or any language, is worth substantially more than that, and doesn't have to fuck with elance.

Also, you can take your restrictive covenants and shove them. You wouldn't try to include that in a contract with Apple, or have much room to argue about it if they decided to compete with you anyway. Likewise, the majority of NDAs don't cover anything worth the time it takes to read about them (God forbid you have to sit through a presentation).

Thanks for using your own country's labor only when you really want to screw them. I'm touched; you shouldn't have.

No, he was completely accurate in his description. The seeds of WWI were sown in the calamitous defeat of the French in 1870 at Sedan, when Napoleon III was captured. Whoops, there goes that government.

Not that either the German nor the French governments had existed long at the time (and the French in particular had gone through quite a run of them) but though the Germans had won the strategic victory, there was no way they could effectively conquer the French. Their armies were tiny by comparison with WWI & WWII, and wars in that era were more about exchanging territorial control of commerce. In point of fact, they were just as often dominated by naval combat over ports of trade.

In any case, German forces took the territories of Alsace and Lorraine from France, which had been the largest, most populous and powerful country in Europe between, say, CE 800 and CE 1815. It wasn't the sort of thing that countries usually let slide, and France certainly was not going to forget it. The seeds of the next war were founded in the armistice of 1870, and likewise with the armistice of 1918.

The military buildup that preceded both was a tolerably open secret. You can't hide the construction of e.g. large battleships, especially when said battleships are limited in number by treaty. The propaganda machine needed to fire up the populace for war takes some time to effect, as well. Hitler was astoundingly effective at leading the German people to war, but that he was doing so certainly escaped no one's attention.

And, most pertinent to the subject, WWI is essentially a very finely detailed refutation by counterexample of your statement that no one wants war. There's a little room for waffling about the Kaiser's inner feelings, but not with his actions, and the Allies reasons have been mentioned. The situation is best described by Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which provides a good background to the opening of that conflict, but omits information concerning the histories of the French and German states in the seven or eight decades prior which would give Sedan more context.

Bitcoins as Money
(and Gold as Not)
keywords: gold, silver, petrodollar, bitcoin, us government, dollar, cryptocurrency

Objecively, gold and silver are commodities. Some cultures have a system of coinage involving these metals. Gold with sufficient proofs to its purity might be exchanged at something equivalent to its spot price on the open exchange, perhaps if you were a pirate? I'm sure it happens, but trading e.g. krugerrands must surely be easier.

Gold and silver are commodities. Money, in the context of this discussion, has a formal definition. I will for expediency quote wikipedia:

Something that changes value all the time can be used as money, but it generally makes transactions difficult, so it's not a good idea. Another terrible idea is basing a national currency on the trade of a commodity that said nation does not control. The US has been doing pretty good on the petrodollar, but gold and silver were a pretty stupid idea, sorry.

Bitcoin is fairly interesting in being an international currency, albeit one that is struggling to escape the influence of the US Dollar. It's not quite safe to say that it fails to qualify as money at this point, but it has some interesting feedback loops built in which may allow it to actually bootstrap itself. I think that in the long run they are more likely to end up promoting the idea of cryptocurrencies than to actually succeed as one; the advantage gained by the first miners is at this point a market flaw. However, barring that or some mathematical attack, it may be in use for some time, as other cryptocurrencies gain mindshare.

Now, at what price in Bitcoins may I purchase a smarter AC?

Quantum physics is indeed absurd, but do read up on the observer effect; there's very little fundamental difference between observing a quantum phenomenon and interacting with it. 'Infinite are the arguments of sages'*, but for the purposes of the layman, not only is an observer a requirement of quantum physics, but before you observe things, they are not just in one state or the other (but unknown to you), they are in a state of superposition, i.e. simultaneously occupying both states. This superposition is as real as any other phenomenon in the universe. "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." Another relevant Bohr quote: "Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems."

To me the thought that, by observing distant stars or the CMBR, I am interacting with the deeps of time, is pretty cool.

*Apologies to UKL

Morals have strong effects on survival and survivability for groups and individuals, and thus far H. sapiens is a social animal. At the very least, society is necessary for child bearing and rearing. More to the point, thus far we as societies have no problems killing members of our own who consider themselves above the common morality.

I mean, sure, as far as your own mind is concerned, morality is no more or less mutable than any other phenomenon. Let's not confuse that as being relevant to the topic of morality as a structural part of human culture.

Frankly I think the point is beyond debate; you are subject to, and you obey the moral whims of those around you. Your delusions of rationality and free will are irrelevant even within your own life, and have no effect whatsoever on the people around you. You should be glad they're only delusions, too, for if you really believed that strongly in your individualism, this must surely be the purest living hell.

And that will eventually replace everything else.

If the shoe and underpants bombers had been intending to actually succeed, they would have gone to a lavatory to set their bombs off, they would not have done what they did in plain sight of other passengers. It's not really reasonable to think that the intent of either of those incidents was to actually take a plane down, since if it was, they would have been instructed to go to a toilet to do it.

The idea behind those "attacks" was to get us to enact even more incredibly stupid security tactics, and they succeeded perfectly.

Funny, I had the same reaction when I read it. He seemed like a salesman for Google or something.

Dear Prince Bernard, If you're talking about my bank account, you're barking up the wrong tree :)