No, partitioning is for multi-user systems with long uptimes. For single-user systems it is just a waste of space.

Profits are for the corporate officers, all that other stuff is the same pablum they've been saying for decades instead of paying employees more money. All that stuff is great and is a necessary part of a good job, but when the focus is on the fluff that's just a way to keep the peons from focusing on the dollars.

Yes, I know what you are "suppossed" to do, it is a hassle that I do not need to do with ubuntu. Next up is the argument that I "should" do all that regardless of distribution to which I say my level of backups is sufficient for my needs even if it is not sufficient for Mint's needs.

I'm running Mint now, I think it is MInt 13 or maybe 12. I would have upgraded a long time ago except that in place upgrades are not supported. If I had known that, I would never have left ubuntu for Mint.

Next time I "upgrade" I'm just going to go back to Ubuntu so I don't have to deal with that hassle anymore. In place upgrades always worked fine for me on Ubuntu since I would wait a month or two after release for all the other guinea pigs to work through any problems.

He has to use the revolutionary war because if he pointed to anything more modern like the multi-billion dollar failures in vietnam, iraq and afghanistan he would cause so much cognitive dissonance in his core constituency that their heads would asplode like scanners.

Note that I'm aware that guns were not the only weapons the underdogs used in those fights, but they were a necessary component.

I used to believe that until a few years ago when a handful of states like Texas did "tort reform" to limit liability to something rather small, like $100K. It had barely any affect on the cost of healthcare in those states.

Since then I've come to believe that the problem is money - all the healthcare companies in the business to make a profit. It is in their interest to go overboard on procedures and diagnostics, especially when they have been able to move a significant part of those diagnostics in house. I've seen it myself when I went to the doctor with a sore throat with symptoms that clearly contra-indicated strep but they wanted to test for strep anyway - I later found out they had recently bought the equipment to do strep testing in house.

Here is a good article that examines massive health care costs in a town adjacent to one with normal health care costs.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

> If it's getting cheaper for companies to run robot factories in the US than to employ Chinese labourers

It's even getting cheaper to use robots in china than to employ chinese laborers.

You are correct, sir!

> I bet you that they have immunity of some sort. That is the problem

I bet they don't have immunity to a baseball bat. If any parents actually had a kid injured at one of those intersections - even if the light timings were not at fault - someone may well decide to take justice into their own hands...

Forget fining the patent office -- all that will do is reduce the funding available for patent examiners to do their jobs causing the reverse effect of letting more bad patents slip through. But a fine on the patent holder for certain kinds of invalidations sounds good to me. It is my understanding that it is the patent filer's responsibility to seek out prior art as part of the application process. If a patent is invalidated for what is essentially failure to follow the filing process correctly then I think a big fine is appropriate.

What we do not want is to turn the system into one where a big company can simply out-lawyer a small patent holder and then add insult to injury by forcing them to pay a fine too. That increased risk would discourage little guys with validly patentable inventions from filing in the first place (or force them to settle out of the court on poor terms).

> I work in a "right to work" state in the US. So, I don't even have to worry about half the stuff a European employer will have to when it comes to letting people go.

Being in a "right to work state" doesn't change what you have to do to hire or fire someone. It just means that employers are forbidden from entering into exclusive labor contracts with organizations like unions. If the employee is a union member (which can be the case even in right to work states) then you have to abide by whatever contractual obligations the company has negotiated with the union.

Who ever heard of boring vaporware?
Making it exciting is the whole damn point.