Maybe the underlying point is that people, on average, rush to believe in something that they don't understand when they are under stress. For people who have rejected religious belief but do not understand science, it is natural that they would rush to "believe" in science. This is a well-understood phenomenon.

I mean, look at our moon and other planets/moons in our solar system. Look at their craters. Look at the craters on our planet. Something hits something else, a peice breaks off and flies toward something else (eventually). Let's say a comet so big hit Earth that gravity from the comet attracts water, bacteria, plantlife, some fish, etc. and then flies off in another direction...carries it somewhere else. If you think about how LONG the universe has been around, this is a scientific certainty that the "building blocks of life" will be carried around and distributed to other planets.

I like to think that the universe has been playing a nonstop game of billiards for billions and billions of years.

I cannot disagree that Ubuntu (and Canonical) have done a good (no, great) job at bringing Linux more into peoples' hearts and minds. To say that Ubuntu is a poster-boy distro, however, would be a crime. Ubuntu stood on the shoulders of Debian to gain its traction, but past the initial push of getting better hardware/driver support, it seems like the roadmap of Ubuntu has been about as scattered as darts thrown by a drunken barfly. A bunch of ambitious "tries" at different angles, with very little attention to actually fixing bugs to maintain their stability/usability ("Won't fix" as new release is out, LTS: Long-term-suffering, ...). I really, really tried loving Ubuntu for the long term, even bet my biggest contract on them to bring LTSP to schools (one of their ambitious "tries" back in the day) but their coordination with outside OSS projects and communities were disappointing to me.

I'm not trying to bash Ubuntu, like I said they have done a lot of good. But I'm typing this on my Debian workstation, which I left to go to Ubuntu for a number of years, and now I'm back. And I couldn't be happier, because I haven't had such a stable system in years =) None the less, congrats on fixing the infamous bug #1 I guess. It is a very sentimental thing, I'm sure.

Don't let the higher-ups know you're running a rebel operating system, you might just get canned. What use is running Linux in school anyway, when the students should be learning REAL job skills (I.E. Microsoft Office)? /sarcasm

(Sorry, I have been tainted by the education "industry" when it comes to anything Linux in school).

Your mom was a pretty good fuck last night, just sayin'...

PLEASE DON'T HIT ME! lol

THANK you.

Hi, 4chan! *waves*

Assuming that there are negative effects of the current patent system in terms of seeds, there is still another side to the coin. Without patent protection, would Monsanto have developed Roundup Ready (TM) soybean seeds? Or, for that matter, Roundup (TM) herbicide? Without these complementary items, soybean production would be much lower. (Due to decreased production by using other means of weed control and/or increased cost of weed control.) Maybe both products would exist without the seeds being protected by patent law, but if, on average, the total production is increased by the availability of such protections, they give society a net gain.

I've been using Debian 'testing' as a desktop (and a netbook for that matter) for many years now. I used Ubuntu for about 4 years at home and with my business clients (I'm a network engineer), roughly from v6.10 -> 10.04 but switched back because of the "will not fix" developer mentality to those who wanted functional packages from an LTS release. There was always something major that was broken, always with the carrot-on-a-stick, "Just upgrade to the latest release and use PPA from JoeSchmoe" answer when you just wanted to use your computer. It kept me for a while, but it got reeeeal tiring.

Debian has always "just worked" on my desktop. It's also a great LTSP sever, serving my kitchen and livingroom thin clients. With all of the good stuff that the Ubuntu/Canonical folks do getting backported to Debian, I feel like Debian testing is "Ubuntu Stable".

Extradition does not decide guilt. It decides whether you are the person being sought to face charges in the other jurisdiction and whether the charges are extraditable to the other jurisdiction. Evidence of guilt is mostly irrelevant to those questions.

Keep in mind this is an extradition matter. At an extradition hearing, the issues are basically limited to (1) whether you are the person being sought by the other jurisdiction and (2) whether the charges in the other jurisdiction are the type of charges for which a person can be extradited. I am not as familiar with international extradition as I am interstate extradition within the United States, and certainly there will be specific rules spelled out in an extradition treaty between New Zealand and the United States (possibly by way of the UN, for all I know). But those are the real issues: are you the right guy and are the charges extraditable. The extradition hearing is held in and under the procedural law of the court in New Zealand.

Once arraigned in the court where the charges are pending (the United States federal court), the issue becomes whether you are guilty of the offense charged. And the evidence against you is relevant to that issue. The evidence is largely not relevant to whether you can be extradited. And that's essentially what it sounds like the New Zealand court concluded.

It's not just you, but your conclusion is correct: You just aren't used to it. Once you get used to it, Scheme (or any other modern Lisp) is a very easy language to write clean, effective code in.

(in testing):

---
thedarkener@c64:~$ steam /home/thedarkener/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by /home/thedarkener/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6) /home/thedarkener/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by /home/thedarkener/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6) /home/thedarkener/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by /home/thedarkener/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6) /home/thedarkener/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam: /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by /home/thedarkener/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6)
---

I saw the above post regarding the i386 libs and I was sure that I had already installed them previously (and confirmed with the following:)

---
thedarkener@c64:~$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk ia32-libs-sdl
Place your finger on the fingerprint reader

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package ia32-libs-sdl
thedarkener@c64:~$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
ia32-libs is already the newest version.
ia32-libs-gtk is already the newest version.
---

Any ideas?