Indeed.

I have been down the track of being frustrated with systemd and pulseaudio, and have somehow managed to get over it as my requirements changed.

I used to go a lot more coding than I do now, and for many years (since about 1995) I was pretty much a committed slackware user, since the distro never got in my way, and everything "just works".

I appreciated Arch for much the same reason at first, since in its early incarnations there used to be a lot of similarities with Slack, but with a more "modern" package manager. As time passed, though, I came to feel that the team behind Arch became less focused on stability and more on chasing concepts of "elegance", that (while valid) just got in my way.

Now that my primary computer is an android tablet, I don't much care about distro wars, I just run Mint on my desktop/laptop machines, and don't give it any more thought.

Those that figure it out will survive.

Hmmm. From a terrorist's point of view, those who bypass encryption entirely will survive, at least for long enough to do what they intend. A one-to-one conversation on a beach or other exposed place is a good way of achieving this, and it would appear that they know it.

Those IS nutjobs seem to have learned that the best way to avoid being trapped in the mesh of surveillance programs is to fragment their operations to the extent that they all operate as lone wolves. It clearly works.

Most people who need to be concerned about excessive and intrusive government surveillance are everyday people who just like to have the bathroom door shut while they're having a dump.

If Skype is the issue, a lot depends on how the provider intends to block it. Some sites just block port 5060 (IIRC), leaving the user free to configure his Skype client to use port 80. If the ISP tries to block that, there will probably be one or two complaints.

Maybe I'm just showing my age (OK, downhill side of 50), but it seems to me that just about any whitegoods type of appliance these days is made to such shoddy standards, it would be pretty much impossible to attribute failure to vandalism on anyone's part.

A dishwasher or washing machine from just about any reputable manufacturer used to last 20+ years. Nowadays we can count ourselves lucky if they work for 5 years. So much for advances in technology. :(

Well said.

But just to throw a spanner in the works, it doesn't hurt to mention that even the so-called "classic" version of the site is looking pretty damn fugly at the moment for a logged-in user who has left any non-default settings in his profile. So (at least in my case) the beta could easily be seen as an improvement.

Except that I am aware of at least one case where a guy DID get fired for buying a non-IBM machine. He was a new broom on a long-standing Burroughs site (this was back in the '70s), and he reckoned he was the shizznit, without the requisite experience to back that up. When the directors heard that this fool had splurged on an IBM box that was virtually incapable of functioning in their company, he was dismissed immediately.

Back in the late '70s, I shared a house with a guy who had a pet Bengal tiger. The animal was a real pussy (of the non-edible kind), but one time a prowler came round, sticking his head through an open window. The pussy-cat snuck up, put his nose to the intruder's face and purred or growled or whatever it is they do. That guy's screams were quite funny.

You would do better to read up on why some distros elect not to use systemd, despite the fact that it is becoming quite popular in some quarters. For my part, I consider it to be an unnecessary complication, so am happy that my preferred distro (Slackware) still elects not to implement systemd by default.

I'm going to change my name to William Shakespeare and claim royalties for all those plays (and sonnets, of course) that have been reproduced without my permission. That'll show 'em.

I've heard that it was the Irish who gave the Scots the bagpipes, but the Scots haven't got the joke.

Yes. And there's the piano accordion...

The best definition for perfect pitch is being able to chuck a piano accordion down a well without it touching the sides.

I don't know what world you're living in, but $1325 is real money right now. And I suspect my dog might appreciate whatever that works out at in dog money.

That aside, one of the big advantages of Project Gutenberg's sister sites is that there are servers outside the US that are not tied to predatory American copyright legislation, so many texts that should (by reasonable, ethical expectations) have passed into public domain have often already done so somewhere.

As a professional cheesemaker, (yes, one of the blessed variety), the first question that comes to my mind is:

Why are these people throwing out their brine? This seems an unnecessarily costly exercise.

It is typical practice in many cheese factories (and all of those in which I've worked) to keep and re-use brine (sometimes for decades), with routine and simple maintenance such as topping up salt levels, adjustment of pH, filtration to remove solids and occasional pasteurisation if required.

A "raw" brine of just NaCl and water will, of course, do the job of salting your cheese, but most of the salt is left in solution at the end of the brining process (so it doesn't make sense to throw it away), and the pH will have a tendency to bounce around, adversely affecting the properties of your cheese. The various whey products in a re-used brine help to stabilise the pH, so one usually only needs to top up salt to replace that absorbed by the cheese.

There seems to be a rash of similar posts re Waco in other threads too, and I suspect that the failure to post as AC here was inadvertent. Having a low UID doesn't excuse being a troll.

I don't exactly hate vocals (I was raised as a classical violinist, but my musical appetite now weighs a little more heavily in favour of jazz), but I find lyrics just get in the way when the music should be able to speak for itself. Thus, (from TFS)

just doesn't apply for me. Though of course I have to accept that other people's priorities differ, and I'm fine with that.

What I cannot abide, however, is the current tendency to play unnecessary incidental "music" over spoken dialogue in TV shows. While I accept that my ears are not what they once were (I am well over 50 years old, and if there's one thing I would change if I had to live my life again, it would involve earplugs), I do not accept that these noises contribute anything useful, and frequently make dialogue difficult to hear.