I would concur with that from most Windows user's point of view, but it doesn't always hold.

I have had enough successes upgrading Debian based servers from woody to sarge to etch to lenny to consider it a fairly safe operation (by "fairly safe" I mean I'm happy to do it remotely, but only on machines that are not currently doing anything important - live services are moved elsewhere for a while until the new environment is considered ready and stable). I've only done a desktop upgrade twice, and while both occasions went well that is not many data points so I can't call it statistically relevant.

BUT, in every case the vast majority of the software on those machines came from the official repositories, with only a few odds and ends coming from the semi-official "backports" repos and a sprinkling of small things hand compile into /usr/whatever (or just living in /home/*). You average Windows home machine is in a state that is *nothing* like this because MS do not maintain the repo for all that software the users have installed, so you can't simply expect it all to go smoothly.

Having said all that, I still generally recommend an OS reinstall for a major upgrade even for home systems (for server use the new install option is a no-brainer anyway, as you will be wanting the new environment fully built and tested alongside the old one before migrating over) running Debian. If all your irreplaceable data is away from the system drives/partitions and properly backed up and you have all your install sets and product keys to hand you are not going to lose anything except a little time, and you get a much cleaner system (less all the collected cruft you forgot was even there on the old setup) out of it.

libavcodec currently has decoders for 242 audio and video codecs, encoders for 100, demuxers for 129 container formats and muxers for 89.
The resulting DLL is about 7 MB.

If their goal is outright legalization, then their stated goal should also be outright legalization.

Suggesting that pot should be something that you get from a pharmacy and with a prescription when, in reality, you believe that you should be able to grow and use it yourself is disingenuous and counterproductive.

Pretty sure that's exactly what was meant. This is an area in which attention is needed.

So other people's software is about your benefits and your own software is about your benefits? Hmm.

It terrifies me that so many people are replying to this as if it's a serious comment.
Slashdot, I am disappointed.

Develop it however the hell you like, pay people if necessary, just release the source code when you're done to prove you did it right.

You don't have to allow everyone to edit articles/commit code to be open.

Linux has the audio usergroup. You could, if you wanted to, remove yourself from the audio usergroup or manually mess with permissions on the audio device such that only root could access the mic so you would need to supply a password every time the mic was requested by a program.

The notifications are opt-in. That's what I meant.
And it's not like it's hard to set up. You should be thankful robots.txt is obeyed by most robots.

It's an opt-in notification system - nobody's forcing you to do anything. Also, robots.txt has been around since long before google.

Both of them have the same initials, too.
I think maybe somebody's random name generator has a broken seed.

Define "average distro". Median? Mode? Mean? By installations or by simple existence? If mode installations, then yes, you're debatably right (although comparing dd, mount and umount with Nero is a bit of a stretch). The problem here is the vast difference in aims of Gentoo, Arch, etc. vs Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.

If appropriate, try using -D.

Don't be ridiculous. Nobody on slashdot has friends.