I suspect that the point of the UK threat was: a) to piss off the Ecuadorians enough to make sure that they *did* grant him political asylum; b) to make sure that Assange stays holed up in a small building in London potentially for many years, severely limiting his ability to run Wikileaks for the duration.

Well done on the Ecuadorians for making that threat public.

It's a stupid threat for the UK government to have made, for the reasons so many posters have pointed out, and I'm ashamed of the stance the UK government is taking on this issue.

"An OS upgrade has no business resizing your /var or root partitions. Period. Heck, you have to be pretty ignorant if you presume they're always local."

An OS upgrade could conceivably slightly increase the amount of space used in /usr.

But according to this little gem /usr should now be part of your root partition. Which you will now presumably need to do an online resize of - assuming you actually installed your root partition on LVM, with the appropriate infrastructure needed to support that. Presumably, non-local /usr is no longer supported - similarly with having /usr (which is read-mainly) on a small SSD and the rest of the OS on spinning media.

Fuckup after fuckup after fuckup from Fedora these days. And an arsey attitiude from the likes of Poettering to go with it.

Moving every thing to /usr to make the filesystem more sane.

Meaning that the system no longer supports /usr in a separate filesystem: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken.

Of course, you can still use /usr in a separate filesystem from / if you boot with an initrd, but you now almost need half an operating system (busybox, rescue shell and utilities, perhaps support for lvm and/or RAID) just to boot your real operating system.

Why would you want /usr on a separate filesytem? Perhaps you want it in LVM, so you can resize it easily if necessary (maybe to make room for installing a new desktop environment, for example), but don't want you root file system in LVM. Perhaps you want to periodically fsck /usr on boot, and fall into single-user mode if it fails. Perhaps you want /usr (which is a read-mainly file system) on a small SSD, and all other file systems (which are written to more frequently) on spinning disk storage. Perhaps you want to mount /usr over NFS. Not that I can still see many people doing this but it seems a pity to prevent something that has worked fine in the past - and in these days of "running applications in the cloud" it seems Linux will no longer run applications in the local network (ie. NFS-mounted /usr).

Seriously, read the level of professionalism and maturity on that page. This is the level or maturity to which Linux slowly seems to be sinking. As a long-time Linux user and supporter I find this deeply disappointing.

And what's the reason for all this? Because the udev developers can't wipe their own a{r|s}es, put their house in order, and properly sort out which files go where (or at least sort out what needs to be done to mount any necessary non-root filesystems, mount them, and then continue with any programs/scripts which use them). Instead, all of that gets pushed out to initrd (ie. oh no it's hard, let's give it to someone else to do). Seriously, they're like a bunch of 8-year-olds bragging to their friends that they won't clean their bedrooms, even when mummy thinks they should.

Notice that the post you are replying to (several paragraphs long and containing a number of links) was posted the very same minute as the story.

Not the first time such a thing has happened to today with posts that seem to be putting forward a particular agenda.

Strange, isn't it?

If it was surgery, you'd probably pick the surgeon with 20 years experience over the one with a couple of years experience to operate on you.

If is was a builder you were employing, you'd probably prefer the one with 20 years experience over the younger one to build your house.

And whatever Zuckerberg says can probably be ignored, because you just know he's the type that, when he's getting on a bit, will be saying that age and experience are what counts.

So let's get this straight: you just sacked 60% of your developers for not following certain rules?

That 60% of your developers had properly been informed that certain rules were important enough to follow that breaking them would probably mean dismissal, and then went ahead and broke them anyway?

That there was no process in place of informal verbal warnings / formal verbal warnings / formal written warnings that could have been followed before sackings?

That this wasn't discovered before it was widespread enough that it became necessary to sack 60% of your developers?

That you have decided you'll be more productive in future with only 40% of your new development workforce having any experience of your software whatsoever?

Your company has BIG problems.

"What he's saying is that with the US economy in the state it's in now, it's a choice of certain economic collapse and widespread death, starvation, & suffering..."

Why is it that the USA can seemingly find enough money for a recent war in the Middle East, or a recent war out in Asia, or even spending billions and billions on a new security agency, but spending a similar amount of money on something different would cause "certain economic collapse and widespread death, starvation & suffering".

Not that I think a similar amount of money would or should be spent, just pointing out the ridiculousness of that claim.

"You lost all credibility when you said "banning the light bulb"."

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/09/368

Then why has a certain computer company just released a certain high-profile device with a 4:3 screen?

Presumably that's why Apple so doing so badly at the moment, and other hardware manufacturers are doing a roaring trade.

Doubly hilarious throwbacks and inflexible old fossils, indeed.

I'm starting to look round for a replacement for my current 15.4" laptop, because after a few years heavy use, bits are starting to fail. It's got a great 1680x1050 screen, and I certainly don't want to spend money to trade down from that.

I'm another guy who likes lots of vertical screen space.

Although there are hundreds of new laptops out there, all proudly showing off their processor / RAM / disk specs, ones with a decent vertical screen resolution are few and far between - unless you go for a 17" screen, which means lugging around a larger laptop, which I don't really want. Yes, I know I can plug in an external monitor. But then it's no longer portable, is it?

Pretty ironic that general-purpose (portable) computers are now seemingly stuck with 16x9 screens, designed for the passive consumption of media, whereas an iTablet device aimed more towards the passive consumption of media (than a general-purpose laptop is) comes with a super-high-res 4x3 screen. That same iCompany is one of the few who also sells laptops with high-res 1920x1200 screens, albeit 17" (and pricy).

No wonder *other* tech companies are having a hard time flogging kit.

"They want to find out what liberals support, and be the opposite."

I can't see this at all.

To me it seems that what conservatives want is a combination of:
a) bloody-mindedly getting their own way, sometimes to the extent of ignoring reason (and by extension, scientific consensus or even scientific fact, where it is "disfavourable");
b) wanting things to continue as they have in the past (or an image of how things have been in the past); a more traditional meaning of the word conservative.

"That education is favor they do for their parents and a favor that society gives to them. Sure, it is cheaper than jail, but we are more than willing to pay for and put them in jail."

Some might consider education a right (see article 26).

What was that mention of putting kids in jail all about?

"I want my children to walk on Mars, and my children's children to visit Pluto.....I'm willing to sacrifice just about anything to make sure that happens because nothing else matters more."

"The free market and research universities will take care of malaria and AIDS. I'm not terribly worried about either, frankly, and both will be better solved by just about anyone other than government."

With your sense of priorities, I would hate to be a child of yours.

The original - a classic.

Would those be chipmonks?

OK, OK, I'm going........