Discouraged, yes. Though I just installed the latest Ubuntu and this stuff was opt-in, so perhaps the cries were heard. My point is that to award this distinction to Ubuntu in the face of all the crap going down on the Internet is simply absurd, extremely small potatoes, and smacks of sour grapes and/or piling on, which is the norm for the FOSS press.

What's popular isn't always "right" (who decides that?), but we really might maintain a sense of proportion. In over 15 years of observing the FOSS world, it really seems that if you start to get any traction in the wider world, the "community" (as if there were a "community") seems to want to smack it down. For all the talk of world domination and so on and so forth, the "community" seems on some visceral level to want to remain marginal, They are getting their wish.

You don't understand...

Ubuntu was threatening to be successful in the wider market. Therefore, it must be taken down at any cost! Once again, the FOSS "community" (gack!) eats its young.

This sort of nonsense is why Linux "market share" will never get anywhwere.

You fool! CowboyNeal is a Temporal Master! He works in all time zones at once and across all times at once.

Thank Meg.

Maybe she could revive them by rolling out an online auction service. eBay sucks now.

That certainly seems to be the trend.

And I don't want to tell them how to do their job, but has anyone considered making their space ship out of some sort of "metal"? And maybe put a thing on the bottom that shoots fire out of it?

I wish it were just cynicism rather than actual informative observation.

People will pay whatever is charged up to the point that the market will bear. It's not that far off from an unregulated utility at this point. Television content delivery has similarly pulled their prices up through the roof, because people will pay it.

I haven't paid for either service (at least intentionally) since 2009. Under the right circumstances I might be persuaded to get the broadband again, but not cable or satellite television.

Anti-poaching laws, if they exist, sound to me like government interference meant to reduce worker salaries by artificially limiting competition for workers. Or is government interference only bad when it protects individuals from large companies?

There's also the fact that the terrorist threat isn't as significant as they want us to believe it is.

Even for adversarial people, the problem is that we deal with electing adversarial people into an environment where long-in-the-tooth politicians drag new blood into their old feuds, turning the old feuds into the new guy's feud by nature of remaining "consistent". Politicians aren't allowed to develop new understandings anymore. They get called inconsistent and hypocrites, and it may ruin their career. But whether it should be a career is a whole separate can of worms.

Only two or three contracting companies can actually be bothered to jump through the hoops required to do business with the Fed, and they all suck. So you can go in there and pitch a Citrix/Winframe solution that was all the rage in 1993 and they'll just eat that shit up! And the thing about the Fed is they're so damn easy! No matter how many times they get burned, they never tie payment to any sort of acceptance criteria! You can just tell them your 14 Indian subcontractors implemented a shining beacon of code that reads your mind and does exactly what you want! And they'll believe you every time! So you take your 6 billion dollars and retire to the Bahamas, leaving behind huge shit sandwich for everyone else to eat!

I'd guess the footage of Han firing first and the Wookie Christmas Special.

I could just RTFA but I'm contractually obliged to bring this up whenever the subject of Star Wars material is broached.

Artificial Intelligence now exceeds human capability.

Yes and no.

This website was completely in the Democrats' hands. However, the only reason the national exchange is even necessary is because the Republican governments of some states refused to build their own exchanges the way they were supposed to. These kind of specifics work better on a state level, and Republicans of all people ought to understand that, if they were really trying to govern conscientiously according to their viewpoints rather than just sabotage Obama in every way they can.

So every person living in a state where they have to access the badly implemented national exchange site is living under a Republican government that completely failed to implement any site at all. In other words, under this Democratic failure is an even bigger Republican one.