If Obama woke up tomorrow and ordered that all Tea Party members be arrested, I would expect our military to essentially remove him from office -

How about if he just had all of the newspaper editors arrested and jailed who were publishing stories in opposition to his policies?

Because that's what Lincoln did and the Army supported him. Both used / would used 'continuity of government' as an excuse to violate the laws that authorize that government in the first place.

the paranoia is unwarranted, but it still exists.

It may well be there, but there's also a marginalization of Qt/KDE by some of the largest distros (perhaps with that canard). If you look at the companies backing them, you'll see many @bigco addresses on the GNOME-related software teams and many, many fewer working on KDE. So I think some of it is simply NIH, but perhaps with a business strategy aspect of, "Who is Digia and why should BigCo be dependent on them when we have an alternative we control, even if it's not as good?" That question may have even had more merit under Nokia, especially when it was taken over by Microsoft (oh, did I say that out loud?).

Even if it's a false dilemma, it probably keeps many people working on the projects they like inside their comfort zone. Big choices can be made on merit, but there are sometimes humans involved who apply criteria without pure impartiality. Sometimes these bigco's pick a technology horse, and boy do they stick with it until it needs to be brought out back and shot. Qt/KDE is definitely not alone in that regard!

Who used LessTif?

Everybody who didn't want to pay for Motif, for whatever reason

Sadly, by time it get really compatible it was mostly obsolete.

GTK was invented by the GIMP guys (early versions used Motif)

I bet most linux GIMP users were *not* linking against commercial Motif.

"Who's the more fool - the fool or the fool who follows him?" - Ben Kenobi

They should really read up on the US media, which knows that most stories aren't worth following after a week and no story, no matter how important, is worth more than two weeks' attention, unless, and only unless it involves a court trial, violence (preferably interracial) and systematically-reinforced emotion.

Our leaders, the smartest of the smart, have judged this formula to be good for society.

If this thing works, it's going to be a new Turing Test, judging by the number of posts here that simply state: "Whoosh!"

At least the chicken chain is probably less likely to lawyer up than the fiction author.

they've mainly demonstrated that they AREN'T a popular choice

Yet 99.995% of the population will never read this article or hear about this.

It's hard for me to understand why the state department even cares if people visit their page or not.

Propaganda always sells itself as the popular choice.

Of course that would probably result in considerable unpleasantness.

The unpleasantness goes back decades. Look, here's a Slashdot story about the EU investigating it from 1998.

This time around they learned that NSA/CIA is spying on their governments, not just their citizens. That's what they're really tweaked about. They've been complicit in spying on their citizens all along - that's what the 'data sharing' agreements are for.

This is just self-appointed elites getting mad at other self-appointed elites for doing to each other what they do to everybody else. You can put the US or the EU in either the subject or the object there and it still works just fine.

What Snowden did is get the elites' press talking about the extant unpleasantness - fifteen years after the alternate press.

There is several how to because everybody has a different view on what to use

There doesn't need to be a single solution for any of these, but having all the setup be manual doesn't help most users. That's why we went with deb/rpm in the first place.

As far as the choices - all of my clients just tell me "make me a mailserver". They don't choose the specs, they tell me the requirements and I choose the specs. Frankly most people don't care why underlies their tools, for better or worse. Of the hundreds or thousands of packages I use, I can say I've only studied the .specs of dozens of them, so at a certain level apparently I don't care either.

When did you last time see a pretty woman doing great things like that?

My goodness, did you go to college? Work anywhere that had employees? I've been in classes with, studied under, and worked with numerous gorgeous women. From that subset of classmates, many are doing great things today.

If you need an example from the famous super-genius echelon, the one that comes to mind most immediately would be Lisa Randall, though frankly it's the sapiosexual qualities that do it for me.

Management has reached the conclusion that there isn't a management problem.

than a handful of irrelevant people who made a pretty website and metioned the Raspberry Pi

Hey, when I read this I thought, "oh, look, something useful to do with those buggy-as-shit RPi's I got conned into buying," and then I went and read their site:

Optional: USB sound card for better quality (the integrated sound card on the Raspberry Pi has an annoying crackle bug)

<cartman>Goddammit!</cartman>

Dude, in a few years she'll be doing great things and you'll still be living in your parents' basement wishing you had an organic girlfriend.