It's also well-known that if I had invested in the market back in last summer (2008), I would have lost about half the value of my investment.

No, not even if you were insanely unlucky. Even if you were stupid enough to put all your money into the market around the beginning of May 2008: the S&P is about 76% of what it was (not including the dividends you would have got) and the DJIA is about 75% of what it was (again, not including dividends you would have got) -- note that the worst day to invest was different in both cases, by a week or two.

And, again, a professional financial advisor would likely have told you to use Dollar Cost Averaging ... and you'd have to have been really unlucky to suddenly get a lump of cash to invest just as the market went down as it did. But, hey, set fire to your money for all I care (but I wouldn't recommend it to any lurkers reading this).

You mean those persons that worked for Lehman and other bankrupt firms?

Personally I use Edward Jones, but I'm sure there were plenty of good and honest people working for some of the companies that went bankrupt ... and I think it's very likely that people going to them have made more than people putting everything in a savings account and trying to guess the market.

Well it's starting with the F11 (been and gone) and F12 changes to x86 support: F11 moves to i586+ and F12 moves to i686+

The stats. used to backup these plans were from smolt data, and download stats. ... IIRC the data was released on fedora-devel (as the data on those pages doesn't show that info.

The other point that was made (maybe on fedora-devel, maybe on IRC) was that the smolt arch. data is misleading as to usage of i?86, as that has been on a steady decline ... and there would come a time within the next few releases where only x86_64 would have any significant % usage (esp. if you remove machines which could be x86_64 but are i?86 atm.).

Sure, someone will fix it ... eventually. But why take that risk for 0.001 cents of disk space? It seems like the most retarded feature in the world to me, and yet I can't deny that people are asking for it in yum ... so you aren't the only person with a big OCD desire to remove every unneeded bit.

How many processes have you seen complain that they are out of address space with only 4GB?

To be fair, there are now realistic cases where you want to mmap()/etc. a 4GB+ file. It's not always needed, and there are workarounds, but it's pretty soon going to be the case that 99% of users won't care if the developer starts making those assumptions.

On a related point within the next 12-18 months Fedora are supposed to have x86_64 as the only primary arch. so some code requires 8GB of virtual memory, it won't even be a primary bug anymore in Fedora.

Yeah I know. It's only there temporarily, until I can decide if the stock market is going up-or-down.

Newsflash, by the time you've worked it out it'll have gone up already so it'll be too late. Second newsflash ... it's already recovered a lot, you've already lost 10-30%.

It's well known that when people try and guess/decide on perfect timing of the market, they lose money. Which is why no credible financial advisor recommends trying to do that. Go speak to one.

Why would you not want to use APT on a server? What part of [...], easy security update application [...] do you not want on your servers?

APT has a security update application?

Doing a search the only things I found were like: this, which is from 2006 and just talks about the "special" security repo. Debian.org/security doesn't point to anything like a security update application either.

Who started up a campaign to end software patents? It wasn't Novell, or Red Hat,

Red Hat has always taken the stance that Software Patents are bad and should die, and I would bet they have done much more to further this goal than the FSF. If only because they are a company, and have much more money.

I'm sick and tired of people spreading FUD about how 64bit programs are larger due to 8-byte pointers. [...] The hundreds of megs of RAM used by your browser and OpenOffice contain mostly your data

You don't think firefox uses a huge amount of pointers? The last time I saw a comparison by someone who was advocating that 64bit was always better showed a 20-30% RAM increase, and then tried to pretend that "didn't matter".

For new machines, I'd suggest 64bit+8GB now. But if for some reason you can't get 8GB of RAM, then you should seriously consider only using 32bit, IMNSHO.

Do you have a really old green card? Because my green card has my picture and fingerprints on it already.

Phoronix has a history of doing long and misleading benchmarks between Linux and *BSD/Solaris, where they manage to include so many extraneous factors that the results are meaningless.

As the saying goes "don't attribute to malice ...".

Phoronix has a history of doing long and misleading benchmarks between Linux and Linux. Phoronix are idiots, if only they wouldn't keep hitting the /. front page *sigh*.

I can only hope that this happens enough, and thus. causes enough monetary loss, that someone tells the retarded programers that if they require working JavaScript for users to see text they'll be fired. Speaking as someone who's paid slightly more at amazon so I could happily ignore some other random website's "requirement" I turn JavaScript on for them, to allow me to give them money.

Well, except that SVN revision numbers are in order.

If you only use a single branch, then I guess that might be true. But the only reason you'd be doing that IMO is because SVN is utterly worthless at managing branches.

The government should not be in the mindset of taking money from the rich strictly for giving money to the poor or supporting them in some way. [...] Just because the government taxes us doesn't mean it is redistributing the wealth because the money is not necessarily given to people, especially for nothing. It is used to buy stuff that needs created (e.g. roads) or services (e.g. contract work or even defense)

You take money from X and give it to Y, and that isn't redistributing wealth? You are very confused.

Why aren't the poor or the unqualified being taxed to pay for their own health care so that everyone else can be left alone?

Why aren't the rich paying for all of the current economic bailouts, it's hardly the poor or middle classes fault that there was a bubble in RE and the financial sector? Because it would cause too much collateral damage, and in general the government should try to solve systemic problems. The "rich" complaining about universal health care is even more of a joke, because if implemented even half decently everyone's total costs should go down ... the current health care "system" in the US is very expensive (in the same way if everyone decided to build their own roads, and put tolls on them).

The poor and under-privileged are always wanting a fair chance in life which is understandable however wanting the rich to be taxed more in order to get what they want out of life is not a fair chance in life by any definition.

I'm sure many factory owners said the same thing about not being able to hire 8 year olds for 6 day work weeks (why should _I_ be deprived for _their_ education). Fortunately the intelligent option (eventually) prevailed and everyone became better off as a result.

You fail to make a distinction between the government forcing person A to give money to person B through taxation (force) versus letting person A give money to person B on their own accord which lets person A decide how much money and when to give the money, neither of which is possible when the money is forcefully taken through taxes.

If you are arguing that a government can run without any taxation, then you should buy enough drugs for everyone and share them around. But you don't seem to be saying that, later on, you say "I ... have no trouble paying for taxes that are used to pay for infrastructure, etc." making some arbitrary distinction between "infrastructure" and whatever it is you feel the government shouldn't be spending "your" money on.

So here's a clue, as soon as the government taxes anything for any reason it's redistributing wealth. It really doesn't matter if it's doing this by building roads, allowing companies/people to deduct bad investments from profits on good investments, or paying for someone's education/medical-care. All of those could be good usage of government money, and probably all three could be bad (although the later one much less so, IMNSHO).

Actually, I don't buy this argument. You don't need train-tracks "everywhere" -- you just need it "in some places". For example, I'm moving to NJ, with the house being nearly equidistant from train stations of two different branches of the railroad.

If you are trying to say that you'll be equidistant to two train stations which use two completely separate tracks to get you to the same (or roughly the same) destination ... I don't believe you.

Of course even if true, passengers aren't the real custom for any significant amount of train tracks anyway so neither company would be improving their service for you. Commercial goods transportation is roughly 10x the revenue IIRC, so it's likely a non-monopoly would provide even worse service for passengers (from both/all providers).