Read a little more closely. Fedora releases stop being supported after 12 months, and new releases come out every 6 months. RHEL releases lose support after 7 years, with new releases every 3 years or so.

This is exactly the point: the support cycle is long enough that I will generally have to reinstall at some point before the 7 years are up, and I can do so at my discretion, when I have time available. I do not buy a new machine every 6-12 months; were I to stick with Fedora, I would be reinstalling (or praying that the upgrade option will work) on the same hardware year after year, and then having to take a few days away from work to rewrite configuration files, find workarounds for deleted features (or worse yet, added "features"), get my machine to connect to the network, etc.

I'm glad to here Ubuntu LTS works for you and lets you get your work done. I'll be over in here RHEL land getting my work done, and I'll be ignoring Google and their efforts to get me to do something else.

I guess I just do not see that problem on my own systems. I have a few EPEL and RPMFusion packages, and otherwise everything I need is already in the repositories.

There is a reason Chromium has not made it into Fedora's repositories (and by extension, RHEL):

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chromium

Basically, the problem is this: Chromium depends on extensions to libraries that have not been merged with the main releases of those libraries, and so having Chromium on Fedora would require either static linking (giant packages) or maintain separate sets of libraries just for Chromium. Neither of those options is something that Fedora will do, and if Fedora is unwilling to include a package in its repositories the package as almost no chance of being included in RHEL. Years have passed since the problem was first discussed with Google (see the link), and there has not really been much progress, mostly for the same reasons that RHEL6 is not supported by Chrome: Google does things their way and is not going to change that for someone else (regardless of that other person's reasoning).

Does Debian stable promise a 7 year support cycle? When last I checked, Debian stable releases will only be supported for three years, but I am not really a Debian user some perhaps someone can correct me.

What I have trouble understanding is why you are so dismissive of the idea that someone would run RHEL on a workstation. I see a lot of researchers do it, and they all say essentially the same thing I said: they lack the time needed to upgrade frequently and new features are less important than stability. Debian stable may deliver that, but so does RHEL; what exactly do you think makes Debian better for workstations than RHEL?

Fedora is not better suited for all workstation tasks. I simply do not have time to deal with things breaking every few weeks, nor do I have time to upgrade my entire OS every year and go through the process of dealing with things breaking as a result. I switched from Fedora to ScientificLinux (a RHEL clone, more or less) for that reason: I have better things to do than to deal with a distro that thinks I should reformat my hard drive every 6 or 12 months. I am not alone in this either; I know a lot of other people who need a reliable workstation more than the latest features of every package.

Instead of legalizing a practice that would otherwise be illegal to protect obsolete businesses, why not legalize a practice that is otherwise illegal to rid ourselves of those obsolete businesses?

Sounds like rich people get more of a vote than poor people.

It's like going to the mechanic for an oil change, and being charged for a new transmission.

Aaron Swartz wrote a program that automatically downloaded journal articles, and faced 13 felony charges for it. Weev noticed that by adding one to a number in a URL, you could see the information of other people, with no attempt to secure that information.

You're right, totally different! Aaron actually did some hacking; Weev did about as much hacking as a kindergardener might do. Yet he now faces prison time for it.

Indeed, but the key thing to recognize here is that the kind of guns that thieves steal are handguns, not rifles. Unfortunately, people keep talking about "military grade" rifles (which is a deliberately deceptive term to use) and the urgent need to keep those kinds of guns out of the hands of lunatics, while ignoring the fact that most gun murders involve low-caliber handguns. I am glad people are talking about gun control; now we just need them to stop making idiotic statements like, "We're not talking about taking away anyone's right to defend their homes with a handgun, we just want to restrict access to military rifles!"

Publish a map of handgun owners promotes criminal use of guns, by telling thieves where they should go to get handguns to sell on the black market. Criminals want handguns -- not rifles, not shotguns, handguns.

This is entirely the wrong issue to focus on. Rampage killers are a rarity: a mere seven in 2012 was considered unusually high. Compare that to the number of homicides in 2010: 14,748. If you ignore firearms, that number is still almost 5,000 -- 700 times higher than an unusual cluster of rampage killings. Source: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html

Why is New York focusing on rifles anyway? Just before the Newtown massacre, a man was shot execution-style on one of New York City's streets with a handgun in broad daylight: http://pix11.com/2012/12/12/mystery-behind-execution-style-shooting-in-midtown-deepens-even-as-investigators-learn-more/

Handguns are the preferred weapon of criminals, and there is a huge black market for handguns. Why should we distract ourselves with the occasional massacre when we have a very real problem with criminal gun use? Criminals almost never use rifles -- rifles are too big to conceal easily, they make too much noise, and their accuracy at long distances is useless for the kind of fights criminals deal with. People need to stop wasting their time being terrified of guns that look scary and start focusing on the guns that are routinely used to murder people.

So hiding a laptop in a closet in order to download scientific articles is a crime worthy of decades in prison?

I honestly would not put it past the copyright lobbyists to use this in their propaganda. You know, portraying someone who pirates copyrighted media as lonely, depressed, and hounded by the federal government until they kill themselves.

You are unusual if you are talking about a smartphone. If people have a choice between an app and a website, they choose the app -- at the very least, it involves one less tap. Remember when we used to talk about having fewer clicks, and complained about websites that required two or three more clicks to get to the things we wanted?

A bunch of people whose operations are done using money borrowed from other people who want to see a return on their investment. A corporation cannot let values or anything other than a nation's laws supersede its profit motive without the consent of its investors, and it is naive to think that Apple's investors care about anything other than the return on their investment.

Let's put it this way: Steve Jobs admitted that the tantalum used in iPhones probably could be traced to Congo, where teenage soldiers are being ordered to rape women as a military tactic in a conflict that is fueled by minerals. Did Apple take some grand moral stance and spend money on either ending the conflict or finding alternative materials? No, Apple simply said that tantalum is needed to make iPhones and that they could not do anything about the conflict (despite being a corporation with enough capital that it could buy the entire region).

I call BS on that one. The only complication is in how corporations choose and exploit their markets, not in the purpose of their existence or of their ultimate goal. Apple is not creating computers out the goodness of their hearts. Apple did not sue journalists out of some moral obligation. Apple did not go after hackintosh makers for any sort of greater good. When Apple gives to charity, do they do so quietly, or do them make sure lots of cameras are around so that everyone knows about their service to the world (when/if you give to charity, do you then go around telling everyone about it?)?

It is kind of like saying that there is a complex reality to an army at war. Sure, different armies do things differently, and they are fighting for different reasons, but at the end of the day an army has a goal when it fights and that goal takes priority. Corporations are not all that different from a military operation: the people who work for them are trained to think they are doing something important, they are trained to think that they have an ethical obligation to follow orders, and at the top level there are people who direct operations to achieve the goal.

Apple was led to an overwhelming success by one ruthless person. Steve Jobs was not on some moral or ethical quest; he wanted to lead Apple to a great business success, and was willing to do whatever it took to make that happen. He berated employees if they were not perfect. He directed the company to patent everything, so that they could never be sued without having some counter-suit ready. He directed the company to go after anyone who stood in the way of the company's profits. It is as if he read Ender's Game and thought, "I bet Apple would be the most successful company in human history if someone like Ender Wiggin were to run it..."

Which of Apple's or Jobs' actions leads you to think otherwise? Frankly, which of the technology companies that was driven to success by one person suggests a different story? Facebook has yet to work on any sort of interoperability with any other system, and is increasingly aggressive about profiting from its userbase. Google does not stop short of doing business in countries where they are required to be evil. Oracle is as typical of a corporation as possible. Do I even need to mention Microsoft?