That's what people hoped, but all he promised was change. Perhaps he delivered.

Where did you get that idea that tool usage is recent? People and Chimpanzees both use tools, so the conservative assumption would be that tool use pre-dates the split between the species. And it's not like it requires immense brain power. Crows use tools. Some of Darwin's Finches use tools. And many others. (Too many to list.)

The problem is, most of the tools are wood or straw, so they don't tend to be preserved. The ones I listed are all modern species, and the reason for that is that if we didn't watch them using the tools, we wouldn't know that they did. There's no evidence at all that it's recent along ANY of the gene lines. (For that matter, I believe that British Great Tits learned to use tools to pry the caps off milk bottles to get at the cream. This is a species that has, I believe, otherwise only been observed to use tools in nest-building.)

Depends on the layman. Still, there could be species that are radically different from any currently extant. E.g., I believe that all current species that have blood rather than ichor use either copper or iron as an oxygen transporter...but there could be something else. Also, all known species use 4 DNA codons (AGTC) or RNA codons (substituting Uracil for one of those...I'd need to look up which). It could be that there were earlier species that had more (or fewer) than four. That would be pretty much of a shock....though proving it from a fossil would be really tricky. They could find that feather-like things emerged as soon as multi-cellular animals. Etc.

Mind you, these are just examples. It would be REALLY shocking if one of them were true. But that there should be something equivalent that was true wouldn't be surprising, though any particular example would be quite surprising. Like feathers on a T.Rex. Or the brontosarus having the wrong head (so now it's an apatosarus, which isn't anywhere near a good a name, and the head is very different).

Well, my system's a bit old, so a usb boot won't work. I *do* have a couple of live CDs, but ... I just prefer to avoid THAT kind of hassle.

OK, unicode still doesn't post. And loading the comments took about 5 minutes. (2 minutes the first time, 5 minutes the second time.) The posting/loading problem is an obvious bug. My suspicion is that the problem with unicode is that they just didn't fix the problem that the old slashdot had...i.e., not handling unicode.

It's a very good thing they've decided to fix some bugs before they roll this out, as it appears to currently be a very early beta. And they're wasting huge amounts of space, but that should be easy to fix, if they are so inclined.

How are they supposed to let the folk who run the site know how upset they are? At least it was under the first post, which is pretty much always a throw-away.

P.S.: I may not be as upset as he is, but I'm not fan of Beta, either. I *am* currently testing it, and it's not really terrible, but that's all I can say in its favor.

P.P.S.: This is just to test how it reacts to unicode:
OK, it looks good before I post it, but it didn't show up in the preview...so now I'll post. (It was largely Greek letters.)

An earlier post by another proponent of OpenRC said that it was still too beta to be adopted, even though he regretted it.

That said, if reports about window managers beginning to rely on systemd are valid, this may have been a foced move. I, personally, see no reason to move from sysvinit, but if KDE starts to perform poorly, because it's assuming that it can depend on systemd to supply some services....well, I'd be unhappy.

Did you intend that to make any sense? If you did, you need to explain a bit more.

When is the last time you hand configured your monitor, putting in desired refresh rate, etc.?

I'm not convinced that this is a good move, but I'm also not convinced it's a bad one. I don't know. It's beyond my area of expertise.

FWIW, I don't understand why the init process needs to be changed. My feeling is pretty much "It ain't broke, so don't fix it.", but there may be valid reasons. Two different groups of people seem to think so.

Personally, I prefer the traditional init system from UnixV...but then I also prefer grub over grub2. I like to be able to edit my scripts easily, and not dig through several files and try to puzzle out the documentation. (In the case of grub2 my puzzling out the documentation hasn't been that successful...I frequently need several attempts to get a change that would have been simplicity itself in grub. OTOH, I've only got one machine that I can use, so any change is difficult. If I make a mistake, I may need to reinstall the whole system. I can't just look up an answer on the internet...because that requires the machine to be working.)

MSWind may not be dead, but the signs are strong that MSWind8 is. IIUC MS is already planning to release MSWind9 fairly soon.

OTOH, I don't closely follow MS decisions. Perhaps they've changed their minds again, and are now planning to stick with it.

Still, it's not just that MSWind7 is good enough. (Is it? I've never used it, and due to the last MS EULA I read I have no intention of using it. But it could be. After all, MSWind95B was better than MSWind98.) But people have been refusing to use MSWind8 in droves. So much so that they quickly rushed out a patch upgrade to 8.1...which apparently solves some of they problems (whatever they were), but not enough to satisfy people. So much so that some manufacturers have started selling MSWind7 again. (That must have taken some smooth talking to get MS to allow it.)

Sorry, but that's a goal, not necessarily an achieved state. E.g., during the 1990's one needed to be careful while configuring ones monitor lest one cause the system to damage it. By the late 1990's there were automated tools to set the parameters, and I can't remember the last time I've seen the warning "Be careful with this setting as you may damage your hardware.", but it's been there in the not-so-distant past. (Would it actually have damaged my monitor? I was never experimental enough to investigate.)

FWIW, I buy from ZAReason. There are other vendors, but for me it's local. I've never had a problem with "You shouldn't have installed that OS!". Of course, it comes with Linux installed, and the other OSes I've installed have just been other versions/distros of Linux. Don't know what they'd say if I installed BSD.

Pogo sells systems with MSWind, Linux, or both installed. To me that's not benefit, besides, they're farther away.

System76 sells laptops with Linux installed.

Why were you dealing with Dell again?

OK, that's one.

IIUC, the DMCA only applies to the person filing the takedown request. Not to someone who directed him to do it.

P.S.: I've also heard of companies stating in court that yes, they knew they didn't have any ownership in the material they were demanding be taken down, and asserting, without penalty, that the court couldn't do anything about it.

IANAL, so there may well be some technicalities that I'm not understanding here. But if the punishment of someone for falsely filing a takedown request rates headlines, you know it almost never happens...and I don't mean the false takedown request.