"anyone who cares about having a usable OS probably dropped Ubuntu as soon as they made Unity the default."

True. It's certainly what I did.

Exactly, indeed. Calling someone names is not an argument. (Nor is it all that unchildish.)

It's also flat-out false to say RMS is spreading fear, uncertainty, or doubt. Nowhere does he dangle dark but unnamed consequences for using Ubuntu. And there's no uncertainty or doubt whatsoever in his rejection of spyware and therefore of Ubuntu.

Exactly. Google search was amazing early on, when the comparison was to "no search." Now, with a near-infinite web and squillions of SEOs gaming the ratings, it's just half-baked, like all GOOG's products. Half-baked and gamed still brings in billions of dollars for them. Without effective competition that could take any of those billions away, half-baked is going to be all we get.

No, the author does not have a right to some share of my mind. The author has a right to demand payment before I can see the work. They have no right to bamboozle me into absorbing ads because that's an easier way to get money from people.

Officially, we're not cattle. So when did making a buck off me start to take precedence over everything in the Bill of Rights?

That's not just a figure of speech. As the (great?)grandparent comment says, it's about impressions. There's plenty of evidence (1, 2, 3, for instance) that ads have the most effect on behavior when you're not paying attention. So the only way for me to stop manipulation of my own mind is not to have those ads in the background in the first place.

But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions. Which is even weirder because, I'm told, the free market depends on informed consumers making free choices.

Let's face it. Advertisers are gunning for a world where our eyelids are propped open with matchsticks while we watch whatever we're told to watch.

Yes, that's been covered in multiple studies. (The Cartalk guys, for all that they're funny, have a page full of serious links to that stuff. The whole "hang up and drive" is a crusade of theirs.) One big difference is that the passenger can see when the driver drifts toward the oncoming truck -- or whatever -- and stops talking.

Another vote for the pre-October logo.

I know. I know. This is /. Nonetheless... the article is talking about social and mechanical reasoning. Not empathy vs. logic. Not Repub vs Dem. Not women vs men.

It's about two types of problem solving: reasoning about causal relationships of inanimate objects and reasoning about the mental states of other persons. Those are the two that are, according to this research, neurologically mutually exclusive.

By racing off into stereotypes, the most obvious implication has been missed. At least one of them has. Using a phone or social media (social cognition) is mutually exclusive to driving (physical cognition).

It'll be fun to time how long it takes that inconvenient point to sink in against motivated cognition.

Being a crazy biologist, I thought it would be fun to see how hermit crabs react to the availability of an unexpected big Rolls Royce shell. They'd been congregating near the showers, so I put it there. At night there was a seething mass of hermits swapping. Shells are at a premium, and I'd noticed earlier that the smallest one was making do with a discarded toothpaste tube cap. It looked very sad.

Well, the next morning there was no sign of the orgy. No hermit crabs to be seen, no discarded shells, no debris. But in one corner of the shower stall, there was the toothpaste tube cap, no longer needed.

There's no presumably about it. When White Men Can't Do Math, Stereotype threat and the intellectual performance of African Americans (and pdf). Stereotype threat and the academic underperformance of minorities and women.

You can put anyone down, make them feel bad, and make them less than they are. And then we all lose what they could be contributing.

and payment is a small percentage of price based on usage metering by something like the Patent Office. Except it wouldn't be the Patent Office. It'd be the Usage Office or something. The money for the payments would come from a surcharge on things invented within the last however-many years. And payments would be made for, say, half that many years. After that, the thing would enter the public domain.

People would still get paid for being brilliant inventors, but they couldn't rest on a useless monopoly.

And the other essential rule is that only the actual inventor(s) could get payment. None of this BS of selling intellectual "property."

1) Actually, around 1997 or 1998, I started trying to switch to Redhat. Setup (esp. couldn't get graphics working on my computers) and package installation were way too time-consuming for somebody who didn't know much and did have other work to do.

2) 2003-2005 got a laptop with Fedora pre-installed and moved to Linux as primary OS

3) early 2005 moved to Ubuntu

4) early 2011, refugee from Unity, moved to Linux Mint Debian

Now: still there, but playing with Solus....