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....

No doubt what's wrong with my connection is that I'm not in Charlotte. I'm in a working class neighborhood in Southern California. No, it's not a conspiracy. It's a monopoly. (A few blocks over, where the condos start, everybody gets Verizon Fios.)

TW is the only ISP in my neighborhood. Officially we get 1MB/s up, 8Mb/s down. And ever since I signed up for the federal SAM speed testing program I heard about here on /., I've actually seen those speeds more than half the time. Before that, and now on weekends, we're generally at 50Kbytes/s (so 400 Kb/s) down, around 5% of the advertised "speed."

People say you get what you pay for, but not with Time Warner.

And those of you pissing about "well, whaddya need it for?" That's not the point. (In my case, it's mainly for downloading GBs of Debian distros....) The point is that we should get what we pay for.

There's LinuxMint. Not precisely a fork because it's based on Debian itself, but there's the fairly recent SolusOS which is a real beauty. It actually has up-to-date versions of the kernel and major software. (I know. Whoever heard of such a thing, right?)

So the countdown went through 0 and has been in positive numbers for years already.

Preinstallation, preinstallation, preinstallation. That's all that matters. Preinstallation with icons already on the desktop. Why do you think Microsoft fought so hard and long to keep anybody else's browser icons off their precious desktop? Why is the stupid desktop icon worth any price to companies who want their commercial crapware pre-installed?

People will use whatever is in front of their faces. Linux is never in front of their faces. It's not commercial, there are no kickbacks, so it's never going to be in front of their faces. Business IT departments want an 800 number they can call and scream at when things go wrong. Linux has no 800 number. Business IT depts aren't going to demand it, no matter how much sense it makes for the business.

So is it all hopeless? I don't think so. The only thing we can do, you and me, is hold installfests. Help people over that initial hurdle. I've gotten about ten people moved over to Linux (ubuntu) in the last four-five years purely by doing installations for them. And they're thrilled. No more virus problems. Everything works. They're not worrying about the artwork or whether it's a "modern" interface. If we could propagate the get one - install one meme, you can calculate how long it would take for every desktop and laptop to run linux.

You must have forgotten what I said between reading my comment and your reply. The short answer (since any other kind might overtax your reading comprehension) is "No."

Air rage will be a major cause of interrupted flights, if people blather on their phones in the air like they do on the ground. Bus rides usually aren't that long. In trains you can move to a different car. But cooped up in a tin can on a long-haul trans-Pacific flight with someone who won't stop yakking?

Death penalty. It's the only punishment that fits the crime.

But how much do you want to bet that once they magnanimously allow blathering, the airlines will start charging more for seats outside the blather zone?

And I should add that I've already tried 10ESR. It's so corporate-oriented, it's a pain for regular users.

Seriously, Mozilla. Wrap your collective mind around the concept of respecting the user. You used to be really good at it. Get back to your roots.

I run LinuxMint Debian. I'm playing with Nemo on my Nokia N900. I wouldn't have a clue how to hack the kernel, but I'm also not a complete idiot. And you know what version of firefox I'm on? Five. Because I got so fracking sick of having my extensions broken and my UI messed with.

Just quit it.

Haha. I'm in the boondocks of greater Los Angeles and sometimes I have T-Mob cell signal inside my house, and sometimes I don't. (Since I mostly use VOIP over wireless, it doesn't matter that much, but still.) When I absolutely have to send someone a text via cell, I walk around the sidewalk in front of my house until I get a signal. I don't know what the neighbors think.

(I should add that it's worth putting up with because I'm getting cell service when I'm out and about for $10 per year. So there's that.)

Debian has excellent help. I'm just saying most people know way too much for me to be of any use to them. I tried straight Debian and stumbled on stupid stuff like figuring out how to set permissions for my sftp backups and stuff. Debian can handle networks of any complexity, so for a household user, their permissions are set up more strictly than what I was familiar with and I ran out of time on the learning curve. You know how it is. I keep playing with it though because I like their attitude. One of these days I'll have learned enough to switch.

Since I-don't-remember-when (Hardy Heron?), I was spending more and more time recustomizing stuff after every upgrade. They kept pushing gwibber and telepathy and f-spot or shotwell or whatever-the-hell back on. I had a small hard drive and a slow connection and didn't want programs I never used taking up space and bandwidth during updates.

With Unity and its "you VILL haff ze launchbar on ze left and like it" attitude, it looked to me like the whole philosophy was headed straight down the porcelain fixture. That's why I changed distro. Sure, I could install xfce or kde (which is what I did, I'm kind of a sucker for eye candy), but as I say, I got increasingly fed up with having to fix things I hadn't broken and being told, in effect, to get used to it.

Ubuntu helped me completely switch over to linux back in 2004-2005. But once they changed to Unity, I moved to Linux Mint Debian and haven't looked back.

Sad, really. Their forums were one of the best things about them. As I learned tips and tricks, it became sort of a hobby to visit the forums and try to answer questions for even bigger noobs than me. Not much I can do there now. And the Debian boards are more of a listen and learn place for me. I miss the community, but the OS has made itself unusable. Wayland sounds like a way of piling that mistake higher and deeper.