There's a lot of reasons to switch distros. Everyone usually finds one that fits their way of thinking after two or three. People also find that the different distros work better at different tasks - you don't (generally) use Ubuntu for servers, for instance.

As far as what I run on "my" computer, it hasn't changed much: Slackware -> Debian unstable. I knew Slackware inside and out (back in the 3.x days) and now I know Debian very well (you have to, if you run unstable). I've hit a comfort zone, and I'm unlikely to change.

I switched from Slackware to Debian because Slackware was very, very far behind on switching from the libc5 C library to glibc (the second major change in Linux, the first being the switch to ELF executable format). A lot of software was being written that didn't work with the old libc5, and Pat (the maintainer of Slackware) was being stubborn on the point. He had his reasons, but I wanted new software, so I switched.

I tried Corel Linux back when it came out. That lasted about two days. It didn't live up to its promises, and when I found myself replacing the Corel repositories with Debian repositories, I knew it was in vain (BTW, doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade from Corel to Debian is... interesting. It worked, after a lot of fixing, but I finally wiped and reinstalled Debian). It's just as well - there was only the one version of Corel Linux.

I've had to use Red Hat (not Enterprise, but old school Red Hat Linux) on a few occasions for work-related reasons. This was back in the RPM dependency hell days, and it turned me off of any distro that doesn't maintain a decently large package repository. I used Fedora Core 4 and found it to be just as bad. Same goes for Mandrake (before they became Mandriva - I had friends who ran that because it was "user friendly" - I did not find it so. It might be better now, of course.

I've used Gentoo for shits and giggles on a server I run. I was just curious about it. I've since replaced it with OpenBSD because a) I didn't have the time to learn to admin it properly and b) compiling every package in the system on an Intel Atom chip is painful. (I already knew how to admin OpenBSD.) I liked Gentoo and if I ever replaced Debian as my main distro, it would be to go to Gentoo. I just don't have the time to learn a new system anymore.

I've done LFS. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the underpinnings of Linux. It reminded me a lot of my Slackware days, back when you had to compile everything.

Ubuntu works, and I've run it on a few machines, but doesn't fit into my way of doing things. I like to customize my system a lot, and I like to log in as root when I'm doing admin stuff. You can do that with Ubuntu, but it's just easier with Debian.

Of course, there's the BSDs and Solaris as well, and these days I mostly do server stuff on OpenBSD (or FreeBSD if it's a fileserver). The BSDs make excellent servers and don't feel as "hacked together" as Linux does. I wouldn't use one as my main system, but if I had a technical job again I wouldn't mind a FreeBSD desktop.

So the rite of passage isn't to find the most obscure distro, but to find the distro that suits both you and your use case best. Experimentation never hurts, and you can learn a lot from running different distros.

He's not really talking to people who hate Democrats anymore. He did that during the primary.

Now he's talking to independent voters who don't vote straight party ticket. People who hate Democrats are going to vote for him no matter what he says.

Every* religion has its fanatics, but they don't all blow people up. They might kill you (Christian fanatics vs. abortion doctors), wage a war on you (catholic vs. protestant in Northern Ireland, Shia-Sunni conflicts), take away your rights (Christian fanatics with blue laws, countries with Islamic law), or force their ideas onto you and your children (Intelligent Design, Hamas' anti-Jewish children's shows). Mormon fanatics are the ones that still practice polygamy and force young girls into marriage.

Normal Mormons of course are just regular people with some strange beliefs, but really, most of the strangeness was already in Christianity anyway (God created a huge, vast universe with uncountable stars and planets, with relativistic and quantum effects, and he really gives a shit who you like to poke your dick into?). I find it easier to believe that some guy found some gold plates and transcribed them than to believe that the word of God has passed down thousands of years without anyone tampering with it for their own benefit.

*OK, I've never met a pastafarian fanatic, but it's possible. I am curious what a Buddhist fanatic would be like.

You're thinking amish. Mormons can use technology just fine, they just can't wear miniskirts.

I agree that it's a terrible example, but for different reasons.

The post office loses money, true. But it's more like roads that people realize. The post is the one way that is (supposed to be) sure to communicate with someone.

You are notified of jury duty by mail. You're notified of property taxes via mail (at least in Oklahoma, I never owned property anywhere else). Pretty much any time the government needs to tell you something, it's via the mail. Mail has special legal status (certified and registered mail) that other forms of communication do not.

The byproduct is that it's useful for people to mail each other or businesses to mail customers or potential customers, which is good for the economy as a whole.

It's pretty much the same argument as the roads - they're good for the economy and the government needs them anyway.

ISPs, on the other hand, are probably not best deal with by the government. They'd pull another pre-split AT&T and we'd be stuck with crap service. I wouldn't mind seeing them operate the cables, though - government owned last mile and backbone, private reselling and packaging.

According to TFA they can't use the speed camera for anything except photographing speeders (Maryland law), so A wouldn't catch you vandalizing B.

Of course, they could always set up C to watch B, I suppose.

Depends if you're wanting to make a statement or stop the program.

If you just want to make a statement, then a paintball to the lens is good enough (bear in mind though that paintballs aren't exactly sniper ammo - they're pretty inaccurate). If you want to make the program too costly to operate, you destroy the camera.

I'm not advocating that, btw.

No it's not. You can photograph military property in the United States.

You can't photograph certain objects or certain areas, but in general you wouldn't be allowed inside those areas or near those objects to begin with unless you had clearance to do so.

I've got a photograph of what was the Network Control Center at Kadena Air Base hanging on the wall (it's a group shot of my coworkers when I was stationed there, presented to me by our shop superintendant, a Senior Master Sergeant). I've got several more I took around the base in a scrapbook somewhere. Just outside the base there are small platforms that camera crews can climb to film jets taking off.

I find it funny someone from the party that voted Dan Quale as vice president makes a big deal about an obvious verbal slip.

Windows isn't like Linux in that respect, since the Linux kernel is developed seperately from the rest of the system. A Windows release is worked on and tested as one object (not counting media center, premium, etc.).

There's advantages and disadvantages to both methodologies. The BSDs are similar to Windows in this reguard; OpenBSD 5.1 refers to the entire system, not just the kernel.

The Linux distributions use their own version numbers that are independent of the kernel, but since the utilities in the distributions are generally not distribution specific, not to mention the fact that a single distro version can use more than one kernel, the kernel version becomes more important than it would be otherwise. In Windows, you'd never run a Vista kernel with a 7 userland, so the point is moot.

Methinks the problem with Windows is the complete lack of coherency within versions. Think a bit:

DOS codebase: Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 3.11 for Workgroups, 95, 98, 98SE, ME
NT codebase: OS/2 1.x*, NT 3.x, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 (with server versions sprinkled in somewhat randomly)

If that's not a sure sign of corporate lack of attention span, I don't know what is.

MacOS X is kind of like X11 - it's been X11 for ages, but the R version keeps going up.

*OS/2 1.x is not Windows, but there was a lot of shared code before Microsoft pulled out and created NT 3.x.

True, but they're the most obvious. It might take quite a bit of study to identify signs of an ancient civilization based on land shaping and rock distribution. The pyramids are obviously artificial.

Those types of organisms wouldn't support a civilization, either. Mars has obviously never had a diverse biosphere that could support advanced forms of life (at least as we understand it), so there's little point to searching for Martian artifacts. I'm all for searching for the Martian equivalent of bacteria and archea.

I'm not sure we know enough about Venus to say one way or the other, but I'll readily admit my ignorance on the subject. I've always found Venus to be dull and haven't spent much time reading about it.

That's a "turtles all the way down" argument. Do you know how an abacus works? Down to the quark level?

A CPU chip does the math and logic. No one outside of electrical engineering really needs to understand how it works, but any tech needs to know what it does, how to install one, and how to evaluate which chip is appropriate for a particular use.

He's wanting something where he can point at a component and say, "that's the memory," or "that's the soundcard." If the kid wants to break out the oscilloscope when he's older, more power to him.

You don't have any high voltage available outside the power supply, which is self-contained. Most power supplies are difficult to open while they're installed, and you usually unplug them to uninstall them. Computers are probably the safest electric appliances you could tinker with while they're plugged in.

The most you have to worry about is the 12V lines. I've worked on more open machines than I can remember and I've never had a shock (not counting static). There's a lot more danger of the kid frying components with static electricity than shocking himself with 120V (or whatever you use where you are).

I doubt that's necessary.

I hunt-and-pecked from the age of 7 on a Commodore 64 and an Atari 800 (I loved the 800's keyboard). I took a typing class in high school (using actual typewriters) and had no trouble picking up touch-typing.

Besides, look at piano lessons - they don't put 7-year-olds on Schroeder-sized pianos. The kids adjust as their hands grow.

The same reason the news doesn't announce that the sun comes up. Everyone knows about the evidence for water on Mars. This is interesting because someone came up with an alternate source for the clay formation that doesn't require water.

Well, yes, there's a lot of evidence to support that, but this paper says the presence of clay soil doesn't necessarily count as evidence of water. No one's saying that there wasn't water on Mars - they're just saying you can't count the clay as evidence for a wet Mars.