All I heard was Al Gore use the typical cop-out line of "some people say X" so he can put forth a position and blame it on those mythical "some people" later if it turns out that his tentative position turns out to be a bunch of B.S. (which it did).

Trust me, Al has no problems taking credit for something later if the magical "some people" turn out to be right about whatever point he is putting forward.

The Plasma Desktop, which provides the basic desktop experience for KDE (start menu, taskbar, widgets, etc.) is now going into long-term maintenance while the developers focus on Qt 5 & Qt Quick 2 for the new KDE frameworks. (P.S. --> This upgrade path will be massively less intrusive than what happened with the KDE 3 -> 4 upgrade so thankfully we should avoid the massive drama that happened during that transition)

Programs that are associated with the larger KDE project will still get upgrades and you'll see a gradual transition from Qt 4 to Qt 5 over time. It doesn't have to happen overnight and Qt 4 and Qt 5 applications can coexist just fine.

Basically: KDE is still being developed, but the plasma component of KDE 4 is now in maintenance mode while new developments shifts to Qt 5. The good news is that it is very mature software at this point, and there will still be bug fixes as needed.

I've got two different systems running Arch using these boards. One of them is booting in traditional BIOS mode, and when I turned off the secureboot and followed Arch's UEFI installation procedure, I got the second one booting with UEFI just fine.

Have you seen what the EPA has done to people? Calling them the Gestapo isn't that far off and I'm getting a little tired of the exact same people who think that the NSA spying on *anyone* (even North Korea) is some insane violation of the Constitution having zero problems with the EPA spying on American citizens and effectively confiscating their property and livelihoods because they think a slug might live within 50 miles of their homes.

So when Google/MS/etc. etc. all were heaping money on for the pro-gay marriage debate why was protest by company employees not allowed while this is seen as being a "moral' thing to do?

I'm not taking a position either way on either topic, I'm just pointing out that lots of people on this site and in general have very blinkered views where paying money to support the "correct" politicians is perfectly fine while paying money to support the "incorrect" politicians should somehow be illegal.

Here's the speech:

"We are the champions, my friends.
And we'll keep on fighting, 'till the end!
We are the Champions,
We are the Champions!
No room for losers, cause we are the Champions,
Of the World."

Oh... wait.. you meant THAT Queen?
Nevermind.

It's kind of sad that people on Slashdot no longer understand that operating systems include modular components that can be replaced.

I installed Windows 8.. on a 5 year old Core 2 duo system using a spare hard drive. You know what? While I sure didn't like the UI choices MS made for Windows 8, it was at least as fast as my Arch Linux installation on the exact same box (the difference being that Arch got an SSD while Windows 8 was on an older mechanical hard drive).

In many ways the Windows graphics stack is well ahead of X (Wayland is fixing this fortunately, but it has taken a long time). The interesting thing is that the actual 3D stack in Linux, which practically ignores the X server in modern implementations, is actually quite good, but the actual core graphics in Windows are also very good despite what Slashtrolls would like to believe. Nvidia
has done a very good job at getting comparable performance levels out of both platforms.

Look, this isn't a real security vulnerability because it can't alter the Linux kernel on your droid. All it can do is log your key strokes, steal your passwords, and send your credit card and other personal information to Russia. Since that doesn't constitute a kernel-level breach, it's not a security hole and Linux is completely and utterly secure.

(Hey, this line of reasoning is considered perfectly valid whenever the PHP vulnerability of the week gets announced, so why not here? For some reason, this logic isn't used when there is a hole in a Windows application though.. I'm not sure why.)

Oh yeah! As long as there is absolutely no chance of making a profit I'm sure safety will shoot right through the roof!

  Just look at the death toll from Three Mile Island! Do you know that since the accident THOUSANDS of people in Pennsylvania have died from cancer! It's a crime!

Now look at Chernobyl where Progressive Soviet Idealism has shown the light that will conquer the corrupt imperialist western scum! Did you know that the death toll from cancer in Pripyat has been ZERO for over twenty years! This shows the superiority of the Soviet system over the profit-seeking scum who intentionally caused Three Mile Island and Fukushima because they made insane fortunes from nuclear accidents! Dear Leader Kim Jong Un will soon deliver us to a new world where there are no profits of any kind except to his ruling elite! Join us or die!

Wayland & Weston are coming along pretty well and we are seeing increased adoption in both GTK+/QT toolkits and in desktops with upcoming versions of KDE.

One area where the developers need to go out and evangelize is on the front of EGL for proprietary drivers. Yes it's great that Intel's open source drivers (and to a lesser extend the open-source AMD & Nvidia drivers) have EGL support, but both AMD & Nvidia need to be convinced that EGL is important to their upcoming proprietary drivers too.

The irony here is that Mir, which is is seen as a huge competitor to Wayland, could end up helping Wayland enourmously since Canonical doesn't seem to be afraid to pick up a phone and call people at AMD/Nvidia to talk about updating the drivers.

Chromebooks most certainly are self-serving products for Google. Just because they aren't selling on the same scale as Android doesn't make them charity devices.

To really use a Chromebook do you need to have a Google account? Yeah?

Will you be bombarded with ads? Sure?

Are the two complaints I just listed above huge bones of contention for Windows 8 & 8.1 (substituting Microsoft's online services for Google's)? YES.

So just because the Google version is "free" does that make it insanely great while a Windows machine is full of spyware? Not necessarily. A Chromebook running real Linux is nice, but a better-specced Windows notebook that also runs real Linux can be quite a bit nicer.

So basically the NSA has been granted the same level of access as every low-grade Taiwanese device manufacturer, the Mozilla foundation that wrote the firefox browser I'm using, and probably multiple front companies associated with the PLA. Check.

Still doesn't prove or even suggest there's a backdoor, and as far as I know, even the big-bad NSA would have to send traffic over a network to control my PC remotely. How come nobody has ever seen that traffic? In order for the traffic to be completely invisible, the NSA would by definition also have to have backdoors in Linux that prevent Linux based security monitors from seeing their traffic.

So basically we have two big choices:
1. The NSA has backdoors in everything (Windows and Linux) and the exact same security researchers who find holes in software on a daily basis are too stupid to see what would undoubtedly have to be highly complex rootkit software right in front of their noses. Basically, you think that Bruce Schneier isn't all that bright.
OR:
2. When the NSA wants to do dirty work it uses the exact same exploits that crackers use every day, albeit with probably a greater degree of sophistication since they have a big budget. Since there are security holes in Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, etc. etc., the NSA can certainly do nasty things, but they don't do it via magic, they do it exactly the same way that everyone else does it.

As I posted above... why does the NSA need Stuxnet to attack Windows computers in Iran when they have magical access to every Windows machine in existence already?

P.S. --> At no point in my post did I ever say that I trusted the NSA, I just pointed out facts that an open-source project is not magically invulnerable to security breaches simply because people can read the source code. If the Windows source was so uber-secret, how would you even know that it is approximately 50 million lines?

As a followup to my other response, if this magical backdoor into every Windows system on the planet is so great, then why was there a need for Stuxnet to ever come into existence?

The NSA should have built-in access to every Iranian Windows computer without the need for highly complex malware package!

So the NSA put in a magical untraceable backdoor that has never been found by the likes of Bruce Scheier or others in his field, but the NSA was also so stupid that they named the file "NSA_secret_evil_backdoor.dll" or something like that... yeah whatever.