My solution to this problem that I've been working on for years, but still has further to go is LiveDVD linux distribution, that includes all the source code to rebuild itself (the iso image) from scratch. Add to that, a cool interaction with some NDS homebrew, including all the source and compilers needed to modify that. Currently what I have is a fedora derived LiveDVD/USB that boots a PC into an electric guitar-f/x preamp, which when combined with speakers and a guitar, lets you easily start jamming with Rakarrack. For the NDS homebrew side, I have an application that lets the NDS talk via wifi to control Rakarrack in realtime. A TouchScreenWhammyPad implementation.

For the long term goal to achieve what you described, I intend to add more simple GPL homebrew games, and a book walking a kid through the process of tweaking some little aspects of the existing games, maybe just text strings. That would get them familiar with the development process. Then maybe a complete tutorial implementing tic-tac-toe or such (from good overcommented template code of course).

If you want to check out what I have so far-

http://gzyx.org/

(developer build of new f11 based version will upload today, and an f12 version should be coming pretty soon)

Anyone else (unemployed and looking like me) feel like a disturbing portion of the job market is constituted of 'blame taking positions'?

It's probably paranoia, but I feel like the businessworld is composed of corrupt people who will lie and bullshit, and then the poor saps that get stuck with the 'blame taking positions'.

In my youth, I had naive libertarian beliefs about talented and competent people winning out in the free market against those types. Now that I've witnessed the naked annihilation of even the illusion of capitalism, via the bank bailouts... I just have no real hope that there is any way to make a living without either being one of those bullshitters, or poor blame taking saps. I guess the honorable thing is to just accept a sequence of blame taking jobs, and survive and get fed until we see a better age.

You sound dangerously close to the kind of young people screwing up Linux distributions. But I do find the core of this idea to be brilliant. I've had similar thoughts in the past, but you've really nailed the heart of the issue. I would love to see a niche distro do this, to let the idea catch on (somehow finding yourself with the authority to make it a new default for a mainstream distro, would be criminal however).

I suppose one implementation would be a filesystem, that stores metadata of application state along with each file. Really, the userspace memory image of the application with the file open would be overkill sufficient. And OS smarts along the lines of VMWware/recent-linux memory de-duplication.

If you had browser uptimes that averaged weeks, and performed roughly a dozen google searches a day, you'd see it isn't as simple as that. (auto deleting cookies at end of session/exit)

Sure, I can vote with my feet. I certainly will for my habit of 'wikipedia' prefixed google searches that seemed to shave a few tenths of seconds over the overall latency, versus native wikipedia search. But the problem is that google is google because they are a damn good search engine. Having to change my use due to a new pro/con balance will hurt. I know several people that work there. I'd like to like google. But it's gotten harder over the years, and this feels like the tipping point to me.

Lightning fast (non personalized) high quality search results were why I got addicted to them in the first place nearly a decade ago. First usenet, now google. Next thing you know, slashdot will require you to set a cookie, to opt-out of cookies being used to by default serve you a selection of articles based on algorithms. Algorithms approved by their paying advertisers. Algorithms with knowledge of your browsing history. It's sad. It's not what I want.

The point of the original poster was not about google or your ISP nefariously spying on you. The poster is clearly that paranoid already. The point was about not wanting your search results skewed by previous searches, _by default_.

With browser uptimes of weeks and a dozen plus searches a day, that quickly adds up to very skewed results for each subsequent search. Auto-deleting of cookies on browser close, or 'allow cookie for session' is not enough.

I may be in the Global Warming alarmist camp, but I don't want my search results for scientific data skewed by google's knowledge of my prejudice gleamed from prior search terms.

Forcing users to set a cookie in order to opt-out of having search results skewed by cookie tracking, is absolutely rich.

While probably not a solution to the original problem, an answer to the specific question about native ext2 images instead of LiveCD iso images is this-

The Fedora and CentOS LiveCDs do contain a native ext3/4 filesystem image embedded within a squashfs image. The normal Fedora anaconda/liveinst installer works by copying this image directly to the target destination then using resize2fs to expand it to the destination's size.

My ZyX-LiveInstaller at http://filteredperception.org/ goes one further and does this process with the running copy-on-write version of the filesystem, allowing for a rebootless LiveOS installation.

But of course these LiveCD sized filesystems are on the order of 2G (compressed about 3:1 by squashfs). You can probably find a minimal spin that brings that down a bit, but not enough for your needs. A real answer of course is as others have said- get a distro of the same vintage. Linus himself commented on the bloat recently didn't he?

"Linux is a great product, and that is the result of the magnificent work of all the coders and contributers. But sometimes they just act like children."

When used in this sense, it is equally valid to say that everyone on the planet acts like children. Really, it is the control freaks that are good at repressing their inner child that worry me the most. They come off as professional, work their way into positions of real power an authority, and then you discover how much they can _really_ screw things up for the rest of us.

I for one am reassured by Obama's stupid 'stupid' comment. Sure, it was stupid of him, but it convinces me he isn't going to do anything WW3 level stupid because he can no longer repress every natural aspect of his human nature.

yeah, looking at the (current) wikipedia breakdown, I guess 'declarative' would have been the better choice. Though under declarative they only have 'functional' and 'goal-oriented' as members of that class, with the latter not yet having a wikipedia page yet. So I don't think 'functional' is too bad a choice. In fact, when I consider the classes of programmings from the best intuitive definitions of the words, I think 'functional' is better at conveying the meaning to people familiar with traditional imperative programming (who have used 'functions' before), than 'declarative'.

No need to bring hardware design into this. I believe the term is 'functional programming'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming