I don't see how any one group or company could even have any significant influence on Linux...

Two words for you: pulseaudio and systemd.

But we don't really understand why WE developed intelligent life.

Why didn't the dinosaurs? There could have been intelligent life (in the sense of tool use, construction etc.) a quarter billion years ago, but as far as we can tell there wasn't. There was only semi-intelligent life (in the sense of mobility, family structures etc. compared to plant and microbe life, ie. animals).

What makes you think they didn't? Just because we found no cities or cave paintings? Consider the following:

• There were intelligent dinosaur species.
• They lived in artificial structures like our houses.
• They, for whatever reason, faded away.

We hardly find evidence of our earliest human ancestors which is just 1.6 Million years -- the Dinosaur period, for what we know, ended 65 Million years ago which is the 40-fold timespan and so long that even the continents were moved and reshaped significantly.

But even without such major geological effects: What makes finding evidence of earlier humans, even just 20.000 years ago, so hard?

Because people reused anything they could make use of. Cutting wood was so time- and labor-intense that you reused timer until it could only serve as firewood. Later, making bricks was such an effort that bricks would also be reused as long as they were half-way intact (have a look at post WW2 Germany where the "debris women" (Trümmerfrauen) spent lots of efforts cleaning up the mess and saving what can be reused, and that was just 70 years ago).

Where we find bones, this is either from dedicated graveyards or where people were accidentally buried like in Pompeji during the Vesuv eruption.

So if we don't find anything from a prospective dinosaur civilization this might well be that during the process of fading away (due to whatever circumstance) they erased their traces simply by reusing available resources.

Just like we would when The Don and Li'l Kim escalate their current tug-o-war into a full-blown nuke scenario. With the so-called civilization having broken down and in no supply of essential daily needs, we would first raid the cities for immediate and easy resources, and later even start tearing down buildings and ripping apart cars as this would be the easiest way to e.g. get steel (from concrete reinforcement) and copper (from electrical wiring) or sheet metal (from cars).

Add a little bit of destruction for sheer reasons of destruction, burning up crap (heck, with no supply for combustible material even raiding the landfills for plastic material would make sense), and within a rather short period of time the traces of our civilization will already have faded greatly.

Plant life and, for organic matter, bacteria and fungi will do the rest, and in 65 million years you might find nothing but stuff that was accidentally conserved by falling into tar pits or quickly being buried.

Are they people with proper scientific training in the field who can do appropriate risk assessment? Then, please, do so and provide a list of risks, potential consequences as well as measures to minimize and mitigate potential ill effects.

Or are they basically people from some sort of so-called "social studies" and self-proclaimed "philosophers" who do nothing more than "discussing" things just based on their gut feelings and hearsay?

Branding oneself as "ethicist" sounds an awful lot like the latter -- and I couldn't care less about those peoples' opinion.

The command-line wizards like to mock the GUI crowd, but I've never seen anyone make this kind of blunder with a GUI admin tool. :-P

Then you have never worked on a repository with users of TortoiseSVN and the likes.

"Hey, my commit didn't get through because of some funky error I didn't care about. But if I flip this 'force' switch, then everything always goes smoothly."

One thing that marks the onset of presbyopia is that your vision increasingly sucks as low/dim light conditions. If this stuff is without side effects, then this would make a neat (at least temporary) cure for early presbyopia, not requiring bright(est) lights for reading, soldering, etc.

Given the approach, the listed "successes" are no wonder.

This EEG-based stuff typically works on the so-called P300 response, i.e., the fact that 300ms after(!) thinking something you can measure a response in the brain waves, if you just look closely enough.

Unfortunately, that's not only horrible laggish, but also not really precise. For more complex tasks like easy games like train simulators you already end up having positive interpretation in the range of 48% to 52% (so closely centered around guessing ...), with most test subjects not exceeding around 60-65%.

With some few test persons you might be able to get something in the 70-90% range, but from what I've seen over time I have a feeling that they rather get trained (or somewhat train themselves) to produce responses the EEG pickup system can read better rather than the computer getting better at reading their brainwaves.

Using P300-based spellers achieves a best-case net bit rate of around 2 bits/second. So already typing a single character will take in the range of 3 seconds.

I don't see how this will ever be sped up unless we go for deep brain-probing, which probably no human test subject wants to volunteer for (it's used for mice experiments, though, in certain virtual reality experiments studying learning and orientation).

If that will become the new /. look, it will just be another site looking like any other half-assed wordpress site optimized for smartphone browsing. Seriously, why is everyone thinking that all sites should look alike? It's boring!

And, of course, you do know that there are still people using real PCs on screens bigger than 9"? Especially among the /. readers.

So make it at least two CSS style sheets, one for the mickey mouse screens and one for the real ones -- and let the users select.

Why do I still get updates? Seems kind of weird to me to update unsupported versions ...

In any case: It's not even related to Ubuntu versioning (discussing the Ubuntu version was a moot point anyway, but some people like to rather jump on these rather than dealing with the problem).

As I found out meanwhile, it's a problem of the Trinity desktop environment regarding mapping GTK widgets to QT widgets, potentially affecting every user of that desktop environment, no matter what recent or not-so-recent Linux distribution they are using ... Removing the kgtk-kde3 package solves the issue.

Anything helpful to say?

It still is supported, btw, Desktop until 04/2013, Server even until 05/2015. So much for that. (You do know what LTS stands for, right?)

Besides, behavior like this

• FF will not crash, when strace'd.
• FF will also not crash, when started via "ssh localhost".

does not sound like some "get your .mozilla directory fixed" kind of problem (which doesn't help btw.), but some race or whatever mess going on.

After upgrading to FF17, the browser started crashing whenever the file dialog pops up for up- or downloads. It doesn't matter whether the file is double-clicked or selected via "Ok" -- the browser instantly crashes afterwards, sending home a crash report.

That very behavior also takes place with FF18. When running the with strace, the crash does not happen. FF16, in term, does not show this bug.

Any idea how to hunt this down or even fix it? (I'm running Ubuntu 10.04LTS w/ Trinity/KDE3.5)

I don't know about you, but if *I* am sick, I'm in no way able to visit the nearest doctor's office (and definitely no clinic), especially not in the morning, because I'm fever-struck or similarly immobilized. Just feeling "meh" does not equal being ill.

Luckily, I'm living in Germany where employers usually demand the sign-off only from the third consecutive day on -- unless people show an obvious tendency for being sick at Fridays, Mondays, bridging days, or denied vacation days; but who abuses a system of mutual trust is asking for such measures.

And yes, we have (almost) unlimited paid-for sick days in Germany, of which the first consecutive 42 typically come out of your employer's pockets. Yet, the overall abuse rate is comparatively low.

Hey, Commodore! How could you let my investment ins skills die on the vine! Bring back the C64 and the Amiga!

Get off me lawn, you youngsters!

When I was young we carefully wove ALUs using 74xx and 40xx, and we saved our programs to paper tape!

Sheesh, I remember, when "high-resolution graphics" meant 256*192 pixels. Not necessarily colorized ones, so forgive me shedding tears when I look at old Amiga ads remembering the stunning first sights of the 4096-color Hold-and-Modify mode...

Unfortunately, very few developers actually test their stuff with ~ on NFS. Firefox is another program which fails hideously with ~ on NFS -- the bookmark toolbar would fail to load, misc. random errors upon loading pages, etc. (I think it was because of Sqlite, but I'm not sure.).

Ah, the joys of Firefox on networked file systems.

I happen to have my work home on AFS, which has an "official" path /afs/[much longer path here]/home/angstroem -- and the localized official path /home/angstroem

Now guess, which path Firefox uses in its config files, just to fail on that at later restart. After forcing all paths in its config files to /home/mylogin anything is fine and even restart works.

We're talking about cell phone here, not military-strength microwave radar signals :)

Would really astonish me if he could even light up a energy-saving lamp with the cell-phone signal.