laffer1 wrote: "This helps if there is a crazy background process eating up CPU and it might even help control flash crushing system performance a bit."

Well, sort of, but not really. A competent video player is fine running along with CPU intensive background processes. The problem is competing for attention with new-born babies.

A parallel 'make' will fork() and exec() short-running processes at the rate of dozens per second. The scheduler will find that each new-born processes has used up zero CPU so far, and therefor put them ahead of the video player and browser, which have already sucked major CPU without completing their work.

A task group for each TTY fixes that particular problem. Each child process has to wait and share the CPU time allocated to its group. Immoral as charging children with debts of their parents may seem, in this case it smooth out our video and web browsing so that's that.

Slashdot isn't about religious dogma. The teachings of the Catholic Church, whether about extraterrestrials or how the Sun orbits the Earth, are of no relevance to the scientific search for life elsewhere in the universe.

Whether intelligent societies elsewhere in the universe developed religions comparably to how we did is perhaps an interesting question. Trying to apply some of our historical myths to beings who evolved completely independently from ourselves is just nonsense.