It depends how one looks at it. Technically Linux is a perfectly fine desktop OS, I'd contend that as far as user friendliness on the desktop goes, Windows or OSX have nothing on desktop distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora. Many organisations have deployed Linux desktops and are happy with them. The general public uses Windows (and the rest OSX) not because they conclude that these are better desktop OSes, but because they come preinstalled. People just regard them as being an integral part of the computer they buy. I know an otherwise perfectly sensible person who had a Windows laptop, used it every day, was happy with it until the day the came to ask me to help her because she would like to buy "a computer that has Paintshop Pro". After some discussion I understood that she never realised she could actually install new windows apps on her laptop. Thus the point is, the general population doesn't use Windows or Linux. They use "a computer" and don't generally care (or even know) what OS and software it runs. Linux's problem in that area is not the OS itself, but compatibility. LibreOffice is nice and well and its MS Office compatibility is usually good, but people send each other photos as MS Word documents with pictures embedded in them through OLE... Until LibreOffice can open such stuff flawlessly every time with 100% reliability, until the most popular game of the day runs on Linux (without having to deal with GL driver conundrums) and until mouse pads sold in your local supermarket are advertised as being "linux compatible", there will be no Linux on the desktop for the wide public. Linus made the OS technically capable of making a great desktop, but this is not something he can change.

I still don't understand why don't people just use PGP. It solves the problem pretty well.

We are not talking products but technologies. Technology X is cheap and efficient. Technology Y is expensive and ineffective, so much so that it has currently no advantages whatsoever and is unsellable on its own merits. Green advocates want to tax technology X to make it less competitive in the hope that people will buy more of Y instead. Not only is this dumb by itself, but they also fail to understand that X defines the baseline price in the market. By raising that price, there will be less pressure on Y to improve and even if/when such an improvement becomes possible, it will not happen because there will be no incentive to ever become cheaper than X. In short, by arbitrarily taxing the cheapest energy source available for no reason other than to make it artificially expensive, you only make sure that ALL energy will be more expensive. Game over.

Oh right, think-of-the-children, I forgot that :D

But the fact is that to the contrary, I do care about the next generations: I want them to enjoy a prosperous, stable society with a small government and a high quality of life. I don't want them to live wondering how it must have been once upon a time in the early 21st century when energy was cheap and widely available, which, and nothing else, allowed people to have their own detached homes, travel without restrictions and have a life expectancy approaching 80 years.

Admittedly, all analogies are flawed, but still - when the first railways were built in 19 century Britain, they attracted very vocal opposition due to their perceived negative effect on society, their alleged unsustainability (it was a "scientific fact" that coal would only last for 20 years or so) and, yes, their genuine environmental impact. No-one at the time could imagine that one century later, we would have electric HSTs which would suffer from none of these problems while being much faster, much cheaper, much safer and much more frequent. Yet the development of coal-powered steam locomotives allowed the advent of precisely that. Today, the green progressives' attitude is similar to the then-opponents, who lobbied to limit the number of trains and force them to run slower.

In other words, of course one day oil will become irrelevant - but not because of green social engineering, or because we will use something greener. It will be because we will use something superior. I for one wish the next generations will be able to take advantage of it and I am infinitely grateful to our ancestors that they did NOT think of the future generations when they learned to use fire.

This is the leftist worldview at work. In their world, energy *should* be expensive, living standard should be lower, the ultimate goal of any nation should be to be "green", not prosperity or the pursuit of happiness. Politicians who adhere to this ideology consider themselves to be accountable to {the UN|Greenpeace|"the planet"}, never to the constituents who elected them. Indeed Obama and his New-Age pals in virtually every First World country believe that a good government is one that manages to overcome (or ignore) the opposition of its own population in the pursuit of Agenda 21.

The interesting thing about France is that it has actually two police forces, the Police National and the Gendarmerie. They somewhat compete against each other, don't always like each other very much and occasionally throw sticks into each other's wheels. I don't know, maybe the French are onto something there.

It has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is about expressing a private citizen's opinion. As a private citizen, anyone can campaign for banning anything they (don't) like, but the role of a senior public official is not to express random opinions but to preserve what the people regard as their fundamental rights and freedoms. If you are the CFO of a large corporation and you recommend to the Board that the best course of action would be to donate half the assets to ISIS, transfer the rest to a tax haven and blow up the tax office building just to be sure, you are going to get sacked at the very least, and claiming freedom of speech will not save you.

I do use thunderbird+enigmail and love it. Stable, robust, complete PGP support is paramount to me and I have absolutely no use for email clients that don't implement it. No webmail, ever.

Everyday the Gaia mystics show their true totalitarian nature. The debate has never been about the science, it is about whether the hypothetical impact of any climate evolution on quality of life and economic prosperity would be so great that it would be preferable to the very substantial and immediate loss of prosperity and personal freedom, resulting from the "climate action" policies as they are being relentlessly pushed by the zealots. AFAIK no such argument has ever been proposed. So far it was always about "changing habits", lifestyle enforcement and "but... but... but... think of the children!".

Sorry Dave, but you are the one who is wrong. The UNCHR's mandate was to "examine, monitor and publicly report on human rights situations in specific countries or territories". It was not to bring notorious violators on board as peers in order to engage with them. Yes, there is a place and time for that, but the police's role is to arrest offenders, not to have a discussion with them and definitely not to enrol criminals among their ranks in order to help improve these criminals' reputation. It was in fact so discredited that to the UN's credit, it was dissolved in 2006 precisely for that reason and replaced by the HRC. And since we are at it, what are the human rights improvements that were made in Lybia and Iran, under the respective presidency of those two countries? And, more importantly and closer to the topic, what about Figueres' view that political pluralism is "very detrimental" to the CO2 emissions cause? Is it also a case of a wannabe dictator appointed by the UN so that she can improve her ways?

I don't care about fossil fuels industries or their profits. What I *DO* care about is energy availability, abundance and cost. The fact is that there is NO substitute for fossil at the present time. Nope, nada. If and when thorium technology or fusion become a reality, I will be all for converting our infrastructure to use them, but currently it's either fossil fuel or a massive regression in living standards. Such is the reality and even the more honest ones among green activists admit that.

Ok. Would you care to explain what would replace coal, then? Which non-fossil source of energy is readily available, can be used 24/7, can provide as many or more GWh than coal at a cost to the consumer no higher than coal, is scalable enough to meet future demands (e.g. provide more energy per capita for 9 billion people at a lower cost) and can be deployed now, in poor and rich countries alike? I'm sorry but THOSE are the issues to be adressed, they come before "carbon" considerations.

The UN? Is it the same UN who elected Gaddafi's Libya to chair the Human Rights Commission, elected Iran on the Women's Rights Commission, repeatedly praises Cuba as a "victim" and appointed as Exec Secretary of the UNFCCC none other than Christiana Figueres, who is (in)famous for publicly admiring the way how China's totalitarian government can impose decisions on society without having to worry about those pesky checks, balances, freedom and other democratic inconveniences; among other great achievements? That's some moral authority!

Perhaps torturing you to death, burning your house and selling your children into slavery. Don't forgat that for those people copyright violation is the most terrible crime imaginable, worse than murder, child rape and high treason combined.

IMHO there are many nice things to be said about systemd:

• 1) it provides a predictable baseline set of features that developers can rely on
• 2) it allows apps to create and manage services using a well-defined API rather than random, break-prone, kludgey scripts
• 3) dependency resolution, evenement handling etc.
• 4) at last it gets rid of the *nix heritage