Or.. it may just signal to patent trolls that if you have a case pending in East Texas (where you probably already one just based on location) you must continue with it no matter what. Otherwise they might get you from somewhere that the courts are less corrupt.

There is an open source Flash implementation but it is very incomplete. My understanding is that it can be used to view some subset of Flash videos and not much else.

There is Flash for Android although it is no longer supported and hasn't been updated in a few years. I'm not sure if it can even be installed in current Android versions or not. I don't think that it can. I know it wouldn't install on my 'latest' phone which is actually from 2013!

I'm pretty sure that outdated, discontinued Android apk is the only commonly available Flash support for ARM. As closed source software it's not like you are going to port it over to Rasbian or any other distro/OS either.

There may be some single purpose ARM devices out there like internet TVs or something. Those will be specifically built for that device and hidden away inside of a ROM chip. It's not like you are going to copy it out and run it on your Raspi.

- Closed Source Software: Most closed source software requires x86. Sure there isn't much of that for Linux but there is some, especially for niche applications. Also... Wine. Don't tell me Wine isn't usable.. I've used it.

- Flash: Thankfully the days when most of the content on the web required Flash are finally over. Good Fckng ridden! But.. there is still some crap out there that requires it. You can certainly live without that but if you really want to say you have access to the whole internet... nothing beats an x86.

- One Platform: Your desktop and/or laptop are almost 100% likely to be an x86. There's something to be said for using the same platform everywhere. Want to play around with bare metal programming on an SBC? Learn that on this thing and now you know low-level programming for 99% of desktops. Learn it on a Pi and you know low-level programming for... a Pi.

- Choice: Discounting Windows since that's what this post is about, still probably more than 99% of other OS/distributions available are for x86. The Pi can run... a strange version of Debian and a strange version of Gentoo.

- Long Term Support: Arm platforms aren't standardized the way x86 ones are. What will you do with your IoT project after Rasbian has moved to some future, incompatible Pi version and your board is no longer supported? IoT projects are appliances. They should just work. Once they do just work they should continue to do so. It's not like your desktop, after building your 'smarthouse' full of IoT devices based on Raspi do you relly want to have to replace all those Raspis? Or.. with them all connected to your network do you really want to keep running old, no longer secure software? Do you want to support updating them yourself?

It's hard to imagine the day when you can't get an easy update for x86 Linux free off the internet.

They will no when someone other than the government figures out the back door and makes off with their identities.

"if a 67% increase per year"

??? It was a 6% increase. Was that a typo that was supposed to read 6 - 7%?

Anyway, I'm not sure it matters. Look at the graph. It's not linear it's exponential. If that trend keeps up I would expect much more than 6 to 7% increases in the coming years.

That's just stupidity. To make a good analogy for Slashdot that's like saying the internet shouldn't have high bandwidth backbone lines because you can't run one to each and every user's house.

You don't need 50 LONG HAUL trucks traveling clear across the continent when you can have 1 train traveling to a distribution center where 50 SHORT HAUL trucks then distribute those goods to 50 LOCAL grocery stores.

I've even seen trains which were actually made up of flat cars with a semi trailer on each flat car. All they needed was a local driver at the train stop to then hitch up to the trailer and take it the last mile.

Unfortunately that is the exception to the rule. Here in the US at least railroad lines are constantly getting closed down and tore up. Instead we are getting more and more long distance trucks on the road choking up our air and, slowing down our freeways and breaking apart our taxpayer funded asphalt.

The one thing I would grant for using long haul trucks is that if sanity did somehow sneak it's way into our system and we started transitioning back to trains we should take it slowly so that we aren't flooding the workforce with too many unemployed drivers all at once.

It's a complicate two-sided situation. Remember thalidomide... sure, remember it. Also remember that while a medicine is in testing, not yet available to the public real people are suffering and even dying. Those people that die waiting for a cure... they aren't coming back... EVER!

Beyond all that the longer and more beurocratic you make the process the more expensive it is. No, I'm not arguing money over lives but that money could be used to save more lives. The cost of testing is either passed on to patients meaning some will not be able to afford treatment or it is pulled out of R&D meaning some other medicine never gets discovered. Either way.. more death and suffering.

What is needed is a proper balance. From the outside it does not appear that there currently is such a thing. Instead it appears that the medical field has gone from a period of overactive optimism jumping on unfounded treatments like thalidomide, lobotomies, leaches, etc... to an overly pessimistic period where everything that might have one day saved your life will instead be bogged down in decades of expensive and unproductive bureaucracy.

You might want to argue that this is untrue and that we do have a good balance today. If so please, do so and explain why you believe that. Simply explaining one side of it though, either side without acknowledging the other isn't very convincing.

"What you lose is remote x display but you weren't using that anyway." - Actually I do use that as well I just got sick of arguing that one and decided not to mention it. I use remote X at home on a terminal in my workshop, SSH + VNC from other places. It's great so long as I don't want sound.

"Also yes your complaint is perfectly valid but that's the "unix way"

I suppose. Actually.. I wouldn't mind having separate applications but wrapping a GUI around them. Just look at how Remmina wraps itself around vncclient and ssh to make tunneling less painful. It's not as easy as using Remote Desktop with it's built in encryption but it's good enough for me.

My problem is that there isn't really any equivalent client for sound. I always thought that was because X has the DISPLAY environment variable. Even if multiple people are logging in from multiple places, if things are set up right they each inherit a DISPLAY variable that automagically directs any GUI they run to their own X server or VNC client.

Even with audio servers like Arts and eSound there wasn't anything like that. You had to tell each application as you run it where to send the sound. That sucked!

I guess Pulse Audio is supposed to do something like this. It seems to work for multiple LOCAL sessions. That I find just annoying. I used to sometimes do things like Ctrl-Alt-F1 to a terminal to run pianobar or mpg123 and then Ctrl-Alt-F... back to X. Ok, there was never a real reason for me to do that but I just liked to sometimes. Now it silences as soon as you switch back because it 'knows' the session with the music player is not the currently visible one. Why would I want it to do that? Pianobar is certainly just fine heard but not seen!

On the other hand.. if I log in with a remote session... I have never seen it automatically know this and forward audio on to my local client like X would. I see hints that it is supposed to work there... there is some sort of X Pulse Audio plugin. I've tried all sorts of fiddling with PulseAudio configuration and have never managed to make it work though. At this point I don't think it does. I think Pulse's developers are fixated on some strange use case where a bunch of people are sharing a Linux desktop, none of them ever log off and they like to keep noisy things running.

I suspect remote operation was intended but never really debugged/fleshed out for Pulse. Probably, there is a generational issue where the kids have an allergy to remote access because they all prefer to just run crap locally on their tablets anyway... It's probably the same one affecting the Wayland devs.

I use Linux on the desktop and 90% of this stuff does not affect me. But.. what really gets on my nerves... remote desktop support.

Sure there is VNC but VNC has no sound! I guess Pulse can do it... That's what I keep reading but I can't make it work no matter how hard I try. Even if Pulse actually can provide remote sound.. (which I am begining to thing requires a visit from the friendly ghost of Leonert Poettering himself) it should be seamless with the remote desktop app to be considered good enough for 2001 (let alone 2016). Look how easy it is in Windows! Check the fucking box and it works. That's what I want to see in Linux.

Yes, there have been other sound servers over the years, eSound, aRts. I remember eSound even having a java client so I could hear my Linux Desktop from someone's Mac or Windows box. So what... they still were not (click a box) integrated AND they were only supported in certain applications.

Once upon a time, when I was first switching to Linux I was super impressed by remote X display. Windows had no native remote desktop back then, you had to pay a bunch of money to PC Anywhere to get that. Linux was light years ahead in my eyes in that it ran over the network natively.

What the hell happened? All those years, Windows gets Remote Desktop which seamlessly incorporates sound AND on terminal servers even separates the sounds by login session. I can log in to Windows remotely while a buddy does the same and we can listen to separate sounds on our respective terminals.

Linux has what? VNC plus PulseAudio? WTF?

I could rant about VNC not having built in encryption too. I guess RealVNC has it.. for a price. I think TightVNC can do SSL but you have to use the Java client. That sucks. At least SSH tunneling gives me a solution to that though. Still waiting for such a simple sound solution.

Alas... Linux seems to be finally changing on this front. IN THE WRONG FUCKING DIRECTION! Now we are supposed to be switching to Wayland and relying on each respective desktop environment to independantly invent and implement a remote protocol for us to use?

I think the Linux Desktop is in the process of self destructing. Where to now?

Glass won't be a successful product unti the price is reasonable.

There are plenty of reasons that something like Glass would be useful. I want one and I'm not even interested in taking your picture.

It's anoying though that so many people are so offended by a wearable computer because all they can see is a camera. I used to have friends that really liked to fight. If I ever get Glass maybe I'll look them back up. I can be their bait. I'll sit on my bar stool enjoying my drink and minding my own business. Nobody will know who I am with until some douchebag decides he has to do something about the technology in his presence.

It will be fun!

You really had to run off to OSX because of Systemd? I call BS.

First, there are still distros that do not use Systemd. Sure, switching distros might involve a learning curve but you just switched operating systems!

Second, While I mainly use Gentoo I just spent a couple months with playing with other distros on my laptop. I had desktops set up in both Debian Jessie and Ubuntu. I wasn't quite sure... was Ubuntu using Systemd or Upstart? Yeah.. that's how much it mattered for desktop use... not at all!

Eventually I switched back to Gentoo and good old OpenRC but it wasn't because of Systemd not working. I went back to Gentoo for reasons that had nothing to do with init and OpenRC only because it's what I know best.

Why did I bother switching away? Gentoo lets you have things your way. I mean.. really really your way. After figuring out what all my favorites were back in about 2001 Gentoo never really made me change them. It just happily builds the latest releases of all that old software. I had to switch away for a while to get a better feel of what is out there so that I could come back and set up a less ancient feeling desktop! Once I came back I just had to 'emerge' my 'perfect' combination of my new and old favorites. Now I am good to go again for a while.

So.. if there is something you won't let them take away until they pry it from your cold dead hands... like your favorite init system... just switch over to Gentoo, not OSX! WTF were you thinking?

Oh.. and compiling isn't really a big deal. Just do it in the background in a screen session. If you want to use your computer before you even have the base system compile that's doable too. Skip the Gentoo CD and use your favorite Linux Live CD. Yes, you can build Gentoo from there... inside screen... while you use all those desktop apps anyway. You can even set your builds to a high nice level if you are afraid that background building will interfere with your computer use although I rarely find it necessary to do so even on my nearly fossilized hardware.

It doesn't sound like there is much you can do. But.. you could just filter your email so that this particular error report, when their particular ip is attached goes straight to trash.

Oh please, the cost to maintain and backup a database...
Distributed among millions of users.. all of them with less than 1kB of data in the database...

"Especially at government service rates."

Yes.. that's my point exactly. Those government service rates are jacked up. Any time rates are jacked up somebody is pocketing the money.

"so that miscreant drone operators can be held accountable"

And you are calling me stupid? If someone doesn't know or doesn't care that they shouldn't be using a drone near an airport, over a crowd, etc... why the fuck would they know or care that they are required to register? This is just another money grab and only just another money grab. There is no value in a drone registry. Well.. unless maybe you are an advertiser.

A drone registry is a way that politicians can do the two things they do best. Appease ignorant voters and suck money.

Just put it somewhere in coal country. You don't even need to dig, just pour it right into the local wells. The locals won't mind, they will fiercely defend you so long as you employ them to do it.