I am incredibly offended by the tone in the comments thread initiated by this parent node. One generalization after another. Don't count on me to come back and consult the Slashdot community on any worthwhile issue.

I take it from your description that you are talking your primary computer. This makes a big difference.

On a primary computer, I find it makes sense to go with a distribution on which things actually work, since there is plenty to learn even then.

In my own case, on my primary machine I run Ubuntu, but with XMonad as a window manager and I do all my disk operations in XTerm. This has forced me to learn a great deal, and indeed configuring XMonad is not a small undertaking for a nondeveloper.

On my secondary machine I alternate between Debian and Arch, initially with the intent of eventually displacing Ubuntu as my primary OS, but those installations still have things not working which on Ubuntu just work, so I may just stick with what I've got. On your primary computer, you won't have the patience to have essentials not work for weeks on end.

YES THANK YOU. I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find this sentiment expressed. Isn't the natural inference that bad maths skills are linked to low intelligence (however that is defined), which correlates with "ruined lives" in one or more ways? The same results could surely be found for poor spelling/illiteracy and a host of other symptoms of a larger problem. My maths skills are dreadful, and it only takes primary school maths for me to understand that anecdotal evidence is statistically irrelevant. Yet I suspect the fair few people I know who like myself have a PhD in combination with societally average maths skills and are hardly living the life of crime may be signal, not noise.

I don't know what ADF scanners you have tried, but I have been enormously pleased with Epson's GT-2500. With straightforward letter-sized/a4-sized paper it is very reliable, at least with the Windows software. Unfortunately, the Linux software calls jams all the time when they're not even physically happening.

I haven't used it much lately just because the photocopier at my office is even faster and allows me to dump scans onto an ftp account.

The Norse settlements were never covered by glaciers. What you probably meant to say is that Norse Greenlandic graves, as well as plant roots, have been found in permafrost layers. Of course, these finds were done in the 1920s, nearer the beginning of the climatic impact of the Industrial Revolution, and very soon after the end of the "Little Ice Age", a well-documented period of relative cold which in this part of the world lasted roughly from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth. Indeed, this climatic downturn seems to have played a key role in the demise of the Norse settlements in Greenland. I don't know the state of the soil at the Norse settlements today, but I suspect the permafrost levels of the 1920s no longer hold. Summaries of some of the 1920s reports may be found here and here.

Weddings are irrational.

Yes, this is a weird thing for the article to say. I returned two external HDDs to the Future Shop in a week's time. Granted that was because they did not work (they took my word for it either way), but Canada has pretty good consumer protection and most items can be returned without reason, surely including electronics.

You're overlooking the fact that greater efficiency drives up demand. As Chris Goodall suggests in his book, when people install cleaner energy/heating for their houses they will start to use more of it--so if you insulate your house, you will feel justified to heat it to a higher level, to some extent cancelling out initial benefits. Similarly, the efficient computer chips you mention mean that we now feel we need to carry at least two full-fledged computers with us in our pockets wherever we go, meaning the total environmental degradation goes up, not down.

ThinkPad, no question about it. Go with the X series for optimal reliability and portability. My x60s is now almost five years old and still runs like a dream on Ubuntu + XMonad (I've never seen the point of transition effects and "3D" window managers anyway). I should mention, however, that the information on thinkwiki.org tends to be hopelessly outdated, so ubuntuforums.org is a better source of information.

As for out of the box success, if you get a model with a webcam it might not work (last time I checked, the x220 webcam had not yet appeared on the compatibility list). I actually haven't bothered to try setting up my fingerprint reader since I moved to GNU/Linux. On the whole, whatever does not work out of the box is generally worth learning to set up yourself. Notable is fan control, for which you'll want to use the thinkfan daemon available in the repositories. Requires some tweaking, but well worth it. Here thinkwiki.org is probably your best source of advice.

Wait, you're serious though right? I'm very much interested in small-footprint, non-WYSIWYG solutions for humanities text editing, but surely Markdown doesn't support, say, generating a table of contents? If you have to add that in at the LaTeX level, then you're dealing with two (sets of) source files, which is inconvenient.

I imagine I'll write my future scholarship in something along the lines of Vim + LaTeX, but when I was setting out on my PhD thesis I chickened out in the knowledge that some humanities journals demand copy in legacy proprietary formats, so I've drafted in .odt instead. I'm sorry to say oOo/LibreOffice formatting using styles is highly unreliable—totally should have gone with Vim + LaTeX.

Anyway, none of this concerns ePub--do carry on.

I suspect even Ehrlich's 1.2 billion is too high an estimate. A strictly sustainable world population makes no use of fossil fuels, as they do not get replenished nearly as rapidly as we use them up. We last had 1.2 billion people about 1820, when coal was already part of the mix, not to mention peat. We can argue over how long oil, coal, and natural gas supplies will last us, but at the end of the day their use does not count as sustainable. We can currently feed a sizeable portion of the world population, but that is thanks to the green revolution of the twentieth century that basically came down to an intensification of production (and transportation) through an increased dependence on fossil fuels. Take fossil fuels out of the equation and precious few of us will survive another year. The problem is that whenever we develop a major new technology, we increase the size of the population to the new maximum carrying-capacity resulting from that development, and thus we become painfully dependent on that same technology (as argued by Craig Dilworth).

Sounds like commenters have a lot of hardcopy storage space! Having moved between eight student rooms in four countries over the past decade alone, I minimize my physical burden by running everything that comes in through a scanner with automated document feeder into 600dpi b/w pdf, simply stored behind date-ordered folders and filenames. I keep many redundant copies (online backup storage, SD card, two external HDs, and once a year a computer on the other continent). Things important enough to keep in hardcopy simply go into large envelopes ordered by subject, but I rarely need to look at them because I keep those in softcopy too. When I leave a country I can usually throw most of the hardcopies out.

Nope, privacy doesn't enter into it. I access my Thinkpad using the fingerprint reader. It's not the authorities registering the fingerprints, it's me, so the machine won't let me log in if I'm not me. No third party involved. You'll just need to take off your gloves for login/ignition, then you can put them on again. Good idea, I say, let's make it mandatory.

I got the latest bill from Yak "high-speed Internet" (in Ontario) two days ago. It says that my "unlimited downloads" subscription will be capped at 60GB starting Feb 1, even though they don't seem to offer any way of tracking usage, and (so far) no way to upgrade; indeed, their website doesn't mention the change in policy at all and still encourages unsuspecting consumers to sign up for the Internet provider that has "Unlimited downloads, yes, really!". Capped data reminds me of the 1990s. Not cool. I share a house with five others, so I will have to ration my downloads of Linux ISOs and media files severely.