I'm not going to downplay the feeling of insult that the black couple experienced. There is a long history of racism against blacks, referring to them as apes and other things, with the intent of putting them down. In *this* case, it was an accident of a flawed algorithm, but there's some history here that makes that a hot button. For the sake of repairing the effects of racism of the past, we should be careful about how we use racial slurs, even accidentally.
That all being said, we're learning more and more about gorillas and other higher apes and how intelligent they are. We're closely related. To an alien from another planet, they may look at humans and other apes and not perceive much difference. To compare humans (in general) to apes (in general) isn't all that unreasonable. And some day, when all this racism shit is behind us, mistakes like what happened here might be merely amusing.
A mechanical hard drive is, well, a mechanical device, which can fail at any time due to vibration, wear, weak parts, and lots of other reasons. They're ticking time bombs. That being said, as with other mechanical devices, like cars, they are appropriately over-designed with wide tolerances. With cars, you get several years of warranty to have the weak parts replaced so that by the end of that period, it ought to be in good shape. Testing a hard drive is a time-consuming and expensive procedure, which is why only the enterprise drives get any factory testing. The rest just ship. To keep down the failure rate, drives are built with all kinds of mechanisms to compensate for variation. For instance, there are vibration sensors, and the firmware will slow down the spindle and read/write arm movements to ensure that the drive works *correctly* even if some have degraded performance. It is this approach that keeps hard drive prices low. While the failures are unfortunate, an alternative would increase prices for everyone, and the smart ones among us put new drives through burn-in testing anyhow. When I buy a laptop, I cross my fingers that the drive has been through some OEM testing. When I build a server, I do burn-in and use RAID.
I agree that homeopathy is total nonsense. Unfortunately, it's commonly linked with other forms of alternative medicine that actually do work, and I won't want to see those go down as well. In fact, there is a push by the pharmaceutical companies for the FDA to regulate alternative medicines such that they will become no longer cost-effective to produce. Herbal meds take money out of the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies, so they will try to take advantage of homeopathy going down to elimiate herbal meds as well.
I could list all sorts of herbal and other alternative meds and their positive effects and side-effects. Two I'll mention:
- Dessicated bovine adrenal gland is useful if you have some mild adrenal dysfunction. - Dessicated porcine thyroid gland is fabulous if you have a thyroid disorder and Levothyroxine hasn't been effective. The glandular is kinda like taking Armour Thyroid or Cytomel, except that you get the complete set of thyroid hormones.
Just to be clear. The government lies. Government workers just say whatever they have to to stay out of trouble. This results in lies, but the individual employees aren't lying, at least not intentionally. Only upper management has culpability for not specifying what to say that is truthful.
Edward Snowden had no family to take care of. He was a loner who could afford to flee the country. Most other people are not in this kind of position.
I don't care who you are; people act in their own self-interests. For many government workers, their self-interests include keeping their job, taking care of their families, and not getting thrown into jail. So when a government employee tells you something, you can't trust it. But that's not because they're lying. Most of the time, they're misinformed. Nobody in the NSA knows what anyone else in the NSA is doing. It looks like it's so poorly managed that the management doesn't know what the rest of the organization is doing. (Hey, they should try spying on themselves!) The rest of the time, they're just saying the minimum that is safe to say. The main thing impacting what they say is keeping out of trouble, so they'll say whatever achieves that goal.
Considering that neither you nor I have the circumstances or cojones to do what Snowden did, we're in no position to judge what he or anyone else has done. Most slashdotters in his position like to talk big right now, but the fact is, you'd be scared shitless and do absolutely nothing. Or maybe if you could manage in this economy, you might try to find a different job. Someone really smart and dedicated would work to gain employee status so they could be covered under whistle-blower laws. But that's neither you nor I. The same applied to every other government position.
And as I say, everyone else is in the same position. You want to judge the people who work for the federal government. But they act with total self-interest in the same way that we do. Don't make waves, feed your family, don't get arrested. The only way to fix these problems is to change the law, and that is slowly happening. It may take decades, but it'll happen.
Meanwhile, we all need to be cognizant of the needs to maintain both freedom in our country and also security. We should not sacrifice one for the other. But that makes this a delicate and dynamic balancing act. There are no simple solutions. And on our own, neither you nor I knows the whole solution (in part because the solution has to keep adapting to the ever-changing threats to freedom and security).
Keep in mind that the customer service person you get when you first call your cable company knows less than nothing. The have a script and some stock questions and answer, and they would likely get into trouble for deviating from those. Telling them that you know more than they do is likely to annoy them and slow down your progress.
I have found that the best way to deal with this is to actually go through all the trouble-shooting steps yourself that you know they'll put you through. For instance, you know how they tell you to reboot your computer and your router? And how they often don't want to stay on the line while you're doing that (or if you're using chat, you'll get disconnected)? If you can say, "I did that step already" to everything they come up with, you'll eventually reach the point in their script where they're SUPPOSED to escalate you to the next level.
This is painful, but there's no way around it. They're not supposed to escalate you immediately. If they did that, the second tier would get overwhelmed anyhow. So they're an important and necessary filter to deal with all the OTHER people calling in who are total morons who don't realize their router isn't plugged in.
It's like dealing with some doctors. If you know what's wrong with you, don't ask for the right drug. Find out what are the classic symptoms to tell them about so that they'll feel smart by writing you the right prescription.
Here's one specific case: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LGPL-GPGPU-NyuziProcessor
Multiple people have contacted Michael Larabel and told him that it is in fact Jeff Bush, not Theo Markettos, who developed Nyuzi. I emailed Larabel directly. Multiple people pointed the error out on the forums. People mentioned it in response to Larabel's tweet. Larabel has been contacted in enough different ways that he simply could not have missed this, so he's intentionally refusing to correct the error. BTW, this is not his only error in the linked article.
Just to be clear, this is not an isolated incident, otherwise it wouldn't bother me so much. Innocent mistakes happen. But I've caught him on numerous occasions posting factual errors on his site. It is clear that he has zero interest in correcting his errors.
Here's another one: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwNTQ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwODY And some others on this topic.
The OGP is more or less dead, although Nyuzi has the potential to bring is new life. However, Larabel got his information about the demise of the OGP from this weasel named Michael Meeuwisse who for whatever reason got a bug up his ass to undermine the OGP. I think he wanted to take attention away from us to put it onto his ProjectVGA. Now, disagreements happen. But Larabel is a sensationalist, not a journalist, so it was more in his favor to get his "facts" from some malcontent. Instead of me, the guy who founded the OGP who would therefore be able to present a different perspective and correct some of the factual errors. But that wasn't interesting to Larabel.
Does any of this matter in the long run? Not really. Nobody who matters really believed any of what Meeuwisse was saying, and it hasn't had any impact on what's going on with Nyuzi or any other work in this area. Meeuwisse and his ProjectVGA have disappeared into obscurity even moreso than the OGP.
The fact still remains that Larabel has zero interest in correcting errors or presenting rebuttals or any kind of balanced viewpoint.
An open source GPU: https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor And its wiki: https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor/wiki And even some peer-review: http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~millerti/nyami-ispass2015.pdf
We could have fixed this problem a decade ago if the FOSS community had gotten behind the Open Graphics Project, but they're not as interested in FOSS-friendly graphics as they say they are. This is because most FOSS enthusiasts are more interested in gratis than they are in freedom.
There's still lots for people to do with those trucks. People have to load them, drive them between loading/unloading and staging areas, maintain them, fuel them, etc. Sure, a computer can back up a semi to a loading dock, but the logistics are more complicated than that, so humans will be involved. So basically, the effect of having self-driving trucks is that the same people that drive them all around the country can now just live at end and way points, and we can deploy more trucks for them to handle at delivery ends and way points.
You see, eating more nutritious foods, and maybe avoiding certain conventionally grown foods that are known to suck up pesticides (i.e. only buy organic apples), and maybe using fewer BPA-laden containers, and maybe exercising, and maybe taking a good multivitamin, and maybe cutting your sugar intake. How about not smoking and cutting back on the binge drinking? We could also work to reduce the industrial pollution we pump into the air and water. But those things are all just too hard to do. This would mean you can't eat pizza and beer for every meal and put all your garbage into the land fill.
But vaccines are easy to avoid. So we'll just blame everything on them.
I'm not saying that there aren't problems with systemd. But I'm noticing a trend in terms of the balance of attitudes about systemd and toward people who keep going on and on about how they hate systemd. They're in a shrinking minority, and everybody else is just moving on, both technologically and mentally. Currently, the systemd deniers are just considered to be annoying. But give it a year, and they the attitude will be quite different: In the same way that creationists and climate change deniers are thought of as morons by the rest of the scientific community, the systemd haters will be relegated to the class of trolls and bikeshedders who interfere with progress. And this has nothing to do with whether or not they're RIGHT about anything.
I have known people who were passionate for programming... but they were terrible at it. And people who were passionate at something else but managed to write some damn good code... when they were required to as a tool to solve a problem in some other domain. I was a total computer nerd as a kid, but now I don't code for its own sake most of the time. (Actually, I do sometimes, but not anywhere near what I used to.) Now, I mostly code because I have to. I enjoy it, but it's just a part of bigger things I'm working on, and those problems (a lot of them in circuits) are what I'm passionate about.
I have another thought to put programming into perspective: I know CS professors who are _fine_ at coding, but some are way better than others. That varying coding skill has nothing to do with their effectiveness at the job, because they're scientists doing research, most of which doesn't relate to coding per se.
Technically, China is a capitalist dictatorship. People often conflate the economic system with the system of government, because in our experience, most capitalist counties are also democratic (although typically republics), while most communist countries are also dictatorships. China has a heavily regulated economy, but the government doesn't own all wealth and resources, so it's not communist. That being said, I'm sure there are aspects that are heavily socialist, but no country is completely polar in these regards. I mean, the US isn't totally capitalist; there are high taxes, and there are a lot of centralized resources in the government.
There are a lot of "skeptics" who are really motivated by their own special interests, like not wanting reduction in coal mining to impact their home state's economy. They are set up to be biased. But a lot of skeptics are true believers that climate science is some kind of grand conspiracy. Now with those people, I don't really know what their motivation is for being skeptics, because they're not scientists. They just repeat some stuff they've been told by other people that sounds plausible to them. But anyhow, this is the problem we face. Most of the skeptics are not "lying." They are simply misinformed.
I've been saying for years that plasmoids (with their rounded corners and translucency and other cool effects) look neat, but the window manager looks terrible, because it doesn't fit in with the rest of the theme. It looks like they've been improving it a bit. It's still not totally seamless, but it's way better than it was a few years ago.
So, I have a question: KDE seems like a more technlogically advanced desktop system and it's more pleasant to look at than GNOME. What is the appeal of sticking to GNOME as the default in distros like Ubuntu?
Regarding lead in the water, you don't know the half of it. People harp on all the wrong contaminants. It's like this bullshut about vaccines and autism. Two (!) cases involving autism and vaccines have gone to court, and in both cases, the "victim" had some preexisting condition. The fact is, the really horrible American diet, with excessive sugar and pesticides and all kids of other crap, has far more impact on developing autism symptoms.
The original theory was that by putting fluoride into drinking water, it'll get into developing teeth, which are chemically altered to be harder. Then they figured out that that doesn't happen; it just reacts directly with teeth in the mouth. But we have fluoride toothpaste that does just as well and doesn't get swallowed quite as much. Then there's the issue of toxicity, which apparently is essentially nil except for people with thyroid problems, where the fluorine can displace iodine.
The conspiracy theorists actually play on the thyroid thing. The idea is that fluoride induces hypothyroidism, which slows people down and makes them more docile, and a docile populace is what governments want, because they rock the boat less. But I think this is a case of opportunism, kinda like how creationists will accept scientific theories whenever they appear to support their delusions. The theory that it was a communist plot predates any hypotheses about thyroid effects. I don't think there's any evidence that fluoride will *induce* thyroid problems.
It's possible that Michael Larabel didn't get his facts wrong this time, but he has a history of (a) sloppy reporting and (b) completely ignoring requests for making corrections. Considering the number of times his mistake was pointed out in this one case (https://twitter.com/phoronix/status/575005596501590016, http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?115543-An-LGPL-Licensed-Larrabee-Inspired-GPGPU-Processor/page2), I think he does it on purpose just to fuck with people.
There are systemd haters who just think the design is fundamentally broken. There are others who just don't want to have to deal with an immature, buggy system for years upon end. By putting it into a distro as popular as Ubuntu, there's going to be a ton of practical fallout, where more and more people hit the corner cases and experience system crashes, many of which are directly the result of systemd bugs. Now, if Canonical are really smart (who knows), they'll be logging these crashes and make it easy to push stack traces upstream.
Eventually, the bugs will be worked out, and all we'll be arguing about is the architecture.
Someone already pointed out how the creationists are already going to use this in their favor as evidence that fossils aren't the product or evolution or somesuch.
But it goes both ways. They often rant about how the scientific literature is biased against anything that goes against the evolution dogma. Although these non-life fossils don't really contradict any OTHER fossil evidence, nevertheless, here we have an example of a publication about exactly the sort of thing that the creationists say would never get published.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to downplay the feeling of insult that the black couple experienced. There is a long history of racism against blacks, referring to them as apes and other things, with the intent of putting them down. In *this* case, it was an accident of a flawed algorithm, but there's some history here that makes that a hot button. For the sake of repairing the effects of racism of the past, we should be careful about how we use racial slurs, even accidentally.
That all being said, we're learning more and more about gorillas and other higher apes and how intelligent they are. We're closely related. To an alien from another planet, they may look at humans and other apes and not perceive much difference. To compare humans (in general) to apes (in general) isn't all that unreasonable. And some day, when all this racism shit is behind us, mistakes like what happened here might be merely amusing.
A mechanical hard drive is, well, a mechanical device, which can fail at any time due to vibration, wear, weak parts, and lots of other reasons. They're ticking time bombs. That being said, as with other mechanical devices, like cars, they are appropriately over-designed with wide tolerances. With cars, you get several years of warranty to have the weak parts replaced so that by the end of that period, it ought to be in good shape. Testing a hard drive is a time-consuming and expensive procedure, which is why only the enterprise drives get any factory testing. The rest just ship. To keep down the failure rate, drives are built with all kinds of mechanisms to compensate for variation. For instance, there are vibration sensors, and the firmware will slow down the spindle and read/write arm movements to ensure that the drive works *correctly* even if some have degraded performance. It is this approach that keeps hard drive prices low. While the failures are unfortunate, an alternative would increase prices for everyone, and the smart ones among us put new drives through burn-in testing anyhow. When I buy a laptop, I cross my fingers that the drive has been through some OEM testing. When I build a server, I do burn-in and use RAID.
Adrenal fatigue is a real thing. I have it. And if you want a norepinepherine boost, those glandulars work great.
Man. Some people keep missing the "and other alternative" parts. Can't read much?
I agree that homeopathy is total nonsense. Unfortunately, it's commonly linked with other forms of alternative medicine that actually do work, and I won't want to see those go down as well. In fact, there is a push by the pharmaceutical companies for the FDA to regulate alternative medicines such that they will become no longer cost-effective to produce. Herbal meds take money out of the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies, so they will try to take advantage of homeopathy going down to elimiate herbal meds as well.
I could list all sorts of herbal and other alternative meds and their positive effects and side-effects. Two I'll mention:
- Dessicated bovine adrenal gland is useful if you have some mild adrenal dysfunction.
- Dessicated porcine thyroid gland is fabulous if you have a thyroid disorder and Levothyroxine hasn't been effective. The glandular is kinda like taking Armour Thyroid or Cytomel, except that you get the complete set of thyroid hormones.
Just to be clear. The government lies. Government workers just say whatever they have to to stay out of trouble. This results in lies, but the individual employees aren't lying, at least not intentionally. Only upper management has culpability for not specifying what to say that is truthful.
Edward Snowden had no family to take care of. He was a loner who could afford to flee the country. Most other people are not in this kind of position.
I don't care who you are; people act in their own self-interests. For many government workers, their self-interests include keeping their job, taking care of their families, and not getting thrown into jail. So when a government employee tells you something, you can't trust it. But that's not because they're lying. Most of the time, they're misinformed. Nobody in the NSA knows what anyone else in the NSA is doing. It looks like it's so poorly managed that the management doesn't know what the rest of the organization is doing. (Hey, they should try spying on themselves!) The rest of the time, they're just saying the minimum that is safe to say. The main thing impacting what they say is keeping out of trouble, so they'll say whatever achieves that goal.
Considering that neither you nor I have the circumstances or cojones to do what Snowden did, we're in no position to judge what he or anyone else has done. Most slashdotters in his position like to talk big right now, but the fact is, you'd be scared shitless and do absolutely nothing. Or maybe if you could manage in this economy, you might try to find a different job. Someone really smart and dedicated would work to gain employee status so they could be covered under whistle-blower laws. But that's neither you nor I. The same applied to every other government position.
And as I say, everyone else is in the same position. You want to judge the people who work for the federal government. But they act with total self-interest in the same way that we do. Don't make waves, feed your family, don't get arrested. The only way to fix these problems is to change the law, and that is slowly happening. It may take decades, but it'll happen.
Meanwhile, we all need to be cognizant of the needs to maintain both freedom in our country and also security. We should not sacrifice one for the other. But that makes this a delicate and dynamic balancing act. There are no simple solutions. And on our own, neither you nor I knows the whole solution (in part because the solution has to keep adapting to the ever-changing threats to freedom and security).
Keep in mind that the customer service person you get when you first call your cable company knows less than nothing. The have a script and some stock questions and answer, and they would likely get into trouble for deviating from those. Telling them that you know more than they do is likely to annoy them and slow down your progress.
I have found that the best way to deal with this is to actually go through all the trouble-shooting steps yourself that you know they'll put you through. For instance, you know how they tell you to reboot your computer and your router? And how they often don't want to stay on the line while you're doing that (or if you're using chat, you'll get disconnected)? If you can say, "I did that step already" to everything they come up with, you'll eventually reach the point in their script where they're SUPPOSED to escalate you to the next level.
This is painful, but there's no way around it. They're not supposed to escalate you immediately. If they did that, the second tier would get overwhelmed anyhow. So they're an important and necessary filter to deal with all the OTHER people calling in who are total morons who don't realize their router isn't plugged in.
It's like dealing with some doctors. If you know what's wrong with you, don't ask for the right drug. Find out what are the classic symptoms to tell them about so that they'll feel smart by writing you the right prescription.
Because I work at SUNY Binghamton and therefore saw the original article before it got slashdotted. :)
Here's one specific case:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LGPL-GPGPU-NyuziProcessor
Multiple people have contacted Michael Larabel and told him that it is in fact Jeff Bush, not Theo Markettos, who developed Nyuzi. I emailed Larabel directly. Multiple people pointed the error out on the forums. People mentioned it in response to Larabel's tweet. Larabel has been contacted in enough different ways that he simply could not have missed this, so he's intentionally refusing to correct the error. BTW, this is not his only error in the linked article.
Just to be clear, this is not an isolated incident, otherwise it wouldn't bother me so much. Innocent mistakes happen. But I've caught him on numerous occasions posting factual errors on his site. It is clear that he has zero interest in correcting his errors.
Here's another one:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwNTQ
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwODY
And some others on this topic.
The OGP is more or less dead, although Nyuzi has the potential to bring is new life. However, Larabel got his information about the demise of the OGP from this weasel named Michael Meeuwisse who for whatever reason got a bug up his ass to undermine the OGP. I think he wanted to take attention away from us to put it onto his ProjectVGA. Now, disagreements happen. But Larabel is a sensationalist, not a journalist, so it was more in his favor to get his "facts" from some malcontent. Instead of me, the guy who founded the OGP who would therefore be able to present a different perspective and correct some of the factual errors. But that wasn't interesting to Larabel.
Does any of this matter in the long run? Not really. Nobody who matters really believed any of what Meeuwisse was saying, and it hasn't had any impact on what's going on with Nyuzi or any other work in this area. Meeuwisse and his ProjectVGA have disappeared into obscurity even moreso than the OGP.
The fact still remains that Larabel has zero interest in correcting errors or presenting rebuttals or any kind of balanced viewpoint.
Are you satisfied now?
Which is synonymous for bad journalism. What did you expect?
Someone at Apple just has the hots for that blonde singer.
I don't blame them. :)
An open source GPU: https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor
And its wiki: https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor/wiki
And even some peer-review: http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~millerti/nyami-ispass2015.pdf
We could have fixed this problem a decade ago if the FOSS community had gotten behind the Open Graphics Project, but they're not as interested in FOSS-friendly graphics as they say they are. This is because most FOSS enthusiasts are more interested in gratis than they are in freedom.
There's still lots for people to do with those trucks. People have to load them, drive them between loading/unloading and staging areas, maintain them, fuel them, etc. Sure, a computer can back up a semi to a loading dock, but the logistics are more complicated than that, so humans will be involved. So basically, the effect of having self-driving trucks is that the same people that drive them all around the country can now just live at end and way points, and we can deploy more trucks for them to handle at delivery ends and way points.
You see, eating more nutritious foods, and maybe avoiding certain conventionally grown foods that are known to suck up pesticides (i.e. only buy organic apples), and maybe using fewer BPA-laden containers, and maybe exercising, and maybe taking a good multivitamin, and maybe cutting your sugar intake. How about not smoking and cutting back on the binge drinking? We could also work to reduce the industrial pollution we pump into the air and water. But those things are all just too hard to do. This would mean you can't eat pizza and beer for every meal and put all your garbage into the land fill.
But vaccines are easy to avoid. So we'll just blame everything on them.
I'm not saying that there aren't problems with systemd. But I'm noticing a trend in terms of the balance of attitudes about systemd and toward people who keep going on and on about how they hate systemd. They're in a shrinking minority, and everybody else is just moving on, both technologically and mentally. Currently, the systemd deniers are just considered to be annoying. But give it a year, and they the attitude will be quite different: In the same way that creationists and climate change deniers are thought of as morons by the rest of the scientific community, the systemd haters will be relegated to the class of trolls and bikeshedders who interfere with progress. And this has nothing to do with whether or not they're RIGHT about anything.
I have known people who were passionate for programming... but they were terrible at it. And people who were passionate at something else but managed to write some damn good code... when they were required to as a tool to solve a problem in some other domain. I was a total computer nerd as a kid, but now I don't code for its own sake most of the time. (Actually, I do sometimes, but not anywhere near what I used to.) Now, I mostly code because I have to. I enjoy it, but it's just a part of bigger things I'm working on, and those problems (a lot of them in circuits) are what I'm passionate about.
I have another thought to put programming into perspective: I know CS professors who are _fine_ at coding, but some are way better than others. That varying coding skill has nothing to do with their effectiveness at the job, because they're scientists doing research, most of which doesn't relate to coding per se.
Technically, China is a capitalist dictatorship. People often conflate the economic system with the system of government, because in our experience, most capitalist counties are also democratic (although typically republics), while most communist countries are also dictatorships. China has a heavily regulated economy, but the government doesn't own all wealth and resources, so it's not communist. That being said, I'm sure there are aspects that are heavily socialist, but no country is completely polar in these regards. I mean, the US isn't totally capitalist; there are high taxes, and there are a lot of centralized resources in the government.
There are a lot of "skeptics" who are really motivated by their own special interests, like not wanting reduction in coal mining to impact their home state's economy. They are set up to be biased. But a lot of skeptics are true believers that climate science is some kind of grand conspiracy. Now with those people, I don't really know what their motivation is for being skeptics, because they're not scientists. They just repeat some stuff they've been told by other people that sounds plausible to them. But anyhow, this is the problem we face. Most of the skeptics are not "lying." They are simply misinformed.
I've been saying for years that plasmoids (with their rounded corners and translucency and other cool effects) look neat, but the window manager looks terrible, because it doesn't fit in with the rest of the theme. It looks like they've been improving it a bit. It's still not totally seamless, but it's way better than it was a few years ago.
So, I have a question: KDE seems like a more technlogically advanced desktop system and it's more pleasant to look at than GNOME. What is the appeal of sticking to GNOME as the default in distros like Ubuntu?
Regarding lead in the water, you don't know the half of it. People harp on all the wrong contaminants. It's like this bullshut about vaccines and autism. Two (!) cases involving autism and vaccines have gone to court, and in both cases, the "victim" had some preexisting condition. The fact is, the really horrible American diet, with excessive sugar and pesticides and all kids of other crap, has far more impact on developing autism symptoms.
The original theory was that by putting fluoride into drinking water, it'll get into developing teeth, which are chemically altered to be harder. Then they figured out that that doesn't happen; it just reacts directly with teeth in the mouth. But we have fluoride toothpaste that does just as well and doesn't get swallowed quite as much. Then there's the issue of toxicity, which apparently is essentially nil except for people with thyroid problems, where the fluorine can displace iodine.
The conspiracy theorists actually play on the thyroid thing. The idea is that fluoride induces hypothyroidism, which slows people down and makes them more docile, and a docile populace is what governments want, because they rock the boat less. But I think this is a case of opportunism, kinda like how creationists will accept scientific theories whenever they appear to support their delusions. The theory that it was a communist plot predates any hypotheses about thyroid effects. I don't think there's any evidence that fluoride will *induce* thyroid problems.
It's possible that Michael Larabel didn't get his facts wrong this time, but he has a history of (a) sloppy reporting and (b) completely ignoring requests for making corrections. Considering the number of times his mistake was pointed out in this one case (https://twitter.com/phoronix/status/575005596501590016, http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?115543-An-LGPL-Licensed-Larrabee-Inspired-GPGPU-Processor/page2), I think he does it on purpose just to fuck with people.
There are systemd haters who just think the design is fundamentally broken. There are others who just don't want to have to deal with an immature, buggy system for years upon end. By putting it into a distro as popular as Ubuntu, there's going to be a ton of practical fallout, where more and more people hit the corner cases and experience system crashes, many of which are directly the result of systemd bugs. Now, if Canonical are really smart (who knows), they'll be logging these crashes and make it easy to push stack traces upstream.
Eventually, the bugs will be worked out, and all we'll be arguing about is the architecture.
Someone already pointed out how the creationists are already going to use this in their favor as evidence that fossils aren't the product or evolution or somesuch.
But it goes both ways. They often rant about how the scientific literature is biased against anything that goes against the evolution dogma. Although these non-life fossils don't really contradict any OTHER fossil evidence, nevertheless, here we have an example of a publication about exactly the sort of thing that the creationists say would never get published.