I'm fine with this. The idea of freedom of speech is about allowing people say what they think, even if it is unpopular. However, there is no mandate that people have to listen to you. Creating tools to help people filter out speech they aren't interested in hearing in such a way that it only affects the listener is a great idea. If some people want live in their own little bubble/safe-space let them, it doesn't hurt anyone else. This is a much better solution than other sites (cough twitter cough) use that would remove the post altogether. A mechanism we've seen abused again and again to stifle speech that is unpopular.
The central problem with projects like this is the result is already determined. They've already decided that movies are horribly sexist before the first line of code was written. Think about it. What if, after detailed analysis, it was determined that there is no problem, that women and men are treated roughly equal? What happens then? It can't happen, it wouldn't be acceptable. The funding would dry up, and they would be shutdown. It would be like the NRA releasing a study saying guns are bad. And good luck getting funding in the future, if you can't produce results that affirm what we "know to be true" then clearly you are a terrible researcher.
Bankruptcy is an absurd punishment over a celebrity sex tape. But that isn't what bankrupted them.
Gawker got taken to court to have the film taken down, and lost. But decided to keep spreading the film anyway, and wrote an article bragging that they were going to ignore the ruling. Giving a big middle finger to the judicial system. That is what did them in. The court would have let them off much easier if they hadn't been complete assholes. It didn't help that AJ Daulerio "joked" that he would have given the green light to publish child porn.
Finally the punishment wasn't to bankrupt them. Hogan only sought $100 million in damages, it was the court that felt he was owed more.
The whole thing is a sham. The people behind this want UBI so they are rigging up a system to "prove" that it work.
This "experiment" is useless because it's only testing the easy part of the UBI, handing out money, while completely ignoring the hard part: collecting. What will happen to people if we give them free money? Their lives will improve obviously! This isn't in question. In fact it isn't even new. If they really wanted to know the answer to that question they could just research people who have won cash for life lotto prizes, those have been around for a long time and would be a much more cost effective way to study giving out free money.
If they want to test UBI they need to test the part that will actually be difficult: paying for it. Anyone who has seriously looked into UBI recognises that it's an insanely expensive proposal. The much bandied about "efficiencies" and replacing existing services won't even come close. To make UBI work there would have to be a massive tax increase, and that is the part that is the hard sell. Jacking up everyone's taxes so that people can choose to sit at home and do nothing all day.
This "experiment" has nothing to do with testing UBI. It's about putting the name UBI on an experiment that can't possibly fail so they can hold it up as proof that UBI works.
The problem these claims about "subsidies" is that they are not. An untaxed negative externality is not a subsidy, no matter how much the green lobby tries to spin it as such. This bogus calculation is never applied in other areas, no one counts the cost of car accidents as subsidies, or the health impact of a big mac. People have come to associate subsidies with something bad, and now people like Musk are trying to expand the definition to suit their own ends. It's bullshit and people need to start calling them on it.
They call it the "brains" of the plane. It isn't. The brains are the sensor fusion computers. This is the Autonomic Logistics Information System. Key word: Logistics. It's a maintenance system. They say the whole program is a failure because the fancy maintenance system could ground the fleet. Except most of the USAF flies just fine without this type of system. Oh, and the problem isn't that it doesn't work, it is working. It's that it hasn't been thoroughly tested. Why? Because it's still in testing. Then they complain that there is no backup system if it doesn't work.
So they cry that the program is too expensive. Then cry some more because there is no redundant replacement for a non-critical system. Of course if there were a backup system they would be complaining that the program spent millions on duplicated efforts. It's just stupid.
That would actually be very useful. If you know of an earthquake a few days out you can:
1) Have emergency services ready for an influx of casualties. 2) Have the national guard on standby just in case. 3) Shutdown all the nuclear reactors. 4) Make sure any dams are not operating near capacity. 5) Prevent workers from working on high rise construction projects. 6) Prevent workers from working with hazards materials for that day. 7) Shutdown oil refineries and other major fire hazards. 8) Shutdown any amusement parks. 9) Stop all the trains. 10) Have airlines ready to divert to other airports. 11) Limit the number of vehicles that can be on major bridges. 12) Issue public alerts reminding people what to do in case of an earth quake.
It matters a lot depending on the type of embedded chip you are using. Unlike microprocessors, microcontrollers include the RAM on chip in the form of SRAM. This is to save money, power, or both. The PIC32MX795 microcontroller that I'm working on right now only has 512k of SRAM and it is the largest offering from PIC. On the small end PIC10s can have as little as 16 bytes! With tons of chips in-between. On that RAM you might need your OS, TCP/IP stack, USB Host stack, FAT filesystem stack, graphics stack, a bootloader, plus drivers for whatever you are connected to, and then your code. All told it can add up to a lot. It sounds crazy to have such small amounts, but with nanowatts of power consumption and prices a low as 30 cents these chips find uses everywhere.
Indeed. I do this on my company's internal VM server with LXC+BTRFS and it is amazing. Once we get one system setup we can snapshot it and make many copies. Even better is for working with old versions. Since we keep a copy of each old image, if something comes up its easy to spin up a clone of an old version and reproduce the customers issue.
This is really interesting technology, but the article is a little light on the details.
What is the efficiency of this system? What is was the price? Is the water coming out of the system potable? What are the "Unused Gases" coming out of the system? Where does the salt from the salt water go?
Cargo ships release a huge amount of CO2, the only reason we don't complain is because they are efficient per ton moved. But switching them over would greatly reduce CO2 consumption. I think it would make sense to do them first since the ship designs are much much less sensitive to mass and volume relative to airplanes. Further, we have had ship based electric propulsion in the form of submarines for a very long time. Once the prise of batteries comes down I'd like to see high voltage lines to the major ports on hand to re-charge ships while the are being unloaded. Since they don't need to be charge 24/7 they would make a great place to dump excess capacity when solar/wind are producing at their maximum.
I think most pilots would prefer to not be shot at all.
The problem with the A-10 is it's whole philosophy is low and slow. You can't build a flying tank. Sure can put some armour on aircraft, but it's a losing proposition. Armour is heavy, and heavy thing don't fly too well. It's also hard to upgrade the armour of a plane. Case in point is the A-10 which was designed to withstand the Soviets 23mm AA, to which the Soviets responded by upgrading their AA to 30mm.
This is why every other plane flies high and fast. It's why everyone is investing in stealthier planes.
Except the A-10 isn't successful at it's job, never has been.
The A-10 was designed to strafe tanks during the Cold War, but never got used for that mission. They tried to use it to attack Republican Guard tanks during First Iraq War. But the A-10 proved too vulnerable to anti-air defences and the job was given to F-16s using laser guided bombs. The majority of ground attack missions in the Second Iraq War was conducted by F-16s and F-18s. The same is true for Afghanistan. The only reason the A-10 is still around is because congress won't let the USAF get rid of it. It's never been good at its job.
I'm not sure why people are hammering Trump on this, he isn't saying anything different than Clinton or Obama.
Here is what Clinton had to say: “We’re going to hear all the usual complaints, you know, freedom of speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of foreign fighters, then we’ve got to shut off their means of communicating." And Obama has proposed outlawing encryption.
At least Trump has has the balls to admit that the media are part of the problem.
The thing about ships is that they can go places and carry a lot of fire power. You can send the airforce and army if there are friendly countries in the neighbourhood willing to base them. But only the navy can project power on a global scale. Further, pretty much anything can be put on a ship. Cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, air planes, you name it. So if you are close enough to launch a missile at a ship, there is a pretty good chance that the ship is close enough to launch a missile at you. But the ship has the added benefit that it can move around pretty quickly. Fixed installations like missile sites and airfields not so much.
Lately there has been a lot of talk about Chinese anti-ship missiles. But the problem is that those are an asymmetric response. Area denial might help China keep the US out of the South China Sea. But it isn't going to do much to help Chinas allies in Africa. It isn't going to protect China trade routes through the Strait of Malacca. Nor will it lend credence to Chinese offers of military assistance to new allies.
To win a war, you have to show up in the war zone. Without a Navy, you aren't going to get far from your immediate neighbourhood.
Spend the first quarter of the day in meeting either day dreaming or staring off in to space. Spend the second quarter of the day responding to email, talking to customers on the phone, or talking to coworkers about interfacing our code. Spend the third quarter of the day doing some vim. Spend the fourth quarter of the day browsing the internet and waiting to go home.
Really, the actual typing away part of my job is pretty small. I probably spend at least as much time whiteboarding, talking to coworkes, and talking to customers as coding.
Further I work in embedded systems, I don't see the C language going anywhere soon. I don't expect the Linux kernel to be rewritten in Haskell anytime soon.
I started on LinuxMint 17 and rolled into 17.1 and 17.2 without any problems, and I don't expect any problems for 17.3.
The thing to remember is that LinuxMint 17.x series is based off of the Ubuntu 14.04LTS. So the upgrade from 17.2 -> 17.3 is like going from Ubuntu 14.04.2 -> 14.04.3. The major changes are to the parts of the software stack that are added by the LinuxMint team like the Cinnamon DE and the Mint* series of apps. Although this release does include a kernel upgrade from 3.16 -> 3.19, that still isn't exactly bleeding edge. And an upgrade for LibreOffice from 4.4 -> 5. So these are all pretty safe upgrades. These aren't Arch style rolling releases, morel like Windows service pack upgrades. There shouldn't be any major changes to the core of the system like switching to systemd or moving from python2.7 -> python3 or anything like that.
Also note that the upgrade will not install automatically. To do the upgrade you have to open the Update Manger like you do for normal upgrade, and select "Upgrade to 17.3" from the Edit menu, or something like that (sorry it's been a while). Accurate instructions will be posted on the LinuxMint blog in a little while. If you are concerned just wait a week or so and see if people on the forums have had any issues.
The systemd team didn't create those dependencies, the DE maintainers did. All of these DEs ran just fine without systemd and they still could if someone was interested in doing so. In fact given the maturity of the old interfaces, and the code already existing in previous releases it should be much easier to maintain say, KDE or Gnome, without systemd that it is for the team trying to add it in. There is nothing stopping people from forking the existing code and running their own project, we have seen this happen in the open-source world dozens of times. If there is a lot of demand for systemd less distros, the community will make them.
The question isn't "Will You Be Able To Run a Modern Desktop Environment In 2016 Without Systemd?". The question is "Where are all the systemd-free projects?".
Linus said talk is cheap show me the code. So where is it? For all the complaining, flamewars, and cries of fleeing to *BSD you would expect systemd-free projects to be springing up left and right. So where are they? If Red Hat is making such a huge mistake switching to systemd, then surely their competitors at SUSE, Cannonical, and Mandriva will capitalize on that mistake in the name of profits no? It isn't surprising that seemingly everyone is adopting systemd. systemd is solving problems and implementing feature that people want. That is easy to explain.
What is remarkable here is the massive disconnect between the amount of outcry about systemd and the amount of code being written to avoid it.
After WWII the West and the Soviets split Germany. East Germany has socialism, where everyone's needs were provided for. West Germany had a capitalist system, where people got what they worked for. Well it didn't take long for people working in the East to figure out that they could do much better in the West, so they left. Yes, some of it was politics, yes some of it was about freedom. But the Berlin Wall wasn't built to stop political activists, pensioners, university students, or those in need of longterm care from fleeing. It was to stop professionals: engineers, technicians, physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers. The drain of those with the largest net contribution to society was crippling the East German economy. So they built a wall to stop them. It's not an accident that most socialist countries enforce(d) exit visas.
Here in Canada we already enjoy a brain drain of our medical professionals. Why stay in Canada with lower incomes and higher taxes, when you can jump across the boarder and make out so much better. And I predict that Finland will see the same thing. Many Fins already speak Swedish and English so the barrier to exit is low. If you are a high paid professional why lose a huge chunk of your income to those who don't work when you can leave via the Schengen agreement.
Now might say that it won't cost extra because we will cut funding in other programs. Well that's bullshit. But don't take my word for it, or the media's word for it, sit down and do the math yourself. Basic income that provides any meaningful level of income is crazy expensive, well beyond what a few cuts here and there is going to cover.
You might say that only a few people care enough about higher taxes to leave. And you would be right. The problem is that it is the people who pay the most taxes who are going to leave. And when they leave the tax burden on those who stay goes up. Which creates more incentive for people to leave. It's a vicious cycle where the highest taxed leave and the next highest tax bare the burden.
I'll leave you with a thought experiment. Let say a nice liberal state like Vermont decided it's going to implement basic income, but no other state in the union follows suite. What do you think would happen?
Well for starters the B-2 isn't going to be replaced by the LSB, only the B-52 and B-1B are. The B-2 will be replaced by a new bomber design sometime around 2037, but that is ways off. More B-2s won't be built because they are expensive, and after 20 years the state of the art has changed a lot.
The B-1B was designed to defeat Soviet radar by flying low and fast. We now know that this won't work against a modern air defence systems that know how to deal with ground clutter. While at present only the big boys have these radars over the next 15 years Russia will be exporting them all over the world. Further the fast-and-low is hard on the airframe and hard on the engines. Making the B-1B expensive to operate and short on lifespan. By 2030 the B-1Bs are going to be almost 50 years old and at the end of their lifespan. So you either spend a lot of money extending the life of an old plane with an outdated mission, or you spend a lot of money on something modern.
The B-52 is a dinosaur and the USAF keeps flying it because they've never gotten the money to replace it. By 2030 those airframe will have no life left in them. And the B-52 has been outdated since what? The 80s or 90s? The USAF has extend its life by using it as a missile truck, but it can't bomb targets in contested airspace. They use it because that is what they have.
The problem is that a lot of studios are trying to produce cash cows, and audiences aren't buying it.
These shows establish a basic over arching story that people are actually interested in. But spend 90% of the show with monster of the week crap that no one is interested in. With the goal being of milking the show for as long as possible. With two predictable results: Most shows are just garbage that never pick up a fan base and die after a season or two. While a handful shows get lucky and they milk it for years until the audience gets pissed off.
Studios need to start producing shows that are designed to end. Stop producing comic-book style never ending stories, and start producing long movies. Shows like Dexter and Battlestar Galactica had amazing ideas in them, but the writers just lurched from season to season trying to keep the things afloat. There needs to be a story with a fixed end point, and once the show gets there it ends and that talent moves on to something else. I'd much rather watch a bunch of long-miniseries type shows like Rome, Band of Brothers, Sherlock, Jekyll, Babylon 5, etc. That are designed to end. Than all these shows that just milk a good idea to death.
Back in 1991 the A-10 had to be pulled off attacks on the Republican Guard and given a blanket lower flight deck because they were getting shot down. Think about that. The air defences of a 3rd world dictatorship bested the A-10 almost 25 years ago. The replacement were F-16s using precision weapons and a new method called 'tank plinking'. The USAF has been trying to kill the A-10 ever since. Its an aircraft designed for killing tanks, but it haven't been able to do that job in decades.
Even during the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of the strike were being done by F-16s and F-18s. Multirole aircraft like the F-16 and F-18 plus drones have already replace the A-10. Congress just doesn't want to do that for political reasons. Not because of cost or effectiveness.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fine with this. The idea of freedom of speech is about allowing people say what they think, even if it is unpopular. However, there is no mandate that people have to listen to you. Creating tools to help people filter out speech they aren't interested in hearing in such a way that it only affects the listener is a great idea. If some people want live in their own little bubble /safe-space let them, it doesn't hurt anyone else. This is a much better solution than other sites (cough twitter cough) use that would remove the post altogether. A mechanism we've seen abused again and again to stifle speech that is unpopular.
The central problem with projects like this is the result is already determined. They've already decided that movies are horribly sexist before the first line of code was written. Think about it. What if, after detailed analysis, it was determined that there is no problem, that women and men are treated roughly equal? What happens then? It can't happen, it wouldn't be acceptable. The funding would dry up, and they would be shutdown. It would be like the NRA releasing a study saying guns are bad. And good luck getting funding in the future, if you can't produce results that affirm what we "know to be true" then clearly you are a terrible researcher.
Bankruptcy is an absurd punishment over a celebrity sex tape. But that isn't what bankrupted them.
Gawker got taken to court to have the film taken down, and lost. But decided to keep spreading the film anyway, and wrote an article bragging that they were going to ignore the ruling. Giving a big middle finger to the judicial system. That is what did them in. The court would have let them off much easier if they hadn't been complete assholes. It didn't help that AJ Daulerio "joked" that he would have given the green light to publish child porn.
Finally the punishment wasn't to bankrupt them. Hogan only sought $100 million in damages, it was the court that felt he was owed more.
The whole thing is a sham. The people behind this want UBI so they are rigging up a system to "prove" that it work.
This "experiment" is useless because it's only testing the easy part of the UBI, handing out money, while completely ignoring the hard part: collecting. What will happen to people if we give them free money? Their lives will improve obviously! This isn't in question. In fact it isn't even new. If they really wanted to know the answer to that question they could just research people who have won cash for life lotto prizes, those have been around for a long time and would be a much more cost effective way to study giving out free money.
If they want to test UBI they need to test the part that will actually be difficult: paying for it. Anyone who has seriously looked into UBI recognises that it's an insanely expensive proposal. The much bandied about "efficiencies" and replacing existing services won't even come close. To make UBI work there would have to be a massive tax increase, and that is the part that is the hard sell. Jacking up everyone's taxes so that people can choose to sit at home and do nothing all day.
This "experiment" has nothing to do with testing UBI. It's about putting the name UBI on an experiment that can't possibly fail so they can hold it up as proof that UBI works.
They haven't gotten the population sufficiently upset yet to justify a state sponsored Netflix that no one watches.
The problem these claims about "subsidies" is that they are not. An untaxed negative externality is not a subsidy, no matter how much the green lobby tries to spin it as such. This bogus calculation is never applied in other areas, no one counts the cost of car accidents as subsidies, or the health impact of a big mac. People have come to associate subsidies with something bad, and now people like Musk are trying to expand the definition to suit their own ends. It's bullshit and people need to start calling them on it.
These F-35 FUD writers are getting desperate.
They call it the "brains" of the plane. It isn't. The brains are the sensor fusion computers. This is the Autonomic Logistics Information System. Key word: Logistics. It's a maintenance system. They say the whole program is a failure because the fancy maintenance system could ground the fleet. Except most of the USAF flies just fine without this type of system. Oh, and the problem isn't that it doesn't work, it is working. It's that it hasn't been thoroughly tested. Why? Because it's still in testing. Then they complain that there is no backup system if it doesn't work.
So they cry that the program is too expensive. Then cry some more because there is no redundant replacement for a non-critical system. Of course if there were a backup system they would be complaining that the program spent millions on duplicated efforts. It's just stupid.
That would actually be very useful. If you know of an earthquake a few days out you can:
1) Have emergency services ready for an influx of casualties.
2) Have the national guard on standby just in case.
3) Shutdown all the nuclear reactors.
4) Make sure any dams are not operating near capacity.
5) Prevent workers from working on high rise construction projects.
6) Prevent workers from working with hazards materials for that day.
7) Shutdown oil refineries and other major fire hazards.
8) Shutdown any amusement parks.
9) Stop all the trains.
10) Have airlines ready to divert to other airports.
11) Limit the number of vehicles that can be on major bridges.
12) Issue public alerts reminding people what to do in case of an earth quake.
All hail Web Marshall Mike Rogers, defender of the internets!
It matters a lot depending on the type of embedded chip you are using. Unlike microprocessors, microcontrollers include the RAM on chip in the form of SRAM. This is to save money, power, or both. The PIC32MX795 microcontroller that I'm working on right now only has 512k of SRAM and it is the largest offering from PIC. On the small end PIC10s can have as little as 16 bytes! With tons of chips in-between. On that RAM you might need your OS, TCP/IP stack, USB Host stack, FAT filesystem stack, graphics stack, a bootloader, plus drivers for whatever you are connected to, and then your code. All told it can add up to a lot. It sounds crazy to have such small amounts, but with nanowatts of power consumption and prices a low as 30 cents these chips find uses everywhere.
Indeed. I do this on my company's internal VM server with LXC+BTRFS and it is amazing. Once we get one system setup we can snapshot it and make many copies. Even better is for working with old versions. Since we keep a copy of each old image, if something comes up its easy to spin up a clone of an old version and reproduce the customers issue.
This is really interesting technology, but the article is a little light on the details.
What is the efficiency of this system?
What is was the price?
Is the water coming out of the system potable?
What are the "Unused Gases" coming out of the system?
Where does the salt from the salt water go?
Htop is a great piece of software. Glad to hear it is still being improved.
Why don't we make electric cargo ships first?
Cargo ships release a huge amount of CO2, the only reason we don't complain is because they are efficient per ton moved. But switching them over would greatly reduce CO2 consumption. I think it would make sense to do them first since the ship designs are much much less sensitive to mass and volume relative to airplanes. Further, we have had ship based electric propulsion in the form of submarines for a very long time. Once the prise of batteries comes down I'd like to see high voltage lines to the major ports on hand to re-charge ships while the are being unloaded. Since they don't need to be charge 24/7 they would make a great place to dump excess capacity when solar/wind are producing at their maximum.
I think most pilots would prefer to not be shot at all.
The problem with the A-10 is it's whole philosophy is low and slow. You can't build a flying tank. Sure can put some armour on aircraft, but it's a losing proposition. Armour is heavy, and heavy thing don't fly too well. It's also hard to upgrade the armour of a plane. Case in point is the A-10 which was designed to withstand the Soviets 23mm AA, to which the Soviets responded by upgrading their AA to 30mm.
This is why every other plane flies high and fast. It's why everyone is investing in stealthier planes.
Except the A-10 isn't successful at it's job, never has been.
The A-10 was designed to strafe tanks during the Cold War, but never got used for that mission. They tried to use it to attack Republican Guard tanks during First Iraq War. But the A-10 proved too vulnerable to anti-air defences and the job was given to F-16s using laser guided bombs. The majority of ground attack missions in the Second Iraq War was conducted by F-16s and F-18s. The same is true for Afghanistan. The only reason the A-10 is still around is because congress won't let the USAF get rid of it. It's never been good at its job.
I'm not sure why people are hammering Trump on this, he isn't saying anything different than Clinton or Obama.
Here is what Clinton had to say: “We’re going to hear all the usual complaints, you know, freedom of speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of foreign fighters, then we’ve got to shut off their means of communicating." And Obama has proposed outlawing encryption.
At least Trump has has the balls to admit that the media are part of the problem.
Cruise missiles launched from what?
The thing about ships is that they can go places and carry a lot of fire power. You can send the airforce and army if there are friendly countries in the neighbourhood willing to base them. But only the navy can project power on a global scale. Further, pretty much anything can be put on a ship. Cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, air planes, you name it. So if you are close enough to launch a missile at a ship, there is a pretty good chance that the ship is close enough to launch a missile at you. But the ship has the added benefit that it can move around pretty quickly. Fixed installations like missile sites and airfields not so much.
Lately there has been a lot of talk about Chinese anti-ship missiles. But the problem is that those are an asymmetric response. Area denial might help China keep the US out of the South China Sea. But it isn't going to do much to help Chinas allies in Africa. It isn't going to protect China trade routes through the Strait of Malacca. Nor will it lend credence to Chinese offers of military assistance to new allies.
To win a war, you have to show up in the war zone. Without a Navy, you aren't going to get far from your immediate neighbourhood.
Probably the same way I do now.
Spend the first quarter of the day in meeting either day dreaming or staring off in to space. Spend the second quarter of the day responding to email, talking to customers on the phone, or talking to coworkers about interfacing our code. Spend the third quarter of the day doing some vim. Spend the fourth quarter of the day browsing the internet and waiting to go home.
Really, the actual typing away part of my job is pretty small. I probably spend at least as much time whiteboarding, talking to coworkes, and talking to customers as coding.
Further I work in embedded systems, I don't see the C language going anywhere soon. I don't expect the Linux kernel to be rewritten in Haskell anytime soon.
I started on LinuxMint 17 and rolled into 17.1 and 17.2 without any problems, and I don't expect any problems for 17.3.
The thing to remember is that LinuxMint 17.x series is based off of the Ubuntu 14.04LTS. So the upgrade from 17.2 -> 17.3 is like going from Ubuntu 14.04.2 -> 14.04.3. The major changes are to the parts of the software stack that are added by the LinuxMint team like the Cinnamon DE and the Mint* series of apps. Although this release does include a kernel upgrade from 3.16 -> 3.19, that still isn't exactly bleeding edge. And an upgrade for LibreOffice from 4.4 -> 5. So these are all pretty safe upgrades. These aren't Arch style rolling releases, morel like Windows service pack upgrades. There shouldn't be any major changes to the core of the system like switching to systemd or moving from python2.7 -> python3 or anything like that.
Also note that the upgrade will not install automatically. To do the upgrade you have to open the Update Manger like you do for normal upgrade, and select "Upgrade to 17.3" from the Edit menu, or something like that (sorry it's been a while). Accurate instructions will be posted on the LinuxMint blog in a little while. If you are concerned just wait a week or so and see if people on the forums have had any issues.
The questioner has it the wrong way around.
The systemd team didn't create those dependencies, the DE maintainers did. All of these DEs ran just fine without systemd and they still could if someone was interested in doing so. In fact given the maturity of the old interfaces, and the code already existing in previous releases it should be much easier to maintain say, KDE or Gnome, without systemd that it is for the team trying to add it in. There is nothing stopping people from forking the existing code and running their own project, we have seen this happen in the open-source world dozens of times. If there is a lot of demand for systemd less distros, the community will make them.
The question isn't "Will You Be Able To Run a Modern Desktop Environment In 2016 Without Systemd?". The question is "Where are all the systemd-free projects?".
Linus said talk is cheap show me the code. So where is it? For all the complaining, flamewars, and cries of fleeing to *BSD you would expect systemd-free projects to be springing up left and right. So where are they? If Red Hat is making such a huge mistake switching to systemd, then surely their competitors at SUSE, Cannonical, and Mandriva will capitalize on that mistake in the name of profits no? It isn't surprising that seemingly everyone is adopting systemd. systemd is solving problems and implementing feature that people want. That is easy to explain.
What is remarkable here is the massive disconnect between the amount of outcry about systemd and the amount of code being written to avoid it.
Haven't we already played this game?
After WWII the West and the Soviets split Germany. East Germany has socialism, where everyone's needs were provided for. West Germany had a capitalist system, where people got what they worked for. Well it didn't take long for people working in the East to figure out that they could do much better in the West, so they left. Yes, some of it was politics, yes some of it was about freedom. But the Berlin Wall wasn't built to stop political activists, pensioners, university students, or those in need of longterm care from fleeing. It was to stop professionals: engineers, technicians, physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers. The drain of those with the largest net contribution to society was crippling the East German economy. So they built a wall to stop them. It's not an accident that most socialist countries enforce(d) exit visas.
Here in Canada we already enjoy a brain drain of our medical professionals. Why stay in Canada with lower incomes and higher taxes, when you can jump across the boarder and make out so much better. And I predict that Finland will see the same thing. Many Fins already speak Swedish and English so the barrier to exit is low. If you are a high paid professional why lose a huge chunk of your income to those who don't work when you can leave via the Schengen agreement.
Now might say that it won't cost extra because we will cut funding in other programs. Well that's bullshit. But don't take my word for it, or the media's word for it, sit down and do the math yourself. Basic income that provides any meaningful level of income is crazy expensive, well beyond what a few cuts here and there is going to cover.
You might say that only a few people care enough about higher taxes to leave. And you would be right. The problem is that it is the people who pay the most taxes who are going to leave. And when they leave the tax burden on those who stay goes up. Which creates more incentive for people to leave. It's a vicious cycle where the highest taxed leave and the next highest tax bare the burden.
I'll leave you with a thought experiment. Let say a nice liberal state like Vermont decided it's going to implement basic income, but no other state in the union follows suite. What do you think would happen?
Well for starters the B-2 isn't going to be replaced by the LSB, only the B-52 and B-1B are. The B-2 will be replaced by a new bomber design sometime around 2037, but that is ways off. More B-2s won't be built because they are expensive, and after 20 years the state of the art has changed a lot.
The B-1B was designed to defeat Soviet radar by flying low and fast. We now know that this won't work against a modern air defence systems that know how to deal with ground clutter. While at present only the big boys have these radars over the next 15 years Russia will be exporting them all over the world. Further the fast-and-low is hard on the airframe and hard on the engines. Making the B-1B expensive to operate and short on lifespan. By 2030 the B-1Bs are going to be almost 50 years old and at the end of their lifespan. So you either spend a lot of money extending the life of an old plane with an outdated mission, or you spend a lot of money on something modern.
The B-52 is a dinosaur and the USAF keeps flying it because they've never gotten the money to replace it. By 2030 those airframe will have no life left in them. And the B-52 has been outdated since what? The 80s or 90s? The USAF has extend its life by using it as a missile truck, but it can't bomb targets in contested airspace. They use it because that is what they have.
The problem is that a lot of studios are trying to produce cash cows, and audiences aren't buying it.
These shows establish a basic over arching story that people are actually interested in. But spend 90% of the show with monster of the week crap that no one is interested in. With the goal being of milking the show for as long as possible. With two predictable results: Most shows are just garbage that never pick up a fan base and die after a season or two. While a handful shows get lucky and they milk it for years until the audience gets pissed off.
Studios need to start producing shows that are designed to end. Stop producing comic-book style never ending stories, and start producing long movies. Shows like Dexter and Battlestar Galactica had amazing ideas in them, but the writers just lurched from season to season trying to keep the things afloat. There needs to be a story with a fixed end point, and once the show gets there it ends and that talent moves on to something else. I'd much rather watch a bunch of long-miniseries type shows like Rome, Band of Brothers, Sherlock, Jekyll, Babylon 5, etc. That are designed to end. Than all these shows that just milk a good idea to death.
It's a test the F-35 will win easily.
Back in 1991 the A-10 had to be pulled off attacks on the Republican Guard and given a blanket lower flight deck because they were getting shot down. Think about that. The air defences of a 3rd world dictatorship bested the A-10 almost 25 years ago. The replacement were F-16s using precision weapons and a new method called 'tank plinking'. The USAF has been trying to kill the A-10 ever since. Its an aircraft designed for killing tanks, but it haven't been able to do that job in decades.
Even during the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of the strike were being done by F-16s and F-18s. Multirole aircraft like the F-16 and F-18 plus drones have already replace the A-10. Congress just doesn't want to do that for political reasons. Not because of cost or effectiveness.