What are you talking about? That's a bunch of crap.
Samsung batteries are easily available on Ebay and Amazon; there's countless third-party battery options for those phones, plus the OEM batteries are still available if you bother to look. My S4 is several years old now, and I can easily buy all kinds of 3rd-party parts for it, including batteries.
And no, using the same battery is dumb, as that constrains their design too much. No one has any problem with them having a bunch of different battery sizes; there's no shortage of aftermarket companies making compatible batteries for these phones, even with the assortment of sizes. And no, cars don't all use the same battery size either. Go look at the battery shelf at Autozone sometime: there's at least a couple dozen sizes, and a bunch more that you have to special-order. And any cars with the new "start-stop" or other mild-hybrid systems have to use special batteries anyway.
Well the driver's license thing is somewhat understandable because it's a government matter, not something sold to you by a private party. Government-related stuff can always be different.
It's still kinda crap that you don't technically own it, because in every state I've lived in, you have to *pay* for the thing. At least with credit cards, you don't actually pay for those, the company just gives it to your for free (at least for Visa/MC usually, Amex is different but that company is a scam anyway). Your province that let people keep them for ID purposes did the right thing I think, but if the government wants to retain ownership of licenses, I think they should provide them for free.
Think of iPhone charging from USB. It requires data or specific resistors on the data pins in order to charge and they state it is to protect the charger from using more power than it can handle. If that was really the case, then how about complying to the USB standard if the data is missing and only pull 2.5W?
Seriously, iPhones won't even charge at 500mA from a standard USB jack? That's really shitty.
Android phones (at least my Samsung, and my older HTC) do exactly what you say: you plug it into a standard USB jack and it draws 500mA or less. To draw more, the data lines have to be shorted. Unfortunately this is different from Apple's stupid method (using some specific resistor), and most of the chargers are "optimized for Apple" because of their huge marketshare, so they'll only charge Android devices at 500mA. To get more, you need a cable that has the data pins shorted, or an Android-specific charger. I'm not sure why these stupid chargers (like high-current car chargers) can't just put a small switch in there to select between Android and iOS.
An emissions control system might disable a car or generator if it discovers it's been tampered with, does that mean you don't own your car?
No, but for good reasons there have been various laws to prevent carmakers from forcing consumers to use their dealerships for service, such as the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975 (which prevents carmakers from voiding your warranty if you don't use their OEM parts and dealership service, unless they can prove that you caused the problem that way), and also the Massachusetts "Right to Repair" law which requires carmakers to provide the same information to independent shops as they do to their dealers, and which is binding in all 50 states.
Also, citation needed on disabling a car. I've never heard of that. Tampering with emissions control on a car usually yields a "check engine" light and an OBDII code, which makes it impossible for you to pass emissions checks if you have to do that in your state/region. It doesn't "brick" your car. Cars always come with "limp-home" modes because the bad press of having a car that refuses to work for some silly reason is going to kill sales for that automaker: no one (except maybe an Apple cultist) wants a car that refuses to drive for some dumb reason, as people depend on their cars for transportation. Even when something is seriously wrong with the engine, cars will attempt to "limp home" because it's better than being stuck somewhere dangerous.
Microwaves and other electronics will frequently have tamper avoidance measures built into them for safety reasons
What are you talking about here? I've taken my microwave apart, it's pretty easy. If you're talking about "tamper-resistant" screws, don't make me laugh. You can get some screwdriver bits at Harbor Freight for a few dollars to open these, or you can just find another screwdriver that you can manage to jam in there and turn it with.
It depends on the components and the scale. I agree, SMT is nice and easy when you're working with 0805 resistors and capacitors, and ICs with 0.5mm pin spacing, like a standard SOIC package.
However, if you start working with BGAs and DFNs and chip-scale packages, it's really not. A lot of electronics these days have gone to the former because it's easy enough to work with and the parts are cheap and you can make things fairly small. But cellphones are not normal electronics, they're arguable the very cutting-edge state of the art, because miniaturization is so important there. Take apart a reasonably modern cellphone and you'll probably find just one main PCB, and it's covered with BGAs, plus crazy things like capacitors and resistors embedded in the PCB, "buried" and "blind" vias (vias that don't penetrate the whole board, only certain layers, and vias that are part of pads), etc.
Some parts you might still be able to work on with a soldering iron or a hot-air rework tool, such as a common microUSB jack, as long as it's not too close to something small-scale like the above. (On my S4, I believe the USB jack is actually on a small, separate PCB, so that wouldn't be too hard at all.) But if you think you can work with chip-scale packages (these are basically bare chip dies soldered directly to the PCB) with hobby equipment, you're seriously mistaken.
That's why, as soon as you see signs of this, you update your resume and start looking for a new job pronto. The best time to get a new job is while you are still employed; employers don't want to hire someone who's unemployed for some odd reason. So don't wait around until your present employer cans you; jump off the sinking ship as soon as you see a small leak.
Similarly the rise of cheap air travel has raised the expectation that you'll just turn up at a conference, so I find I have to attend more now.
That's strange, I've seen the exact opposite. I used to get sent to a bunch of conferences right around 2000, before the dot-com implosion. After that bubble burst, I never got sent to another conference.
Air travel cost isn't the problem, it's the cost of the conference itself. I remember the tickets for those conferences costing $2500 each, back in 2000. Throw in airfare, hotel, and rental car and other expenses and you're looking at a bunch of money to send an engineer to one of these things to walk around and ogle at the booth babes. But those were the days when stocks were flying high, and big companies were happy to throw tons of money at stuff for no good reason. After the bubble burst, that all changed and they became miserly: they stopped spending on things that were seen as unnecessary, and trade shows and conferences were quickly axed.
I think maybe you just happen to be in a job that values conference attendance more, or it's more useful for your industry.
Your other points I completely agree with, except the driverless car thing; that's a bunch of crap, sorry. Driverless cars aren't going to improve things that much, except reducing the accident rate a lot. They're not going to get you any place any faster than before, in fact they'll be slower because they'll follow all the traffic rules, namely speed limits. It's not going to "free" people at all, unless you're in one of those few shitty cities where Uber doesn't operate. Uber has already broken the taxi cartels, so driverless cars are only going to make it so your Uber car has no driver, and there'll probably be a small handful of competitors (like "GM/Lyft"). I suppose it will make a big different with inner-city parking congestion though.
If you want a real revolution in transport, you need to build SkyTran PRT. That'll actually get you from point to point far faster than a driverless car, and it'll do so with far less energy.
No, it's not a disqualification. If it were, he'd lose his position as Senator for choosing this action. However, he won't, and in fact his constituents will happily vote for him in approval of this action. That's the problem with a democracy: when the voters are stupid, you get bad government.
Except that the People willingly elect these people to be their Congresspeople. You can whine about gerrymandering if you want in the House, but in the Senate that argument is invalid. The People rightfully elected all the Senators, so it's the idiotic voters who are completely to blame for the situation there.
That's actually really brilliant. We could stand having Biden as Prez for the next 10-11 months, and honestly, Obama would probably make a better SCOTUS Justice than President.
Someone should submit a petition to whitehouse.gov about this.
I know this issue doesn't concern a lot of people, particularly young people. The net is "always there" and privacy "WTF is privacy?"... but I think that's a function of them being young and not really understanding either the depths that some people will sink to, or the relative fragility of the network.
Nope, you're confusing "young people" with "Millenials".
The young people (Generation Z, college-age and lower) are eschewing stuff like Facebook precisely because of privacy concerns. They actually realize that everything they put on there stays there forever (or until Facebook dies), so they're not using it.
The people still using Facebook are the Millenials (around 25-35), and worse the completely idiotic Gen-Xers (which I unfortunately have to count myself among). They don't understand the privacy problems at all. Remember, the Gen-Xers are the idiots who largely vote for our political leaders today and believe all the Big Brother bullshit about "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about" in regards to NSA spying.
Well (assuming he was real) he lived for 30-something years, so obviously he said a lot of stuff that wasn't written down in the Gospels. Those books aren't *that* long.
The problem with Christians is that they claim that the Bible is the "inerrant word of God", so while they obviously recognize that there's more to Jesus's life than what's written there, and even that there's a giant gap between his childhood and when he was around 30, they also believe that all the important stuff is captured there, since, after all, it was "divinely inspired".
The problem with Barbara is that she seems to somehow think that if there isn't line in the Bible ascribed to Jesus, then he must have not have said it, and worse, he must actually endorse something if he didn't specifically criticize it and have this criticism written down in the Bible. I can understand having issues with Christianity (since, after all, if you listen to the sects (most of them) who claim it's the "inerrant word of God", and that the whole thing is valid, including the anti-gay parts even though Jesus was never written to have said anything about homosexuality, along with the other Old Testament barbarity like the Israelites murdering other tribes because God told them to, and of course the parts endorsing slavery), but blaming all that on Jesus who is only in one part of the Bible, may or may not be a real person (or could be a composite), may be like other ancient texts where the real story was massively embellished with fantastical fictional bits, and his sermons and actions and words are written down by people who only lived after he died, and wrote down orally-passed-around stories.
As for your church idea, it's not unprecedented. Just look at Joseph Smith: he made up some wacky story about finding a "new testament" about Jesus somehow coming to Mesoamerica before European colonizers and finding it on gold plates, left there by some angel who showed him the location along with a "seer stone" to read them with. Of course, no one ever saw these holy plates again, and the stuff he "translated" from these plates flatly contradicts all available archaeological evidence, but it doesn't matter: there's millions of people who believe that shit. Even crazier, he also supposedly found an ancient Egyptian text called the "Book of Abraham", which he somehow translated, and it tells about how if you're a good Mormon, you'll become the god of another planet after you die. They believe that too!
No, you need help because you're arguing with someone who isn't religious as if he were, and you're not following a coherent line of thought in any way. You can't even follow a logical discussion about the topic.
Win7 is obsolete now, you have to use Windows 10, like it or not (or just not use Windows). That's the problem with proprietary software: if the vendor decides to turn it to shit with a horrible UI and load it with spyware, you're stuck with it (or else you don't get security updates, which is suicide on an internet-connected computer). At least with open-source stuff, if there's enough people who get pissed off about a vendor's or maintainer's direction, they can fork it, as we've seen with Linux Mint, Cinnamon, and MATE, and several other examples. Or you can just modify it yourself: when Ubuntu was doing the Amazon Lens thing, it was supposedly really simple to remove it with an "apt-get purge" command, so you didn't have to completely change to another distro if you didn't want to. This isn't so easy with Windows, since it's closed, so people report that they try to remove the spyware telemetry but it doesn't stay gone, and network analysis shows that Windows is still phoning home despite all their attempts at disabling it.
You should probably seek professional help, because you're trying to argue religion with someone who obviously isn't a believer. You're so hateful of Christianity that you can't even follow a logical discussion about it, you just froth at the mouth.
2) It's a work computer. I have no say over the distro. However, AFAICT CentOS is quite stable, except for Gnome (which I can't say I've seen crash, only exhibit annoying buggy behavior that made me need to restart the session).
ISIS represents a smaller percentage of the global Muslim population than did the KKK.
No, they don't. They have tens of thousands of fighters, and control a huge amount of territory including probably several million people. Since those people willingly allow themselves to be governed by ISIS, and there's zero evidence of any kind of resistance to their rule (from the Sunnis they govern), they can be considered ISIS citizens and sympathizers.
How do you know he was silent? Were you there with him? All you have, assuming he was even a real person, is some oral histories that were passed around and then, after a few decades, finally written down as the "Gospels". Since there's no contemporary eyewitness accounts of Jesus' sermons, much less any video footage, no one really knows what he said, or if the stories were embellished the way Homer's Iliad was (the Iliad was a true story, to some extent, in that there really was a Trojan War, but it's pretty safe to assume that the Olympic gods were not present and taking part in it).
It sounds to me like you have some kind of issues with Jesus for some reason. Having issues with modern-day Christians is understandable, but having issues with characters from a book of third-hand stories from 2000 years ago is rather concerning.
Right now, I'm happy using KDE4.x (12 I think, I forget) on Linux Mint on my personal computer.
It's my work computer that I have issues with. I can't choose the distro there, nor do I have much choice over the UI (I can only use what's available on the install disc, I'm not allowed to bring in new software and it's not network-connected).
Yeah, I didn't say proprietary software was doing any better. As much of a Windows-hater as I am, I'll admit that Win7 was the best of the bunch, though I actually liked the look of Vista better (just not its operation). But it's been all downhill from there with the horrid Metro UI.
Basically, software in general seems to be going down the toilet.
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Yep, and don't forget that Obama and Hillary are both big, big supporters of the TPP with this kind of crap.
The only Presidential candidates who don't support this are the anti-establishment candidates, and there's only two of them.
What are you talking about? That's a bunch of crap.
Samsung batteries are easily available on Ebay and Amazon; there's countless third-party battery options for those phones, plus the OEM batteries are still available if you bother to look. My S4 is several years old now, and I can easily buy all kinds of 3rd-party parts for it, including batteries.
And no, using the same battery is dumb, as that constrains their design too much. No one has any problem with them having a bunch of different battery sizes; there's no shortage of aftermarket companies making compatible batteries for these phones, even with the assortment of sizes. And no, cars don't all use the same battery size either. Go look at the battery shelf at Autozone sometime: there's at least a couple dozen sizes, and a bunch more that you have to special-order. And any cars with the new "start-stop" or other mild-hybrid systems have to use special batteries anyway.
Well the driver's license thing is somewhat understandable because it's a government matter, not something sold to you by a private party. Government-related stuff can always be different.
It's still kinda crap that you don't technically own it, because in every state I've lived in, you have to *pay* for the thing. At least with credit cards, you don't actually pay for those, the company just gives it to your for free (at least for Visa/MC usually, Amex is different but that company is a scam anyway). Your province that let people keep them for ID purposes did the right thing I think, but if the government wants to retain ownership of licenses, I think they should provide them for free.
Think of iPhone charging from USB. It requires data or specific resistors on the data pins in order to charge and they state it is to protect the charger from using more power than it can handle. If that was really the case, then how about complying to the USB standard if the data is missing and only pull 2.5W?
Seriously, iPhones won't even charge at 500mA from a standard USB jack? That's really shitty.
Android phones (at least my Samsung, and my older HTC) do exactly what you say: you plug it into a standard USB jack and it draws 500mA or less. To draw more, the data lines have to be shorted. Unfortunately this is different from Apple's stupid method (using some specific resistor), and most of the chargers are "optimized for Apple" because of their huge marketshare, so they'll only charge Android devices at 500mA. To get more, you need a cable that has the data pins shorted, or an Android-specific charger. I'm not sure why these stupid chargers (like high-current car chargers) can't just put a small switch in there to select between Android and iOS.
An emissions control system might disable a car or generator if it discovers it's been tampered with, does that mean you don't own your car?
No, but for good reasons there have been various laws to prevent carmakers from forcing consumers to use their dealerships for service, such as the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975 (which prevents carmakers from voiding your warranty if you don't use their OEM parts and dealership service, unless they can prove that you caused the problem that way), and also the Massachusetts "Right to Repair" law which requires carmakers to provide the same information to independent shops as they do to their dealers, and which is binding in all 50 states.
Also, citation needed on disabling a car. I've never heard of that. Tampering with emissions control on a car usually yields a "check engine" light and an OBDII code, which makes it impossible for you to pass emissions checks if you have to do that in your state/region. It doesn't "brick" your car. Cars always come with "limp-home" modes because the bad press of having a car that refuses to work for some silly reason is going to kill sales for that automaker: no one (except maybe an Apple cultist) wants a car that refuses to drive for some dumb reason, as people depend on their cars for transportation. Even when something is seriously wrong with the engine, cars will attempt to "limp home" because it's better than being stuck somewhere dangerous.
Microwaves and other electronics will frequently have tamper avoidance measures built into them for safety reasons
What are you talking about here? I've taken my microwave apart, it's pretty easy. If you're talking about "tamper-resistant" screws, don't make me laugh. You can get some screwdriver bits at Harbor Freight for a few dollars to open these, or you can just find another screwdriver that you can manage to jam in there and turn it with.
It depends on the components and the scale. I agree, SMT is nice and easy when you're working with 0805 resistors and capacitors, and ICs with 0.5mm pin spacing, like a standard SOIC package.
However, if you start working with BGAs and DFNs and chip-scale packages, it's really not. A lot of electronics these days have gone to the former because it's easy enough to work with and the parts are cheap and you can make things fairly small. But cellphones are not normal electronics, they're arguable the very cutting-edge state of the art, because miniaturization is so important there. Take apart a reasonably modern cellphone and you'll probably find just one main PCB, and it's covered with BGAs, plus crazy things like capacitors and resistors embedded in the PCB, "buried" and "blind" vias (vias that don't penetrate the whole board, only certain layers, and vias that are part of pads), etc.
Some parts you might still be able to work on with a soldering iron or a hot-air rework tool, such as a common microUSB jack, as long as it's not too close to something small-scale like the above. (On my S4, I believe the USB jack is actually on a small, separate PCB, so that wouldn't be too hard at all.) But if you think you can work with chip-scale packages (these are basically bare chip dies soldered directly to the PCB) with hobby equipment, you're seriously mistaken.
That's why, as soon as you see signs of this, you update your resume and start looking for a new job pronto. The best time to get a new job is while you are still employed; employers don't want to hire someone who's unemployed for some odd reason. So don't wait around until your present employer cans you; jump off the sinking ship as soon as you see a small leak.
Similarly the rise of cheap air travel has raised the expectation that you'll just turn up at a conference, so I find I have to attend more now.
That's strange, I've seen the exact opposite. I used to get sent to a bunch of conferences right around 2000, before the dot-com implosion. After that bubble burst, I never got sent to another conference.
Air travel cost isn't the problem, it's the cost of the conference itself. I remember the tickets for those conferences costing $2500 each, back in 2000. Throw in airfare, hotel, and rental car and other expenses and you're looking at a bunch of money to send an engineer to one of these things to walk around and ogle at the booth babes. But those were the days when stocks were flying high, and big companies were happy to throw tons of money at stuff for no good reason. After the bubble burst, that all changed and they became miserly: they stopped spending on things that were seen as unnecessary, and trade shows and conferences were quickly axed.
I think maybe you just happen to be in a job that values conference attendance more, or it's more useful for your industry.
Your other points I completely agree with, except the driverless car thing; that's a bunch of crap, sorry. Driverless cars aren't going to improve things that much, except reducing the accident rate a lot. They're not going to get you any place any faster than before, in fact they'll be slower because they'll follow all the traffic rules, namely speed limits. It's not going to "free" people at all, unless you're in one of those few shitty cities where Uber doesn't operate. Uber has already broken the taxi cartels, so driverless cars are only going to make it so your Uber car has no driver, and there'll probably be a small handful of competitors (like "GM/Lyft"). I suppose it will make a big different with inner-city parking congestion though.
If you want a real revolution in transport, you need to build SkyTran PRT. That'll actually get you from point to point far faster than a driverless car, and it'll do so with far less energy.
Some cars require specialized tools to do oil changes. Oil changes!
Citation needed.
Modern cars are lasting beyond 200k miles easily, which is far more than 50s/60s cars could dream of lasting.
No, it's not a disqualification. If it were, he'd lose his position as Senator for choosing this action. However, he won't, and in fact his constituents will happily vote for him in approval of this action. That's the problem with a democracy: when the voters are stupid, you get bad government.
Except that the People willingly elect these people to be their Congresspeople. You can whine about gerrymandering if you want in the House, but in the Senate that argument is invalid. The People rightfully elected all the Senators, so it's the idiotic voters who are completely to blame for the situation there.
That's actually really brilliant. We could stand having Biden as Prez for the next 10-11 months, and honestly, Obama would probably make a better SCOTUS Justice than President.
Someone should submit a petition to whitehouse.gov about this.
I know this issue doesn't concern a lot of people, particularly young people. The net is "always there" and privacy "WTF is privacy?"... but I think that's a function of them being young and not really understanding either the depths that some people will sink to, or the relative fragility of the network.
Nope, you're confusing "young people" with "Millenials".
The young people (Generation Z, college-age and lower) are eschewing stuff like Facebook precisely because of privacy concerns. They actually realize that everything they put on there stays there forever (or until Facebook dies), so they're not using it.
The people still using Facebook are the Millenials (around 25-35), and worse the completely idiotic Gen-Xers (which I unfortunately have to count myself among). They don't understand the privacy problems at all. Remember, the Gen-Xers are the idiots who largely vote for our political leaders today and believe all the Big Brother bullshit about "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about" in regards to NSA spying.
) Fingerprints for entry into the job. This is common damned near anywhere professional, simple "do they have any warrants for anything?" check.
Oh bullshit. I've never seen ANY professional jobs that required fingerprints, except for those requiring government security clearances.
It's easy to check for warrants on someone, and you sure as hell don't need their fingerprints to do it.
Once it finally fails (and it's circling the drain, the Trust and Safety Council is just one example), the world will be a better place.
I've been saying this for years, and people just called me crazy.
Well (assuming he was real) he lived for 30-something years, so obviously he said a lot of stuff that wasn't written down in the Gospels. Those books aren't *that* long.
The problem with Christians is that they claim that the Bible is the "inerrant word of God", so while they obviously recognize that there's more to Jesus's life than what's written there, and even that there's a giant gap between his childhood and when he was around 30, they also believe that all the important stuff is captured there, since, after all, it was "divinely inspired".
The problem with Barbara is that she seems to somehow think that if there isn't line in the Bible ascribed to Jesus, then he must have not have said it, and worse, he must actually endorse something if he didn't specifically criticize it and have this criticism written down in the Bible. I can understand having issues with Christianity (since, after all, if you listen to the sects (most of them) who claim it's the "inerrant word of God", and that the whole thing is valid, including the anti-gay parts even though Jesus was never written to have said anything about homosexuality, along with the other Old Testament barbarity like the Israelites murdering other tribes because God told them to, and of course the parts endorsing slavery), but blaming all that on Jesus who is only in one part of the Bible, may or may not be a real person (or could be a composite), may be like other ancient texts where the real story was massively embellished with fantastical fictional bits, and his sermons and actions and words are written down by people who only lived after he died, and wrote down orally-passed-around stories.
As for your church idea, it's not unprecedented. Just look at Joseph Smith: he made up some wacky story about finding a "new testament" about Jesus somehow coming to Mesoamerica before European colonizers and finding it on gold plates, left there by some angel who showed him the location along with a "seer stone" to read them with. Of course, no one ever saw these holy plates again, and the stuff he "translated" from these plates flatly contradicts all available archaeological evidence, but it doesn't matter: there's millions of people who believe that shit. Even crazier, he also supposedly found an ancient Egyptian text called the "Book of Abraham", which he somehow translated, and it tells about how if you're a good Mormon, you'll become the god of another planet after you die. They believe that too!
No, you need help because you're arguing with someone who isn't religious as if he were, and you're not following a coherent line of thought in any way. You can't even follow a logical discussion about the topic.
Win7 is obsolete now, you have to use Windows 10, like it or not (or just not use Windows). That's the problem with proprietary software: if the vendor decides to turn it to shit with a horrible UI and load it with spyware, you're stuck with it (or else you don't get security updates, which is suicide on an internet-connected computer). At least with open-source stuff, if there's enough people who get pissed off about a vendor's or maintainer's direction, they can fork it, as we've seen with Linux Mint, Cinnamon, and MATE, and several other examples. Or you can just modify it yourself: when Ubuntu was doing the Amazon Lens thing, it was supposedly really simple to remove it with an "apt-get purge" command, so you didn't have to completely change to another distro if you didn't want to. This isn't so easy with Windows, since it's closed, so people report that they try to remove the spyware telemetry but it doesn't stay gone, and network analysis shows that Windows is still phoning home despite all their attempts at disabling it.
You should probably seek professional help, because you're trying to argue religion with someone who obviously isn't a believer. You're so hateful of Christianity that you can't even follow a logical discussion about it, you just froth at the mouth.
1) I'm using CentOS7, not Fedora.
2) It's a work computer. I have no say over the distro. However, AFAICT CentOS is quite stable, except for Gnome (which I can't say I've seen crash, only exhibit annoying buggy behavior that made me need to restart the session).
ISIS represents a smaller percentage of the global Muslim population than did the KKK.
No, they don't. They have tens of thousands of fighters, and control a huge amount of territory including probably several million people. Since those people willingly allow themselves to be governed by ISIS, and there's zero evidence of any kind of resistance to their rule (from the Sunnis they govern), they can be considered ISIS citizens and sympathizers.
You're so blinded with hate you're not even making any sense, you're just foaming at the mouth and unable to maintain a logical conversation.
How do you know he was silent? Were you there with him? All you have, assuming he was even a real person, is some oral histories that were passed around and then, after a few decades, finally written down as the "Gospels". Since there's no contemporary eyewitness accounts of Jesus' sermons, much less any video footage, no one really knows what he said, or if the stories were embellished the way Homer's Iliad was (the Iliad was a true story, to some extent, in that there really was a Trojan War, but it's pretty safe to assume that the Olympic gods were not present and taking part in it).
It sounds to me like you have some kind of issues with Jesus for some reason. Having issues with modern-day Christians is understandable, but having issues with characters from a book of third-hand stories from 2000 years ago is rather concerning.
Right now, I'm happy using KDE4.x (12 I think, I forget) on Linux Mint on my personal computer.
It's my work computer that I have issues with. I can't choose the distro there, nor do I have much choice over the UI (I can only use what's available on the install disc, I'm not allowed to bring in new software and it's not network-connected).
Yeah, I didn't say proprietary software was doing any better. As much of a Windows-hater as I am, I'll admit that Win7 was the best of the bunch, though I actually liked the look of Vista better (just not its operation). But it's been all downhill from there with the horrid Metro UI.
Basically, software in general seems to be going down the toilet.