It's not about efficiency, it's about emissions, which runs counter to efficiency. It's the whole problem with diesel engines to begin with: if you want better fuel economy, you have to increase combustion temperature. Doing so with diesel gives you higher NOx emissions. So you have to lower combustion temps to keep those down, but then you sacrifice mpg and also horsepower (both of which are very important to drivers for fairly obvious reasons).
If the company could, they'd maximize fuel economy and power and ignore emissions, but that would give you huge NOx emissions, which causes serious smog problems (Paris has much worse smog than most American cities from what I hear, because of all the diesel engines).
There really isn't a great solution to this it seems. Urea injection is supposed to help a lot though. But it seems like the best answer is to give up on diesel for small passenger vehicles and stick with gasoline or just move to EVs.
After all these many years, Slashdot still is so primitive it won't let you edit comments after submitting to fix silly mistakes like this. Superior forums like Reddit fixed this ages ago.
Actually, I think part of the problem is that either they didn't have enough space available for the extra emissions hardware needed to do it right (urea injection), or it would have driven the cost up too much. The cars this affects are their smallest cars, which don't have much extra space in the engine bay, and probably have a lower profit margin as well; on larger models like SUVs, this stuff probably isn't a problem.
If sourcing substantially different parts from different vendors is necessary to meet production volume, then they need to have different part names and model names for these products. This isn't a case of having resistors or capacitors from different manufacturers, something that won't affect performance in any measurable way, this is a case of having two completely different CPUs, with very different performance from the two. 6h vs. 8h in a power-consumption test is a huge, huge difference. Intel sells CPUs all the time which are very similar, but have performance that differs to that extent: they use completely different part numbers to describe these parts.
Simple: don't buy it at all. If a company is going to play shenanigans like this where products marketed with the exact same name and part number are significantly different and it's just a luck-of-the-draw ass to whether I get the good one or the crappy one, I'm just not going to buy their product at all.
The problem here is that you're equating "intelligence" with their mastery of the English language. Someone whose first language is not English wouldn't do so well. Of course, based on his full post, he does appear to be a native English speaker, but I could be wrong, but it looks like a simple brain-fart to me.
But this does bring up a good point: the problem with the intelligence test idea is that: who do we trust to design the test? And how exactly will they measure knowledge and intelligence? Which factors would be favored? Pick some random people in the US and you're likely to get a test which tests your knowledge of religious dogma and weights that above all else.
Oh please. We're not talking about seriously mentally challenged people (e.g. autistic savants, or anyone else who can't take care of themselves) or about children, we're talking about regular adults who have jobs, drive cars to work, etc.
Since we live in a technological society where we have to have some grasp of technology just in order to live and get along (you can't drive a car without knowing a little bit about technology, nor can you use a typical smartphone), excusing people for being completely uneducated about science is ridiculous. This is part of a basic education, stuff that everyone should know about to some extent.
So yes, if someone actually thinks Mars isn't a real planet, or that dinosaurs didn't exist, then that means they flunked 5th-grade science class and are therefore an idiot.
If there's one thing that popular TV has done for us lately, I'd say the show "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" actually is a help because it gives us an idea of where we ALL *should* be educationally; if you're not even as educated as a typical 5th grader, then you're a failure. This isn't a matter of "having different talents", this is a matter of very, very basic education. My talents are definitely not in literature, but I still can read and I know who Shakespeare was, and know of several of his plays. Considering he's probably the most important person in English literature, not knowing anything about him would be inexcusable and a sign of a completely lacking education. My talents aren't in biology either, but I learned about basic biology in high school; everyone else should have as well. I'm definitely not at all talented at art, but I know who Picasso was, again because I managed to graduate 8th grade. Heck, I think I learned about cubism and impressionism in 5th grade.
Not knowing basic science isn't a matter of having different talents or interests, it's a matter of basic elementary school education. If you don't have that, there's something wrong with you, plain and simple.
Don't believe the hype. I've been driving 30 years and haven't come close to crashing.
That just means you're lucky. Most people in fact probably don't have a life-threatening crash in their lifetimes. However, over 30,000 people a year die in the US alone (I think it used to be closer to 50k, but it's fallen thanks to safer cars). Do you want to play the odds? I don't.
Aftermarket parts can fix that easily
Then you wind up with a car with crap stuck all over the inside, wires hanging around, etc. And even if you get some nice all-in-one stereo you're still stuck with a noisy car (they've gotten a lot quieter in the past decade or so), and a gas-guzzler (fuel economy has increased greatly in the last 5 years). Plus you also have a car that's constantly having problems and needs expensive repairs because things wear out after 100-200,000 miles.
I have a Mazda, please post a link and save me from this hell...
If it's one of the newer ones with the JCI/Visteon infotainment systems, check out mazda3hacks.com and mazda3revolution.com. Disabling the speed-related touchscreen lockout is pretty simple once you figure out how to log in (you'll probably need a USB-to-Ethernet adapter).
My next car will be a vintage car. I've had enough of technology that makes my life harder...
Fuck that. I don't want a car that kills me in a minor fender-bender, I want a car that has state-of-the-art crashworthiness, and also has useful technological features integrated such as a Bluetooth phone interface.
Or block the passenger from doing it, just like my car does with the GPS.
Yep, my car used to do that too. Thankfully, however, it's a Mazda and the infotainment system runs Linux, so a bunch of people have been hacking on it for a while and figured out how to change things. Now, after logging into it with my laptop and editing a file, it doesn't block the passenger (or driver) from doing anything while the car is in motion.
Most modern consumer router firmware is crap, but the answer isn't to give up on WiFi, the answer is to get a router supported by OpenWRT or DD-WRT and use that instead. Similarly, with cars the answer is to get a car that has a hackable infotainment system.
A good manager is supposed to facilitate the work of their team members: give them guidance in what they're supposed to do, help them work with other teams when necessary, and do all the interfacing with upper management so that individual contributors don't need to worry much about what goes on above them and can concentrate on what they do best.
Unfortunately, there aren't that many great managers, but that doesn't mean that getting rid of all managers is the answer.
That's weird, my two-year-old Samsung Galaxy S4 seems perfectly responsive.
Maybe you should upgrade to a newer device with at least 2GB (which is what my phone has). My last phone (which is now 4-5 years old) only had 1GB IIRC, and it was indeed slow and laggy. Of course, it also didn't have any support and had an ancient version of Android. For all I know, it could have been infected with malware thanks to the wide-open security holes in unpatched devices like that.
The real problems with Android are the lack of support/upgrades, and all the bloatware. But at least on Android there's 3rd-party ROMs available for many devices, so you have the possibility of moving to something like CyanogenMod if your device loses support as so many do. iDevices retain support a bit longer, but once they're dropped, that's the end.
This is also why the malware writers are moving to the Windows Phone store. Anyone naïve enough to buy a Windows Phone is also a prime target for a scam.
It does seem like having multiple letters (or numbers) is starting to look very useful, because several of these characteristics can apply to the same planet; for instance, Venus would be class S and K, so maybe it should be "Class SK", while Mercury would be "Class CHT".
Yes, they're fictional, but it's a good start, since after all it proves that modern-day researchers weren't the first people to think of classifying planets by their habitability characteristics. Also, the simple "class [letter]" scheme is easy to remember and use; I sure hope they don't come up with some arcane, complicated system instead. Finally, they should definitely use "Class M" to refer to Earth-like planets simply to pay homage to Star Trek. Everyone and his brother knows what a "Class M" planet is, as long as they watched some Star Trek within the last 50 years.
It looks like you got your classes from Star Trek too, as seen here, but with some differences. I'm not sure where you got Class Q or I. The system probably does need a little revision though. Class H's "generally uninhabitable" doesn't tell you why. The Class P (see appendices) for icy planets is a good example. Class N for "sulphuric" really isn't sufficient; Venus is more like the Class Y "demon planet" except there's no dilithium-based biomimetic lifeforms, but the fact that Venus is so hot is important it needs to be classified that way. If a planet is too cold or too hot to live on, that's an important factor for humans. Same if there's no atmosphere. A planet (or moon) that's not too warm or hot but has no atmosphere can still be inhabited using domes or other sealed habitats, so that should be a class by itself. Mercury probably wouldn't fit there however, because it's much too hot. But it's hot in a different way than Venus, so they should have different classifications (hot because it's too close to the star, vs. hot because it has a thick atmosphere and runaway greenhouse effect). Finally, moons and planets should be classified together. The orbital path doesn't really matter (except insofar as it affects the climate/temperature). There could very well be Earth-like moons out there somewhere, so those should be Class M (like the moon in "Avatar").
So here's my proposal which borrows from ST: Class M - Earth-like, small, rocky, oxygenated atmosphere, right temperature Class D - small, rocky, little to no atmosphere, right temperature, inhabitable with sealed habitats (e.g. Mars) Class J - gas giant (any size; this may be expanded later after we explore more star systems and decide we need to classify them further) Class E - small, rocky, little to no atmosphere, too cold (e.g. Pluto) Class F - small, rocky, little to no atmosphere, too hot (e.g. Mercury) Class G - small, thick atmosphere, too hot (e.g. Venus) Class A - very very small, not spherical (e.g. moons of Mars, captured asteroids) Class B - very small, spherical but extremely low gravity (e.g. Sedna, Ceres, Pluto, dwarf planets in general)
I'm probably missing something here, perhaps planets with only liquid surfaces. I avoided calling Venus "Class N" because it sounds too much like "Class M".
Unfortunately, this shows why books are kinda obsolete for anything that's still under development. For things like awk, sed, grep, etc., they're great, because those things haven't changed much in ages. For a whole OS, not so much; they're all changing constantly. There is an e-book on git at git-scm.org, but being an e-book it gets updated, plus it seems like git has stabilized now.
I'm not so sure the cathedral model is really necessary for a competent and motivated tech writer however. As long as the tech writer can navigate git (using a GUI program like gitk or TortoiseGit or whatever), they can follow the development of the project and then update the documentation soon after changes are made, having the doc updates ready in time for major releases.
But for anything that's still under active development, the docs are always going to be going out-of-date unless someone keeps them up-to-date. This is true of any software project. You can't use a book about Windows Vista for Windows 10.
I can't speak for other people, but personally I do value documentation. Not that I want to spend all my time documenting someone else's work, but when I need to learn about something, documentation is invaluable. No, it isn't as fun as writing code, but that doesn't make it useless. If someone else wants to contribute to FOSS and isn't a coder, but can do tech writing, I for one would appreciate their contribution to documentation.
Just because a lot of stuff isn't documented well doesn't mean it should be this way. git is a bit of a special case: it does have documentation (there's lots of man pages for it), but the problem is that its UI is organically grown, it wasn't really designed with a consistent interface, and it shows (badly). It's very powerful but the interface isn't the greatest; I usually find myself googling for answers when using git, and winding up reading stuff on stackexchange. Good documentation only helps so much when you have a wacky UI.
If women don't care about making code faster and more compact, maybe they should work on other aspects of FOSS. For instance, most of it could use a lot of help in the documentation department.
To be fair, this issue really has almost nothing to do with Linux on the desktop. This is about the kernel mailing list. The kernel has been used successfully on Linux desktop systems for over 15 years now; it's really not holding anything up there. Most of it is a solved problem. There's some interesting work still going on there to be sure, but most of it is either for servers/high-performance computing or for embedded systems, not for standard desktops. There's nothing that can be done in the kernel that will magically make Linux a much more attractive option for the desktop.
Almost all the stuff that could be done to improve the desktop experience is in userspace, which by definition doesn't have anything to do with LKML: things like init systems, desktop environments, application software, distributions, etc. The main exception is graphics drivers, but even that isn't really a LKML topic, those things (like Nouveau) are pretty big projects by themselves and aren't conducted on the LKML. And of course, it should be obvious that the biggest impediment to Linux on the desktop isn't really technical at all, it's the availability of application software (though I suppose you could argue that improving WINE would make a big difference here).
Anyway, the point is, this issue is about only one part of the whole FOSS/Linux community; other projects don't have this notoriety.
No, I want them to already have values which align with my own.
What you're advocating is a politician who's corrupt and votes for legislation that's against my own interests (like the DMCA, Iraq War, etc.), and then only changes course somewhat after he/she finds out that position is too unpopular, so they change their rhetoric somewhat to try to appeal to the voters and keep getting re-elected. Meanwhile, the shitty legislation has already been passed, and they're not doing anything to repeal it.
The point of a democracy isn't to elect someone who will do the bare minimum to get re-elected, while passing as much stuff as they can for their corporate benefactors without pissing off their constituents too much. The point of a representative democracy is to elect candidates who share your own values, so that they can spend their time studying the issues in-depth and making sound decisions on them, because they may come up with a different decision after studying the issue for weeks or months than you would after reading some slanted "news" article for 1 minute.
It's simple: Western society is collapsing. It's too bad, too; we're finally figuring out a few things like equal rights for gays and ending prohibition for pot, the former marginalizing a significant portion of society (reducing productivity) and the latter costing society a fortune in money and violence (just like alcohol Prohibition did in the 1930s).
But I guess all the corruption, plus all the outsourcing to low-cost nations, plus all the lawsuits, is catching up with us.
No, it's not about being "Christian", dominionists are a particular strain that wants Christians to have dominion over everyone, hence the name.
It's just like how only some Christians believe in Prosperity Theology ("God loves rich people more, and that's why he's blessed them with wealth." Dominionists are closely related), and only some Christians believe in speaking in tongues. Christians aren't all the same.
As for Cruz's claims, obviously he keeps that quiet. His father spells it all out.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily; was this engineering done in Germany or the US? If it was Germany, they might not have such a dumb law.
It's not about efficiency, it's about emissions, which runs counter to efficiency. It's the whole problem with diesel engines to begin with: if you want better fuel economy, you have to increase combustion temperature. Doing so with diesel gives you higher NOx emissions. So you have to lower combustion temps to keep those down, but then you sacrifice mpg and also horsepower (both of which are very important to drivers for fairly obvious reasons).
If the company could, they'd maximize fuel economy and power and ignore emissions, but that would give you huge NOx emissions, which causes serious smog problems (Paris has much worse smog than most American cities from what I hear, because of all the diesel engines).
There really isn't a great solution to this it seems. Urea injection is supposed to help a lot though. But it seems like the best answer is to give up on diesel for small passenger vehicles and stick with gasoline or just move to EVs.
After all these many years, Slashdot still is so primitive it won't let you edit comments after submitting to fix silly mistakes like this. Superior forums like Reddit fixed this ages ago.
Actually, I think part of the problem is that either they didn't have enough space available for the extra emissions hardware needed to do it right (urea injection), or it would have driven the cost up too much. The cars this affects are their smallest cars, which don't have much extra space in the engine bay, and probably have a lower profit margin as well; on larger models like SUVs, this stuff probably isn't a problem.
If sourcing substantially different parts from different vendors is necessary to meet production volume, then they need to have different part names and model names for these products. This isn't a case of having resistors or capacitors from different manufacturers, something that won't affect performance in any measurable way, this is a case of having two completely different CPUs, with very different performance from the two. 6h vs. 8h in a power-consumption test is a huge, huge difference. Intel sells CPUs all the time which are very similar, but have performance that differs to that extent: they use completely different part numbers to describe these parts.
Simple: don't buy it at all. If a company is going to play shenanigans like this where products marketed with the exact same name and part number are significantly different and it's just a luck-of-the-draw ass to whether I get the good one or the crappy one, I'm just not going to buy their product at all.
The problem here is that you're equating "intelligence" with their mastery of the English language. Someone whose first language is not English wouldn't do so well. Of course, based on his full post, he does appear to be a native English speaker, but I could be wrong, but it looks like a simple brain-fart to me.
But this does bring up a good point: the problem with the intelligence test idea is that: who do we trust to design the test? And how exactly will they measure knowledge and intelligence? Which factors would be favored? Pick some random people in the US and you're likely to get a test which tests your knowledge of religious dogma and weights that above all else.
Oh please. We're not talking about seriously mentally challenged people (e.g. autistic savants, or anyone else who can't take care of themselves) or about children, we're talking about regular adults who have jobs, drive cars to work, etc.
Since we live in a technological society where we have to have some grasp of technology just in order to live and get along (you can't drive a car without knowing a little bit about technology, nor can you use a typical smartphone), excusing people for being completely uneducated about science is ridiculous. This is part of a basic education, stuff that everyone should know about to some extent.
So yes, if someone actually thinks Mars isn't a real planet, or that dinosaurs didn't exist, then that means they flunked 5th-grade science class and are therefore an idiot.
If there's one thing that popular TV has done for us lately, I'd say the show "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" actually is a help because it gives us an idea of where we ALL *should* be educationally; if you're not even as educated as a typical 5th grader, then you're a failure. This isn't a matter of "having different talents", this is a matter of very, very basic education. My talents are definitely not in literature, but I still can read and I know who Shakespeare was, and know of several of his plays. Considering he's probably the most important person in English literature, not knowing anything about him would be inexcusable and a sign of a completely lacking education. My talents aren't in biology either, but I learned about basic biology in high school; everyone else should have as well. I'm definitely not at all talented at art, but I know who Picasso was, again because I managed to graduate 8th grade. Heck, I think I learned about cubism and impressionism in 5th grade.
Not knowing basic science isn't a matter of having different talents or interests, it's a matter of basic elementary school education. If you don't have that, there's something wrong with you, plain and simple.
Exactly. Similarly, Windows is simply a rip-off of CP/M.
Don't believe the hype. I've been driving 30 years and haven't come close to crashing.
That just means you're lucky. Most people in fact probably don't have a life-threatening crash in their lifetimes. However, over 30,000 people a year die in the US alone (I think it used to be closer to 50k, but it's fallen thanks to safer cars). Do you want to play the odds? I don't.
Aftermarket parts can fix that easily
Then you wind up with a car with crap stuck all over the inside, wires hanging around, etc. And even if you get some nice all-in-one stereo you're still stuck with a noisy car (they've gotten a lot quieter in the past decade or so), and a gas-guzzler (fuel economy has increased greatly in the last 5 years). Plus you also have a car that's constantly having problems and needs expensive repairs because things wear out after 100-200,000 miles.
I have a Mazda, please post a link and save me from this hell...
If it's one of the newer ones with the JCI/Visteon infotainment systems, check out mazda3hacks.com and mazda3revolution.com. Disabling the speed-related touchscreen lockout is pretty simple once you figure out how to log in (you'll probably need a USB-to-Ethernet adapter).
My next car will be a vintage car. I've had enough of technology that makes my life harder...
Fuck that. I don't want a car that kills me in a minor fender-bender, I want a car that has state-of-the-art crashworthiness, and also has useful technological features integrated such as a Bluetooth phone interface.
Or block the passenger from doing it, just like my car does with the GPS.
Yep, my car used to do that too. Thankfully, however, it's a Mazda and the infotainment system runs Linux, so a bunch of people have been hacking on it for a while and figured out how to change things. Now, after logging into it with my laptop and editing a file, it doesn't block the passenger (or driver) from doing anything while the car is in motion.
Most modern consumer router firmware is crap, but the answer isn't to give up on WiFi, the answer is to get a router supported by OpenWRT or DD-WRT and use that instead. Similarly, with cars the answer is to get a car that has a hackable infotainment system.
A good manager is supposed to facilitate the work of their team members: give them guidance in what they're supposed to do, help them work with other teams when necessary, and do all the interfacing with upper management so that individual contributors don't need to worry much about what goes on above them and can concentrate on what they do best.
Unfortunately, there aren't that many great managers, but that doesn't mean that getting rid of all managers is the answer.
That's weird, my two-year-old Samsung Galaxy S4 seems perfectly responsive.
Maybe you should upgrade to a newer device with at least 2GB (which is what my phone has). My last phone (which is now 4-5 years old) only had 1GB IIRC, and it was indeed slow and laggy. Of course, it also didn't have any support and had an ancient version of Android. For all I know, it could have been infected with malware thanks to the wide-open security holes in unpatched devices like that.
The real problems with Android are the lack of support/upgrades, and all the bloatware. But at least on Android there's 3rd-party ROMs available for many devices, so you have the possibility of moving to something like CyanogenMod if your device loses support as so many do. iDevices retain support a bit longer, but once they're dropped, that's the end.
This is also why the malware writers are moving to the Windows Phone store. Anyone naïve enough to buy a Windows Phone is also a prime target for a scam.
It does seem like having multiple letters (or numbers) is starting to look very useful, because several of these characteristics can apply to the same planet; for instance, Venus would be class S and K, so maybe it should be "Class SK", while Mercury would be "Class CHT".
Yes, they're fictional, but it's a good start, since after all it proves that modern-day researchers weren't the first people to think of classifying planets by their habitability characteristics. Also, the simple "class [letter]" scheme is easy to remember and use; I sure hope they don't come up with some arcane, complicated system instead. Finally, they should definitely use "Class M" to refer to Earth-like planets simply to pay homage to Star Trek. Everyone and his brother knows what a "Class M" planet is, as long as they watched some Star Trek within the last 50 years.
It looks like you got your classes from Star Trek too, as seen here, but with some differences. I'm not sure where you got Class Q or I. The system probably does need a little revision though. Class H's "generally uninhabitable" doesn't tell you why. The Class P (see appendices) for icy planets is a good example. Class N for "sulphuric" really isn't sufficient; Venus is more like the Class Y "demon planet" except there's no dilithium-based biomimetic lifeforms, but the fact that Venus is so hot is important it needs to be classified that way. If a planet is too cold or too hot to live on, that's an important factor for humans. Same if there's no atmosphere. A planet (or moon) that's not too warm or hot but has no atmosphere can still be inhabited using domes or other sealed habitats, so that should be a class by itself. Mercury probably wouldn't fit there however, because it's much too hot. But it's hot in a different way than Venus, so they should have different classifications (hot because it's too close to the star, vs. hot because it has a thick atmosphere and runaway greenhouse effect). Finally, moons and planets should be classified together. The orbital path doesn't really matter (except insofar as it affects the climate/temperature). There could very well be Earth-like moons out there somewhere, so those should be Class M (like the moon in "Avatar").
So here's my proposal which borrows from ST:
Class M - Earth-like, small, rocky, oxygenated atmosphere, right temperature
Class D - small, rocky, little to no atmosphere, right temperature, inhabitable with sealed habitats (e.g. Mars)
Class J - gas giant (any size; this may be expanded later after we explore more star systems and decide we need to classify them further)
Class E - small, rocky, little to no atmosphere, too cold (e.g. Pluto)
Class F - small, rocky, little to no atmosphere, too hot (e.g. Mercury)
Class G - small, thick atmosphere, too hot (e.g. Venus)
Class A - very very small, not spherical (e.g. moons of Mars, captured asteroids)
Class B - very small, spherical but extremely low gravity (e.g. Sedna, Ceres, Pluto, dwarf planets in general)
I'm probably missing something here, perhaps planets with only liquid surfaces. I avoided calling Venus "Class N" because it sounds too much like "Class M".
Unfortunately, this shows why books are kinda obsolete for anything that's still under development. For things like awk, sed, grep, etc., they're great, because those things haven't changed much in ages. For a whole OS, not so much; they're all changing constantly. There is an e-book on git at git-scm.org, but being an e-book it gets updated, plus it seems like git has stabilized now.
I'm not so sure the cathedral model is really necessary for a competent and motivated tech writer however. As long as the tech writer can navigate git (using a GUI program like gitk or TortoiseGit or whatever), they can follow the development of the project and then update the documentation soon after changes are made, having the doc updates ready in time for major releases.
But for anything that's still under active development, the docs are always going to be going out-of-date unless someone keeps them up-to-date. This is true of any software project. You can't use a book about Windows Vista for Windows 10.
I can't speak for other people, but personally I do value documentation. Not that I want to spend all my time documenting someone else's work, but when I need to learn about something, documentation is invaluable. No, it isn't as fun as writing code, but that doesn't make it useless. If someone else wants to contribute to FOSS and isn't a coder, but can do tech writing, I for one would appreciate their contribution to documentation.
Just because a lot of stuff isn't documented well doesn't mean it should be this way. git is a bit of a special case: it does have documentation (there's lots of man pages for it), but the problem is that its UI is organically grown, it wasn't really designed with a consistent interface, and it shows (badly). It's very powerful but the interface isn't the greatest; I usually find myself googling for answers when using git, and winding up reading stuff on stackexchange. Good documentation only helps so much when you have a wacky UI.
If women don't care about making code faster and more compact, maybe they should work on other aspects of FOSS. For instance, most of it could use a lot of help in the documentation department.
To be fair, this issue really has almost nothing to do with Linux on the desktop. This is about the kernel mailing list. The kernel has been used successfully on Linux desktop systems for over 15 years now; it's really not holding anything up there. Most of it is a solved problem. There's some interesting work still going on there to be sure, but most of it is either for servers/high-performance computing or for embedded systems, not for standard desktops. There's nothing that can be done in the kernel that will magically make Linux a much more attractive option for the desktop.
Almost all the stuff that could be done to improve the desktop experience is in userspace, which by definition doesn't have anything to do with LKML: things like init systems, desktop environments, application software, distributions, etc. The main exception is graphics drivers, but even that isn't really a LKML topic, those things (like Nouveau) are pretty big projects by themselves and aren't conducted on the LKML. And of course, it should be obvious that the biggest impediment to Linux on the desktop isn't really technical at all, it's the availability of application software (though I suppose you could argue that improving WINE would make a big difference here).
Anyway, the point is, this issue is about only one part of the whole FOSS/Linux community; other projects don't have this notoriety.
How so? What's to keep someone from advertising through a non-WAA vendor? It's not like website viewers can tell the difference.
No, I want them to already have values which align with my own.
What you're advocating is a politician who's corrupt and votes for legislation that's against my own interests (like the DMCA, Iraq War, etc.), and then only changes course somewhat after he/she finds out that position is too unpopular, so they change their rhetoric somewhat to try to appeal to the voters and keep getting re-elected. Meanwhile, the shitty legislation has already been passed, and they're not doing anything to repeal it.
The point of a democracy isn't to elect someone who will do the bare minimum to get re-elected, while passing as much stuff as they can for their corporate benefactors without pissing off their constituents too much. The point of a representative democracy is to elect candidates who share your own values, so that they can spend their time studying the issues in-depth and making sound decisions on them, because they may come up with a different decision after studying the issue for weeks or months than you would after reading some slanted "news" article for 1 minute.
It's simple: Western society is collapsing. It's too bad, too; we're finally figuring out a few things like equal rights for gays and ending prohibition for pot, the former marginalizing a significant portion of society (reducing productivity) and the latter costing society a fortune in money and violence (just like alcohol Prohibition did in the 1930s).
But I guess all the corruption, plus all the outsourcing to low-cost nations, plus all the lawsuits, is catching up with us.
As I said, if you want to haul around a graphing calculator in your pocket everywhere you go, feel free. I'm not going to.
I guess if you never leave your parents' basement, then portability issues aren't a problem for you.
No, it's not about being "Christian", dominionists are a particular strain that wants Christians to have dominion over everyone, hence the name.
It's just like how only some Christians believe in Prosperity Theology ("God loves rich people more, and that's why he's blessed them with wealth." Dominionists are closely related), and only some Christians believe in speaking in tongues. Christians aren't all the same.
As for Cruz's claims, obviously he keeps that quiet. His father spells it all out.