To claim that there's a significant number of transgender people out there like this is simply ridiculous. They are out there, but they're a tiny, tiny minority. Most of them state quite clearly in their profile what their situation is.
Also, if you're having trouble telling a born-female person from a MtF transgender, you might want to get your eyes checked. There aren't very many who actually "pass" that well. Tip: look for an Adam's Apple.
You've been dating the wrong sort of women. Try finding those with whom you have some common feeling. If none exist, the problem is with you.
I don't know about the OP, but I'm an engineer, and women interested in dating engineers don't seem to exist. Maybe I'm the problem, but I don't know how to not be an engineer, and how to change myself into a salesguy or a marketer or a CEO, nor do I think it's realistic to think I could completely change my personality that way.
The main problem I have in dating, truthfully, is actually meeting women to date. I've always had this problem. As an engineer, I just don't come into personal contact with women very often in life: women don't go into engineering majors in college, or into engineering jobs afterwards. So I'm limited to meeting women in just a few ways: 1) hope to meet them at work somehow, among the few non-engineers I run into (which doesn't happen much), 2) run into them IRL somehow, like when standing in line (how often does this happen???), 3) meet them at some kind of singles function, or 4) meet them on a dating site online. None of these are particularly great ways to meet compatible people; #4 is theoretically the best, but in practice doesn't work out well because so few women actually use such sites, as they have no trouble getting picked up IRL somewhere, so the women who do use such sites are usually the leftovers who can't get a date any other way. Now throw in that I'm not so young any more, and women in my target age range (30s) are mostly married with kids (or divorced with kids and nearly unable to date because they have no time away from their kids), and the situation is very bleak.
My advice is to find a really good partner when you're in college, and don't graduate until you do. Go for a Master's or a second degree or something if you haven't found someone. After you leave college, it's all downhill.
We can stomp ISIS into the ground should we be so inclined - but we're not so inclined.
No, we can't. We have no such capability.
The problem is that ISIS is not a uniformed, traditional military force. It's supported by the cities it rules over. It's one and the same with the local population of Sunnis. The only way you're going to stomp ISIS into the ground is to level Sunni cities, and kill ALL the people living in them. The west is not willing to do that.
Now it is nothing but clothing stores and bad restaurants.
What else has there ever been at a mall?
Even back in the 80s when I was a kid, almost all the stores were clothes stores and fast-food restaurants ("food court"). The few exceptions were things like bookstores (like Waldenbooks), software/game stores (Electronics Boutique), arcades, Radio Shack, music/video stores, and tobacco stores. Book stores are mostly gone now, with Barnes and Noble being the sole survivor (besides odd little used book stores) (B&N sometimes does have mall locations though), most malls still have a game store (GameStop), some malls do have an arcade, Radio Shack just recently went under, music/video stores are mostly gone thanks to Netflix and Amazon and iTunes, and tobacco stores were forced out of malls ages ago.
But the point is, I can't remember a time when malls weren't mostly clothing stores and bad restaurants.
But no, I wouldn't buy one anyway. I'll stick with a Vizio dumb TV instead. And if they stop making those, I'll find some other brand that makes dumb TVs.
What are you talking about? We don't need these companies. We sure as hell don't need Sony: they don't do or produce anything that society relies on. I don't need a Sony TV, I can buy one from Samsung, LG, or Vizio, or lots of others. I don't need Sony music (and artists can go find another label). I sure don't need crappy Sony computers, I can get them from many other makers.
The same mostly goes for the others too. I never said eliminate all corporations, I just have a select list. I'd be happy to see GM disappear and for everyone to buy cars from other carmakers which can make a decent ignition switch for instance.
Now they are so worried about any possible failure that it takes them decades to do anything. That is the different between one guy in charge with a mission vs committees upon committees.
That has nothing to do with it. NASA hasn't had the budget it had with Apollo since the 60s/early 70s, and it hasn't had any kind of stable political backing either. Every 4 or 8 years, there's a totally different plan. It took longer than 8 years to do the Apollo program. The problem is that it simply isn't possible for our crappy government to do anything serious in space, because our government is too unstable. As soon as someone from "the other party" gets elected to the White House, NASA will have to scrap everything it did under the previous guy and do something totally different. That is a recipe for failure. The only reason they were able to get Apollo to work was because there was just enough unity between the politicians at the time to actually budget enough for the program and keep at it long enough, all because of their intense competition with the USSR in the Space Race. If the Russians hadn't gotten to space first, twice (first manmade object in space, and first human in space), making the Americans look stupid, Apollo would never have happened. These days, our politics are so completely fractured and broken that nothing is going to bring about that kind of unity.
The reason is we are a threat; not now but in about 1000 years at current rates of technological advancement; so they take us out now to maintain their dominance of space etc...they take us out now because it is easy. So no we wouldn't see them coming and we wouldn't stand a chance.
The problem with this is that it assumes that space, in space (pardon the pun), is a limited resource, and that it's actually feasible to have some kind of interstellar civilization, and thus some sort of empire that encompasses a region of space.
Here on Earth, back in Roman times (or better yet, during the time of the Hittite empire), no one in that empire would have cared much about establishing dominance over South America for instance, because they didn't really know it existed, and wouldn't have cared anyway because they didn't have any reliable way to get there: ships of that time simply weren't capable of making the voyage across the Atlantic safely and reliably, so no one went there.
Right now, according to our understanding of physics, there's no way of transporting ships between star systems within any kind of reasonable time-frame, or of communicating between star systems any faster than using such ships, so there's no way of having an interstellar empire or civilization. If you have to wait a few centuries before a message from a nearby star system is delivered, that makes it effectively impossible to govern. Of course, our understanding of physics could be flawed, but there's countless commenters here on Slashdot who insist that this is flatly impossible, even though we haven't even managed to send anything more than automated probes past our own moon.
So I guess if you assume FTL is possible, that could be a good reason for ET invasion. However, the "Independence Day" scenario I think is also quite possible: ETs looking for a new homeworld. Given what we know, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that other ETs would likely evolve in somewhat similar circumstances, on so-called "habitable zone" worlds. We're already looking for these ourselves, to find possible colonization sites or worlds which might have other life (as we know it). Maybe we're not the only ones looking for habitable-zone worlds....
The main problem with alien invasion scenarios is that they frequently don't have a good reason for invading in the first place. Why would aliens want to invade? Resources, land, or human bodies? If it's resources, it doesn't make any sense at all, because they can much more easily get whatever they need closer to home on other planets, moons, and asteroids. Even our own system has lots of these which we haven't touched yet. The only two scenarios that make much sense are land and bodies. In "Independence Day", it was land: supposedly the ETs had similar biology to ours and wanted the planet for themselves because it's liveable for them. Of course, that would make bombarding the planet with asteroids a bad idea, because that would make it much less liveable. Then there's the bodies angle, as seen in the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" movies and also some more recent movie I forget the name of (where a band of uninfected humans hides out in a mountain cave). This however seems highly unlikely: aliens who are biologically able to take over our bodies for hosts even though they evolved somewhere far away?
Why does alien invasion require FTL travel? That seems to assume that the aliens have human-like lifespans, haven't invented suspended animation, don't bother with generation ships, etc.
However, to make up for not having FTL, they had to use the plot device of a single solar system having hundreds of planets and moons which were terraformable, which is highly improbable.
I have a book but am not legally allowed to xerox all the pages of it and sell or give those copies away to other people. Does that mean that I don't own the book?
There is nothing stopping you from xeroxing all the pages of your book and giving away those copies. You might get sued (not likely) by the publisher or other copyright owner after the fact, but there is no technological measure preventing you from doing so. Your photocopy machine will happily copy these pages for you.
This is quite different from a non-jailbroken phone which doesn't allow you to install any app you want.
It's one thing for there to be a law saying you can't do something, and if you do you can be sued by the person you're harming, and quite another thing for a device you own to prevent you from doing what you want with it.
As for seatbelts or airbags, it depends on the exact make and model, but newer cars may throw up some roadblocks if you disable airbags. However, this is really apples and oranges: copyright violation is not a matter of public safety, and isn't even a crime (or shouldn't be, I guess the stupid DMCA makes it one, it's supposed to be a tort only). Anything to do with automobiles is a matter of public safety and therefore deserves a lot of regulation.
Because they care about replacing the existing software because it doesn't let them do all the things they want?
so they can installed pirated apps.
Well, the existing software wouldn't let them install pirated apps, so it looks like the OP was correct.
Are you advocating that our devices, which we pay for and own, spy on us and prevent us from doing things the government doesn't approve of? It's a pretty slippery slope from not allowing you to install pirated software to spying on you and sending your information to someone for nefarious uses even though your actions are completely ethical.
The exponential calculation I propose is key to the whole proposal (esp. on the copyright side). Let companies keep things protected as long as they want, but keep jacking up the fees, to a large degree. Note that it doesn't necessarily need to be exponential as in x^n where n >= 3 (which seems to be the common meaning of the word), just a very large degree: perhaps n=1.5. This makes it a cash cow for the government, and also allows companies to keep things protected as long as they can afford it, which for highly profitable things could be quite a while. But then for things which aren't profitable, they fall into the public domain very, very quickly, which is totally unlike the current state. Unless someone pays up, things shouldn't stay out of the public domain for more than 5 years. And fuck the Berne Convention; it's obviously not serving society well, so it doesn't need to be followed. Since it was probably pushed mostly by the US anyway, since we're easily the biggest beneficiaries of copyrights and patents, it shouldn't be too hard to get the other signatories to agree to a new system.
I actually disagree, and I have a proposal which a corporate-owned government might actually like. I've posted this before in years past.
It's basically a "pay-as-you-go" system. I'm going to concentrate on copyrights, as patents are a much stickier and more complex issue IMO.
It works like this: You file for copyright protection with the USPTO, and you get it, for free, for 5 years. After that, your work goes into the public domain, unless you pay. For another 5 years of protection, you need to pay $10,000. After that, if you want more protection, another 5 years will cost you $1M. After that, $10M. And so on.
The exact terms and dollar amounts can be argued, but the idea is the amount goes up exponentially. You get a little protection for free, but if your copyrighted work isn't generating much money, it isn't worth it to extend the protection beyond a certain point. Valuable works are worth protecting longer, but at some point the fees become too great to bother, and the work falls into the public domain. If Disney wants to spend tons of money getting the maximum protection for Steamboat Willy, that's fine, but other works won't be kept out of the public domain because of them, and most will be public domain in either 5 or 10 years.
All the money from this will finance the USPTO's operations, and any excess can go into the Treasury so taxes can be kept low.
Something similar could be done for patents, but for lesser terms, but the patent system still needs to be reworked completely to prevent submarine patents, overly-broad claims, and approval of patents with obvious prior art which the examiners never seem to know about, so this would only be one component of a patent system reworking.
No, they should still roll into town and hand out paper certificates proclaiming gifts they bring, but then on the certificate deduct the same amount for paying this patent troll, so the net result is $0. Make a big show of handing these out, so everyone can plainly see that their shitty little town is getting nothing but hot air because of this patent troll they sided with.
See how the parents like it when little Suzy and Johnny get certificates for scholarships which are worth nothing because the money went to a patent troll instead. And then Samsung should go to some other not-far-away town and give that same amount, in the form of these gifts (scholarships etc.) to them instead.
Exactly. That's why you have to smash all their belongings when they file the lawsuit, and make sure you wipe out all their data in the process. Then they won't be able to win the lawsuit. And make sure you conceal your identity well so you don't get prosecuted or sued.
Git is definitely a very powerful and flexible tool for competent developers, but there's no way in hell I'd ever recommend it to non-programmers for doing version control of binary data like office documents.
In fact, I wouldn't recommend any kind of DVCS for this application; DVCSs are more flexible and powerful, but not as easy to understand for laypeople. They want something that's central and hierarchal, where they check in stuff to a central repository which is the undisputed authority.
Offhand, I'd say SVN is probably the best choice for something like this if you want a FLOSS solution.
It doesn't matter if we figure out how to harness that energy. Our planet will be so inhospitable that we won't survive as a civilization on it. We couldn't even get Biosphere 2 to work, so artificial habitats are out. And a few people living in some caves with solar panels on top does not equal a civilization, only a dying species.
I'm not saying it's impossible for humans to survive all this, but our track record and current direction are so bad that it's much more likely that things are going to collapse in a big way before we're able to save ourselves.
You're a fucking moron. It's well known that most Linux installs are on computers sold with other OSes. There's no numbers because no one can possibly run around and figure out who has what installed on their computers, they only go off of sales figures. The vast majority of Linux users do NOT buy their computers with it pre-installed.
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To claim that there's a significant number of transgender people out there like this is simply ridiculous. They are out there, but they're a tiny, tiny minority. Most of them state quite clearly in their profile what their situation is.
Also, if you're having trouble telling a born-female person from a MtF transgender, you might want to get your eyes checked. There aren't very many who actually "pass" that well. Tip: look for an Adam's Apple.
You've been dating the wrong sort of women. Try finding those with whom you have some common feeling. If none exist, the problem is with you.
I don't know about the OP, but I'm an engineer, and women interested in dating engineers don't seem to exist. Maybe I'm the problem, but I don't know how to not be an engineer, and how to change myself into a salesguy or a marketer or a CEO, nor do I think it's realistic to think I could completely change my personality that way.
The main problem I have in dating, truthfully, is actually meeting women to date. I've always had this problem. As an engineer, I just don't come into personal contact with women very often in life: women don't go into engineering majors in college, or into engineering jobs afterwards. So I'm limited to meeting women in just a few ways: 1) hope to meet them at work somehow, among the few non-engineers I run into (which doesn't happen much), 2) run into them IRL somehow, like when standing in line (how often does this happen???), 3) meet them at some kind of singles function, or 4) meet them on a dating site online. None of these are particularly great ways to meet compatible people; #4 is theoretically the best, but in practice doesn't work out well because so few women actually use such sites, as they have no trouble getting picked up IRL somewhere, so the women who do use such sites are usually the leftovers who can't get a date any other way. Now throw in that I'm not so young any more, and women in my target age range (30s) are mostly married with kids (or divorced with kids and nearly unable to date because they have no time away from their kids), and the situation is very bleak.
My advice is to find a really good partner when you're in college, and don't graduate until you do. Go for a Master's or a second degree or something if you haven't found someone. After you leave college, it's all downhill.
We can stomp ISIS into the ground should we be so inclined - but we're not so inclined.
No, we can't. We have no such capability.
The problem is that ISIS is not a uniformed, traditional military force. It's supported by the cities it rules over. It's one and the same with the local population of Sunnis. The only way you're going to stomp ISIS into the ground is to level Sunni cities, and kill ALL the people living in them. The west is not willing to do that.
Now it is nothing but clothing stores and bad restaurants.
What else has there ever been at a mall?
Even back in the 80s when I was a kid, almost all the stores were clothes stores and fast-food restaurants ("food court"). The few exceptions were things like bookstores (like Waldenbooks), software/game stores (Electronics Boutique), arcades, Radio Shack, music/video stores, and tobacco stores. Book stores are mostly gone now, with Barnes and Noble being the sole survivor (besides odd little used book stores) (B&N sometimes does have mall locations though), most malls still have a game store (GameStop), some malls do have an arcade, Radio Shack just recently went under, music/video stores are mostly gone thanks to Netflix and Amazon and iTunes, and tobacco stores were forced out of malls ages ago.
But the point is, I can't remember a time when malls weren't mostly clothing stores and bad restaurants.
Because attacking the Army directly would lead to instant loss. Attacking civilians is a much more successful strategy.
Well, it's better than a Sony TV....
But no, I wouldn't buy one anyway. I'll stick with a Vizio dumb TV instead. And if they stop making those, I'll find some other brand that makes dumb TVs.
What are you talking about? We don't need these companies. We sure as hell don't need Sony: they don't do or produce anything that society relies on. I don't need a Sony TV, I can buy one from Samsung, LG, or Vizio, or lots of others. I don't need Sony music (and artists can go find another label). I sure don't need crappy Sony computers, I can get them from many other makers.
The same mostly goes for the others too. I never said eliminate all corporations, I just have a select list. I'd be happy to see GM disappear and for everyone to buy cars from other carmakers which can make a decent ignition switch for instance.
Now they are so worried about any possible failure that it takes them decades to do anything. That is the different between one guy in charge with a mission vs committees upon committees.
That has nothing to do with it. NASA hasn't had the budget it had with Apollo since the 60s/early 70s, and it hasn't had any kind of stable political backing either. Every 4 or 8 years, there's a totally different plan. It took longer than 8 years to do the Apollo program. The problem is that it simply isn't possible for our crappy government to do anything serious in space, because our government is too unstable. As soon as someone from "the other party" gets elected to the White House, NASA will have to scrap everything it did under the previous guy and do something totally different. That is a recipe for failure. The only reason they were able to get Apollo to work was because there was just enough unity between the politicians at the time to actually budget enough for the program and keep at it long enough, all because of their intense competition with the USSR in the Space Race. If the Russians hadn't gotten to space first, twice (first manmade object in space, and first human in space), making the Americans look stupid, Apollo would never have happened. These days, our politics are so completely fractured and broken that nothing is going to bring about that kind of unity.
They should just shut the whole company down and sell it off in small pieces.
I'd like to see lots of other companies do the same: Microsoft, Comcast, TWC, Oracle, Apple, GM...
The reason is we are a threat; not now but in about 1000 years at current rates of technological advancement; so they take us out now to maintain their dominance of space etc...they take us out now because it is easy. So no we wouldn't see them coming and we wouldn't stand a chance.
The problem with this is that it assumes that space, in space (pardon the pun), is a limited resource, and that it's actually feasible to have some kind of interstellar civilization, and thus some sort of empire that encompasses a region of space.
Here on Earth, back in Roman times (or better yet, during the time of the Hittite empire), no one in that empire would have cared much about establishing dominance over South America for instance, because they didn't really know it existed, and wouldn't have cared anyway because they didn't have any reliable way to get there: ships of that time simply weren't capable of making the voyage across the Atlantic safely and reliably, so no one went there.
Right now, according to our understanding of physics, there's no way of transporting ships between star systems within any kind of reasonable time-frame, or of communicating between star systems any faster than using such ships, so there's no way of having an interstellar empire or civilization. If you have to wait a few centuries before a message from a nearby star system is delivered, that makes it effectively impossible to govern. Of course, our understanding of physics could be flawed, but there's countless commenters here on Slashdot who insist that this is flatly impossible, even though we haven't even managed to send anything more than automated probes past our own moon.
So I guess if you assume FTL is possible, that could be a good reason for ET invasion. However, the "Independence Day" scenario I think is also quite possible: ETs looking for a new homeworld. Given what we know, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that other ETs would likely evolve in somewhat similar circumstances, on so-called "habitable zone" worlds. We're already looking for these ourselves, to find possible colonization sites or worlds which might have other life (as we know it). Maybe we're not the only ones looking for habitable-zone worlds....
The main problem with alien invasion scenarios is that they frequently don't have a good reason for invading in the first place. Why would aliens want to invade? Resources, land, or human bodies? If it's resources, it doesn't make any sense at all, because they can much more easily get whatever they need closer to home on other planets, moons, and asteroids. Even our own system has lots of these which we haven't touched yet. The only two scenarios that make much sense are land and bodies. In "Independence Day", it was land: supposedly the ETs had similar biology to ours and wanted the planet for themselves because it's liveable for them. Of course, that would make bombarding the planet with asteroids a bad idea, because that would make it much less liveable. Then there's the bodies angle, as seen in the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" movies and also some more recent movie I forget the name of (where a band of uninfected humans hides out in a mountain cave). This however seems highly unlikely: aliens who are biologically able to take over our bodies for hosts even though they evolved somewhere far away?
Why does alien invasion require FTL travel? That seems to assume that the aliens have human-like lifespans, haven't invented suspended animation, don't bother with generation ships, etc.
You'll have to start by first finding some fundamental physics which allows superluminal travel. Sorry, but Star Trek physics doesn't count.
Physicist Miguelle Alcubierre disagrees.
The "Firefly" TV series wasn't boring at all.
However, to make up for not having FTL, they had to use the plot device of a single solar system having hundreds of planets and moons which were terraformable, which is highly improbable.
I have a book but am not legally allowed to xerox all the pages of it and sell or give those copies away to other people. Does that mean that I don't own the book?
There is nothing stopping you from xeroxing all the pages of your book and giving away those copies. You might get sued (not likely) by the publisher or other copyright owner after the fact, but there is no technological measure preventing you from doing so. Your photocopy machine will happily copy these pages for you.
This is quite different from a non-jailbroken phone which doesn't allow you to install any app you want.
It's one thing for there to be a law saying you can't do something, and if you do you can be sued by the person you're harming, and quite another thing for a device you own to prevent you from doing what you want with it.
As for seatbelts or airbags, it depends on the exact make and model, but newer cars may throw up some roadblocks if you disable airbags. However, this is really apples and oranges: copyright violation is not a matter of public safety, and isn't even a crime (or shouldn't be, I guess the stupid DMCA makes it one, it's supposed to be a tort only). Anything to do with automobiles is a matter of public safety and therefore deserves a lot of regulation.
Because they care about replacing the existing software because it doesn't let them do all the things they want?
so they can installed pirated apps.
Well, the existing software wouldn't let them install pirated apps, so it looks like the OP was correct.
Are you advocating that our devices, which we pay for and own, spy on us and prevent us from doing things the government doesn't approve of? It's a pretty slippery slope from not allowing you to install pirated software to spying on you and sending your information to someone for nefarious uses even though your actions are completely ethical.
The exponential calculation I propose is key to the whole proposal (esp. on the copyright side). Let companies keep things protected as long as they want, but keep jacking up the fees, to a large degree. Note that it doesn't necessarily need to be exponential as in x^n where n >= 3 (which seems to be the common meaning of the word), just a very large degree: perhaps n=1.5. This makes it a cash cow for the government, and also allows companies to keep things protected as long as they can afford it, which for highly profitable things could be quite a while. But then for things which aren't profitable, they fall into the public domain very, very quickly, which is totally unlike the current state. Unless someone pays up, things shouldn't stay out of the public domain for more than 5 years. And fuck the Berne Convention; it's obviously not serving society well, so it doesn't need to be followed. Since it was probably pushed mostly by the US anyway, since we're easily the biggest beneficiaries of copyrights and patents, it shouldn't be too hard to get the other signatories to agree to a new system.
I actually disagree, and I have a proposal which a corporate-owned government might actually like. I've posted this before in years past.
It's basically a "pay-as-you-go" system. I'm going to concentrate on copyrights, as patents are a much stickier and more complex issue IMO.
It works like this:
You file for copyright protection with the USPTO, and you get it, for free, for 5 years. After that, your work goes into the public domain, unless you pay. For another 5 years of protection, you need to pay $10,000. After that, if you want more protection, another 5 years will cost you $1M. After that, $10M. And so on.
The exact terms and dollar amounts can be argued, but the idea is the amount goes up exponentially. You get a little protection for free, but if your copyrighted work isn't generating much money, it isn't worth it to extend the protection beyond a certain point. Valuable works are worth protecting longer, but at some point the fees become too great to bother, and the work falls into the public domain. If Disney wants to spend tons of money getting the maximum protection for Steamboat Willy, that's fine, but other works won't be kept out of the public domain because of them, and most will be public domain in either 5 or 10 years.
All the money from this will finance the USPTO's operations, and any excess can go into the Treasury so taxes can be kept low.
Something similar could be done for patents, but for lesser terms, but the patent system still needs to be reworked completely to prevent submarine patents, overly-broad claims, and approval of patents with obvious prior art which the examiners never seem to know about, so this would only be one component of a patent system reworking.
No, they should still roll into town and hand out paper certificates proclaiming gifts they bring, but then on the certificate deduct the same amount for paying this patent troll, so the net result is $0. Make a big show of handing these out, so everyone can plainly see that their shitty little town is getting nothing but hot air because of this patent troll they sided with.
See how the parents like it when little Suzy and Johnny get certificates for scholarships which are worth nothing because the money went to a patent troll instead. And then Samsung should go to some other not-far-away town and give that same amount, in the form of these gifts (scholarships etc.) to them instead.
Exactly. That's why you have to smash all their belongings when they file the lawsuit, and make sure you wipe out all their data in the process. Then they won't be able to win the lawsuit. And make sure you conceal your identity well so you don't get prosecuted or sued.
ODT documents are nothing more than collections of XML files in a ZIP container.
Git is definitely a very powerful and flexible tool for competent developers, but there's no way in hell I'd ever recommend it to non-programmers for doing version control of binary data like office documents.
In fact, I wouldn't recommend any kind of DVCS for this application; DVCSs are more flexible and powerful, but not as easy to understand for laypeople. They want something that's central and hierarchal, where they check in stuff to a central repository which is the undisputed authority.
Offhand, I'd say SVN is probably the best choice for something like this if you want a FLOSS solution.
It doesn't matter if we figure out how to harness that energy. Our planet will be so inhospitable that we won't survive as a civilization on it. We couldn't even get Biosphere 2 to work, so artificial habitats are out. And a few people living in some caves with solar panels on top does not equal a civilization, only a dying species.
I'm not saying it's impossible for humans to survive all this, but our track record and current direction are so bad that it's much more likely that things are going to collapse in a big way before we're able to save ourselves.
You're a fucking moron. It's well known that most Linux installs are on computers sold with other OSes. There's no numbers because no one can possibly run around and figure out who has what installed on their computers, they only go off of sales figures. The vast majority of Linux users do NOT buy their computers with it pre-installed.
Fuck off, idiot.
Um... Slackware?