Yep; at least back in those days, there was competition for international aid, between the capitalist Americans and western powers and the communist Russians and the Soviet state. Now it's being monopolized, unless China decides to get into the international aid business to further their superpower goals.
Things like this are not the norm in America, and certainly not for private-sector employees. There's all kinds of weird crap going on in the government sector, but a few things like this are significant to the national economy as a whole.
Sounds great, but how do you convince some other country to be your benefactor? Usually, when countries get loans, there's all kinds of horrible strings attached which only serve to keep that country crippled in perpetuity.
Huh? That's not part of the US's problem at all. Cosmetic surgery isn't covered by insurance, it's at-will and paid directly by those who want it. It's totally irrelevant to the problems in the healthcare industry in America. In fact, if anything, it's probably more cost-effective and efficient because it cuts the insurance companies out of the equation.
and everything else you pay for out of your own pocket.
Yes, that's already how we do it for cosmetic surgery. It's everything else that's a disaster.
But if the software is changing hands b/w say the USAF and the US Navy, or b/w Centcom and Pacific fleet, then is that considered 'distributing only to yourself' or is it considered distribution? All of the above come under the Pentagon, but are different organizations, or aren't they? This is where the license becomes more fuzzy.
I would call the US Government a singular entity.
You think it's "distribution" if the IT Department of Corporation X gives software to the HR department of that same corporation? Or Billy in IT gives a copy to John who's also in IT and sits next to him? Sorry, no.
How do you know that there's nothing hiding in the background of your CM install? Did you build it from source?
Well if nothing else, I trust the guys at CM and other such open-source projects (like DD-WRT) a LOT more than I trust any manufacturer or telecom carrier. The latter have been proven to load their phones with shitware and spyware; the former have not. Moreover, the mfgrs and carriers have strong financial incentives to load their devices with shitware; the CM guys have a strong disincentive, since as soon as someone finds out they did (by analyzing network traffic) and publicizes this, their reputation is toast.
At some point you have to trust the OS.
You don't know how the OS was altered by the mfgrs and carriers; they have the source, and can build in any back doors and spyware they want. They've already made it so you can't uninstall any of their pre-loaded shitware.
If you can't do that, get another OS.
Yes, that's why lots of people are trying out CM. It's not like there's any alternatives from the large mfgrs or carriers anyway; they're all going to be loaded with shitware and spyware.
So are you saying that you have a hard time getting employees to move to your location? Where is your company located? Maybe you should look into telecommuting, opening a remote office somewhere better, or offering generous relocation packages and higher salaries.
You're an idiot if you don't think Obama is a crony capitalist. Almost every US politician, including Chris Christie, is a crony capitalist (except maybe Bernie Sanders). Obama is not special or different.
As for the far right, they believe he's a Nazi, commie, Muslim, or atheist, not all at the same time. The people on the far right are not a single person; they're different people who all have different opinions and beliefs, as hard as that might be for you to understand.
That's no different than most commercial software: unless the commercial software is developed for one customer (i.e., it's custom-made software), that software maker needs to try to please as many potential customers as possible, so you end up with "featuritis".
If the software is developed for the US Government (USG), then the terms of the GPL don't really even apply: the GPL requires you to distribute (or make available) the source code to everyone you distribute binaries to. Well, if you're only distributing binaries to yourself, then there's nothing to do. So if the USG doesn't distribute the binaries to anyone else outside the government, then they don't have to distribute source code anywhere.
You can freeze some of it, but can you really freeze all of it? How do you know? There's no way to really know what kind of shitware is running in the background, and not able to be disabled from the application manager; since the OS image is closed, there can easily be services running in the background that aren't disableable by the user.
Who knows, it could be either. A lot of standby power loads have a terrible power factor because of the way switching power supplies work. One fix for it is to use a power factor correction circuit (PFC); a lot of newer devices, such as PC power supplies, now have these because of European regulations requiring a certain minimum power factor (poor PF is apparently difficult for the electric utilities to deal with). These microwaves probably didn't bother with that, because PFC requires extra parts (esp. for "active PFC", versus "passive PFC" which is just a few extra capacitors and coils I think), and also active PFC itself consumes a small amount of power, reducing efficiency slightly.
X is an extendable. It has been extended. Modern applications don't use the drawing API. Everything wayland does could be (and will be) implemented in X11 (see their FAQ).
There's a lot of things that can't be done in X11, because it's architecturally incompatible. Tearing is apparently a big problem currently, for instance. Also, as with any software project, at some point extending it over and over becomes too burdensome, and it's faster and more efficient to toss it out and start over with a clean rewrite.
If you think X is so extendable, then why don't you extend it to fix all these problems? The people who actually work on X11 (the people at x.org) have all given up on it and moved to Wayland development. If the people who actually maintain a project have decided it's time to move on, then who the fuck are you to tell them they're all wrong?
On local clients, nothing goes over the network. So X11 is not necessarily slower.
Wrong, totally wrong. Did you read anything at all above? I never addressed local performance (though that is too slower, but not that much), I was addressing network transparency and the speed of running X applications remotely. It's slow as shit, because X was never designed to run large, bitmapped applications over a network. Whereas Microsoft's RDP was, which is why it's so superior and faster. Heck, you can even run VNC full-screen sessions (or better yet, NX) much faster than singular forwarded X applications.
Network transparency. I use X11 every day, and no RDP is not a good alternative.
Um, yes it is. RDP is fast, so fast that it lets Windows users run entire desktop sessions with far greater responsiveness than singular X applications over the same link. With Wayland, we'll soon be able to use the RDP protocol to run singular applications remotely, just like we do now with X but much faster and with far better performance over high-latency links.
Yes, X11 currently sucks over high latencly links (which could be fixed on the toolkit level)
That's funny, Microsoft didn't need to "fix" the toolkit level for RDP to work well on high-latency links. Why do you think it should be so for Linux apps?
How many people do you know actually using features provided by CM that aren't provided by a clean stock reflash
What are you talking about? A good reason to use CM (or other alternative rom) isn't features, it's the lack of "features": the "stock" images provided by the manufacturers/carriers are loaded with all kinds of shitware. Something like CM can improve performance by not having a bunch of shitware loaded. The other big problem with stock images is that they're usually old; the mfgrs don't bother releasing updated images when new versions of Android come out, and newer versions can frequently have better performance or power consumption. CM (and other alternative roms) give you the possibility of having an image that's updated, and not loaded with shitware, something you can't get with a mfgr stock image.
Um, just try using it. It's slow as shit, because X does a terrible job with bitmapped graphics. X was designed to be network-transparent by moving all the drawing primitives to the X server, so the only information going over the wire would be drawing commands, rather than bitmapped graphics. I guess that worked well enough in the days of butt-ugly CDE and Motif, but those days are long past, and now everyone uses Qt and gtk+, which don't use those drawing primitives at all, and instead everything uses bitmapped graphics. X has no compression, so moving bitmapped graphics over the wire is very slow. For comparison, try running a remote desktop session between two Windows machines, or even between a Windows machine and a Linux machine with "rdesktop"; it's much, much faster.
Wayland will be dumping the obsolete drawing primitive stuff and moving to RDP for network transparency, last I read. So maybe we Linux users will finally get network transparency as good as Windows users have had available for over a decade!!! But for some stupid reason, a lot of curmudgeons would rather we stick with 30-year-old technology that doesn't work half as well as what Microsoft has been using for ages and wasn't designed for modern use cases.
Ok, I can understand the complaint about documentation re: GRUB2. That's something a lot of Free software is lacking in.
But JSON is a pretty standard format, and a pretty easy to understand one at that. JSON mainly exists as a backlash against XML, which was supposed to be a universal data format, but is largely reviled because it's difficult for humans to read and is very wordy (because of all the closing tags). JSON by comparison is very easy to read, and really should be easier than HTML. I can't imagine why a casual nerd wouldn't be able to open up a JSON bookmark file, understand the syntax quickly, and make edits.
No, all I really need in a mirror is a reflective surface. You know, a "mirror."
I really wish someone would invent such a thing for the bathroom. I have actually never seen one. The closest thing I've seen are mirrors which only reflect part of the time, namely when the bathroom isn't humid. I've never seen a mirror that reflects after a hot shower; instead, they're always covered by fog.
What good is this "smart" mirror going to be when I can't read anything on it because it's all fogged up?
Personally, I feel like you've captured the spirit of current Linux development. Don't like something? Developers don't care. You don't have a choice.
Wrong. Developers DO care. Just not all the developers. When Gnome3 came about, it was pretty obvious that the Gnome developers didn't care about the users who complained about this new direction. However, a bunch of other developers DID care, and those developers created MATE and Cinnamon.
As for GRUB2 and KMS, you're one of a tiny number of people complaining about such things; everyone else seems to do just fine with them.
Wayland is a pretty important and necesary item too; X is obsolete and doesn't work well for modern hardware. And unlike the others, you can't even use Wayland, since no one's made a distro with it yet; it's still under development, and unlike some other projects in the past, the Wayland developers seem to be concerned with making sure it's actually ready for prime-time use before releasing it as such. Don't complain about it until it's actually out there, and not just under development.
This is a pretty terrible review. What you need to do is compare the latest LMDE with the latest Mint (non-LMDE version). LMDE is significantly different from the Ubuntu-based versions, and that's likely why you had problems with hardware detection, something that Ubuntu got famous for.
LMDE doesn't have all the features and options that the other Mint flavors have, last time I checked. There's still a lot of nice stuff that Ubuntu adds which hasn't been moved upstream to Debian yet.
Except the politicians are not paying for it, Me and other residents of NC are paying for it, so yes I do expect it to be covered by my taxes.
The problem is that you and the other residents of NC are the ones who happily voted for these politicians to lead you. NC residents are not going to be up in arms and protesting at the state capitol if the science museum thumbs its nose at the NC state government and gets its funding yanked; instead, NC residents would agree with the politicians, since NC residents are climate change deniers.
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Yep; at least back in those days, there was competition for international aid, between the capitalist Americans and western powers and the communist Russians and the Soviet state. Now it's being monopolized, unless China decides to get into the international aid business to further their superpower goals.
Things like this are not the norm in America, and certainly not for private-sector employees. There's all kinds of weird crap going on in the government sector, but a few things like this are significant to the national economy as a whole.
Sounds great, but how do you convince some other country to be your benefactor? Usually, when countries get loans, there's all kinds of horrible strings attached which only serve to keep that country crippled in perpetuity.
Spending money on cosmetic surgery
Huh? That's not part of the US's problem at all. Cosmetic surgery isn't covered by insurance, it's at-will and paid directly by those who want it. It's totally irrelevant to the problems in the healthcare industry in America. In fact, if anything, it's probably more cost-effective and efficient because it cuts the insurance companies out of the equation.
and everything else you pay for out of your own pocket.
Yes, that's already how we do it for cosmetic surgery. It's everything else that's a disaster.
But if the software is changing hands b/w say the USAF and the US Navy, or b/w Centcom and Pacific fleet, then is that considered 'distributing only to yourself' or is it considered distribution? All of the above come under the Pentagon, but are different organizations, or aren't they? This is where the license becomes more fuzzy.
I would call the US Government a singular entity.
You think it's "distribution" if the IT Department of Corporation X gives software to the HR department of that same corporation? Or Billy in IT gives a copy to John who's also in IT and sits next to him? Sorry, no.
How do you know that there's nothing hiding in the background of your CM install? Did you build it from source?
Well if nothing else, I trust the guys at CM and other such open-source projects (like DD-WRT) a LOT more than I trust any manufacturer or telecom carrier. The latter have been proven to load their phones with shitware and spyware; the former have not. Moreover, the mfgrs and carriers have strong financial incentives to load their devices with shitware; the CM guys have a strong disincentive, since as soon as someone finds out they did (by analyzing network traffic) and publicizes this, their reputation is toast.
At some point you have to trust the OS.
You don't know how the OS was altered by the mfgrs and carriers; they have the source, and can build in any back doors and spyware they want. They've already made it so you can't uninstall any of their pre-loaded shitware.
If you can't do that, get another OS.
Yes, that's why lots of people are trying out CM. It's not like there's any alternatives from the large mfgrs or carriers anyway; they're all going to be loaded with shitware and spyware.
if they were willing to settle down locally.
So are you saying that you have a hard time getting employees to move to your location? Where is your company located? Maybe you should look into telecommuting, opening a remote office somewhere better, or offering generous relocation packages and higher salaries.
You're an idiot if you don't think Obama is a crony capitalist. Almost every US politician, including Chris Christie, is a crony capitalist (except maybe Bernie Sanders). Obama is not special or different.
As for the far right, they believe he's a Nazi, commie, Muslim, or atheist, not all at the same time. The people on the far right are not a single person; they're different people who all have different opinions and beliefs, as hard as that might be for you to understand.
That's no different than most commercial software: unless the commercial software is developed for one customer (i.e., it's custom-made software), that software maker needs to try to please as many potential customers as possible, so you end up with "featuritis".
If the software is developed for the US Government (USG), then the terms of the GPL don't really even apply: the GPL requires you to distribute (or make available) the source code to everyone you distribute binaries to. Well, if you're only distributing binaries to yourself, then there's nothing to do. So if the USG doesn't distribute the binaries to anyone else outside the government, then they don't have to distribute source code anywhere.
You can freeze the shitware in modern versions.
You can freeze some of it, but can you really freeze all of it? How do you know? There's no way to really know what kind of shitware is running in the background, and not able to be disabled from the application manager; since the OS image is closed, there can easily be services running in the background that aren't disableable by the user.
Well if something is too slow to be even usable, then for practical purposes it doesn't really exist, which is the way I interpreted his statement.
Who knows, it could be either. A lot of standby power loads have a terrible power factor because of the way switching power supplies work. One fix for it is to use a power factor correction circuit (PFC); a lot of newer devices, such as PC power supplies, now have these because of European regulations requiring a certain minimum power factor (poor PF is apparently difficult for the electric utilities to deal with). These microwaves probably didn't bother with that, because PFC requires extra parts (esp. for "active PFC", versus "passive PFC" which is just a few extra capacitors and coils I think), and also active PFC itself consumes a small amount of power, reducing efficiency slightly.
X is an extendable. It has been extended. Modern applications don't use the drawing API. Everything wayland does could be (and will be) implemented in X11 (see their FAQ).
There's a lot of things that can't be done in X11, because it's architecturally incompatible. Tearing is apparently a big problem currently, for instance. Also, as with any software project, at some point extending it over and over becomes too burdensome, and it's faster and more efficient to toss it out and start over with a clean rewrite.
If you think X is so extendable, then why don't you extend it to fix all these problems? The people who actually work on X11 (the people at x.org) have all given up on it and moved to Wayland development. If the people who actually maintain a project have decided it's time to move on, then who the fuck are you to tell them they're all wrong?
On local clients, nothing goes over the network. So X11 is not necessarily slower.
Wrong, totally wrong. Did you read anything at all above? I never addressed local performance (though that is too slower, but not that much), I was addressing network transparency and the speed of running X applications remotely. It's slow as shit, because X was never designed to run large, bitmapped applications over a network. Whereas Microsoft's RDP was, which is why it's so superior and faster. Heck, you can even run VNC full-screen sessions (or better yet, NX) much faster than singular forwarded X applications.
Network transparency. I use X11 every day, and no RDP is not a good alternative.
Um, yes it is. RDP is fast, so fast that it lets Windows users run entire desktop sessions with far greater responsiveness than singular X applications over the same link. With Wayland, we'll soon be able to use the RDP protocol to run singular applications remotely, just like we do now with X but much faster and with far better performance over high-latency links.
Yes, X11 currently sucks over high latencly links (which could be fixed on the toolkit level)
That's funny, Microsoft didn't need to "fix" the toolkit level for RDP to work well on high-latency links. Why do you think it should be so for Linux apps?
Can you please give some details on how you do that?
How many people do you know actually using features provided by CM that aren't provided by a clean stock reflash
What are you talking about? A good reason to use CM (or other alternative rom) isn't features, it's the lack of "features": the "stock" images provided by the manufacturers/carriers are loaded with all kinds of shitware. Something like CM can improve performance by not having a bunch of shitware loaded. The other big problem with stock images is that they're usually old; the mfgrs don't bother releasing updated images when new versions of Android come out, and newer versions can frequently have better performance or power consumption. CM (and other alternative roms) give you the possibility of having an image that's updated, and not loaded with shitware, something you can't get with a mfgr stock image.
Um, just try using it. It's slow as shit, because X does a terrible job with bitmapped graphics. X was designed to be network-transparent by moving all the drawing primitives to the X server, so the only information going over the wire would be drawing commands, rather than bitmapped graphics. I guess that worked well enough in the days of butt-ugly CDE and Motif, but those days are long past, and now everyone uses Qt and gtk+, which don't use those drawing primitives at all, and instead everything uses bitmapped graphics. X has no compression, so moving bitmapped graphics over the wire is very slow. For comparison, try running a remote desktop session between two Windows machines, or even between a Windows machine and a Linux machine with "rdesktop"; it's much, much faster.
Wayland will be dumping the obsolete drawing primitive stuff and moving to RDP for network transparency, last I read. So maybe we Linux users will finally get network transparency as good as Windows users have had available for over a decade!!! But for some stupid reason, a lot of curmudgeons would rather we stick with 30-year-old technology that doesn't work half as well as what Microsoft has been using for ages and wasn't designed for modern use cases.
Ok, I can understand the complaint about documentation re: GRUB2. That's something a lot of Free software is lacking in.
But JSON is a pretty standard format, and a pretty easy to understand one at that. JSON mainly exists as a backlash against XML, which was supposed to be a universal data format, but is largely reviled because it's difficult for humans to read and is very wordy (because of all the closing tags). JSON by comparison is very easy to read, and really should be easier than HTML. I can't imagine why a casual nerd wouldn't be able to open up a JSON bookmark file, understand the syntax quickly, and make edits.
I prefer not to stick my finger into ice-cold water if I can help it.
No, all I really need in a mirror is a reflective surface. You know, a "mirror."
I really wish someone would invent such a thing for the bathroom. I have actually never seen one. The closest thing I've seen are mirrors which only reflect part of the time, namely when the bathroom isn't humid. I've never seen a mirror that reflects after a hot shower; instead, they're always covered by fog.
What good is this "smart" mirror going to be when I can't read anything on it because it's all fogged up?
Personally, I feel like you've captured the spirit of current Linux development. Don't like something? Developers don't care. You don't have a choice.
Wrong. Developers DO care. Just not all the developers. When Gnome3 came about, it was pretty obvious that the Gnome developers didn't care about the users who complained about this new direction. However, a bunch of other developers DID care, and those developers created MATE and Cinnamon.
As for GRUB2 and KMS, you're one of a tiny number of people complaining about such things; everyone else seems to do just fine with them.
Wayland is a pretty important and necesary item too; X is obsolete and doesn't work well for modern hardware. And unlike the others, you can't even use Wayland, since no one's made a distro with it yet; it's still under development, and unlike some other projects in the past, the Wayland developers seem to be concerned with making sure it's actually ready for prime-time use before releasing it as such. Don't complain about it until it's actually out there, and not just under development.
This is a pretty terrible review. What you need to do is compare the latest LMDE with the latest Mint (non-LMDE version). LMDE is significantly different from the Ubuntu-based versions, and that's likely why you had problems with hardware detection, something that Ubuntu got famous for.
LMDE doesn't have all the features and options that the other Mint flavors have, last time I checked. There's still a lot of nice stuff that Ubuntu adds which hasn't been moved upstream to Debian yet.
Except the politicians are not paying for it, Me and other residents of NC are paying for it, so yes I do expect it to be covered by my taxes.
The problem is that you and the other residents of NC are the ones who happily voted for these politicians to lead you. NC residents are not going to be up in arms and protesting at the state capitol if the science museum thumbs its nose at the NC state government and gets its funding yanked; instead, NC residents would agree with the politicians, since NC residents are climate change deniers.
Too bad that show totally jumped the shark with the whole "invasion from hollow Earth" plotline.