I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, or if you're just uninformed...
1) Why can't they put x-ray machines in airports for checked luggages so people don't put bombs in them?
They do. In fact, they operate at an even higher power level than the x-ray machines used for screening carry-on baggage. Hence the massive warnings as of late to NOT put high-speed film in checked baggage.
In addition to X-raying checked baggage, many airports also employ bomb-sniffing dogs and/or bomb detection equipment to screen checked luggage.
2) Why can't airlines maintain their aircraft so the engines don't fall off?
As other posters have pointed out, this is by design. What would you rather have -- a turbine vibrating a wing off and completely destroying any chance of survival, or the ability to quite likely make a recovery using any remaining engine(s)?
If you've read Carl Sagan's Contact, you know a very interesting theory about pi, and every other seeming random mathematical representation (for example, e) in the universe.
They're not random, they're tied directly to the rules of our universe. And if you look in the right way, they may contain a message.
But Ellie already found it in that book, so this news story's a little old, eh?
Yes, Dell is not the only manufacturer suffering the wrath of this little problem. I saw the "Battery Recall Information" link on many other sites while I was laptop shopping over the past two weeks.
I can't recall offhand the other companies, but it seems like Compaq and/or HP also were recalling batteries.
My feelings on the subject seem quite equal to yours (though I don't have racial profiling or anything else going against me).
Cameras can't discern reality, and the picture quality often mutates it. If the police decide to view the tapes looking for drug dealing, and see a friend handing me something on the street at 10:30 PM, what's going to be their first reaction? I may claim to be innocent, and I may well be, but that means nothing in this day and age. "Video doesn't lie," as they say. Innocent until proven guilty is becoming more and more a fantasy, and judges are becoming less willing to actually analyze a case (and people like That Guy In The White House aren't helping, what with mandatory sentencing and all. Judicial discretion, people...).
The sad truth of the matter is the U.S. is going down the tubes fast. All the liberties our forefathers put their lives down for are being taken away by the government, and with "our" blessing, no less. What a stupid bunch of sheep.
There's a large difference in usefulness here, though. Police stationed on corners, or even patrolling a small area, can respond. Cameras continue staring on obliviously, and only if they're actively monitored will an officer be dispatched, which means (s)he still has to get there for it to be purposeful at all.
This raises an issue in and of itself -- how are you going to pay for monitoring 24/7? Sure, you can do it, but it'll cost insane amounts of money to pay a staff to watch a bank of probably thousands of cameras.
I'm not sold on this crap. Grainy video from a tiny camera can easily be misconstrued, the cost is far too high, and it doesn't honestly solve anything.
Feed me the lines on cameras making people behave all you want, it's not true. Once people have adjusted to the idea of the camera being there, it no longer matters. Many criminals are too brazen to worry about some surveillance device, as well -- recently, someone broke into a museum gift shop and stole thousands of dollars in jewelry. Audible alarm, visible surveillance system, criminal breaks in, criminal escapes.
Cameras were installed at my old school a while back, and nothing changed after about a week of adjustment. Students continued fighting despite the cameras, or found a location where they knew a camera wouldn't see.
Photoradar and red light cameras have recently been installed in my city. The people who want to run the red lights and do 10, 15, or 20 miles over the speed limit still do it.
See a trend yet?
Cameras can't replace people. Period. It just doesn't work.
Okay, seeing as how a handful of users and ACs seem to be under the impression Progeny's just a commercial version of Debian who's Bad Evil Closed-Sourcing everything they put out...
Pay attention! There's been a lot of press about Progeny recently, and most, if not all of it, mentioned how the vast majority (if not all) of their tools are covered under the GPL. Progeny's been friendly to Debian, and the chances of some of the improvements being merged in Debian proper aren't that lousy.
What's Progeny there for? The same reason Red Hat is [or rather, should be]. If you're a CEO or CFO with absolutely no clue, are you going to let Jimbob install Slackware, where he's the only one who can support it -- or are you going to purchase a solution and support plan from a company that can back it when Jimbob isn't there?
Just because someone is selling a distribution doesn't make them evil. Get your facts straight before you scream foul.
No offense, but it's a support nightmare due to the multiple flavors of popular versions and ever-changing kernel...
Well, idFolk, no offense, but it's a nightmare to think you're this out of it. "multiple flavors of popular versions" -- I assume they're referring to distributions. This isn't a terribly hard problem to get around, and for the sake of comparison, it's not much different than Win95 v. Win98. Things are in different places, versions of files may be different, etc. If it really gets your panties in such a knot, static link the binaries.
The "ever-changing kernel" also has me a bit confused -- what's the issue here? As a general rule, the guts don't change significantly inside of a version series (e.g. 2.2.x) to make incompatibility issues. So what's at hand here? My Loki tin specifically says "Kernel 2.2.x". If you're running on, say, 2.0.1, why would you purchase this game, or even expect it to run, hmm? I've been through probably 3 or 4 2.2.x-series kernels and 30 recompiles since purchasing Q3A, and it's gone off without a hitch each time. It's also run perfectly on both a Redhat system and a Debian system (which has been slink, woody, and potato).
Maybe it's just me, but it sounds like id's sold out to the FUD market. Have they been purchased by MS pending X-Box, too?
IIRC (it's been a while, so this is based purely on memory), the method found to crack GSM is using a hardware solution -- not readily available hardware or software -- and even then it's time consuming and expensive.
So, you're not going to have Joe Weirdo down the street listening in on your conversation with a (relatively cheap) scanner as in the earlier days of cellular.
AFAIK, no phone combines GSM and AMPS.
Actually, I believe there are one or two Motorola models VoiceStream is/was selling that are combined GSM/analog. Of course, they don't exist anywhere on the Motorola site, so they may be discontinued.
Not too sure about this, but I do know that you can get AMPS modules for at least the Nokia 5190 (I'd assume the 6190 supports it, too, but don't know for sure)...
You're absolutely correct. The same "Plus" module (although I think it should be a "Minus" module..) is available for both phones. I had looked into getting one at one point, but as they were $200, I decided I'd just stick with my glorious GSM.
GSM is the god of cellular (or "PCS" if you're one of those psychotic people) service. Encrypted phone calls, SIM (Smart) cards, the ability to easily roam... Spent two weeks in San Diego on the Pac Bell network without a hitch.
And of course there's nothing like buying a new phone, slapping your SIM card in it, and having the same address book and general settings as you did before. Ah, the wonders of GSM.
It's very interesting that VoiceStream, a relative newcomer to Arizona, has a better service area than Alltel and Qwest/USWest who have been around for some time now. If it hadn't been for VoiceStream, a guy stranded at the side of the road might still be there -- out of a USWest, Alltel, and VoiceStream phone, mine was the only one with any service (and this was not an area I'd expect to have service).
Judging by this thread,/. is loaded with NHS dropouts or people who just refused to join.
I attended one meeting before I got sick of the elitism shit ("Oh, we REALLY need to raise the GPA requirements to 3.8 or 3.9... We have such riff raff in it right now!" -- But then, that bitch had a 4.3 or so, I believe...).
This year's club pictures rolled around, and I was
one of 5 people in my psych class who didn't go to the NHS picture (leaving only 5 people in the room, no less...). Discussion rolled around to why everyone wasn't in the NHS picture, and my teacher's jaw nearly dropped to the floor when I said I dropped out because I didn't want to be part of such an elitist organization.
That felt very good. Not better than sex (or firing up, say, a Duron with 2 gigs of RAM), but very good.
Oh, please... If I have to see one more disgustingly pathetic JonKatz story, I'm going to
puke all over my keyboard.
High school != Hellmouth, you're just an almost-worthless writer looking for a little publicity, and "Hellmouth" has become your cliched tagline of choice.
Getting through high school is as simple as ignoring the dumbasses. Sure, I've been harassed, and even assaulted (once, presumably as part of someone's gang initiation -- but that wasn't even in high school), so what? If you don't let it get to you, it doesn't hurt that much. There are many morons in the world, and I know darn well they're not worth a second thought.
(And no, the kid should not have been suspended. It's completely ludicrous to bend the rules to castigate someone for something this insignificant. I completely hate his use of "martyr" and "downtrodden", but hey, he's welcome to sensationalize for publicity as much as Katz has for every "article" thus far.)
A little nit-picky, yes, but you'd think if they [DigitalConvergence, the Gods of stupid colon usage] were going to try and make themselves look good, they'd at least (a) proofread their letter or (b) find someone who has mastered the English language. Even grammar and spell check in Microsoft Office (scary, no?) would have caught most of the glaring errors in this letter.
As for a $20 developer's fee... They can shove it up their [insert favorite noun here]. How can you justify charging someone $20 to find out it's just base64/XOR? It's "Revenge of The Increasingly Stupid Capitalist Intellectual Property-weenie Economy!"
No forms were filled out, no statement was made to that effect.
In fact, the salesdroid at RadioShack offered just the opposite -- "Pretty soon you'll be able to scan just about any barcode on anything and be taken to it's homepage and stuff, dude."
As tempting as producing my own caffeine sounds, there's just this unescapable image of a mad scientist running amok with my genes...
I'll just induce my own caffeine daze with Penguin Mints (Mmmm... the ambrosia of the minty gods...) and strong coffee. Yum.
(A little off-topic -- I where my CueCat would take me if I scanned the UPC on my Penguin Mints. I'm sure not booting to Windows ME just to find out, though. *shudder*)
In a perfect, domestic-based world, maybe... But
in our world, this is a pipe dream.
Sony is a multinational (or global, if you prefer that) corporation. So, depending on circumstances, Sony America would be likely to try and get the more localized Sony offspring to take up this case.
Those crazy EverQuest nazis have done all sorts of things already, mind you -- halting eBay auctions and the like (though I honestly don't see the appeal of EverQuest. A massively multiplayer RPG with aging graphics, populated mostly by powergaming twinks who don't know the first thing about roleplaying... ). If that's any sort of indicator, they're going to push this until they get their way.
And, to make things worse, the theory of escaping the US subsidiaries doesn't seem to work too well -- DeCSS fiasco, anyone? Like the MPAA, Sony could likely pull strings in all the markets it serves.
I joined the Freedows project long, long, long ago, and left it permanently after one of the larger fights between developers.
Freedows was a darn good idea, but some of the people working on it couldn't get along if their lives depended on it. This resulted in split after split and, at the time I had left, a giant fork in the development (plus about 50 messages a day of "I hate developer X" and "I hate developer Y"). It doesn't appeared to have made much progress, if any at all.
Rest in peace, Freedows. But hell, your lack of anything useful led me to Linux, so at least something good came of this.;-)
Actually, if I recall correctly, you just have to use a licensed developer's code number in the header, as opposed to the Nintendo bitmap... And of course, a huge list of these is readily available from any one of the numerous GB dev sites.
More and more singles coming out are Enhanced CDs, So if you want the videos/lyrics/whatever other extra crap is on the CD, you're SOL unless you buy it (unless you hit, say, Gnutella, but the way most of these CDs are structured, it's a hell of a lot of files to download).
Of course, the only time I buy singles is when it's the ONLY good song a band has and they're on sale anyway...
Under US Trademark law, there isn't a tradmark conflict if you're in different lines of business, and there's also something about physical location that I can't recall (but if physical location would apply with this sort of thing, I don't know).
i.e. A cleaning company called Apple couldn't be sued by the computer company Apple for trademark violation because it's a different business. Depending on the enlightenment level of the judge ("computers, period" vs. "software or e-mail"), the odds will either be in your favor, or vastly tipped in the opposite direction.
I don't have a problem with X, it lets me do multiple tasks in multiple Xterms quickly. Mmm, Xterm.
What I do have a problem with is the continuing use of the term "X Windows". Read your X documentation, it's not one of the listed names. it drives XFree86 authors (and other X Consortium members) crazy, and only makes *nix systems running it sound more and more like Bill of Borg's Windoze line.
To read straight from the X manpage: "The X Consortium requests that the following names be used when referring to this software:
X X Window System X Version 11 X Window System, Version 11 X11"
"X Windows" sounds ugly, plus it's a lot easier to just type "X", no? The sooner we stop calling it X Windows, the sooner newbies become less confused.
This is as stupid as when a newbie salesperson scrutinizes the differences between your credit card signature and the signature on the sales slip, and calls a manager over because you didn't dot your i. This is easily the most moronic approach to security I've ever seen... Most humans don't type anything consistently -- well, now there's an idea. Since the chances of you never typing closely enough to pass the security check are rather low, more money for the vendor, since you'll have to re-buy it for each additional use. Brilliant! This is almost as good as Microsoft conveniently finding drivers to be "incompatible" with Windows Millennium so you have to buy new hardware.
You know, if you REALLY want KDE, it's much more productive to quit your whining and just download the sources. Geez. (Compile source? Oh my god, not that!) As for the issue of KDE's license being incompatible with Debian, it's more related to Qt and recursive licensing issues...
"Debian is pretty clunky" dselect is clunky, but Debian as a whole, and the installer, are very robust and easy to use. Heck, I found the Debian install to be easier than Redhat's.
"Neither Debian or Slackware have professional printed user manuals" Think again. Debian does have printed manuals, courtesy of New Riders and the author who released their manual under the GPL. It's available both on the web and in your local purveyor of fine Linux books (Barnes and Noble or Borders, here).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, or if you're just uninformed...
1) Why can't they put x-ray machines in airports for checked luggages so people don't put bombs in them?
They do. In fact, they operate at an even higher power level than the x-ray machines used for screening carry-on baggage. Hence the massive warnings as of late to NOT put high-speed film in checked baggage.
In addition to X-raying checked baggage, many airports also employ bomb-sniffing dogs and/or bomb detection equipment to screen checked luggage.
2) Why can't airlines maintain their aircraft so the engines don't fall off?
As other posters have pointed out, this is by design. What would you rather have -- a turbine vibrating a wing off and completely destroying any chance of survival, or the ability to quite likely make a recovery using any remaining engine(s)?
They're not random, they're tied directly to the rules of our universe. And if you look in the right way, they may contain a message.
But Ellie already found it in that book, so this news story's a little old, eh?
Yes, Dell is not the only manufacturer suffering the wrath of this little problem. I saw the "Battery Recall Information" link on many other sites while I was laptop shopping over the past two weeks.
I can't recall offhand the other companies, but it seems like Compaq and/or HP also were recalling batteries.
My feelings on the subject seem quite equal to yours (though I don't have racial profiling or anything else going against me).
Cameras can't discern reality, and the picture quality often mutates it. If the police decide to view the tapes looking for drug dealing, and see a friend handing me something on the street at 10:30 PM, what's going to be their first reaction? I may claim to be innocent, and I may well be, but that means nothing in this day and age. "Video doesn't lie," as they say. Innocent until proven guilty is becoming more and more a fantasy, and judges are becoming less willing to actually analyze a case (and people like That Guy In The White House aren't helping, what with mandatory sentencing and all. Judicial discretion, people...).
The sad truth of the matter is the U.S. is going down the tubes fast. All the liberties our forefathers put their lives down for are being taken away by the government, and with "our" blessing, no less. What a stupid bunch of sheep.
There's a large difference in usefulness here, though. Police stationed on corners, or even patrolling a small area, can respond. Cameras continue staring on obliviously, and only if they're actively monitored will an officer be dispatched, which means (s)he still has to get there for it to be purposeful at all.
This raises an issue in and of itself -- how are you going to pay for monitoring 24/7? Sure, you can do it, but it'll cost insane amounts of money to pay a staff to watch a bank of probably thousands of cameras.
I'm not sold on this crap. Grainy video from a tiny camera can easily be misconstrued, the cost is far too high, and it doesn't honestly solve anything.
Feed me the lines on cameras making people behave all you want, it's not true. Once people have adjusted to the idea of the camera being there, it no longer matters. Many criminals are too brazen to worry about some surveillance device, as well -- recently, someone broke into a museum gift shop and stole thousands of dollars in jewelry. Audible alarm, visible surveillance system, criminal breaks in, criminal escapes.
Cameras were installed at my old school a while back, and nothing changed after about a week of adjustment. Students continued fighting despite the cameras, or found a location where they knew a camera wouldn't see.
Photoradar and red light cameras have recently been installed in my city. The people who want to run the red lights and do 10, 15, or 20 miles over the speed limit still do it.
See a trend yet?
Cameras can't replace people. Period. It just doesn't work.
Okay, seeing as how a handful of users and ACs seem to be under the impression Progeny's just a commercial version of Debian who's Bad Evil Closed-Sourcing everything they put out...
Pay attention! There's been a lot of press about Progeny recently, and most, if not all of it, mentioned how the vast majority (if not all) of their tools are covered under the GPL. Progeny's been friendly to Debian, and the chances of some of the improvements being merged in Debian proper aren't that lousy.
What's Progeny there for? The same reason Red Hat is [or rather, should be]. If you're a CEO or CFO with absolutely no clue, are you going to let Jimbob install Slackware, where he's the only one who can support it -- or are you going to purchase a solution and support plan from a company that can back it when Jimbob isn't there?
Just because someone is selling a distribution doesn't make them evil. Get your facts straight before you scream foul.
No offense, but it's a support nightmare due to the multiple flavors of popular versions and ever-changing kernel...
Well, idFolk, no offense, but it's a nightmare to think you're this out of it. "multiple flavors of popular versions" -- I assume they're referring to distributions. This isn't a terribly hard problem to get around, and for the sake of comparison, it's not much different than Win95 v. Win98. Things are in different places, versions of files may be different, etc. If it really gets your panties in such a knot, static link the binaries.
The "ever-changing kernel" also has me a bit confused -- what's the issue here? As a general rule, the guts don't change significantly inside of a version series (e.g. 2.2.x) to make incompatibility issues. So what's at hand here? My Loki tin specifically says "Kernel 2.2.x". If you're running on, say, 2.0.1, why would you purchase this game, or even expect it to run, hmm? I've been through probably 3 or 4 2.2.x-series kernels and 30 recompiles since purchasing Q3A, and it's gone off without a hitch each time. It's also run perfectly on both a Redhat system and a Debian system (which has been slink, woody, and potato).
Maybe it's just me, but it sounds like id's sold out to the FUD market. Have they been purchased by MS pending X-Box, too?
IIRC (it's been a while, so this is based purely on memory), the method found to crack GSM is using a hardware solution -- not readily available hardware or software -- and even then it's time consuming and expensive.
So, you're not going to have Joe Weirdo down the street listening in on your conversation with a (relatively cheap) scanner as in the earlier days of cellular.
AFAIK, no phone combines GSM and AMPS.
Actually, I believe there are one or two Motorola models VoiceStream is/was selling that are combined GSM/analog. Of course, they don't exist anywhere on the Motorola site, so they may be discontinued.
Not too sure about this, but I do know that you can get AMPS modules for at least the Nokia 5190 (I'd assume the 6190 supports it, too, but don't know for sure)...
You're absolutely correct. The same "Plus" module (although I think it should be a "Minus" module..) is available for both phones. I had looked into getting one at one point, but as they were $200, I decided I'd just stick with my glorious GSM.
GSM is the god of cellular (or "PCS" if you're one of those psychotic people) service. Encrypted phone calls, SIM (Smart) cards, the ability to easily roam... Spent two weeks in San Diego on the Pac Bell network without a hitch. And of course there's nothing like buying a new phone, slapping your SIM card in it, and having the same address book and general settings as you did before. Ah, the wonders of GSM.
It's very interesting that VoiceStream, a relative newcomer to Arizona, has a better service area than Alltel and Qwest/USWest who have been around for some time now. If it hadn't been for VoiceStream, a guy stranded at the side of the road might still be there -- out of a USWest, Alltel, and VoiceStream phone, mine was the only one with any service (and this was not an area I'd expect to have service).
Judging by this thread, /. is loaded with NHS dropouts or people who just refused to join.
I attended one meeting before I got sick of the elitism shit ("Oh, we REALLY need to raise the GPA requirements to 3.8 or 3.9... We have such riff raff in it right now!" -- But then, that bitch had a 4.3 or so, I believe...).
This year's club pictures rolled around, and I was
one of 5 people in my psych class who didn't go to the NHS picture (leaving only 5 people in the room, no less...). Discussion rolled around to why everyone wasn't in the NHS picture, and my teacher's jaw nearly dropped to the floor when I said I dropped out because I didn't want to be part of such an elitist organization.
That felt very good. Not better than sex (or firing up, say, a Duron with 2 gigs of RAM), but very good.
Oh, please... If I have to see one more disgustingly pathetic JonKatz story, I'm going to
puke all over my keyboard.
High school != Hellmouth, you're just an almost-worthless writer looking for a little publicity, and "Hellmouth" has become your cliched tagline of choice.
Getting through high school is as simple as ignoring the dumbasses. Sure, I've been harassed, and even assaulted (once, presumably as part of someone's gang initiation -- but that wasn't even in high school), so what? If you don't let it get to you, it doesn't hurt that much. There are many morons in the world, and I know darn well they're not worth a second thought.
(And no, the kid should not have been suspended. It's completely ludicrous to bend the rules to castigate someone for something this insignificant. I completely hate his use of "martyr" and "downtrodden", but hey, he's welcome to sensationalize for publicity as much as Katz has for every "article" thus far.)
A little nit-picky, yes, but you'd think if they [DigitalConvergence, the Gods of stupid colon usage] were going to try and make themselves look good, they'd at least (a) proofread their letter or (b) find someone who has mastered the English language. Even grammar and spell check in Microsoft Office (scary, no?) would have caught most of the glaring errors in this letter.
As for a $20 developer's fee... They can shove it up their [insert favorite noun here]. How can you justify charging someone $20 to find out it's just base64/XOR? It's "Revenge of The Increasingly Stupid Capitalist Intellectual Property-weenie Economy!"
No forms were filled out, no statement was made to that effect.
In fact, the salesdroid at RadioShack offered just the opposite -- "Pretty soon you'll be able to scan just about any barcode on anything and be taken to it's homepage and stuff, dude."
As tempting as producing my own caffeine sounds, there's just this unescapable image of a mad scientist running amok with my genes...
I'll just induce my own caffeine daze with Penguin Mints (Mmmm... the ambrosia of the minty gods...) and strong coffee. Yum.
(A little off-topic -- I where my CueCat would take me if I scanned the UPC on my Penguin Mints. I'm sure not booting to Windows ME just to find out, though. *shudder*)
In a perfect, domestic-based world, maybe... But
in our world, this is a pipe dream.
Sony is a multinational (or global, if you prefer that) corporation. So, depending on circumstances, Sony America would be likely to try and get the more localized Sony offspring to take up this case.
Those crazy EverQuest nazis have done all sorts of things already, mind you -- halting eBay auctions and the like (though I honestly don't see the appeal of EverQuest. A massively multiplayer RPG with aging graphics, populated mostly by powergaming twinks who don't know the first thing about roleplaying... ). If that's any sort of indicator, they're going to push this until they get their way.
And, to make things worse, the theory of escaping the US subsidiaries doesn't seem to work too well -- DeCSS fiasco, anyone? Like the MPAA, Sony could likely pull strings in all the markets it serves.
Gee, reminds me of my reaction yesterday when I got a banner yesterday on slashdot that was essentially a domain squatter's best friend.
I joined the Freedows project long, long, long ago, and left it permanently after one of the larger fights between developers.
;-)
Freedows was a darn good idea, but some of the people working on it couldn't get along if their lives depended on it. This resulted in split after split and, at the time I had left, a giant fork in the development (plus about 50 messages a day of "I hate developer X" and "I hate developer Y"). It doesn't appeared to have made much progress, if any at all.
Rest in peace, Freedows. But hell, your lack of anything useful led me to Linux, so at least something good came of this.
Actually, if I recall correctly, you just have to use a licensed developer's code number in the header, as opposed to the Nintendo bitmap... And of course, a huge list of these is readily available from any one of the numerous GB dev sites.
More and more singles coming out are Enhanced CDs, So if you want the videos/lyrics/whatever other extra crap is on the CD, you're SOL unless you buy it (unless you hit, say, Gnutella, but the way most of these CDs are structured, it's a hell of a lot of files to download).
Of course, the only time I buy singles is when it's the ONLY good song a band has and they're on sale anyway...
Under US Trademark law, there isn't a tradmark conflict if you're in different lines of business,
and there's also something about physical location that I can't recall (but if physical location would apply with this sort of thing, I don't know).
i.e. A cleaning company called Apple couldn't be sued by the computer company Apple for trademark violation because it's a different business. Depending on the enlightenment level of the judge ("computers, period" vs. "software or e-mail"), the odds will either be in your favor, or vastly tipped in the opposite direction.
I don't have a problem with X, it lets me do multiple tasks in multiple Xterms quickly. Mmm, Xterm.
What I do have a problem with is the continuing use of the term "X Windows". Read your X documentation, it's not one of the listed names. it drives XFree86 authors (and other X Consortium members) crazy, and only makes *nix systems running it sound more and more like Bill of Borg's Windoze line.
To read straight from the X manpage:
"The X Consortium requests that the following names be used when referring to this software:
X
X Window System
X Version 11
X Window System, Version 11
X11"
"X Windows" sounds ugly, plus it's a lot easier to just type "X", no? The sooner we stop calling it X Windows, the sooner newbies become less confused.
This is as stupid as when a newbie salesperson scrutinizes the differences between your credit card signature and the signature on the sales slip, and calls a manager over because you didn't dot your i.
This is easily the most moronic approach to security I've ever seen... Most humans don't type anything consistently -- well, now there's an idea. Since the chances of you never typing closely enough to pass the security check are rather low, more money for the vendor, since you'll have to re-buy it for each additional use. Brilliant!
This is almost as good as Microsoft conveniently finding drivers to be "incompatible" with Windows Millennium so you have to buy new hardware.
You know, if you REALLY want KDE, it's much more productive to quit your whining and just download the sources. Geez. (Compile source? Oh my god, not that!)
As for the issue of KDE's license being incompatible with Debian, it's more related to Qt and recursive licensing issues...
"Debian is pretty clunky"
dselect is clunky, but Debian as a whole, and the installer, are very robust and easy to use. Heck, I found the Debian install to be easier than Redhat's.
"Neither Debian or Slackware have professional printed user manuals"
Think again. Debian does have printed manuals, courtesy of New Riders and the author who released their manual under the GPL. It's available both on the web and in your local purveyor of fine Linux books (Barnes and Noble or Borders, here).
To quote directly from the GPL:
"To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all."
The key word here is everyone. Limiting its access from minors !=everyone.